The Paperless Solopreneur: Digital Note-Taking for Remote Work

Six months ago I was made redundant.

As a result, I decided to scratch a long-held itch and work for myself, remotely. However, staying organised and productive across multiple clients (as well as writing for sites like this!) can be a real challenge.

With no centralised office, meetings scattered across a range of different calendars and a constant influx of new projects and tasks, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.

That’s why going paperless and mastering digital note-taking has been so crucial in the early stages of getting my business off the ground.

I’ve already written about my journey to go paperless, so I won’t repeat myself (you can check out this article though for more details!). Instead, I’ll just say that in the past, I relied on a series of notebooks, sticky notes, printouts and sketches to keep track of my work.

Today, though, in the age of working remotely, a purely digital note-taking strategy has not only proved to be more efficient and eco-friendly, but it has also allowed me to seamlessly access and manage my notes and files from wherever I may be working.

By going paperless and developing an effective digital note-taking workflow, I’ve been able to boost my productivity, minimise wasted time and effort, and maximise my ability to capture vital information on the go.

Here’s an in-depth look at how I’ve embraced the paperless lifestyle with regard to becoming a solopreneur.

The Benefits of Going Paperless

Beyond just being better for the environment, there are some major advantages to ditching the old-school notebook in favour of digital notes:

Accessibility from any device: With cloud-synced notes, I can easily view and update them whether I’m on my laptop, tablet or smartphone. In short, I’m never stuck without access to important info.
Better organisation and searchability: Digital note apps allow me to better categorise, tag and quickly search through my notes compared to the chaos of trying to dig through physical notebooks.
Effortless backup: Cloud backups (I use Backblaze) protect my work and ensure that I’m easily able to retrieve previous versions of notes should the worst-case scenario happen.
Sharing and collaboration: With a few clicks, I can share notes with other freelancers/clients and give access to what I’ve written for feedback and collaboration.
Reduced clutter: I’ve been able to say goodbye to the stacks of paper and notebooks covering my desk, which has been no mean feat!

Digital Note-Taking Methods

When going paperless, you have a few main options for how to take and manage your digital notes:

Note-taking apps: There are a number of great apps designed specifically for note-taking. Apps like Obsidian, Drafts, Apple Notes and Bear offer strong organisation, formatting, search and media embedding capabilities.
Cloud document storage: Services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and Microsoft OneDrive provide basic cloud document storage and note-taking within documents, spreadsheets, etc.
Dedicated writing apps: Apps like IA Writer, Google Docs, Ulysses and Scrivener are designed for longer-form writing but can also work well as digital notebooks.

For maximum portability and cross-platform syncing, web and mobile apps like the Microsoft Office suite give you industry-standard note-taking ability from virtually any device.

Office can be less intuitive though and harder to work with. For better organisation, dedicated writing over the long term and different note types (text, audio, images, etc.), dedicated note-taking apps are a much better solution.

Creating Your Digital Note-Taking System

The specific tools you decide to use are very much down to your personal preference and project needs.

Whichever you decide to go with, the following tips will hopefully be useful in building out an effective note-taking process:

Make a plan: I like to decide ahead of time how I’ll categorise and organise my various projects, clients, to-do lists, etc. within your notes.
Use tags and notebooks: Most apps let you create different notebooks/folders and robustly tag your notes to make them easily findable. The newer apps (such as Obsidian, Tana and Capacities) are now offering bi-directional linking too which I’ve found to be incredibly useful.
Record meetings and calls: When possible, I record my meetings (with permission) and upload the audio/video files directly into my notes (or link to the recording on my cloud storage). That way I never have to stress about capturing every detail.
Embed rich media: I try to jot down text notes, attach files, upload images, screenshots and sketches, create checklists or code snippets — modern note-taking is about capturing every piece of information and deciding what is useful later!
Use cloud syncing: I make use of cloud syncing across devices so that I always have access to my updated notes on the go.
Share with others: Similar to the above, I like to take advantage of easy sharing/collaboration features that allow clients and teammates to view and annotate my notes.
Enable note searching: Whether I’m digging through text, images, audio, PDFs, websites or file attachments in your notes, ensure your app has comprehensive search capabilities. Personally, I find DEVONthink worth its weight in gold for this. It has OCR capabilities and synchs across both laptop and mobile devices effortlessly.
Back up, back up, back up: Take advantage of automatic cloud backup for your notebooks and also manually back up all your critical notes to at least one separate storage location. As mentioned above, I have Backblaze running on my laptop daily.

Beyond Note-Taking: Leveraging Digital Notes

Once you’ve mastered digital note-taking, there are several ways to further leverage your paperless workflow and get even more value from your notes:

Turn meeting notes into action plans: Don’t just jump from one meeting to the next. When one meeting has finished, I like to take ten minutes to review and annotate my notes with tasks, deadlines and responsibilities to create a clear project roadmap and relevant follow-ups.
Extract notes into blog posts or articles: You can easily repurpose your topical notes and research into content for your freelance blog or writing samples.
Create digital portfolios: Organise your best work and writing samples from various projects into a digital notebook to create an impressive portfolio. Apps like Obsidian and Craft can publish pages directly to the web.
Share client briefs: Give clients easy access to your in-depth, annotated notes on their project briefs and requirements. This can be done either through a private link generated by your cloud storage solution or by building out a secure client area in something like Notion.
Look for insights: Analyse your collection of meeting notes, brainstorms and project reflections for patterns, lessons learned and ideas for improvement. This is where the bi-directional linking apps come into play, as similar notes can be linked cross-client, making it easy to identify similar themes or work that has already been completed.

By combining digital note-taking with smart apps and workflows, I can effortlessly capture and organise all of the information I need to stay productive from anywhere.

With access to my entire annotated knowledge base in the cloud, I’m able to work smarter, communicate better, and save time and energy that I can reinvest into growing my business.

Going paperless and establishing a robust digital note system has involved an initial investment of effort.

Now that I’ve made the transition, though, I wonder how I ever survived the insanity of rifling through scattered paper notes and notebooks.

One last thing

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