The release of Google Drive means that I, personally, will now have 8 different places that I can store a file. Between the hard drives on my work computer, my home computer, my laptop, my iPad, my Android phone and the cloud drives of Dropbox and Google Drive (formally Docs) and at least one file sharing server in my workplace, that’s a lot of places to look for a file when the time comes to edit/access it. Fortunately, I go to a lot of conferences and hear a lot of ideas both in session and between. This tip comes from a session I attended at the LibTech conference earlier this year on optimizing iPads with applications, but it will only really work for people who use a task list that is *other* than the built-in one on your iPad (or iPhone).
When the presenter places a file somewhere in the cloud or on her iPad in one of the many note-taking applications that are available for that device, she puts a pointer/reminder in her Reminders app that lists the name of the note or file and the location in which it can be found. If you aren’t creating documents and notes in a massive way, this could be an excellent way to remember just where you last opened that document (for me, I have to remember if the PDF I loaded on my iPad is in iAnnotate, GoodReads, iBooks or just dumped somewhere in Dropbox for me to open later). For folks who create and manage documents constantly, this might be a bit cumbersome, and a real organizational structure (all my class documents go into GoodReads, my work documents into iAnnotate, my ALA stuff into Google Drive, etc.) would probably be almost as good. I would end up forgetting what goes where, though, personally…
Whatever method you use to manage all of your files across all of your various hard drives and cloud drives, this is a skill that we will all need to cultivate and work on, just so we don’t drown in our data!
