by John on February 29, 2008
Let it be noted that today, I finally became cool enough to be a licensed Scrivener user. I’m taking on a large for hire writing project. It involves research and multiple sections, and it occurred to me this is exactly the kind of thing Scrivener was made for. Hmm…now something else is going to have to bear the weight of my technolust.
In some completely unrelated blog news (that doesn’t merit a post of it’s own):
- We have been hovering just under 100 subscribers to the RSS feed. I’d love to push through that on to 200. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I hope you’ll consider doing so.
- I have a few others working on some guest posts that I think will be help all of us find new ways to practice creativity. If you have thoughts you would like to share in a guest post, please let me know.
- With the capture everything series wrapped up, I have one or two more series in the works. If there are some topics you’d like to see developed, please leave a comment below.
Popularity: 39% [?]
by John on February 25, 2008
If you are a Mac user who is looking for a simple, GTD styled task manager, take a look at TaskPaper.
Today, you can get it for only $12 over at MacZot!
Popularity: 36% [?]
by John on February 24, 2008
This is last post in a series on capturing everything. Previous entries:
In a time of growing self awareness a few years ago, I quietly proclaimed myself to be a content creator. I had awakened to the fact that I experience great satisfaction when generating and sharing ideas with others. When I am feeling out of sorts, I realized that it is often because I haven’t found avenues to express myself. Thankfully, between teaching opportunities at my church, maintaining multiple blogs, writing papers for grad school, and a few other writing projects, I generally can find opportunities to share the rattlings of my brain.
At the heart of creating regular content is having something to say. If I don’t think I have something worth saying, I am not creating content. It’s that simple. Much of this series on capturing everything has been about capturing ideas to share. It is not just enough to capture those ideas, but to organize them and help them evolve. I use Yojimbo as an incubator to review and develop those ideas further, but I hope the description below can be helpful to someone using any system.
When ideas are captured into Yojimbo, they end up in my collection of “Untagged Items”. This becomes a file of ideas to sort. Once or twice a week, I go through this folder and tag the notes. Possible blog entries are tagged to_blog. An idea for an upcoming teaching is tagged teaching and current. And so on. If there is an idea that I want to think about more, but that I’m not sure where to put it, it ends up with the tag incubator.
In the image to the left, you can see an example of some of the tag collections I have to help sort out some of these notes. As you might expect, most of these notes end up with tags that might put them in multiple collections.
None of this is worthwhile unless I actually give these ideas the space to incubate. I regularly take time to review these folders to keep the ideas going through my head. Sometimes, I’ll see that two or three potential blog posts might be related, and I’ll copy and paste from one to put them together. Or I might find that one thought might be the Romeo to another idea’s Juliet. Sometimes, I might see a longer series emering, like this post is a part of. I often find that the ideas just need more time. They might not be complete yet, but it is reviewing them that keeps them active in my mind.
This system of gathering and reviewing my thoughts is always changing as I find ways to streamline or improve it. In fact, it has only been as I describe it here for the past few months. I would love to hear from others about how you organize and develop some of the ideas that you capture.
Popularity: 70% [?]
by John on February 23, 2008
Some of my favorite links on creativity and workflow from the interweb this week:
Popularity: 58% [?]
by John on February 20, 2008
I need to write this entry for myself as much as anyone.
I’ve been consumed by my task list this week. Too many projects converged at once with barely enough time and energy to get them done. I’ve kept so busy doing, I’ve had little chance to just be.
As much as I love practicing GTD, I find that it can become a system that consumes me more than it should. With lists of projects and contexts and dreams, these inventories themselves can start to become more important than the outcomes. GTD can become an artform in itself, and my constant tweaks and tunings to the system cause me to lose focus on why I GTD in the first place.
I GTD to create space. I GTD so that I can have a trusted system to hold what needs to be done. I GTD to clear my head of the do’s to make sure that I have space to be.
Popularity: 53% [?]
by John on February 18, 2008
I read Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes in 2005. While I thought the book was interesting, what stuck with me most was the realm in which the book was written. Ethan Watters is one of the co-founders of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. It is a shared “office for the creative self-employed” operating with the hypothesis “that community is conducive to productivity”.
Even those who work primarily alone benefit greatly from being in the presence of others. It might just be the reassurance of having others nearby, the competitive urge of hearing someone else’s keyboard, or the availability of another soul to help mold an idea.
I have worked without a designated office space, other than at home, for the last three years. Several times a week, I find that I have to get out and work in a coffee shop, just to have some sense of activity around me. It is good to be around others, but there are disadvantages as only certain tasks can really be done in that setting.
Today, a friend forwarded me a link to a new shared workspace that will be opening in Austin called LaunchPad Coworking. More and more, creatives are making a living as free-lancers and telecommuters. This seems like the right time for this kind of space. I get excited about the possibilities of having something like this available and I hope it works out for them.
Popularity: 33% [?]
by John on February 16, 2008
If it is a lazy Saturday morning, then it is time for some lazy Saturday links:
Popularity: 29% [?]
by John on February 13, 2008
As much as I love Yojimbo, the icon (to the right) has never quite revved my engines. Somehow, the karate kick just doesn’t inspire me to tuck away thoughts dredged the murky depths of my soul.
Thanks to my friend Todd, I’m now sporting a new Yojimbo icon that looks like a short stack of brand new moleskine notebooks. The icon comes from a program called Notae. (Notae looks like a pretty handy little app in it’s own right — I might need to try it out.)
(Note: For some reason, the paragraph with the instructions was breaking my feed, so I’ve posted them in the comments.)
Now enjoy the inspiration that streams out of your dock.
Popularity: 40% [?]
by John on February 11, 2008
This is part 4 of 5 in a series on capturing everything. Other entries:
As I’ve disclosed my processes to capture every worthwhile thought, discerning readers (or Luddite sympathizers) might have noticed that it seems as if I sit at a computer all the time. That’s not entirely true. Those who know me can confirm that I typically spend more time slouching than truly sitting.
While my computer is the trusted receptacle where I capture thoughts, the reality is that said thoughts often don’t come to me when the computer is convenient. In fact, some of the best thoughts come at the least convenient moments. (I think that perhaps it would be best if I didn’t expand on that any further.)
Here are some of the ways I try to capture while on the go:
Ye olde moleskine. Sometimes, even I find it is easier to actually write something down. I have a couple different moleskine formats that I try to keep handy, depending on what context I’m in. When I want to travel as light as possible, I prefer to carry a cahier. However, when I know I might have a chance for some extended note taking or reflection when a computer won’t be ideal, I make sure I have access to a full notebook. My biggest hangup with the moleskine is getting those thoughts tucked away in the computer. I have a time set on my calendar weekly to remind me to transfer any tasks or ideas from the moleskines into their proper digital buckets.
Ye new iPhone. I have a few very simple routines to quickly capture both tasks and ideas on my iPhone. The setup I am using, however, could work for any cellphone that can quickly create and send an email. I have set up two unique and private POP-based email addresses, one for tasks and one for ideas. Each has a simple name in my address book so that it is quick to find and send an email to. Anything sent to these addresses is automatically picked up by Mail.app and transferred in to the appropriate bucket.
Here’s what task capture rule in Mail.app looks like:
The
MailAction.applescript was written by Curt Clifton and can be found
on this website. With this rule, any email that comes to the ToDo POP account is automatically passed along to my OmniFocus inbox to be processed. The rule for Yojimbo looks identical, except that is is for my Yojimbo POP account, and runs a script that I found
here.
The technical specifics of some of these workflows may or may not be helpful depending on what tools you are using. Even if they aren’t, one thing you and I have in common is this: thoughts worth capture happen anytime and anyplace. What kind of workflow are you developing to make sure that you don’t lose those grand plans for a manifesto to change the world…or a reminder to clean the litter box?
Popularity: 64% [?]
by John on February 10, 2008
Posting may slow down a little bit this week here at Creativityist. I will be doing a little bit of traveling. I have a number of entries in process right now, including the next installment in the capture everything series. I’ll put finishing touches on them and post them if I have opportunities on the road.
In the meantime, here is one final set of words from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to sit with:
If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act–truth is always subversive.
Popularity: 38% [?]