Baby-related Systems Clean-up

Systems 0 Comments

Here are some of the systems changes I’ve made, or am in the process of making, due to baby (and pre-baby):

  • I don’t use a Palm or other pda right now. It started to flake out on me while I was preggo, and at that point I realized I wasn’t going to be super vigilant in syncing it every/every other day. I bought a cheap week-view paper calendar at CVS. I’m still using it. I keep my client’s appointments recorded there and in their files, and now I skip using Outlook with the Palm. I might need to make a spreadsheet to have a digital record at some point
  • I switched to Gmail from Outlook. It started because I was using a mac laptop upstairs and away from home, without Outlook on it. Now I want to be able to check my email whenever I have a free few fingers to type, at whichever computer I can reach with said fingers. I use Outlook to download a backup copy of emails now and then but Gmail just works better for me. I may switch to mac entirely in which case I’ll find a different email application to do the download with.
  • This all means that I’m not using Outlook to keep track of addresses and such so much. I’ll have to come up with some solution for that; gmail is so easily searchable that I occassionally keep track of things by sending myself an email with contact info, and I still have the main database in Outlook. My husband is a Spreadsheet Man, so I kind of think there’s no point in keeping household contacts anywhere else. Business stuff is another matter though. I use gmail contacts to store stuff like email addresses and occasssionally phone numbers but I just would rather have something outside of cyberspace.
  • I’ve delegated a lot of household paperwork to my husband since I’m med-free and therefore a bit extra handicapped in that department.

That’s just a few. I think the challenge to how I worked before helped me throw out some stuff that was just extra work. Not that I’ve perfected the new ways of doing things. What changes have you made when you had a proverbial arm tied behind your back?