How PBwiki Made My Life Easier

As the new guy at PBwiki, folks often ask me about why I wanted to join the company. (thankfully, not too many ask the logical corollary, “Why would PBwiki want you as an employee?”)

Besides the people here, who are great, the biggest reason for me is that I really love the product. Even more importantly, I love what it does for my life.

PBwiki really is my external brain. I use it to keep track of everything in my life.

For example, for my work, I use the company wiki to keep track of all my work.

After every meeting I attend, the first thing I do is to create a new wiki page and enter my notes. That way, everyone in the company has the chance to see them, and to edit and add to them. It’s a great way of keeping everyone up to date.

A couple of weeks ago, David actually came over to my desk after I saved my latest batch of notes, because he had also been working on a similar issue, and when the notification came through, he realized that it was a perfect time for us to get together and work on things together. Without PBwiki, it might have been days or weeks before we synched up.

The next step is to take any action items or tasks and add them to my Job Page (you can find the template I use for my Job Page on the Transparency Project wiki). This way, everyone can see what I’ve put on my plate, and they know who to follow-up with if I don’t make timely progress.

I’m convinced that these simple actions save me hours of time every week, simply because I don’t have to spend time thinking, “What did we talk about,” and “What should I do now?”

Naturally, one of the daily/weekly ongoing tasks I have on my job page is to post to this blog each Thursday.

I’d love to hear how you are using PBwiki to save time or become more productive, either in your personal life, or at work. I’ll try to share some of the best stories in future posts, both because I think it’s cool to highlight what people have done, and because it may help other readers figure out new ways that they too can make their lives easier with PBwiki.

–Chris (The New Guy) Yeh