Sunday
Oct122008
Freedom from email
Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 12:21AM
When Axiom started I knew I wanted to go paperless. It always struck me as counterproductive when people would print emails out and staple them in the client file. It's the technological equivalent of driving your Hummer to the Greenpeace rally.
Three years later nobody even talks about "going" paperless anymore. People just assume you have. If you still have client perm files laying around the office there's probably a rotary phone in use somewhere. But technology doesn't always equate to productivity and I've gained a healthy respect for a former senior partner's staunch reliance on that pink stack of phone messages.
My problem has been that I relied on my email inbox TOO much. In the span of a week it would quickly fill up with three of four hundred messages and I would be stuck spending a huge block of time forwarding, creating followup tasks and the like, but MOSTLY I was filing. The thing is I wasn't usually filing a lot of important stuff. It was mainly something I might need in the next client appointment or something that could be useful later. Sometimes I wouldn't get rid of the message itself because I might need it before the next meeting and I didn't want to PDF it to the client's folder on the server.
This post from Gary Boomer changed everything. A big part of Boomer's setup relies on Microsoft OneNote. First, you should know that I'm not a Microsoft fan. Truth be told I despise Bill sometimes but CPA's can't live without Excel and Outlook is....well it's Outlook and A LOT of people know how to use it, including my employees. So I go along. But this OneNote thing is slick. I had used it before with a tablet PC, but had never used the Outlook integration. It took me about two hours to go through 400 messages with Boomer's system, but now everything is where I need it including all of the attachments and I'm eerily peaceful staring at that empty Outlook inbox.
Three years later nobody even talks about "going" paperless anymore. People just assume you have. If you still have client perm files laying around the office there's probably a rotary phone in use somewhere. But technology doesn't always equate to productivity and I've gained a healthy respect for a former senior partner's staunch reliance on that pink stack of phone messages.
My problem has been that I relied on my email inbox TOO much. In the span of a week it would quickly fill up with three of four hundred messages and I would be stuck spending a huge block of time forwarding, creating followup tasks and the like, but MOSTLY I was filing. The thing is I wasn't usually filing a lot of important stuff. It was mainly something I might need in the next client appointment or something that could be useful later. Sometimes I wouldn't get rid of the message itself because I might need it before the next meeting and I didn't want to PDF it to the client's folder on the server.
This post from Gary Boomer changed everything. A big part of Boomer's setup relies on Microsoft OneNote. First, you should know that I'm not a Microsoft fan. Truth be told I despise Bill sometimes but CPA's can't live without Excel and Outlook is....well it's Outlook and A LOT of people know how to use it, including my employees. So I go along. But this OneNote thing is slick. I had used it before with a tablet PC, but had never used the Outlook integration. It took me about two hours to go through 400 messages with Boomer's system, but now everything is where I need it including all of the attachments and I'm eerily peaceful staring at that empty Outlook inbox.
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