I wrote a post a while back about keeping track of your thoughts and keeping track. I figured I would follow it up with a few more ideas.

Tracking Books

For quite a while now I have been wanting to keep track of the books I read so recently I went looking for software or a website to keep track. I found a few good websites. My favorite is goodreads.com. It is free to sign up for an account and can easily track books. It has “shelves” which you can assign books to. By default you have a “read”, “reading”, and “want to read” shelf. You can add your own named shelves such as “I own it” or and other category you want to track.  There are a few other free websites so be sure to look around if this doesn’t fit what you want.  For software, I really didn’t find anything good – most people just suggested keeping an Excel spreadsheet like I do for my biking log.

iPhone Notes

I love carying my iPhone with me because I always have a place to jot down thoughts.  The Notes program is perfect for miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, or things to follow up on later.  You can even sync Notes with your Mac so you have them available on your computer.  This is a two step process:

1. In iTunes with your iPhone connected, in the left panel select your iPhone under Devices.  Then select the Info tab and scroll down until you see Notes and check the box that says “Sync notes”.  Now click Sync in the lower right corner and it should sync the notes onto your computer. Tip: the computer may warn you with a scary-sounding message like “this will change over 50% of the notes on your computer.  Are you sure you want to continue?”.  If you don’t have any notes already on your computer, this is perfectly normal and safe to continue.
2. The notes actually appear in the Mac Mail program.  If you don’t have Mail set up, you will have to do that now to be able to see your notes.  Once configured, the notes appear in the left pane under Reminders, Notes with the first line of the note appearing like the subject of an email, and then the entire note appearing in the email body section.  Very handy!

I hope you enjoyed these additional tracking tips.  I really like having an accumulation of data over time.  It is great to analyze for future reference, and also just to refer back to since it is so hard to remember everything.  Let me know if you have other data that you like to track or have found good methods.