I’m not talking about your high school past here. We all make notes and jot down important information. A great habit to get into is writing down the date beside anything that isn’t going into the trash within a week. Meetings, school notes, scribbles on scraps of paper, the best way to remember is to get into the habit of dating it all. Otherwise the more time passes, the less useful the information you wrote down becomes.

Case in point: I’m putting together my yearly accounts for Tilted Pixel, inputting all those transactions that haven’t quite made it in yet. In doing so I had to dig up a customer’s information and found an interesting note I must have made years ago in the customer’s file - “Last payment - $74 CAD” - no date of course. I honestly don’t remember why I ever thought to store that information, but at the time it was written it presented reliable data. As time moved forward the note rapidly lost any usefulness it may have once held. Was $74 really the customer’s last payment? Doubtful considering this was never my accounting system, and that I currently use QuickBooks. So when was this payment actually made? What if I was backtracking to fix an accounting error? The information is useless.

Luckily I’m much more organized now and recognize the importance of dates. This is the only reason I can now take a two month stack of papers and input them just as easily as if I had done so each day.

Bonus tip: when writing down a phone number write down the name too. Seems obvious, but I just threw out a whole stack of scrap papers with unidentified numbers that I had written down hastily when on the phone.