I have been listening to Linchpin and I really like what Seth Godin says. When I look back on my 10 years as an employee, I have noticed that I have always thought a little like Mr. Godin.

I have always believed that if you’re comfortable at your job, you’re not indispensable. I always strive to learn new techniques, push new boundaries and become more effective. And, it is working, as my career has progressed from Forestry, to non-profit, to IT, I understand and utilize a myriad of techniques in my professional career.

• Forestry taught me about being complete and double checking my work to make sure it is right.
• Non-profits taught me about facilitation and how to distill information from people.
• IT has taught how to balance hundreds of tasks and complete them on time.

I like the idea of becoming indispensable, being a linchpin gives you options, and options are nice things to have.

Taking Notes

While in grade school, I had no idea how important note taking was. While in university, I took notes through every class, in fact, that is the only reason I did as well as I did. And now, I am certain that taking notes is one of the most important things that I do (meticulous notes lead to tasks, and doing tasks is very important).

Today we are lucky, with the cloud our notes are nearly everywhere, but my biggest problem has been finding a suitable tool to record the notes. I have tried a number of tools on a number of platforms and I have found a balance that works for me and works for my company.

Onenote

Onenote rocks, it is probably one of the best tools Microsoft has created and it works like a charm. I use this tool when I am at work and at a laptop. If you disconnect from the network, there is a cached version on on your machine, when you hook back up to the network, all the change are synced back to the network. Having many people on the same notebook works great, and with the ability to have multiple notebook, tabs and pages, you can organize your notebook to fit perfectly to your style. This tool works best with a network and multiple people editing multiple pages inside the onenote notebook.

Evernote

Evernote is pretty cool, first, they have a cool icon (an elephant), second, the free version gives you everything that you could want, third, it works on everything. With the use of tags and the fact that everything is in the cloud, you will always be able to find what you are looking for, no matter where you are. With tagging and searching, this tool really shines, and is why I use it all the time.

Byword

The editor of choice for me right now is Byword, and for one simple reason, markdown. By using markdown, I can great rich text on my iPad no matter where I am, and it is fun. Dropbox support, email rich text and a preview also make this app fun and indespensible.

So many

I use all three tools, it all depends on when and how I plan to retrieve (or share) the information. If Byword had tagging and a good search function I would get rid of Evernote.