A large part of the everyday life consist of routines, managing mundane tasks and planning things together. What should we eat today? Where should we head to on our holiday? There are lots of questions that require answers. To be able to come up with those answers you need information.
One paradox of the modern life is that there is more information than ever, but finding the right pieces at the right time can be pretty difficult. Just when you’re supposed to start cooking for the in-laws, you notice that the your recipe book is gotten lost. Without recipes, cooking is no child’s play, at worst resulting in a mess you’re too ashamed to put on the table.
Thankfully, modern technology helps here. There are free cloud sharing services like Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, which all enable you to store information in a place where it’s easy to find. No more lost recipes or plane tickets, because the files can always be found in the cloud. Even better, you can share those files with your significant other, meaning both of you can access and edit them when necessary.
We’ve used cloud services among other things for saving recipes, because the paper versions were always a mess. Now, when all the recipes are sorted in folders for main courses, appetizers and so on, coming up with a dinner plan for the in-laws can be done in minutes.
In addition to cooking stuff, we store almost all travel documents in Google Drive. Usually – especially if you book all flights, hotels and such on your own – it’s quite convenient to store plane tickets and hotel reservations in a dedicated folder. Other useful tidbits are maps and travel instructions from the airport to the hotel. Oh, and keep a copy of your passports and credit cards, too. Makes it that much easier if they get stolen! What’s even better is that you can select documents on your phone to store also offline, so you won’t need to pay data charges abroad.
In general, we’re definitely fans of storing almost anything in the cloud. For example, nowadays I don’t have to worry about remembering to print concert tickets, because I can just call up the pdf from the cloud at the door.
Which of the three services is the best? Well, in practical terms there are very few differences. All have enough storage space for everyday usage, and all services are cross-platform. What we’ve liked about Google Drive is the capability to simultaneously edit the same document on two computers. This has been useful with travel planning, because we could sit side by side, and add hotel information in our Excel when planning a road trip. A list that was updated real time ensured that both were up to speed about how the trip as a whole is looking like.