Manage Your Personal Information: Paper, Digital, or Both?

Mar 4

Recently someone asked me about when to use digital information, and when to use paper.

In the early 2000s I had a small business as a professional organizer, specializing in managing information at workplaces. Prior to that, I worked at research sites, managing information. I’ve also worked as a network administrator in a health care setting, managing information. On this blog I emphasize writing things down and reviewing them regularly; which is also about managing information.

So.

I have THOUGHTS.

But instead of sharing what I do (although I’ll mention some things), I want to give you a set of questions to guide you through the information forest.

This essay is about decisions you might want to consider when it comes to managing your own personal information for yourself, or for your household.

What works best for YOU, when it comes to analog vs. digital?

Let’s dive in:

Questions about Managing Your Information

Questions for Both Workplaces and Individuals

Who else needs to access this information?

Where and when does this information need to be accessed?

How unique, critical, or hard to replace is this information — do you need ways to back it up? (Ways. That’s plural. If you need backups at all, you need them to be plural.)

How much time, money, and work will it take for you to maintain this information?

Questions Especially for Individuals

Does this information improve when you copy it, or does it degrade when you copy it? (Hint: we’re getting into creative work.)

What tools do you love to use?

Which values impact how you deal with information? (Think values like “privacy,” or “getting away from screens.”)

Okay, let’s walk through these.

Who Else Needs to Access This Information?

Is it burdensome, or unrealistic, or a privacy/security concern to require others to know how to get into your devices, or to share an app with you?

Some information is useful in analog form, even if it lives in digital space most of the time. When we travel, a dear friend takes care of our cats. Before we go, I print out a piece of paper for her that has our numbers, our itinerary, the number of the vet, and anything else she might need to know in case something comes up and we’re not immediately available.

What I like about giving her a print-out is that neither of us has to wonder if she can find it on her phone.

It doesn’t matter what’s happening with her phone that day. Ta da! The paper with emergency information is right there. If she also wants to take a picture of it for her phone, she’s a smart cookie; she knows how to do that.

I also keep what I jokingly call the Canonical Household Address Book.

It’s a physical address book, but we only keep critical addresses in there: family, close friends, and contact info for people like the vet, the plumber, the electrician, a few other emergency numbers.

For us, it’s a lot less confusing to keep a paper notebook with contact information for the couple dozen people we really need to keep in touch with. If you have a printer, you could also print out your critical contact information.

If You Lost This Information, How Much Work Would it Be to Restore It?

Digital shines here (with — of course — multiple backup modes). I love bullet journaling, but I didn’t love copying over a month’s worth of calendar entries with Ryder Carroll’s original system.

Calendars, master task lists, contact lists… Any personal reference material that is a pain to recreate is usually best maintained in a digital format.

However, one of my values is to stay focused during the workday, so I use a paper notebook to manage my daily plans. My paper daily plan notebook never distracts me with cat videos, notifications, or alerts.

My calendar, and my project and task lists, and even my quarterly and weekly plans live in digital formats, but when I plan out my days, I do that on paper. Planning with paper can also be more effective than using an app, for some visual learners.

Does This Information Prove Something Critical About You?

Our most important documents are still issued on paper. These are the documents that prove you have citizenship; that prove you are, or are no longer married; that prove your military service; that prove your identity; that prove that you have paid off large loans; that prove that you own valuable items like houses or cars.

Store documents like your birth certificate, advance medical directive, passport, deeds, titles, covid-19 vaccine cards, securely. Also scan or take digital photos of these documents.

When and Where Do You Need to Access This Information?

Let’s say you use a safe for your important papers like the ones above.

Where do you securely store the card with the combination to the safe?

Answer: Not in the safe!!! Don’t store the combination to your safe, in your safe. (A locksmith told me a lot of people inadvertently do this.)

When will you want to access certain kinds of information, and under what circumstances?

Example: Information that I know I’ll want to access while I’m away from home, lives on my phone. But I also have a paper list of emergency numbers in my wallet and in my car’s glove compartment in case the data on my phone is not available.

How Much Time, Money, and Work Will it Take for You to Maintain This Information?

All information to be useful, must be maintained.

It must be updated or discarded when it’s no longer useful. It must be filed so you know where to find it when you want it. (Search functions are okay. If you have a lot of information, good filing systems are faster*: see notes below this post, for a couple to try.)

Deciding to keep information, like deciding to keep a physical object, means you also have decided to keep the chores, space, and expenses that go with owning it.

For example, I hate scanning. No, really. I hate scanning.

I also already have an actual home office with filing cabinets and paper-based office supplies. It’s less trouble for me to file a paper copy in my analog filing system, than it is to scan it into my digital filing system. (I use a system which makes it easy to tell whether something is on paper or in my computer.)

I’m also ruthless about getting rid of information, because keeping it is costly. I don’t want to spend time, mental energy, or money maintaining files I don’t need. My hybrid paper-digital system works just dandy for me.

But maybe you don’t want to sacrifice the floor space or expense to keep papers. Perhaps you don’t hate scanning, and it makes more sense to go paperless.

For paper versus digital, ask yourself: How much friction is involved for you to maintain a given format?

I’m not just talking about the work of say, entering data into an app, versus writing something down by hand. I’m talking about the work of making sure you can find what you wrote, later.

Information you can’t find later when you want it, is useless.

Does This Information Improve When You Copy It, Or Degrade When You Copy It?

Creative, Reflective, Insight-Based Material Is Often Improved By Copying

Do you want to be creative with this information?

Do you want to work with it to make new ideas and insights? Are you writing, planning, strategizing, journaling?

A great way to refine an idea, is to copy it over. Creative thinking is iterative.

When you copy over information you’re using to create ideas with, it quickly becomes editing and rewriting. You’re adding new insights; and you’re seeing what’s no longer interesting or relevant. Manually copying information, whether you’re handwriting or re-typing, changes that information.

For me, I like to use paper when I start planning or writing. A lot of it eventually goes to a digital format, but paper forces me to copy it, and hopefully improve it.

Reference Material Is Often Messed Up By Copying

Since manually copying information usually changes it, that’s not so good if it’s reference information.

Especially if, like me, you regularly transpose numbers.

Our paper Canonical Address Book is great for cutting through the fog of the thousands of contacts that Google and Siri indiscriminately record for us. But I have to be super careful when copying that information.

What Tools Do You Love to Use?

In workplaces, we usually don’t get much of a choice about what we use.

At home, we do!

Havron’s First Law of Personal Information Management: Use Tools You Love to Use. Then you’re more likely to keep up with it.

Pretend you are creating your dream personal office from scratch. Pretend that you have an unlimited budget for your thinking tools, for your personal and household information management, and an assistant to help you organize it to perfection. (Remember, we’re pretending. Fantasies, right?)

In your imagination, where would you go to equip your dream office?

Are you headed to the Apple Store?

Or are you headed to the stationers’ shop with all the fountain pens?

What is the office of your dreams like?

Are you working with the latest and greatest devices and apps? Or are you working with beautiful notebooks and writing materials?

Your dream office is a clue to the tools you most enjoy working with.

In some areas of my life, I’m frugal, but with my home systems I learned that I write more, and organize things better, if I like what I’m using.

I am willing to spend a little more money on a notebook I really like writing in, I’m willing to spend a little more money for an app that does exactly what I want it to do.

In short, I drink boring coffee so I can afford cool pens…

Which Values Impact How You Manage Your Information?

I celebrate Screen-Free Saturdays. One of my values is to spend as much time as I can, away from screens. Since I celebrate Screen-Free Saturday , I keep some information on paper instead of on my phone.

Other values might include:

Privacy and security
Longevity of the information, making it “future-proof”
Access to the information
Environmental impact

How you organize your personal information, is also personal. Hopefully the questions above will help you determine what works for you.

References

Elliott, J. (2021) What is the 3-2-1 Backup Rule?, https://www.uschamber.com/co. Available at: https://www.uschamber.com/co/co/run/technology/3-2-1-backup-rule (Accessed: 4 March 2022).

Information longevity: ‘Proven – Rhoneisms’ (no date). Available at: https://www.patrickrhone.net/proven/ (Accessed: 4 March 2022).

Creating a Folder Structure for Your Plain Text Files (no date). Available at: https://plaintextproject.online/articles/2019/11/05/folders.html (Accessed: 4 March 2022).

The Johnny.Decimal system: Home (no date). Available at: https://johnnydecimal.com/ (Accessed: 4 March 2022).

Notes

*Here are two basic, straightforward digital filing systems: a classic directory/folder structure , and the Johnny.Decimal system. I use the Johnny.Decimal system for my digital files because instead of referencing a lengthy file path, I can use one number, which is super handy for my hybrid system. (I also like playing with wiki-style systems, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay…)

Anna Havron