technology

From Cyber Attacks to Pandemics: Reflections on Trying to Work During Times of Crisis

Since 2008, ACRLog’s “First Year Academic Librarian (FYAL) Experience” series has annually featured 1-2 academic librarians in their first year on the job in an academic library. This new series, “Where Are They Now? Former FYALs Reflect,” features posts from past FYAL bloggers as they look back on their trajectories since their first year. This month, we welcome a post from Melissa DeWitt, Research and Instruction Librarian at Regis University.

My final post as an FYAL blogger was in July of 2019. I ended that post on a reflective note, and like the themes I reflected on. In particular, I still believe that relationships are the most important thing, which I hope comes through in this post. While I liked those themes, there were some things I didn’t realize during my first year – mainly that my work life and personal life are not separate. That’s not to say that I don’t take time to myself or find ways to decompress (I love my hobbies, and I definitely know how to chill!). What I mean is that I am not a person that carefully tucks work into bed when I leave for the day, nor can I separate the ways my personal life affects my work. All facets of my life intertwine with and influence one another. I suspect that this is true for most people. Stacey Abrams, in a podcast with David Tennant, describes work/life balance as a myth. Instead, she equates it to a game of Jenga. You carefully stack and pull pieces out whenever you need them, hoping it all won’t come tumbling down, but the crash is inevitable. You have to put the pieces back together and try balancing everything all over again.

The goal of this series is to reflect on our trajectories since the first year, and I’m not sure how to reflect on my trajectory without providing some context. The truth is that reflecting on my work experience since I last posted is upsetting. Sometimes reflection is cathartic, but sometimes it’s like ripping the scab off a wound you’ve been trying to ignore. This reflection is a combination of both.

On August 22, 2019, three days before the beginning of the semester, my workplace detected an external security breach. We learned later in the day that we had experienced a cyber attack, and would eventually learn that it was ransomware.

I could spend hours talking about what happened next, but there’s not enough space in this post. Here’s a brief overview. We did not have systems back up for months. We used personal devices to perform our work. All data on my work computer was lost or unrecoverable. The library did not have access to databases or any online content, and so we contacted vendors, one-by-one, to ask for alternate access, which we listed on a password-protected spreadsheet. The research desk became an IT desk, as we spent hours helping students print and navigate research without purchased resources. We spent months without any of the tools we needed to do our jobs (because if it was tech, we did not have it), and yet we were still expected to do our jobs. My main takeaway from this experience? It was awful.

I mentioned that work and personal life affect one another because this was especially true during the cyber attack. Work became a low point for me and many of my colleagues, which affected my mood at home. Several people left during this time, morale was garbage, and I woke up every morning with a deep sense of dread. We did absolutely everything to try and provide the same services, but that was part of the problem. We should have been able to take a break, to look at the situation and say, “this isn’t sustainable.” Instead, we pretended that we could do the same work without any of the resources that made our work possible. There were also professional repercussions: we had layoffs, incentivized retirements, hiring freezes across many departments, and mergers between colleges. It felt like it would never end. The worst part was that no one outside my workplace really got it, so it felt like we were isolated in our little bubble of misery. That’s not to say that people were not supportive. When I reflect back on this time period, the one bright spot were the people in my personal and professional life that created an amazing support network. I do not know what I would have done without my people. Despite that network, it’s hard to relay the despair, fatigue, anger and poor morale I felt. It consumed all aspects of my life, and that semester is now a huge blur.

My world isn’t solely professional. In 2019, I attended three funerals for grandparents. Life didn’t stop just because work was shit. There were amazing things too. I attended my sister’s wedding, and I got engaged. I planned a wedding during the cyber attack and in between funerals, and then I took a break from the chaos of my workplace to get married in early February 2020. The pandemic was not quite on our radar, and I remember my wedding as the last real gathering with all of my friends and family before everything went down. We were incredibly lucky, and it’s an event I’ll never forget because it’s this amazing, bright and shiny spot on an otherwise miserable year.

Then the pandemic hit, and we all had to deal with it. The only saving grace was that, after working through a cyber attack, pivoting library work for the pandemic felt easy because I had the tools necessary to do my work. Except, this time, the crisis was present in every facet of our lives, and people were (and still are) dying. I won’t spend much time reflecting on the pandemic because, reader, you know what it’s like. Reflection is a process of looking back, but the pandemic is still happening. I don’t know how this ends yet. Instead, I’ll tell you about bright spots amidst the chaos.

When I was first hired, I asked about the possibility of teaching a credit-bearing class because creating a course was one of my professional goals. That goal came to fruition in fall 2020. The class was difficult to teach due to pandemic-related reasons, but also incredibly rewarding. I suspected that teaching a course outside the traditional, one-shot library session would foster my growth as a teacher, and this turned out to be true. I learned so much about myself, my capabilities as a teacher, and about students. Students are the reason I wanted to become an academic librarian in the first place, and teaching a class solidified all the warm fuzzy feelings I have towards them. I will never forget ending our last class of the semester and students remaining in the Zoom room because they did not want to leave. I cried. They cried and wrote the sweetest things I’ve ever read in a chat. There’s something about taking care of one another during a difficult time that brings you together. I also would not have been able to navigate this class without my friend and colleague who was my mentor while teaching the class. She answered all of my frantic emails with grace, and I probably would have melted into a puddle without her.

I also co-wrote my first publication, which was a source of angst during my first year. The timing was not ideal, but it got done. This was, again, not possible without the support of my co-writers. Writing is already challenging, but writing during a pandemic is something else. It’s nice to work with folks who keep you accountable but also understand that we’re all human beings just doing our best. First year me would be very proud. In addition, you can catch me all year presenting at conferences, including two pop culture conferences. I’ll be presenting with some really cool people.

Furthermore, I look forward to the progression of my teaching skills and the evolution of my pedagogy. Continuing my teaching adventures, I will co-teach a master’s level research course in March, which I’m really excited about. I will also teach writing and composition to first year students again in the fall. Teaching and working with students brings me joy in my work, so that’s what I’m going to keep doing.

Final Reflections

It was hard not to feel anger bubble up as I wrote 30 versions of this post (some a little spicier than others). I’m curious to see what my professional life will look like when I no longer have to perform during a crisis. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that institutions will do what’s best for them, not for you. I like my job and my work, but it doesn’t need to be this difficult. We can’t keep doing more with less and expect that to work forever. The professional accomplishments I’m proud of are in spite of my workplace, not because of it. It’s possible I would have published sooner, or achieved more of my goals if I hadn’t worked in a place that was weathering multiple crises. I am trying to acknowledge that impact and recognize that I am not above external factors. At the same time, I do not need to simply roll with the punches. Since my first year, I’m a little louder, a little more jaded, and a lot angrier. I’m less afraid and more confident about what kind of impact I want to make in my work and at my institution. The time since I wrote my last post was jammed with low points, and at some point, I’d like to take a nap. In the meantime, I’ll celebrate my accomplishments, lean on the strength of my relationships, and see what I do next.

No, Fair! Evolving Perspectives on Excessive Use in Research

Midterm brings its share of bustle to the library with last minute research questions to ask and copiers and printers to locate. Library staff are also busy negotiating licenses, finalizing renewals, and troubleshooting access to the resources on which faculty and students rely. I’d like to shed some light on a subtler side of the troubleshooting task that, while not a frequent occurrence, is a growing concern for me as a librarian and researcher. The technologies that enable this bustle of research activity can at times inadvertently trigger what publishers call excessive use or excessive downloading. This is considered a breach of contract according to the licenses for these resources. Remedying this breach usually involves working with university IT security to identify, inform, and prevent such use, assuring publishers that the breach is cured, and publishers then unblocking the network IP or IP range necessary to restore access to content.

Recently, I’ve been contemplating researchers’ expectations when working with scholarly content and technology. What technologies are they using? Are they compatible across content provider platforms? How might they trigger excessive use breaches? What exactly is excessive use or excessive downloading in an online research environment?

What publishers think

Sometimes the publisher’s license language specifies the use of bots, link-checker, crawlers, spiders, automated software, and even indexing as excessive or unauthorized. But more often, breaches associated with this activity are not explicitly defined, nor are they put in context of excessive use within the license. This leaves it fairly open to interpretation.

Publishers must consider the perspective of copyright holders, and typically enforce equivalent limitations for online use that they would for physical print materials uses. It sounds reasonable, but because in reality we use print and online resources very differently, such licenses terms may give up fair use and other scholarly exceptions granted by copyright law. Publishers take an even heavier hand when responding to excessive use breaches. Blocking the user’s IP access, or sometimes an entire campus IP range, presumes malicious intent (which it almost never is). This response also exaggerates the stakes involved and misunderstands what is necessary to perform digital research. Strict reinterpretation of print use restrictions in the online environment denies advances in research technology, from basic citation management software to APIs used for text and data mining. It also ignores the very structure of the linked-data world we live in.

What most people think

When users learn that their actions violate library license agreements, their reactions are surprised, apologetic, and most often confused. While some may be aware of the technologies that makes excessive downloading possible, most don’t believe they constitute unethical or unlawful actions. Breach of contract itself is kind of a boogey-man phrase that brings more readily to mind data breaches like Equifax. If people are aware of breaches occurring in academia, attention more often goes to those involving individual student records.

According to one IT security expert I asked, the kinds of scholarly content breaches I’m talking about don’t even register on the scale of data sensitivity or security. Unless credentials were stolen in order to download excessively, it is not security issue; it’s a copyright issue. Publishers who treat copyright infringement as a security issue might be mitigating risk, but they are not serving or educating their customer.

What librarians think

Librarians, naturally, do approach this from the service and education mindset. Increasingly that means a not just serving end-users within the academy, but the general public who pay for the research through their tax dollars. As researchers assert the right to retain copyright of their own content and share it more widely, more diverse collaboration is possible, increasing potential for innovative research discoveries. Libraries assert copyright exceptions and expose inequities in traditional publishing structures in order to make openness for innovation possible as well.

By Fred Benenson - User: Mecredis [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I’ll digress briefly to the story of Aaron Swartz for illustration and comparison. He was an advocate of openness, yet his deliberate action to hack and release scholarly content provides, I suppose, a perfect case for publishers’ insistence to treat copyright as a security issue. In this case, the breach involved 4 million documents. The scope in numbers (less than 3% of the Equifax breach) pales by comparison, especially considering nature of the data and the consequences (or lack of) to those responsible and to those harmed.

Rarely are scholars’ actions as deliberate or the stakes of intellectual property loss as high as this scholarly breach (or breaches of individuals’ personal data). In fact many legitimate uses of scholarly research technologies are being blocked even to those with “rights” to use them. Some examples of technology uses I’ve seen publishers block include citation management software like EndNote that indexes and stores full text where available. As early as 2006, librarians reported browser technologies that link and open an articles’ cited references, triggering such use. What about mining text and data to discover disciplinary concepts across time and from journal publications that span multiple publishers? Innovating digital researchers are developing their own programming for this, but can they use it? Are there alternatives, and are they open or proprietary?

My role as an acquisitions librarian means I must balance the needs of publishers supplying the content we license with needs of users who access that content for their research and study. That balance falls somewhere between stoic realism and OAnarchy for me. But I’m still a teacher at heart, so educating all sides remains my goal. In the traditional, profit-based publishing system, where flat library budgets mean buying power decreases each year, I must follow open access developments carefully, just as I must work to negotiate the best deal within these existing structures. There is always room in this to educate publishers, librarians, and users.

Learning more about the tools researchers use, wish they had, or wish they could use without being blocked from access is my next goal. In my troubleshooting experience so far, tools like EndNote, Papers on Mac, Abstraktr, RedCap, WGET are just a few. So tell me…

What digital research
(or reference citation management)
technologies are your researchers using?

Meta Top Ten: An Infinitely Regressive New Year to You!

infinitergression_fractal_stuartpilbrow_flickr — stuartpilbrow CC BY-SA 2.0

One of my favorite things to do as a kid while my mother practiced the organ was play in the church’s bridal suite. It had this closet of two large mirrored doors opening to a floor-to-ceiling mirror. I’d close the mirrors on my leg or arm, slide around in there and watch my appendages travel into infinity. As a librarian this has always been my go-to symbol of all things meta — metadata and (my favorite) the you-don’t-know-what-you-don’t-know problem. Answering the New Year’s call for reflection, I thought I’d put a meta twist on the top ten themes from my 2016 and some 2017 resolutions in response to the same.

10. Death – The 10 Best and Worst things to say to someone in grief

It feels like 2016 brought a lot of death. Maybe I’m just becoming more aware of it as I age. Then again, the first of the year marks the death anniversary of a dear friend and my first experience of losing someone very close to me. So, loss and grief have since then been particularly acute themes this time of year. In 2016, I experienced death in my professional life as well. Navigating this brought to mind the list above and an American Libraries article on death cafes in libraries. Knowing firsthand the physical effect of stress on one’s health, and the reverse benefits of de-stressing, death can be a brutal reminder of the stakes involved. So, I’ve resolved to relearn and practice coping skills for anxiety and stress at work this coming year.

9. Happiness — 15 Things Incredibly Happy People Do

I first learned some of this list’s tips during my involvement in organizational and staff development work at my institution — #1 through Brene Brown’s vulnerability research and #3 through mindfulness. I have since put many more to use during stresses like the tenure review process and reorganizations. One of my 2016 resolutions was to do more perfectly reasonable travel (#4 on this list), which I did to two neighboring states this year. Less reasonably, I was even able to get all the way to Hawaii! In 2017 my focus will be going offline, building relationships, and taking more chances, all helping me with meta list items 5, 3, and 2 below.

8. Reduce Stress — De-Stress at Your Desk

After a back injury two years ago, I’ve made fits and starts at keeping up an exercise practice. The stretches my chiropractor recommended were a lot like these, but not nearly as fashionable or fun. This year I finally have a morning yoga routine down, and hope to kick it up a notch in 2017 by adding these moves back in during the day.

7. Time Management — How to Design Your Time Rather…

One of the professional colleagues who passed this year, Shane Lopez, was the author of Making Hope Happen. His work is one among many built upon positivity research. Similarly, this 5-minute read from Fast Company gives a positive strengths-based approach to time management. But you should really check out the time research of Dawna Ballard who was the 2016 ER&L conference opening keynote speaker.

6. The Election — Behind the Lens: 2016 in Photographs

The presidential election was certainly was a significant marker of 2016, and the issue of fake news cycles signaled renewed attention to digital information literacy for libraries. White House photographer, Pete Souza, reflects on the Obama presidency in one of my favorite list mediums, a photo series. And to healthy resolutions (laughter being the best medicine), I’ll just leave this bonus list right here.

5. Technology — Here’s What Happens to Tech in 2017 (Unless 2016 Was All a Dream)

The election cycle had me enmeshed in social media, leading me to consider some serious de-teching resolutions in 2017. So far that’s meant removing Facebook from my phone and an online password management overhaul. The former took two seconds, the latter the better part of an entire day. This year also brought a number of new technologies to my work — VoIP phones, among others. WIRED magazine is great for keeping up to date on such things, even if it does sometimes cause me existential dread.

4. DESJ — Recommended Readings in Critical Librarianship

My university welcomed both a new dean of libraries and a new provost in 2016. Both have shared a strong commitment to action on issues of diversity, equity, and social justice (DESJ). My 2016 reading, limited as it was, occurred mostly in this vein. Since exploring this in my first ACRLog post, I’ve been learning about the use of gender pronouns, my own biases, and microagressions. My resolution in the new year is to facilitate conversations about how these issue play out beyond the service desk in our daily work.

3. More Reading and Writing – The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors

Feeding my recurring resolution to read more, here’s another recommended reading list by one of my favorite sources. In 2016 I took to writing about the changes in my work for traditional publishing venues. But joining the team of bloggers ACRLog in 2016 has been an amazing opportunity to learn from other academic librarians and (hopefully) become a better and more habitual writer in my profession. Still a newbie, I confess that each post so far has been met with part inspired anticipation and part crippling anxiety. I know reading and writing more are the surest ways to improve each skill. Surely with such practice (and above lists 9, 8, 7) the intensity of it all will ease.

2. Ask for help — 5 Ways to Get Better at Asking for Help

I also know the benefits of asking for help. Unfortunately this is also the hardest for me to put into to practice, so much so I considered leaving it off the meta list altogether! Interestingly, these suggestions for improving that ask mirror some approaches I’d like to take in my research this year. Ultimately, I want to take what the reference interview did for patrons asking librarians for research help at the desk and apply it in other, different kinds of information needs in the library. How do patrons ask for help differently when troubleshooting access to digital resources? How do we ask help of our colleagues when needing their assistance to change workflow? How do we ask for help when power dynamics change from patron and librarian to staff and supervisor? A big resolution will be getting this research question out there (no, really, this time) and asking for help.

1. Cats — The most popular cats on YouTube

Really nothing at all to do with the old or new year, but what library meta list would be complete without cats?

Do you have another list, resource, or comment to add on these themes? Please share!

Put a Process On It!

Editor’s Note: We welcome Angela Rathmel to the ACRLog team. Angela is the head of Acquisitions & Resource Sharing at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Her research focuses on libraries’ organizational response to changes in scholarly publishing, acquisition, and access, particularly with respect to organizational communication, information seeking, and knowledge management.

Working in acquisitions and resource sharing, I sometimes struggle to navigate my unique and shared place in the various communities of this profession (ACRL, ALCTS, LLAMA, etc.). I’m often characterized as a “technical services” librarian, but this does not always adequately describe the work I do. In the past 15 years that I have worked in this part of the library, I have seen dramatic changes as a result of the material transition of print to electronic resources. Beyond just the physical format, these changes have meant that technical services staff now work more directly with library users and no longer just process behind the scenes. Our work also involves direct and frequent interaction across more areas of the library than ever before.

I genuinely enjoy working with people. Discovering new ways to communicate across the library, especially through radical change, fascinates me. In spite of these interpersonal interests, in many ways I fall right into the technical services stereotype. I’m a cautious communicator, and my go-to mode of thinking is to solve every issue with a systematized process. Give me a problem and I’ll “put a process on it”!

A particularly cogent example of this tendency occurred recently with some of my colleagues in “public services” (another phrase that no longer adequately describes their work). We were discussing our campus-wide initiatives in diversity, equity, and social justice and how the libraries could support these initiatives throughout all of our services, not just at the service desk. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to once again lower the barriers between technical and public services. But I worried because I found myself expressing the challenge many of us in technical services face even initiating discussions about our own day-to-day work conflicts. I was fearful about my ability, especially as a leader, to initiate a productive conversation with my staff about conflicts, like microagressions, of which individuals may not even be aware. So, I did what I often do when faced with uncertainty — I put a process on it! I suggested that we solicit the help of trained facilitators from the libraries’ organizational development unit. As one of those trained facilitators, this seemed both a safe way for me get involved, while at the same time satisfying the requirements of scale.

I was amazed at how my colleague’s response could all at once genuinely honor my approach and also persuasively encourage each of us to find our own (maybe different) path. This was not the first time I have questioned the appropriateness of my knack to put a process on things. But that discussion was moment of clarity shaping everything I’ve encountered and thought about since. It has prompted me to examine more closely and even question this tendency that has served me well so far in my path in technical services. I thought I’d begin my introductory post to ACRLog sharing my experience as this kind of librarian, and hopefully in the process discover more about a path forward.

The draw of process

When I talk about process in this context, I mean the way in which I think through the steps of workflow, understand cause and effect, and most efficiently move from point A to point B, all while accounting for the connections in between. For acquisitions and resource sharing, the overarching process we are concerned with is the scholarly communication supply chain and its ability to get the resources users need as efficiently as possible. Individual motivations for this work vary, of course. Some enjoy improving these processes for the economic reasons: the joy of saving money, cutting costs, and demonstrating a return on investment. Some like the ever present source of a puzzle to solve. Many still are motivated by service and how the process makes it easy for other people. Some like fighting for our core values through the process of negotiation with vendors. For the more introverted among us, it seems that processes at their root help create predictability where a thing might otherwise be or feel out of control. This certainly describes the environment in which libraries and we librarians of all types have found ourselves ever since change became the new normal.

The benefit of process is not just for the individual coping with change. It has a direct benefit to the organization as a whole. In my experience, process helps me discover and understand how to use new technologies effectively. Process has been the language I use to help others through ongoing training. In my library as whole, that language enables me to translate the impact of larger change on our work. Becoming a trained facilitator, I’ve learned better processes of communication between individuals or groups, made meetings run more smoothly, facilitated strategic planning and assessment efforts, and contributed to larger organizational change. How each area within the library addresses their own particular management of perpetual change has brought about all manner of processes, frameworks, assessment models, and mission statements. It seems librarians of all types can put a process on just about everything.

Process in the extreme

The consequence of taking process thinking too far is that it can get in the way of actual doing, or worse, overlook the human need in all of us for deeper meaning and connection. Technical process efficiency taken to its extreme is automation. Even the rise in library automation processes, however, has not eliminated the need for human aspects in the most technical of workflow processes because the environment is filled with people serving people. I tend to perceive my own process as an act of creativity. As my leadership responsibilities move me from introversion to ambiversion, I prefer to process with others, creating new things and building new relationships. Additional research, suggesting that our minds do not even process or recall like computers at all, supports the notion that there is a more creative present and future for our work.

Processes involved in addressing continual change on an organizational level are essentially human-oriented. These can’t achieve the extreme of automation because they too require ongoing attention for the people involved. How our relationships change, how we communicate across new organizational structures, and how we respond to actual people, are a necessary part of our response to the rapid changes in our work. People and their relationships certainly don’t want to be processed; they need to be seen, understood, and valued.

Process to path

The conclusions I’ve come to are:

we need both technical process mindedness and relational mindedness
these are not necessarily mutually exclusive

Getting myself to that point means rediscovering the areas of research that piqued my curiosity and inspired my passion for this profession from the start – Devin’s sense-making and research around the reference interview. This research speaks directly to how our systematized human processes and automated systems can and should be relational. The fundamentals of communicating in our profession are constructive, “tied to specific times, place, and perspectives” (Foreman-Wernet, 2003, p.5). This applies not only for dealing with patrons, but for dealing with one another, inside and across library departments.

I intend to stay involved in interactions and discussion like the one that prompted this reflection. I may not have the capacity yet to effectively communicate, or know how to take action, on issue of diversity, equity and social justice. But I know enough that it is my privilege to learn. My awareness and willingness seem small to me, but I can accept them as important and necessary steps on my larger path.

References:

Dervin, B. and Foreman-Wernet, L. (2003). Sense-making methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin. New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc.

Tactics for Organization: Making Progress

I started my job as the Undergraduate Services Resident Librarian back in August, and I remember often not knowing what to do with my time during the day. I think that’s normal when you start in a new position, especially a newly created one like mine. For at least the first month or two I had to get used to a new work environment, meet a ton of people, learn as much as possible, and generally begin to shape what my job was going to be. However, I wasn’t sure what to do with the “down time” between scheduled meetings and training.

Fast forward six months and I found myself in the complete opposite situation. Instead of having time on my hands that I wasn’t sure what to do with, I felt like I had so much going on and not nearly enough time to keep up. February was a particularly hectic month and while things have settled down a bit now, I have to constantly work towards staying organized and on track with the variety of projects going on at any given moment.

This week is spring break for students on my campus, so it’s quiet and empty around here and I will hopefully be able to get a lot more work done. Here are some things I’m keeping in mind to make sure I’m actually making progress:

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Everything needs to get done, but something needs to get done first. When I have a list of things to do, I want to jump into them all. This can end up in doing a little bit here and a little bit there, when that time could be better spent focusing on one priority.
Fill your to-do list with specific, actionable items. Instead of “work on X project” or “plan session Y,” I’m thinking in terms of things like “write first draft for X project” and “email instructor about session Y.” Setting smaller, measurable to-do items helps me take on the larger goal.

These may seem obvious, but a reminder doesn’t hurt. Being mindful of those practices has certainly helped me recently.

Getting organized is key to staying on top of things. I’ve tried out several tools in an effort be more organized and to consolidate my many notes and to-do lists, but have yet to find the *one perfect thing* that works for me. Therefore, my notes are scattered throughout many places. Since I’ve found benefits to all of them, I thought I would share:

A friend recommended Workflowy and I fell in love with it immediately. Workflowy is great for list-making and brainstorming, and is very simple and easy to use. I think the best part is that you can collapse or expand any bullet point on the list, allowing you to either see the larger picture or focus on just one point.
I’ve heard Evernote is a great note-taking tool that you can do a lot with, and decided to give it a try. I haven’t delved into any neat tips and tricks, but the Evernote iPad app is now my favorite way to take notes during conference sessions – and now at least most of my conference notes are all in one place.
Sometimes good old Microsoft Outlook is my best friend in organizing. It took me a while to discover the Tasks and To-Do List within Outlook, and now I use them all the time. Flagging emails, setting reminders, creating custom categories…I can get really into this stuff, but the important thing is that is actually helps.
A pen and notepad can be the easiest route to go, especially when I’m dashing off to a meeting and just need something to write on. However, I now have about five notepads in rotation, and have grabbed the wrong one in situations where I need to reference previous notes.

I’m always trying to improve my personal organizational system, but maybe this is what works for me – a combination of many systems. Feel free to share what works for you, and any interesting tips or tools. I’m wishing you all a very productive rest of the week!