Never lose a hard-won process again
This week a potential customer asked me for an evaluation preview of one of my educational PDF ebooks. “No problem!” I said, “I’ll get that to you today.”
Right! Time to watermark a lower resolution copy of the PDF and upload it to the files section of my website. This is a process I have done many times in the past — but not for about two years. It took a bit of experimentation at the time to settle on watermarking software I was happy with, and to get the right settings for placing our logo onto the page.
I repeated the process maybe 10 or 20 times over the course of two weeks, so I felt like it had earned its place on the list of Things I Know How To Do. But I was wrong. It turns out that not doing a thing regularly can turn it into something that needs to be learned all over again.
If only I’d written down the name of the software, and its settings, at the time! Preparing that document for the customer was frustrating, and took up time I’d wanted to spend on other tasks.
Fortunately things like this don’t happen very often, thanks to the personal knowledge base I’ve been building for the last few years. It’s like the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of the corporate world, but for any multi-step process, business or personal.
Some of the other topics in my knowledge base include —
How to reduce the size of a PDF without losing image quality
without losing image quality How to take a screenshot using the terminal
How to fix Miele dishwasher code F14
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