Super effective way of storing day to day information where I can access them quickly?

Question

I am going to start organizing chaos of tasks by Getting Things Done (GTD) in my life. For which I am reorganizing information that I need from time to time, for example:

• Internet Banking Usernames/IDs
• All my Card details (In case I need to call up a bank, I will need this info handy)
• Utilities Customer IDs (Electricity, Water, Internet etc)
  • Track paid bills and unpaid bills (sometimes hard copy don't just come and I might miss paying them. Meaning to look for autopayment stuff but I don't think it exists here)
• Insurance policies, tracking their renewal dates, or when I need to take some particular action with them
• Different complaint numbers across services etc

I am wondering what would be a super effective way of keeping such information where it is easily & quickly retrievable.

Answer 1

Tools: I'm going to beat the crowd to the punch and suggest taking a look at Evernote. It's super available (desktop, web, iOS, Android, etc.); has a freemium model, so you can give it a good try-out before committing to any payments; and is flexible enough to store just about everything you mention.

(The exception to Evernote availability is Linux, which has only a fan-written client.)

The exception would be usernames and passwords. Evernote isn't encrypted enough to handle that. Try Keepass or Lastpass, instead.

Methodology: In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about the importance of good filing. He suggests filing things under the first keyword that comes to mind for them. The advantage of Evernote, of course, if that you can use tags and tag an item with as many keywords as you need.

So, a simple set-up would be having a "Filing" notebook in Evernote and giving each item one or a few tags that says what it is, in a general sense. (I recommend going with as few tags as you can, to help keep things simple.) Be sure to give each note a good title, of course.

Evernote allows for hierarchal tags, so you can even put all of the filing related tags under a parent "filing" tag, to help keep the filing system separate from anything else you do in Evernote.

Answer 2

I'm using Keepass for all these tasks. None of the information you mention should ever be known to the provider an external service, so if you want to use such a service to share the information between different devices over a public network, you will have to keep them encrypted.

Keepass allows you to define categories for all the information you mentioned, and store the related information in an encrypted form. Since it's OpenSource, it's available for free for a multitude of devices and platforms, and it's up to you if you want to keep it local on your devices, and syncronize using your own means or file-copying, or if you want to place the storage file into some kind of cloud service, such as the popular Dropbox.

Answer 3

It seems to me you're trying to do two things:

1. Store secure information (should really be encrypted)
2. Remind yourself when you need to take action (belongs in a calendar)

There are tools out there which keep this information together all encrypted with their own reminder systems. These are mostly aimed at account-management departments, and are probably a bit OTT for personal use, so my recommendation is to use a password manager and calendar, any will do.

Personally, all my "account" information doesn't take up more than two pages, and I use locknote to store that. I use google calendar for reminders and dates. Every account already has a name (i.e. the name of the company or product), so it's easy to cross-reference the two.

Look at how many accounts you actually have that need action at set times, and how much time you actually spend managing all that despite it being split across two tools. You'll probably find the answer is not a lot, so you won't gain much from moving it from reasonably effective to "super effective".

Answer 4

To answer your question on managing priorities with GTD principle I would suggest you following solution. As background, it is always a challenge to find right balance and choose the most critical tasks and avoid spending tons of time for rearranging. There is a tool that can help you with this named VisioTask. The product has just appeared and full of fresh ideas.

In the office I am using Outlook for emails, calendar. The tool is integrated with it and extends it with many useful features. There is very new way to show priorities by four bright distinct colors. All my key tasks are visible on one screen, so it is easy to see complete picture, compare tasks between each other, rearrange and find right sequence quickly without much time spend. All done with easy and colorful interface tools. Also, the tool supports intelligent emails sorting by tasks/projects for easy emails tracking and file linking to provide quick access to data. It makes organizing data easy and quick, frees my time and enables to concentrate on work in productive and efficient way. Check for yourself at site http://visiotask.com, you may find it useful for you as well. Trust it helps.