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FollowDavid Pogue’s Personal Database
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New York Times technology writer David Pogue offers a few of his biggest productivity tips, from working at home (thus avoiding a time-intensive commute) to using voice-to-text transcription software, text expansion, and keyboard macros. What caught my eye is how he uses a personal database to store and find information he needs. Pogue writes:
Years ago, I started using an address-book program that's now called iData 3. It's a freeform database, meaning that the "cards" in this database don't have separate fields for Name, Street, City and so on; instead, you can type or paste whatever you want into each freeform card.
This program doesn't play well with field-based contact managers like Google's or the iPhone's, but the beauty is that it holds whatever you want: recipes, brainstorms, article fragments, driving directions, lists, Web addresses and so on. And you can find anything in a fraction of a second. (Actually, iData now lets you create field-based databases as well, but my freeform database has been growing since about 1988 and I'm not about to convert it.)
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