Getting organised

I spend a lot of time planning things. Pulling together information from many different sources to put together photography trips, workshop itineraries and location shoots. Many hours are spent poring over tide tables and sun position apps. Reading guidebooks (Fotovue guidebooks are particularly good!) and studying OS maps. Plotting locations and marking hotels, vehicle hire and parking places on Google maps. I have shelves full of books and maps, countless bookmarked websites, endless to-do lists, notebooks full of my scribblings. I can always find this reference information (eventually) but as hard as I try I always fell I could be more organised… wouldn’t it be nice to be able to gather it all in one convenient place?

This is where Milanote comes in. Milanote is a simple website/app used to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. You can make notes, add check lists, add links, upload files and images and even add more boards. You can organise your ideas into columns, colour code them or link them with arrows.

Now I should point out that his post is not sponsored in any way by Milanote, there may be other similar websites out there (to be honest I hadn’t thought to look for something like this, I discovered it when I received a targeted email and decided to give it a try) but the beauty of Milanote for me is the simplicity. There is no set way to use it so you don’t have to spend precious time learning how it works. You just have an empty board onto which you can drag and drop things and organise them in whatever way makes sense to you or suits your project. Perfect. The whole idea after all is to make life easier rather than more complicated. There are templates for a variety of subjects (mood board, photo shoot etc) that you can use as a starting point if you so wish or you can do what I do and just make your own boards from scratch.

Once you have created your board you can then share it publicly or privately with collaborators, ( ideal if you are planning a trip with a group of friends or want to share images with a client for example) and as well as the desktop version there is a phone app so your boards can be synced across your devices and thus are with you on your phone all the time.

It’s a simple thing but even though I’m fairly new to using it, I have already found it very useful for organising photography projects, home projects and holidays but especially for planning workshops. For example on a recent recce trip to North Wales I used it to put together a list of locations, plan an itinerary, store the details of the hotel along with links to my google maps, the relevant tide table and weather forecast and several websites for photographic inspiration. The most useful aspect though was, having created cards in Milanote for each location on my shoot list, I could while out shooting make notes on my phone about the parking, walking distances and directions as well as notes or phone snaps of photography ideas. The app works even without a mobile signal and just syncs as soon as you have one keeping my notes up to date.

Give it a try, hopefully it will prove useful or if you already use something similar, let me know.

Milanote is free with usage limits that would probably restrict you to 1 or 2 projects at a time or there is an unlimited version for a small monthly fee. Find out more at https://milanote.com