tools

Yep is available for $20 from MacZot today only. It’s a spiffy little program for, well, spiffing up your workspace by reducing paper clutter. It’s worth a look if you don’t have it.

Thanks to the recommendation of Unclutterer, I picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap to use with Yep. They are pricey but worthwhile if you are serious about getting rid of papers. (I found an older model on ebay at well below half the retail price last summer, so you might want to see what becomes available there.)

On a related note, the makers of Yep also make Leap. Leap is a spiffy program for, well, spiffing up your documents folder. I’ll be talking about how I use Leap as part of the Blinders series. There is some discussion in the Maczot blog about a potential discount on a Yep/Leap combo, so check there later today to see if the developer has worked out a package deal.

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While traveling the past few weeks, I read The Starfish and the Spider for a research project I have due later this month. I read it on my Amazon Kindle. The Kindle experience is turning out to be all I hoped it would — other than having to turn it off for takeoff and landing.

I obsessively, er, avidly collect notes from books I read. I have a database of quotes and thoughts stored in Yojimbo for most of the books I’ve read in the last 4-5 years. In my typical workflow, I underline or make notes in the margin as I read. If there is something I really want to remember, I will dog ear the page. After finishing the book, I go back through it and manually enter the quotes and thoughts I want to remember into Yojimbo. This part often feels tedious, and I admit I have 4-5 recent reads stacked up that I need to do this with. (Maybe I’m not so obsessive after all.)

Reading the book on my Kindle has saved me an hour or more, because I’m not going to have to review my highlights and scribbles. All of them were saved in the clippings file on the Kindle. When I attached the Kindle to my computer, I just opened up the clippings text file, highlighted all the notes from the book and pasted them into a Yojimbo note. When it comes time to write, I’ll drag that note into Scrivener. Bada bing, bada boom. (I can’t believe I just typed that, but I can’t bring myself to delete it.)

Now if only I could figure out how to do Chicago style citations of a Kindle book…

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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!

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Andy Ihnatko reviews Scrivener in his weekly technology column today: Scrivener is in the write place. I’m already on the record stating that Scrivener is an app I wish I was cool enough to use. Andy Ihnatko’s column stirs my interest and notches me one more step toward coolness.

One thing I can say about Scrivener…it has a great model for a trial. The trial period is 30 days of use, but they do not seem to be consecutive days. In other words, the trial does not end 30 days after you first open the program. Rather, each day you use it counts as one day of the trial. So, if you go three days without opening the program, those three days don’t count as part of your trial. This is a model for a trial that very reasonable, and one that more shareware providers should consider.

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This is part 1 of 5 in a series on capturing everything. Other entries:

I have always had a good memory — some friends even call me Rain Man, though I’ve forgotten who they are. This elephantine memory isn’t necessarily a strength, because I’ve come to understand that the best use of my brain is not to tuck things away.

The most helpful idea that I have adapted from David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the discipline to capture everything. From a creative perspective, the goal is to free your mind from remembering details so it can create and interact with ideas.

This will be the first of a series of three or four entries describing my ever-evolving process of capture. It is misconception that ‘getting organized’ is only for anal types who would rather line their children up alphabetically than hug them. On the contrary, a good system of making sure details are taken care of can free up space in our souls to focus more on the things that bring us life.

The first challenge to capturing everything is to make sure you have reliable and trustworthy systems in place to collect and store what is flowing out of your noggin. I will call my collection tools buckets — these are what I use to make sure everything is caught and stored. On my Mac, I have two main software buckets, because there are two different categories of information that need to be captured:

Capturing tasks - The way I see it, tasks are temporary. They can be checked off, completed, and best of all, forgotten. Tasks are typically, but not always, life-draining and serve to distract from more life-giving experiences such as developing relationships or finding ways to express ourselves. Sometimes you just need to focus on getting this stuff done, and when you do, the more prepared you are, the less time these tasks will suck away. There are many tools available to manage your tasks, but as I’ve mentioned before, I use OmniFocus for capturing and organizing my tasks. For those familiar with GTD, OmniFocus is excellent for organizing your tasks into projects and contexts. For those who don’t have a Mac, or the cash for OmniFocus, don’t panic. There are many options, but I would recommend you try out Remember the Milk — a free(!), web-based task manager that seems to have new features everytime I look at it.

Capturing thoughts - Unlike tasks, thoughts usually have value beyond a certain timeframe. They might be an idea you want to think about more, research for a story you want to write, or a quote you want to make sure you never forget, er, lose. There are roughly 10,487 programs for the Mac designed for something like this, but for me, the choice is Yojimbo. In spite of the name and the dock icon, this is a clean and easy program to store and retrieve whatever thoughts, images or notes I need safely tucked away. In my Windows days, I found that OneNote was great for this. I haven’t found an online option that offers the needed flexibility, although you might be able to do something similar with BackPack or Google Docs.

Both of these programs win out for me because they can both collect and organize information very easily…but I get ahead of myself. We’ll visit those processes in future entries in this series.

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On Monday, I posted about the hardware I use in my workflow. Today, we’ll tackle software. One of the best things about being a Mac user is the vibrant community of independent software developers. There are affordable programs that have been coded to help with just about any task or project you can think of, and most of them look great.

The list below isn’t a comprehensive list of what I use. But this is the software I use daily to find space to be creative. For the most part, these are my GTD tools.

OmniFocus - The pool of GTD apps for Mac is getting deeper: iGTD, Actiontastic, TaskPaper, and newcomer Things. I’ve at least played with most of them, and OmniFocus is king. There is a great user community going on the OmniGroup forums and the fact that I can quickly add tasks from just about anywhere is critical to me.

Yojimbo - A good workflow has to have a reliable way to capture and store ideas and content for future reference. There are many programs available to do this on the Mac, but Yojimbo is my choice. Again, a great user community and integration with other programs make it a program that automatically loads anytime I boot up.

Quicksilver - I’m not going to begin to explain Quicksilver here, but it is much more than the program launcher that many use it as. With Quicksilver, I can add a task to OmniFocus or an idea to Yojimbo in three seconds without having to switch away from what I am doing. It is an essential tool to capture everything.

Pages - When Apple released iWork 08, I downloaded the demo to try it out. I had a paper do during my trial period, so I wrote it in Pages. I was hooked. It was much faster than Word, and prettier to look at. I know that Office 08 for Mac has just been released, but I haven’t used it yet. I’d love to hear comments from those who have.

Ecto - I was a skeptic about using a blog editor for quite some time. I always thought that the Wordpress dashboard worked fine. However, now I’ve been using Ecto for a few months and won’t go back. The biggest advantages: having multiple blogs available to post to, and the ability to have a number of different entries in process that I can quickly add a thought to whether I am online or not.

I wish I was cool enough to use…
Scrivener - Scrivener has a lot of fanboys, and I can see why. Everything about Scrivener makes me want to use it. For starters, it is made by a company called Literature and Latte. How can I not like that? Scrivener is similar in concept to StoryMill, but it is designed for more than just writing fiction. Two things are hanging me up: 1) I prefer Pages, because I like to see the layout of something as I go, and 2) I can’t justify the price (although it is reasonable) when I can create a similar experience using Yojimbo and Pages.

I have intentionally not gone into much detail with any of these, but look for posts detailing how I use each to come in the future.

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Mariner Software released StoryMill 3.0 today. StoryMill is a program that is designed for writing fiction with built-in means to track characters, settings and a timeline. This program was originally known as Avenir before Mariner purchased the rights and updated it.

I picked up a discounted license for Avenir when it was on MacZot a few months ago. I’ve had an increasing interest in writing fiction, so I was hoping that having Avenir sitting in my apps folder would inspire me. So far, it has only taunted me.

Mariner offers an upgrade from Avenir to StoryMill for only $15. I had that much sitting restlessly in my PayPal account, so I went for it. Now, I will just have to wait and see if my purchase leads to motivation or mocking.

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I am a technophile. Technology can either be a tool that streamlines our workflow process, or it can be a distraction that slows us down. I experience both. All the time. But my love of technology convinces me that the streamlining surpasses the distraction.

When Amazon launched the Kindle a few months ago, Jeff Bezos stated that they designed the Kindle to just disappear in the hand of the reader. This statement stuck with me. (I’m not the only one, as I’ve seen it alluded to often by others.) Bezos captures an ideal for what technology should be — tools that become seamless extensions of what it is that we want to do.

What follows is a listing of the technology hardware that is a daily part of my workflow. Like anyone who loves technology, I probably spend far too much time playing and tweaking, but when I just need to focus on GTD or playing with ideas, each of these tools is able to get out of the way so I can get to creating.

Apple Macbook - This is homebase and because of that, Creativityist is going to have a distinctly Mac flavor. One of Apple’s recent pitches is “It just works”. I put a lot of effort into tweaking workflow processes on my Mac, but most of them are related to streamlining and making things work better. Getting things to work in the first place is rarely the issue. But, when there is a problem, I know I can go visit the store where I bought it knowing that the store is owned by the same company that made both the hardware and the software. I never have the store telling me that I need to contact the maker of the OS, or the OS maker telling me it is a hardware problem. That’s a beautiful thing. When working on a Mac, I just feel more creative. Of course, after the MacWorld keynote tomorrow, it also might make me feel more obsolete.

Apple iPhone - I don’t need to say much about the iPhone. The iPhone works so well with my Mac, it is extension of homebase. I’ve had many PDAs and smartphones over the years, but none of them has been able to work as seamlessly with my computer. There are some improvements I’m still hoping to see from Apple, but even as it stands right now, the iPhone has been a great addition to my workflow. I’ll talk more about that in future posts.

Amazon Kindle - I am as much of a bibliophile as I am a technophile, which makes this a dream device. I’ve only had it a week, but I can already see how valued the Kindle might be to my workflow. A big part of my creative process comes from interacting with the ideas of others. Being able to carry a searchable library with me is exciting, and the Kindle allows my to transfer notes back to my computer to incubate for future projects.

I wish I was cool enough to use…
Moleskine notebooks - Ever since I saw Johnny Depp sitting in a park while writing plays in his notebook in Finding Neverland, I’ve had a mostly blank moleskine or two on hand. The empty pages beckon me to fill them. But, as cool as they are, I’m just not quite cool enough to have it as part of my everyday workflow. I value having my ideas all tucked away on my computer for easy reference and future interaction, so the moleskine isn’t my primary way to capture thoughts. Still, I usually have one handy for when technology isn’t convenient or available…or when I want to look like a cool creative type.

Stay tuned. Another post (or two) will follow in this series as I talk about some of the software I use in my workflow process.

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