Life Hack - Equestrian Version

It's not often that I come up with a new idea that makes life much simpler, but this weekend, I did. And even better, it's a hack to make my equestrian life easier. Win. Win. Win.

​I don't know how you all keep track of your membership cards, but up until this weekend, I've always squeezed them onto a single piece of paper and made photocopies. When I first joined USDF (and all the rest), they would send laminated plastic cards that were not so easy to photocopy. Since then, membership cards have become a self service kind of thing where you have to print your own. I would print them, cut them out, tape them to a piece of paper so that I could keep them all straight, and then I made enough copies to last all year.

Last year's copy.

Over the weekend, I sat down to print all of my cards so that I could tape them to a piece of paper and photocopy them. Just as an aside, I decided to show Izzy at our localish CDS show later this month. That was what prompted me to gather my membership information. Anyhoodle, as I was on USEF's site getting ready to print my cards, it occurred to me that it might be easier to screenshot the cards and save them to a Google Doc. OH MY GOD, I thought, I am a GENIUS. Or possibly an idiot in the case that everyone else has been doing that all along.

If you're new to Google Docs - I know some of you are, the beauty of using it is that since your document is stored in the cloud, you can access the file on any of your devices and make changes on the go. Rather than starting from scratch each winter, I can now add the most current membership card without a printer, paper, and tape. All I need to do is screen shot the new card, do a quick crop, and paste it into my document. Mic drop moment.

My Google Doc

Even better is that you can resize the cards to make them all fit better. As an added bonus, you can also screenshot the Doc and save it to your phone as a jpeg so that you can flash it to a show secretary. They would prefer a printed copy, but in a pinch, this will do.

Screenshot of my membership "cards"

I do not know why this hasn't occurred to me before, but it is my new favorite idea. For someone who lives in the world of Google Apps for Education, it doesn't speak too highly of my intelligence level that I only think to use Google Apps for work. Sheesh!

Better late than never!