Many of us are constantly defeated by the struggle with myriad bits of paper
Meetings – and there are many of those – all have shoals of it. Minutes of the last meeting demand, usually unsuccessfully, to be linked with the Agenda and other stuff for next. The struggle to have the right bits of paper at the right time and to know how to dispose of them properly afterwards defeats even the best of us.
There is still plenty of paper around our office. But the first stage was the movement towards no longer filing anything in paper form. Today’s photocopiers which scan easily and effectively have dealt with that. And electronic filing increases the chance of finding it again – I remember a session on administration from John Truscott who said, ‘Remember it’s not a filing system. It’s a retrieval system’
But working out how not to carry the paper took much longer. And the answer for me appears to be Dropbox. Anything I need to have with me and be able to refer to can go into Dropbox and be accessed from the IPad. And gradually I find myself arriving at meetings with just the IPad. To dispose of the papers after they are needed is the work of a second
Can it really be as simple as that? Time will tell.
Dropbox is very good and I use it all the time, but is not entirely secure for very sensitive information. Its probably ok for most church stuff. If you are information transiting between PC and Ipad, then I also wholly recommend Google Drive which allows for photos and documents. The allocation of Cloud space is especially generous. Apple’s own cloud space ( ICloud and Pages) is also quite good and has one especially useful feature: you can use SIRI to dictate all your correspondence. It has probably the best accuracy of “speak technology” at present and is much better than Google’s resident speak-app. Again I use this on a daily basis and saves a lot of time.
Dropbox is fantastic, but surely using dropbox and the iPad will only be useful so long as you have wifi access? The second concern I have is over security. It depends on what information you wish to store in dropbox. If it was sensitive information for instance, I would not use dropbox. Just a thought.
Ellie – the wifi problem seems to be solved provided that you remember to open the document after you have uploaded. Well yes – security is always an issue. I wouldn’t use it for material which wasn’t already in reasonably wide circulation or for anything particularly sensitive. But that applies to my e mail as well .. It’s all relative really. After all it avoids the challenge of safe disposal of material after you have finished with it – and the risk of it being around in an office which is visited by many – and ..