A couple of years ago, Lars decided to do something more with his passion for cars and started renovating veterans, starting out with a ’67 Mustang he found online. In order to gather up research and organize his paperwork, he started using Correlate.
By Kristian Male
Published on March 13, 2019
Some might feel that Netflix is the perfect hobby. That’s not the case for Lars, who prefer to fix cars when he’s not in the office. Working on about 5 cars at the same time, the paperwork usually stack up. That’s why he is a frequent Correlater.
Back when Lars was still a man in his youth, he owned a beautiful ’67 Mustang. A couple of years ago, he stumbled upon a used and pretty worn out version of the exact same car. This sparked the interest in veteran cars, which made him jump on it and bought the old wreck.
This is the story of how Lars started fixing cars in his spare time. Since that, his garage has grown from one single vehicle to 5 veteran cars.
Lars quickly noticed that he was lacking something. He lacked fundamental knowledge on how the cars work, as he’s not a mechanic by education. As most people know, a car is not a simple piece of machine. When one is working on a car, there’s a ton of mechanical systems that need to be handled carefully. The tiniest error may have fatal consequences!
So he started doing some research on the subject, but quickly noticed that there’s so much info to work with. The internet is flooding over with everything from tutorials to web shops selling the necessary components. He needed a place to structure the information and websites that’s useful. On top of that, he also had a need for a place to track his progress on each car.
“Correlate makes it easy for me to gather relevant info and keep it until I need it. Each project has a lot of tasks to be planned and followed up. I also need to search for a lot of info from vendors, forums and magazines.”
– Lars, Car enthusiast
That’s when Lars adopted Correlate to help him with everything from task management to bookmarking web content. The app gave him a great place to start the day, as he had everything in one single place.
Doing research to prepare for a project – before even buying the car!
Each car is different in its unique way. Some might be a “quick fix”, while others may demand more love than Lars could give. With Correlate, Lars is able to quickly perform necessary research that will help to make a very crucial decision: should he buy the car, or let it go?
If he decides to move forward with the project, he’s already gathered a large amount of research. He might have tutorials, manuals, technical documentations, and a bunch of shops he can buy parts from. Not to mention all the Youtube videos. This makes it easy for him to find the right information at the right time.
Tracking the process – checklists for each individual task
With such a large and complicated project, it’s bound to be a pretty long list of tasks to do. If the list gets too long, it will be hard to remember what tasks that is already done. On top of that, it’s even more important not forget to do a task. This could easily happen if he doesn’t structure his tasks correctly, as he’s jumping back and forth between cars.
Luckily Correlate lets him keep tabs on all tasks that needs to be done for each individual car. The feature is simple, but it does the job for Lars, tracking which tasks are done and what’s on deck. It’s also easy to separate different projects from each other, as he have one task list for each car.
Keeping track of the conversations with vendors
Keeping an email inbox clean these days are definitely a challenge. Most people have an inbox filled with unwanted newsletters and emails from salespeople. This overfloew makes it hard to find a way back to the right emails. Usually he keeps in touch with a large amount of vendors, juggling emails threads back and forth.
Lars solve this by managing the email threads inside Correlate. That way Lars knows exactly where he can start to look for a specific email. So when he starts working on a car, he can find emails exchanged with the right vendors inside the Correlate Map for that project.
Whenever he starts a new conversation with a vendor, it’s very easy to find that inside Correlate. Since Lars has integrated his Gmail with his Correlate account, he can simply just search for the subject or something from the contents of the email and drag&drop the thread in the projects Correlate Map.
Usually he try to stick with using just one email address for every conversation related to his hobby. Sometimes, however, he mixes things up and use his work address when emailing with a vendor. If he’s having a hard time remembering which email address he used for a specific conversation, he could easily find the correct email with the help of the all powerful Cloud Search inside Correlate. Here Lars is able to search for connect stored inside all his connected cloud services quickly and painless.
Every piece of information – all in one place
Lars has finally found a great way to manage his car renovation projects in a organized way. Since the projects he’s working on usually has a lot of information connected to them, it’s hard to keep track of everything without actually having a place to gather everything.
Thanks to Correlate, Lars has a perfect place to find everything he needs in one place. That way, he doesn’t waste a lot of time looking for the information, and can focus on the fun part. Turning a wreck into a beautiful veteran car.
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