Recently, I remembered an old login name and password I used to use and tried it on the old Flickr account–and it worked! I spent some time transferring the 2,000 some-odd photos of that vacation from the old Flickr account to the my current one.

For those interested in seeing pictures from when I was in Europe (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Turkey, and London) in 2007, you can find the collection (which contains a dozen or more photo sets) here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamietoddrubin/collections/72157633610446391/

And since I have been slowly consolidating all of my photos to a single source–Flickr¹–those who wish to social network with me over there can check out my Flickr profile.

When I learned that tessiegirl was producing a poster of her infographic and was making it available for purchase, I just had to have one. I placed my order and then waited. And waited. (Granted, the poster was being sent from Australia.) I’d almost forgotten about it, until this morning, when I wondered when it might be arriving, or if it had even shipped.

Then, I got a text message from Kelly this afternoon which said, “You got a poster from Australia in the mail today,” and I nearly screamed with glee in my office. When I got home, I opened up the package and here is what was inside:

This poster is too cool just to keep rolled up in its tube. After I pick through it carefully, I fully plan on having it framed and putting it up on my home office wall, right next to muy John Picascio 2013 wall calendar.

Included with the poster was a handwritten note thanking me for buying the poster. It was well worth it to have such a cool poster. Thanks tessiegirl!

Tip #1: Define your requirements

People who read these posts regularly know that defining your requirements is a big thing with me. It helps you to understand what it is you are trying to do and helps you choose the best possible solution for your individual needs. In my case, when my family started going paperless along with me, I outlined a few requirements that needed to be addressed:

1. Regardless of who is scanning and clipping documents, there should ultimately be a single authoritative repository where that data resides.
2. Anyone in the family should be able to access that repository of documents.
3. There should be a clear, simple process for getting documents into the repository.

That was pretty much it. Now, as it turns out, my wife, Kelly, is really the only other person in the family that needs access to the documents so in my case it is pretty simple. That said, the process that I have defined below will work for my kids as well, when they are old enough to participate.

Tip #2: Each person should have their own Evernote account

I have tried scenarios where I share my account with Kelly, but what has ultimately worked best is for Kelly to have her own Evernote account. There are several reasons for this:

1. Improved security. I am not sharing my password and she has a unique password to her account.
2. Autonomy. Outside of the notebooks that we share, we each can maintain our own set of notes and notebook without cluttering things up. For instance, I have an entire stack of notebooks that deals with my freelance writing that would be of no interest to Kelly.
3. Auditing. It is easier to tell who created notes and who updated notes in shared notebooks when it comes from different accounts.
4. Uploading. Depending on your needs, two accounts can essentially double your monthly upload limits. The other accounts don’t have to be premium accounts. They can be free accounts. But in our case, we both have premium accounts because we both go over the basic monthly upload limits for free accounts. (Plus, there are lots of other benefits of premiums accounts.)

Tip 3: Choose a single repository for your paperless data

Regardless of who uploads the documents, all of the paperless documents ultimately get stored in a notebook within my Evernote account called “Filing Cabinet.” What we wanted to avoid in a situation like this was having duplicates of everything, one set in Kelly’s account and one set in mine. Since I already had the infrastructure in place, we decided that everything that gets scanned in or clipped would ultimately go into the Filing Cabinet notebook. For this to work, this has to be a shared notebook So…

Tip 4: Use shared notebooks to provide easy access to your paperless data

I share four notebooks with Kelly and she shares one notebook with me. The arrangement looks something like this:

The notebooks that I share with Kelly are:

1. Digital House: this contains floor plans and measurements of everything in the house. It also contains images of manufacturer information of appliances and devices. It is useful when you are away from the house and need to know if that sofa you are looking at will fit up the stairs. Or what the serial number of the microwave oven is.
2. My Inbox: this contains all of the unprocessed notes in my inbox.
3. Filing Cabinet: this contains the bulk of the paperless data that we scan, clip and otherwise need to be able to access on a regular basis.
4. Manuals: this contains all of the instruction manuals for various devices, toys and appliances that we have. It also contains notes I’ve written, “How-tos” for other things like restoring data from our cloud backup service, or manually restarting the Apple TV.

On Kelly’s side, she shares her Inbox. As you can see in the illustration, when she scans something in or clips something using the Evernote Web Clipper, it automatically goes into her inbox. She shares this so that her inbox can be included in the regular processing and filing of notes. I make this process a little easier by creating a single “virtual” inbox for all our inboxes.

Tip #4: Create a single “virtual” inbox using a saved search to make processing easier

It would be a bit of a drag to have to go to two different places to process my “inbox.” I’d first have to process the notes in my own inbox and then process the notes in Kelly’s inbox. In order to make this simpler, I bring all of these notes together in a single “virtual” inbox. I do this by using note attributes in a saved search.

In a shared notebook environment, if Kelly creates a note in one of my notebooks, say, my Inbox, it has her name in the Author field. If I create a note in her inbox it has my name in the “Author” field. Additionally, when she clips something to her inbox, it is also automatically tagged as “Inbox.” This last item is important because it is what allows me to create the virtual inbox.

The saved search I use looks like this:

Note the keyword any at the beginning of the search. That tells the saved search to match any of the two conditions in the search, as opposed to “all”. This is an “or” search as opposed to an “and” search. Put another way, what the search does is find any notes that

• (1) Are tagged “Inbox”, OR
• (2) Have an author “Kelly Rubin”

When I select this saved search, I see all unprocessed notes in the virtual inbox. Since most of these notes are sitting in our respective inboxes, it acts as a kind of virtual inbox to simplify my processing, which looks something like this:

The virtual notebook search can be a little confusing over time. When I process the notes, I remove the “Inbox” tag as I refile them, but the author stays with the note, meaning that over time, the notes in my virtual notebook grow. I deal with this by sorting the notebook from most-to-least recent. This usually shows me the unprocessed things at the top. I can also use the List view to see what notebook the note is in. If it is in my Filing Cabinet notebook, I know I’ve already dealt with it.

Some of you may be asking: if you are sharing your Inbox, why not make it the default notebook for Kelly? This would be a much better solution, but as far as I can tell, you cannot set your default notebook to a shared notebook. Thus my workaround.

Others of you may be asking, why not simplify your saved search by limited the search to both Inbox notebooks. The problem there is that when you use the “notebook” attribute in a search, it can only take one notebook. So you can limit a search to one notebook, but not to two. Thus my workaround.

Tip 5: Monitor activity through the Activity Button

When using shared notebooks, you can easily monitor the activity for that notebook by clicking on the Activity button on the Evernote toolbar:

This will show you when your notes were last synced. It will also show recent activity and updates. You can see in the above capture that Kelly added a note to the shared notebook, “Filing Cabinet” two days ago.

Tip 6: Share useful how-to notes

I am the Evernote power user in the house, but I wanted to make sure the Kelly could easily access anything she needed, when she needed it. So I created an Evernote “how-to” note in the Manuals notebook. I made sure that she had a shortcut to this note in her copy of Evernote. The note contains information on how to do searching, how to find certain frequently accessed notes, how to add notes and notebooks to the shortcut bar, etc.

The idea here was that if I was not around to ask, the instructions would be clear and easy enough for Kelly to use on her own.

I’ve actually created several notes like this, not all of them related to Evernote. I have a note that describes, step-by-step, how to restore data from our cloud backup service, how to change the programming on the thermostat, how to restart the Apple TV device, etc.

With the tips I have described above, we can each scan or upload documents to Evernote and can access those documents that we need regular access to, no matter where we are. Kelly can do this on her own, without having to ask me how to do it, and I have a sense of peace, knowing that she has access to all of the paperless documents.

If you have a suggestion for a future Going Paperless post, let know me. Send it to me at feedback [at] jamietoddrubin.com. As always, this post and all of my Going Paperless posts is also available on Pinterest.

I don’t recall the context of the dream, or much of the details, but I do remember what that note refers to. It had to do with discovering a way to tweak the “code” of the universe, the way a programmer might modify the code of a program, in such a way that it altered 15 laws of physics. That alteration, in turn, “reversed what light does.” This doesn’t mean make things dark. I think it means that darkness illuminates instead of light. The result was an image of how the universe was created?

What was that image? I have very little detail left in my mind. The note says “pictures” and I think that was to remind me that there was an image. I do remember that the image was an “infographic” of the type you see frequently on the Internet. And I’m pretty sure it involved a caterpillar or a turtle. I’d guess the latter as opposed to the former.

I’m pretty sure I know where the dream came from. I was working out some details of the story I’m currently writing earlier in the day yesterday and the dream was probably initiated from those thoughts. But the turtle at the creation of the universe? Well, friends, all I can say is that I recently re-read Stephen King’s It for a third time, and for those who have read It, the turtle will make a lot of sense in this context.

My experience has been as follows:

• On nights when I feel like I’ve slept pretty well, the FitBit Flex shows that by showing that I didn’t wake up very many times, or wasn’t very restless.
• On nights when I feel like I haven’t slept well, the FitBit shows more restlessness.

It is hard to put this to the test because I tend to sleep in waves of good or bad. That is, when I am sleeping well, I’ll sleep well for weeks on end. Then, when I’m not sleeping well, that will go on for weeks as well.

Last night, however, seemed like a very poor night’s sleep from my perspective. I was tired, but restless. I felt like I was looking at the clock every few minutes and really didn’t settle down into a deep sleep. I figured that last night would be a good test to compare my perception of my sleep to what the FitBit Flex recorded. Here is what the FitBit Flex had to say:

The red lines show when I was awake. The light blue lines show when I was “restless.” Looking at this, I think it reflects very well my restlessness throughout the night.The first red line, right around 11am, was when the Little Man came into our room to tell me he needed to use the bathroom. (This is a little difficult operation for him to perform at night by himself with his cast on.) The second red line, right around midnight, was when I awoke after an unusual dream¹ and jotted a note about the dream so I wouldn’t forget it.

But look at all of those light blue lines, scattered pretty evenly throughout the night. It seemed to me that I was tossing and turning for most of the night, and that is exactly what the FitBit captured. Still, a more quantitative number would be helpful. When you drill into the details for the night’s sleep you see something like this:

Here, you can see that I fell asleep in 4 minutes, was awakened 17 times (some of those times count as “restlessness” as opposed to being awake, the difference being how much movement there is each time. I was in bed for 7 hours and 54 minutes and asleep for 7 hour and 16 minutes. This makes my “sleep efficiency” for last night 93%/

I have sleep efficiency data for other nights, and it seems to me that when my sleep efficiency is above 96%, I feel like I’ve slept well. When it is between 94-96%, I slept “okay.” But when it falls below 93%, I feel like I’ve had a rough night.

I think this backs up my feeling that the FitBit does a reasonably good job of capturing the quality of your night’s sleep. The resulting data matches my perceptions very well. So when I am asked how well the FitBit tracks the quality of my sleep, I guess my answer is the same as it has always been:

It does a very good job, as far as I can tell.

This guy was off by himself, soaking up the quiet:

And here is a pair swimming together further downstream:

Happy Sunday!

When I first read The Shining, I’d never seen a single episode of Doctor Who. In the years since, I’ve seen three or four episodes, but the first episode I ever watched, the episode which the Internet told me to start with, was “Blink.” For those not familiar, there are evil statues in that episode. These statues can move, but only if the observer is not looking at them. Thus the term, “don’t blink.”

Well, this morning, as I re-read that topiary scene in The Shining, I had a sudden feeling of familiarity, more than the kind of feeling you get when you are re-reading something from a few years back. I’d seen something like this somewhere else. I thought about it for a moment and came up with that Doctor Who episode, “Blink.” In The Shining, it seems that those topiary animals only move when Jack isn’t looking at them. When he looks back, they’ve changed position, just like the statues in “Blink.”

And then I realized that I had it backwards. “Blink” is what should have seemed familiar to me because I’d read The Shining years before. And, of course, the book had been written decades before that. Stephen King had been there first.

This isn’t meant to take anything away from Doctor Who or “Blink.” I think it serves as a good example of how the same idea can be reused in novel ways by different writers. New writers often worry that there are no new ideas, but an old idea used in a unique way is just as good.

This morning, the Little Man had surgery to correct the condition. This required general anesthesia, which is always a little nerve-wracking. But this was the third time that the Little Man has had general anesthesia and the surgery itself took only 15 minutes. We left the house at 6:30 am and were back home by 11 am. The Little Man was brave and smiling throughout and the surgery corrected the condition. In about 9 days–when the cast comes off–he will have full mobility and functionality of his right thumb once again.

Yes, there is kind of a cast. Lots of padding and wrapping and bandages, which almost seems overkill for an incision that was barely a few millimeters. But the Little Man is nearly four and the cast will help ensure proper healing.

At the time of this writing, the Little Man is downstairs, happily playing with the Little Miss (and some new toys). He will miss t-ball for two weeks, but he was going to miss a week anyway as we are taking a road trip on Memorial Day weekend. He is a little trooper, though.

I always get a little nervous before these things and it is a relief to have this behind us.

Tarnished by Rhiannon Held (TOR), publication date: May 21, 2013.

The Planet Thieves by Dan Krokos (Starscape/TOR Teen), publication date: May 21, 2013.

Blood and Bone by Ian C. Esslemont (TOR), publication date: May 21, 2013.