Back in January, High Rock Accounting hosted their annual holiday party. Aside from enjoying everyone’s company and reflecting on the past year’s successes, we were gifted these fantastic notepads called Rocketbook. We at High Rock Accounting take recycling and doing what we can to minimize our impact on the environment very seriously. It is even better when it involves cool technology. Our HR Maven, Christina Morse, has owned one of these for a few years now. She was more than excited to share this technology with our Nucleus readers:
“Have you ever committed yourself to the latest app, swearing to get organized and stop managing your life from a stack of post-it notes? Only to be disappointed a month later when you catch yourself writing notes on restaurant napkins.
There is a grand misconception that ‘writing things down’ is something that only old people do. Who am I to judge if that is true or not, but at 45, I’m definitely from the “pen to paper” generation. As it turns out, writing is beneficial for memory and retention. Writing things down vs. typing them out increases our ability to recall the information later. Don’t believe me? It’s science. You can check out one of the many studies here:
https://psycnet.apa.org/
So, what does this have to do with technology? I’ll tell you. My newest favorite app is only one part app – the other part is a physical notebook. The Rocketbook notebook features erasable pages with QR codes that allow you to physically write your notes, scan them with your app, and auto-send them to e-mail, Dropbox folders, Trello boards, and more. Whaaat?! It is a reusable, smart notebook that is cloud-connected.
Gone are the days of flipping through multiple pages trying to find those interview notes, or worse yet, trying to find those meeting action items you lost because you have 47 notebooks laying around that you haphazardly take notes in. With Rocketbook, you don’t need multiple notebooks to organize your topics because you have category icons at the bottom of each page that tell the app where to send your notes. Run three companies? Set up categories for each of those companies Trello boards, scan your notes, and turn the page. Then, you erase the page with a damp microfiber towel (this is no regular notebook paper). Your notes get stored as a PDF in both the app and the location you sent them to.
While I have used the example of Trello boards and Dropbox folders, Rocketbook integrates with 11 cloud services currently:
Google Drive, Evernote, Slack, Dropbox, Box, OneNote, OneDrive, iMessage, iCloud, Trello, and e-mail.
This last one solves for most services you don’t see listed. Just e-mail it to yourself, and you can drop the attachment anywhere you need it.
How has this impacted my life? I used to carry multiple notebooks around because I needed to separate my notes based on the topic. <gasp> I can’t take notes about the volunteer committee in the same notebook that I use for work (OCD much?). Inevitably, I would grab the wrong notebook and end up with torn out pages or random notes about my daughter’s gymnastics fundraiser in-between candidate’s interview notes. That was then.
Now, it’s always just one notebook. I work between three companies, am an organizer for an industry association, and occasionally write a travel blog. But I only have one notebook. Once I scan my notes, they are always accessible in the app on my phone so that I can answer questions immediately. As an extra layer of defense, I have the app send a PDF to my Dropbox folder. No matter where I am, I always have access. Besides, I work in a litigious field, so lost notes could potentially mean a lost court case. I get to keep my paper trail without killing the rain forest. That is what I call a win-win.”
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Back in January, High Rock Accounting hosted their annual holiday party. Aside from enjoying everyone’s company and reflecting on the past year’s successes, we were gifted these fantastic notepads called Rocketbook. We at High Rock Accounting take recycling and doing what we can to minimize our impact on the environment very seriously. It is even better when it involves cool technology. Our HR Maven, Christina Morse, has owned one of these for a few years now. She was more than excited to share this technology with our Nucleus readers:
“Have you ever committed yourself to the latest app, swearing to get organized and stop managing your life from a stack of post-it notes? Only to be disappointed a month later when you catch yourself writing notes on restaurant napkins.
There is a grand misconception that ‘writing things down’ is something that only old people do. Who am I to judge if that is true or not, but at 45, I’m definitely from the “pen to paper” generation. As it turns out, writing is beneficial for memory and retention. Writing things down vs. typing them out increases our ability to recall the information later. Don’t believe me? It’s science. You can check out one of the many studies here:
https://psycnet.apa.org/
So, what does this have to do with technology? I’ll tell you. My newest favorite app is only one part app – the other part is a physical notebook. The Rocketbook notebook features erasable pages with QR codes that allow you to physically write your notes, scan them with your app, and auto-send them to e-mail, Dropbox folders, Trello boards, and more. Whaaat?! It is a reusable, smart notebook that is cloud-connected.
Gone are the days of flipping through multiple pages trying to find those interview notes, or worse yet, trying to find those meeting action items you lost because you have 47 notebooks laying around that you haphazardly take notes in. With Rocketbook, you don’t need multiple notebooks to organize your topics because you have category icons at the bottom of each page that tell the app where to send your notes. Run three companies? Set up categories for each of those companies Trello boards, scan your notes, and turn the page. Then, you erase the page with a damp microfiber towel (this is no regular notebook paper). Your notes get stored as a PDF in both the app and the location you sent them to.
While I have used the example of Trello boards and Dropbox folders, Rocketbook integrates with 11 cloud services currently:
Google Drive, Evernote, Slack, Dropbox, Box, OneNote, OneDrive, iMessage, iCloud, Trello, and e-mail.
This last one solves for most services you don’t see listed. Just e-mail it to yourself, and you can drop the attachment anywhere you need it.
How has this impacted my life? I used to carry multiple notebooks around because I needed to separate my notes based on the topic. <gasp> I can’t take notes about the volunteer committee in the same notebook that I use for work (OCD much?). Inevitably, I would grab the wrong notebook and end up with torn out pages or random notes about my daughter’s gymnastics fundraiser in-between candidate’s interview notes. That was then.
Now, it’s always just one notebook. I work between three companies, am an organizer for an industry association, and occasionally write a travel blog. But I only have one notebook. Once I scan my notes, they are always accessible in the app on my phone so that I can answer questions immediately. As an extra layer of defense, I have the app send a PDF to my Dropbox folder. No matter where I am, I always have access. Besides, I work in a litigious field, so lost notes could potentially mean a lost court case. I get to keep my paper trail without killing the rain forest. That is what I call a win-win.”