I still use paper and pen. It’s the most efficient and least distracting kit for taking notes in a meeting with non-nerds. Bringing out a computing device invariably results in some discussion about the technology. But I work in plain text files for everything before and after the meeting.
Here are some options for commingling those two worlds.
Evernote Evernote is very good at instant capture. At the end of a meeting, I snap photo notes into Evernote of the whiteboard and my paper notebook pages.
An AppleScript action for Due.app from the folks behind Due.app. I have Due launch on login. I use it constantly because I don’t like to think about boring stuff like laundry, phone appointments or a beer in the freezer.
UPDATE: Here’s a Gist for a similar script to use with Reminders.app.
DEVONthink Office is hard to explain in a single blog post. It has an enormous feature list and can be used in a variety of ways. This post over at Organizing Creatively is a good starting point.
Sean Korzdorfer1 has some great tips for using the Delish Smart Bundles (Review. Clever.
Sean’s site is generated by Voodoo Pad and I think that’s pretty awesome. ↩︎
The 1Password browser plugin is great for generating strong randomly generated passwords. Did you know that you can add your own customization to the generated passwords or test your own for strength?
In Safari, just open the password generate and generate a new password. Now click in the text box and add any string to it you like.
If you want to test your own password, delete the generated one and type in yours.
This is a really great sale on a bundle of Indev Email Applications. It includes MailTags, Mail Act-On and Mail Perspectives for $30.
Voila is a Mac toolbox for screen capture and annotation. It’s what Skitch might have been if it was continually developed and enhanced.
Screenshot Collector At its core, Voila provides solid image capture, annotation, sharing and storage. It’s an all-in-one system. Snapshots are stored within the app’s database and can be renamed, tagged and shared directly.
But Voila does more than just hold the images. It tracks how they are used and gives immediate access to that meta-data through “Smart Collections.
Delish is a Mac app1 for managing bookmarks on the Mac. It integrates with Pinboard2 and brings some bonus features that the website lacks.
Smart Bundles Smart Bundles are the real knock-out feature of Delish. They go beyond the standard Pinboard tag bundles. Delish Smart Bundles are similar to iTunes smart playlists and allow a user to combine many different search types into a constantly refreshing smart folder.
The smart folders have access to all of the important bookmark data for a Pinboard bookmark, which makes it easy to build some very useful collections.
The Mail app on OS X is adequate for most users right out of the box. Maybe I get a lot of email. Maybe I have a lot of projects. Maybe I’m a future star of an episode of Hoarders.
I file all of my mail into a folder structure that aids in locating and documenting. Mail’s search is a wonderful thing, but with many thousands of messages, it’s often faster if I begin by narrowing the search domain fist.
I’ve used OmniFocus since the first week it was released. I’ve reached a professional tipping point. I manage some large projects with dozens of contributors that span several years. My OmniFocus database has many, many hundreds of tasks. Six months ago I realized that contexts were becoming irrelevant in an always-available and online world. I can do email at any time. I can write or search the web from my phone.
