I seriously love Eddie Smith’s writing:
I’m convinced the worst part of drowning is right now—the fear of it… the conscious mind’s simulation of the process of drowning. This uninformed, and hence fearful mind, imagines a frantic fight to stay above an infinitesimal line at which the bottom-most layer of our atmosphere sits on the top-most layer of water—that dividing line between the future, rising up infinitely high overhead and the deepest, darkest depths below.
I subscribe to the “lots of little notes” methodology of managing information. I’ve written too much about it.1 If that kind of thing interests you then there is some really thoughtful stuff happening on the internet now.
Christian Tietze has been writing about his “Zettelkasten” process and just launched a site dedicated to the subject.2
I’ve also been reading up on “spark notes” through Steve Zeoli. A spark note is a single continuous document with ideas in a chronological order.
MindMeister is a really great web app for creating context maps. Now you can generate a map from a bulleted list in Google Docs without ever leaving the document.
Here’s a demo video of the process:
MindMeister also integrates with Google Drive to store, create and access maps directly.
The Reminders app on Mac and iOS are one of the bright spots at the cross section of function and design. But I really like Fantastical 2 for managing calendars. It’s not the central focus, but Fantastical is also a great companion for managing reminders on the iPhone.
The quick entry in Fantastical is more efficient for adding new reminders, but the real beauty is how Fantastical presents reminders at the top of the list view AND provides one-tap access to the entire list of reminder lists.
That little green airplane in my menu bar means something important. It means my Macbook thinks it’s sitting at my desk plugged into my Thunderbolt display and on Ethernet. It also means that my NAS remote disks are mounted and ready for action.
Whenever I plug in my Thunderbolt display ControlPlane jumps into action and mounts my most commonly used volumes so that they are ready to go.
ControlPlane is configured to watch a wide variety of hardware and software changes on your Mac.
I’m about two months into my move from OmniFocus to plain text task management.1 I’ve spent the past month simplifying and analyzing how I make things happen.2 The first obvious conclusion is that I almost always need data and information to do anything reasonably complex. That’s where I’ve seen a significant benefit in the TaskPaper format over my previous 7 years with OmniFocus.
Most of my projects involve gathering lots of little bits of information and are generally broken down into actionable tasks:
This post is about productivity masturbation. It’s an inevitable fact of life, but probably not something that I should have an audience for. You’ve been properly warned.
I’ve broken this discussion into separate posts because apparently people don’t like long articles anymore. The subsequent article will be all about the tools for working with plain text tasks. An electronic system is only as good as the software used to interact with the data.
The holidays are a special time for everyone. For a working stiff like me, they also represent a rare time when I can stay up late and goof around.
Holiday Blocks The primary benefit in my holiday vacation time is the solid time-blocks they allow.1 I can work on a single problem in more than 1 hour increments. Three continuous hours is worth at least six individual hours broken up over a week.
To-Done is a plugin for Sublime Text for plain text task management. It’s a great start in my opinion. The two big aspects are the custom formatting of the text view and the Sublime Text Goto menu for finding tasks.
It lacks a lot of the custom feel of PlainTasks for Sublime, but that may be a bonus for some people.
Mail rules are the life raft of the modern working nerd. Without my mail rules I’d be overwhelmed and drowning in messages that I don’t need to see right now, or maybe ever.
For years, I’ve enjoyed some very complex rules in Mail.app. With the combination of MailTags and Mail-Act-On (I’ve written about some of them here), an Mac server can become a competent virtual assistant. Mail.app in Mavericks brings further improvements in rule handling.
