Anyone who leads an active professional life knows how important the quality of note-taking is. The way we communicate with others is also extremely important. The market offers many free applications that can organize time, store important information, and support communication effectively. The problem is getting to know and learning them. Application creators do everything to make them simple, pleasant, and effective. They therefore compete in simplicity, functionality, and aesthetics.
Old Habits versus the Present Day
Many people use traditional book-style calendars. They record events and can find their way around them very quickly. The disadvantage is that no statistics can be extracted. Analyzing the past greatly helps us understand the present: if we face a situation similar to one from more than a dozen months ago, we can analyze how we handled the problem, organized our time, and what contributed to success or failure. A general rule can be adopted: if something is recorded electronically, a great many things can be done with that information. If it is written with a pen, one can only look at it.
The habit of analyzing the past is not widespread because, until recently, every attempt to organize life was paper-based. A lack of analysis leads to incorrect conclusions and frequent self-blame for passivity or insufficient involvement. Some periods seem extremely labor-intensive, although better analysis would show that we were merely more anxious, not busier. Certain information about ourselves could help us greatly in the present.
Unfortunately, book-style calendars do not permit good analysis. They contain meeting notes, but counting all meetings and the time devoted to them requires additional work. Paper calendars have another flaw: losing one creates a problem. Electronic calendars can always be restored from the cloud and remind us about events. There is a clear general trend toward electronic notebooks and calendars.
A modern person’s problem may be the large number of applications used simultaneously. Each has its own characteristics and works differently; most do not connect with one another. A busy businessperson may have a paper calendar, use Excel to record fuel consumption in delivery trucks, and have Outlook on both computer and telephone. Outlook has a calendar, of course, but it contains different meetings from the paper calendar because invitations often arrive by email and can be added with one click, so they are not copied to paper. The businessperson may also have an application reporting the status of cash registers in stores. Such personal infrastructure is burdensome and tiring. Each application requires separate opening, different procedures, and another password.
So far, we have discussed only communication, planning, and task execution. Add the need to record important information unrelated to planning. Bread-roll production is an automated process: every oven and feeder has its place in the technological sequence. One may know all this by heart, but it is good to have a technical diagram recorded somewhere. The technologist knows it, or perhaps it can be found in a binder in the office. Our personal architecture for recording technologies, important regulations, recipes, standards, average consumption figures, and ordinary notes may prove as tiring, burdensome, and disorganized as having several calendars, email inboxes, and notification systems.
How Can We Become Better Organized?
Outlook provides some assistance: it can contain email inboxes and calendars for different identities that can connect with one another. It can accommodate many things, from note-taking through planning and knowledge archives to simple communication. Google Keep is particularly useful for notes. Google applications are in one place, free, and usable on many devices. We can record notes or a shopping list on a computer and then open the list on a telephone while shopping. An integrated personal planning and communication system is useful because it permits backups, remembering, and sending important items.
How Should the Right Application Be Selected?
Finding an application that would “handle” every aspect of life—from meetings and communication to recording important information—is extremely difficult. Producers compete with promotions and incentives. Each application has a specific operating method, making everything difficult, new, and irritating. No one has time for it. Even if people briefly want to change something in their lives, most give up after two or three attempts with something new and return to previous habits. This is entirely normal: changing habits is difficult and most often ends in failure.
Highly Useful Confluence
To avoid searching and wasting time, I suggest becoming familiar with Confluence in addition to the Google cloud. Pure pragmatism favors a tool that is widely used worldwide and, in a sense, prestigious. Confluence is a free application usable online. A personal account can be created within two minutes and is immediately ready. It is prestigious because large IT corporations and the technology industry generally use it. A person running a company frequently deals with IT specialists, engineers, and people installing new equipment or software. Simply saying that plant recipes, production diagrams, or consumption standards are stored in a Confluence repository may significantly affect how engineers and external experts perceive the owner. Naturally, selecting the most important knowledge-storage and organization tool cannot be based on a desire to impress someone.
Confluence gained popularity in technology as a knowledge-storage and rapid team-communication tool for good reason. It is highly convenient and excellent for teamwork. Everyone may know that recipes reside in the raw-material dosing system, where backups keep them safe. Viewing this information is more difficult: someone may lack access, and examining recipes in a production environment may cause failure. If two food technologists and a production engineer are to meet, working in one easy and secure environment is worthwhile.
A meeting no longer requires gathering in a room. It can be organized online even if everyone is in the same office. During it, documents can be opened, screens shown, information sent, and shared repositories consulted. Live meetings require searching computers and pulling out papers. If consumption levels are to be discussed, participants can jointly open the repository, navigate to the relevant place, discuss it, and then refer to another document in the same repository to which everyone has access.
The specialists we employ generally prefer professional tools widely used in technology industries, reflecting their need for development and proper habits and skills. A universal technology tool also facilitates work with external suppliers and improves how external experts perceive the plant.
Confluence is exceptionally good and easy. I personally know no better tool for drawing technological and process-flow diagrams, including diagrams intended for presentation to a wider audience. I have worked with Confluence for ten years, but always treated it as an archive containing important information. Employees generally exchange links to archive locations. Only recently did I discover that it is also good for creating personal notes and diagrams.
Diagrams Are Fundamental
One picture shows as much as a thousand words. We often work in highly complex production systems. A very complex process cannot be explained or described with a “wall of text.” How can workplace organization or a company’s logistics process be described using only written words? Complex systems require charts and flowcharts.
I have always had a problem with this. I sometimes drew diagrams in PowerPoint, Canva, or Microsoft Paint. Canva is primarily for graphic designers and PowerPoint for business. Two fundamental defects appeared. The first was instability—everything could shift apart. The second, probably most important, was page size. When truly large systems must be described, the size of the sheet matters enormously.
Specialist engineering software such as Mathcad1 can theoretically create diagrams, but this is impractical because not every technician has worked with design engineers’ tools. I ultimately began creating key diagrams in Excel—not with a diagram module, but by using cells, merging them, and creating borders. Constructing even the simplest flowchart from spreadsheet cells is extremely exhausting. It is stable and offers practically unlimited sheet size, and can be sent easily, but the time required is disproportionate. I would prefer not to mention the amused expressions and exchanged glances of experts who received a large diagram laboriously built on spreadsheet cells.
To create a process flowchart in Confluence, one can use the Gliffy module, which must be added to the basic version. An editor opens in which shapes (blocks) can be dragged, connected with lines, labeled, and assembled into an entire process diagram. After saving, the diagram is immediately visible on the page to the team or only its creator. No graphic or drawing expertise is required: Gliffy is intuitive and works by drag and drop.
A useful feature is the ability to label arrows. Another feature I recently discovered is layering. I can prepare a diagram and add notes—even awkward comments such as “they could do something about this”—and then hide that layer during a meeting with engineers, or create another one exclusively for engineers containing notes or additional blocks. Anyone who creates process charts will understand that these are highly useful functions that are practically absent from other tools.
In Confluence, one can create a personal space for all comments and notes, inaccessible to other employees. New tools always pose the risk that we may not like them after bearing the cost of learning. Confluence is proven and widely used, so there is little risk of learning it in vain. Even if it is not an ideal repository for us, its prevalence will facilitate external communication. If contractors want to convey something through Confluence, the skill will be useful.
To install the online tool, simply create an account at atlassian.com/software/confluence. Atlassian offers a free version for teams of up to ten users.
One final note for everyone afraid to place important information in the cloud: there is no chance or possibility that someone could steal our recipes or important commercial information from the cloud. Atlassian serves enormous technology enterprises; if even a shadow of danger existed that important information might leak, the company would cease to exist overnight.
1 Full name: PTC Mathcad. Specialist software for engineers for performing and documenting mathematical calculations, with facilities for creating notes, equations, charts, and units of measure.
Wojciech Moszczyński
Wojciech Moszczyński—a graduate of the Department of Econometrics and Statistics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; a specialist in econometrics, finance, data science, and management accounting. He specializes in optimizing production and logistics processes. He conducts research into the development and application of artificial intelligence. For years, he has been involved in popularizing machine learning and data science in business communities.