Organising with Technology

I'm a HUGE lover of technology and gadgets and things and I definitely believe its possible to be (nearly) paper free. I say nearly because sometimes you HAVE to or WANT to keep the original copies of things. For instance you HAVE to keep your original payslips for a certain amount of time and you may WANT to keep your toddler's first nursery masterpiece rather than just taking a photo of it. However, there are so many things that you DON'T need to keep and I have been using the best online peace of organising technology ever and I'm a huge fan - no, they're not paying me to big them up. 

Have you heard of Evernote? Its really really useful. Basically, there is a desktop app, an iphone/blackberry whatever app and you can store notes/documents/photos basically any digital file or peice of information in there. It has a great search engine so as long as you name the file in such a way that you can search for the title, you probably don't even need to use tags and things. But there is that option too. And the search engine can search text within the note, text within PDF attachments, even written text that you have scribbled on a piece of paper & snapped into evernote with your phone. This is what I use it for (in no particular order):

• Recipes
• Articles or blogs that I read that I think I might want to refer back to (I now have so many of these I keep them in a separate "notebook" in Evernote
• My open university coursebooks & notes that I take (the PDF search facility comes in really handy when doing my course assignments)
• Blog posts that I'm in the process of writing or ideas that I want to note down for later (I'm writing this in Evernote now!!!)
• Wish lists for me and for family members or friends so I know what to get them for Christmas/Birthdays
• Information about Cars, insurance, any paperwork that I think I may later need
• Receipts
• Any correspondence that I draft that I may want to come back to (to copy the wording for instance)
• Documents that I am no longer referring to regularly but I do not want to delete altogether (the rest of my regularly updated files go in Dropbox - more about this later)
• Pet/children/husband details - like shoe size, insurance info, that kind of thing. 
• Logins and passwords - you can encrypt the password information

Basically though I use it for anything that I think I may need to refer back to at some point. 

Having said all of this I love nice stationery and sometimes I find that writing things down is more satisfying than having it all online. For instance, my Command Central notebook - part of the purpose of it is to keep the few paper things that I need to keep handy all in one place but also another reason for it is that I need somewhere to keep my routines. I tried using an iphone/ipad app but because I don't always have those handy and out on display when I'm running around, and also because of the fact that if I'm constantly checking my iphone in between doing jobs, I can easily get distracted by Facebook instead of just checking my routine app and then getting back to whatever I was going to do next. However, I will mention the one that I use as it is the ONLY good housekeeping routine app out there. Its called HomeRoutines. It really is extremely versatile and useful and the iphone and ipad apps can sync between eachother. You could also share it with another family member if they also have the app as you need to log in using a specific username and password to get into the app - so that it will sync properly. However good this app was though, I found that having it on paper works better for me - for now.