At work we’re reimagining how we do, well, everything.

We’ve moved our office software to the cloud, transitioned to an agile project management approach, and are expanding on and accelerating our cultural revolution. It’s little things that make a big difference, and the impact is exciting. The way I work is shifting, and one of the things that’s at risk of getting left behind if handwritten notes.

I like taking notes on a computer just fine, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for pen and ink. In a world where I can use my wristwatch to do work though, how does a paper notebook fit in?

This week I went looking for a 21st century solution, and I found Rocketbook.

They sell reusable notebooks (some of which you erase by microwaving them, which seems a bit gimmicky) and, crucially, an app that digitises the notes and automatically saves them to one of a number of predefined cloud destinations like my all new work Google Drive.

They’re $51.05 in Canada which is definitely expensive enough that I wanted to try the app first. You can do that with freely downloadable PDF versions of the notebook’s specially marked pages and grab the app from your app store of choice, and it works great. While I was at it I tried scanning the same page using the Google drive app and it was just as successful, cropping, deskewing and colour correcting without the need for any special page markings.

So I’m sticking to my regular old notebooks and the Google drive app that came on my phone. Fittingly, it turns out I had the tools I needed all along and I just needed a little adjustment to my approach to make the big difference I was looking for.

I’m planning a trip to the UK – where I’m from – later in the year.

Last time I went there I still had my SIM card from when I lived there. I’d changed it to a prepaid account before I moved, so I just added some credit and everything worked great. Since then Three have changed their terms of service and cancelled my account for no other reason than I haven’t topped up my phone in two and a half years.

I need an alternative, and the most cost effective solution for international travel is almost always to buy a SIM in the country you travel to, but is that something I want to deal with on vacation, in each and every country I visit? It is not. I’m prepared to pay (or at least not save as much) to not have to do that.

I found a company called OneSimCard that seemed to fit the bill, offering a SIM I could buy ahead of time and use to save me some money whenever I travelled. Unfortunately the fact that they have three products that all fulfil my need (but each with their own advantages and disadvantages) and I had to work to figure out which was best was a problem, and the checkout process that didn’t quite work correctly was the nail in the coffin.

We could debate whether “the customer is always right” all day long but one thing I hope we can all agree on is that the customer is always the customer: their role in all this is to give you their money in exchange for goods and/or services, and your job – your only job – is to make that process as smooth and simple as it can possibly be. Make sure they’re happy and they come back later to do it all again too, ideally.

Whether you work at a local grocery store or a large multinational, that’s something we’d all do well to keep top of our minds.