One of the most useful general purpose programs available is Ecco Pro. Ecco is an "orphanware" product, meaning that its owner, Netmanage, has discontinued updates and no longer provides technical support, but it still has a loyal cadre of users and the users provide assistance to each other when problems arise. Netmanage has made it available as a free download, and the program still is running strong.
Ecco combines several facets into one program:
- A very useable set of traditional information manager tools, including a phone book and calendar
- A large number of views that can be defined by the user for various different types of information
- A handy outline-based interface allowing entries to be collapsed or expanded
- Database capabilities, so that items can be assigned, sorted, and filtered by user-defined categories
For the last two years, I have been running a main Ecco database which uses a couple of key views, among several others. One is Topics, where I keep basic topical reference information on various items that I want to keep handy. Another is Journal, which is where I keep track of the work I do on a daily basis. Each time I do something or think of something, a brief entry in the Journal, associated with the name of the case and automatically date-stamped, keeps track of it. The entry under the main item, which can be displayed or hidden as I need, allows me to add brief or lengthy notes about the item. Thus, if an item is called "tel conf with John Whipple", I can add a few lines about what we talked about and what information John had to add to my case. This file thus keeps an ongoing record of what happened and when I did key things on the case. Every once in a while, I will filter the Journal view for all items pertaining to a hypothetical Zapruder case, and sort them by date, and print out the list and put in the Zapruder file.
Other views, including Diary and To do, round out the file. All told, keeping all things related to my ongoing cases in this one file has kept my life and my practice well-organized.
Useful links:
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