From Amazon’s product description:

David Allen’s Getting Things Done hit a nerve and ignited a movement with businesses, students, soccer moms, and techies all the way from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia. Now, David Allen leads the world on a new path to achieve focus, control, and perspective. Throw out everything you know about productivity– Making It All Work will make life and work a game you can win. For those who have already experienced the clarity of mind from reading Getting Things Done, Making It All Work will take the process to the next level.

I have to admit I am a little skeptical. What I appreciated about Getting Things Done was the simple, practical approach it offered to productivity. It didn’t read like a self-help book. The description above sounds a little self-helpish and that makes me wary. Nevertheless, I’ll likely purchase this book and share my thoughts about it here, but not until Amazon gets the Kindle version down to the standard $9.99 price.

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david allen’s new book: making it all work

The developer of ActionGear has graciously offered two free licenses for readers of Creativityist (and there is similar giveaway at MacSparky). I’ll draw two entries at random on Monday, January 12. If you’d like to be entered please just leave a comment or let me know via the contact form by midnight PST, January 11.

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actiongear: review (and giveaway!)

Private Library from A Space In Time on Vimeo.

By the way, I found this video via Tim Keel , and his thoughts about this space are worth reading.

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private library

There’s something about note taking and data collection apps on the Mac that makes me want to have every one of them. Circus Ponies Notebook, OmniOutliner, DEVONthink, Together, VoodooPad and many more; I try really hard to resist buying each and every one of them and only sometimes do I succeed.

An app that caught me with my shields down is Curio from Zengobi. The moment I saw it I knew I was going to have to buy it. Just the looks of it on Zengobi’s website prompted me to immediately download it and some dabbling with the trial version confirmed that this app was going to be tons of fun. (Editor’s note: keep reading for a discount coupon toward the purchase of Curio.)

Curio is an application that doesn’t fit into any single category very easily, and it doesn’t really try to fit anywhere either. You could say it’s a notetaking app, but that wouldn’t do it justice. It’s not an outliner either, although it organizes its data that way. It’s more of a notetaking and brainstorming and sketching and outlining and planning and productivity app; sort of.

Maybe it will be easier to grasp what Curio is if we examine its features. Here’s a rundown of what kind of things you can put into a Curio document:

• Notes
• Outlines
• Hand-drawn sketches
• Images
• Documents from other apps
• Mindmaps
• To Do lists
• Web views (embedded live web pages)
• and more…

That’s a lot of stuff, but it still doesn’t quite convey what makes Curio different than any other app. Let’s forget all those categories for a moment and simply take a look at an example session with Curio.

An example session with Curio

Let’s say you want to write a review of a software application, which, incidentally, is exactly what I’m doing at the moment. So you go out on the Web, maybe to MacUpdate, and check out which software you might want to look at in your review.

In Curio, information is organized into “Idea Spaces”. An Idea Space is basically a virtually infinite canvas on which you place your content. So, sticking to our example, you start taking notes of which applications you might want to review. So you click on the List icon in the toolbar and, voila, you have a list - or an outline - on your empty piece of paper.

You then enter some of the applications into the list that look interesting. The list is nice, but it would be even better if you’d add some screenshots of the apps so you have a visual way of remembering what each app does. So you drag some screenshots onto the Idea Space.

Next, you start thinking about the steps you will need to take for writing the review: Decide which application to review; get a basic understanding of the app’s features; create some example data in the app; take screenshots of important steps; write an introduction, the actual review and a conclusion; proof-read the article; and so on. You start collecting all those ideas in a mindmap by hitting the mindmap button in the toolbar and entering all the steps.

Since you like working on a schedule, it would be great to turn the mindmap you just created into a task list that you could check off as you write the review. So you check the option to include to-do checkboxes in Curio’s inspector panel. You also set some start and due dates for good measure.

In the end your Idea Space for this particular project might look something like this:

As you can see, you can include all of these elements in a single Idea Space. Usually you would need to wield several separate applications to accomplish this.

But wait, there’s more!

The example above gives a pretty impression of what Curio is capable of. But Curio can do even more. You can track the completion of tasks automatically, add flags and other adornments to items, use Sleuth to browse the Web for images to include in your document, record audio and video and embed it in Curio, use Curio as a presentation tool, tag items, use a powerful search tool to find items in large documents, create Idea Space templates, manage a scrapbook, draw on an Idea Space with a pen tablet and much, much more.

What you can do with Curio is virtually limited only by your imagination. The ways you can enter data are so diverse, you’ll probably only use half of them, if that. But once you start using it, you might find yourself replacing your previous outliner, web clipping app and notetaking app with Curio.

Conclusion

Curio is a monster of an app, but in a positive way. It’s pretty clear that Zengobi is targeting creative workers with Curio, since free thinkers usually don’t enjoy working in an environment that contricts them in how they can organize their data. The only mandatory structure in Curio is that everything has to go into an Idea Space. But the spaces themselves let your drop anything onto them any way you like.

Probably the only real negative thing one can say about Curio is that it tries to be a jack of all trades. It has so many features and ways to enter and organize data that, while it covers the basics in every area, you can find more full-featured, but dedicated programs for most of the things Curio does.

For example, the mindmaps you can create with MindManager or NovaMind are definitely more powerful than what you can do with Curio. OmniOutliner offers many more outlining features than Curio. And Circus Ponies Notebook is probably the most powerful notetaking app available and out-features Curio easily.

But it’s the combination of all of these features into a single program that makes Curio so powerful and versatile. Even if you’d take the best-of-breed program in any category - mindmapping, note taking, outlining, data collection, … - you’d still just have a bunch of separate programs. Curio integrates all of these very nicely at the cost of providing a bit more of a basic featureset for each.

Curio comes in two versions: Standard ($99) and Professional ($149). To compare the features of the Standard vs. the Pro version, check out http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/pro/.

Pros

• Enormous featureset
• Free form canvas ("Idea Spaces")
• Numerous ways of entering text and data
• Embed virtually any type of object

Cons

• Sometimes overwhelming featureset
• Not as powerful in each feature area as dedicated programs
• Slightly pricey

We contacted Zengobi to let them know we were about to post a review. They were kind enough to offer readers of Creativityist and macsteps a 10% discount between now and December 31, 2008. Enter the coupon code CREATEABC during the checkout process to claim your discount.

Thanks for the review Tom! If any other Creativityist readers would like to write a guest post, drop me a line.

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review: curio by zengobi software

The bad news is that such a post felt like hypocrisy, because I can’t seem to get there. As much as I would like to feel that caught up, my list of available tasks is usually in the dozens when all the contexts are added up. I still need the prod that a due date offers to help me prioritize critical tasks.

The good news is that MacSparky published a great post yesterday called OmniFocus Tips - The Omniscient Start Date. This is a great example of why David is one of my favorite Mac bloggers. Please go read it, whether you use OmniFocus or something else. And if you don’t use OmniFocus, I would recommend using something that has the capability to assign a start date to a task so you can put his ideas to work. Why clutter your brain with things you don’t need to, or can’t, do yet?

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start dates

The second is more elusive, but I’ll call it creative mode. In one of the most helpful take-away’s from The Now Habit, Neil Fiore describes this mode:

For you to work creatively, and very rapidly, the critical and logical functions of our brain (generally attributed to the left hemisphere) must be temporarily suspended to allow the creative functions (generally attributed to the right hemisphere) to start the flow of ideas and inspiration that you need.

Reading Fiore’s thoughts helped me to clarify the uniqueness of these two different modes. Both are based on output. But the state of mind for each, and the results, are very different. GTD mode is valuable, but it’s primary purpose is to make the space to be in creative mode. GTD mode tends to be outward focused, and as Fiore describes, it is left-brained. It looks at what expectations are weighing on me and meets them.

Creative mode is inward focused. It is a matter of being in tune with my soul to let my natural creative processes emerge. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron describes it this way:

All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be able to be productive. Now, to be creative is to be productive — but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it.

Fiore uses a different term to describe creative mode; he calls it the flow state. This captures what Cameron describes above. It is about connecting with the right side of the brain, with my own creativity, rather than forcing it out. The latter section of The Now Habit describes how to engage with the flow state. It begins with a two minute process called focusing “for shifting rapidly to the flow state by replacing guilt and stress with a stress-free focus on the present.”

Fiore gives several helpful exercises. They alone make the book worthwhile, but I find that just the awareness of the flow state has been helpful for me. Designating times for GTD vs creating is important and I make time for both. But the latter is not just an appointment to make in my calendar. It comes when I take the time to slow down, to quiet the external demands, and to listen to my soul.

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the flow state

I’ve come to love instrumental stuff so much, I listen to it most of the time. Some of my favorites are below. They are listed from most favoritist to not quite as favorite (but still better than noise). The first few of them I could listen to just about anytime, while the ones further down the list seem to come and go with moods.

I liked the look of mixing all the artwork together, but for convenience’ sake, the artists listed above include Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, This Will Destroy You, Joy Wants Eternity, The Album Leaf, Caspian, and Eluvium. If there are others you’d suggest, I’d love to hear about them.

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creative soundtrack

From studying the performance styles of achievers, I have learned how essential guilt-free play is to attaining quality work and minimizing procrastination. A firm commitment to guilt-free play will recharge your batteries, creating renewed motivation, creativity, and energy for all the other areas of your life.

Earlier today, I had a conversation with a friend who just returned from two months in Tuscany. He moved in with a family that own a small vineyard and helped them with the grape harvest. He had no access to email, and not even a pen and paper to jot down things he needed to remember to do. It was just him, the vines, and a breathtaking view every day.

As he described it, he has returned home with a renewed understanding of what it means to live in the moment. The worries and concerns of daily life took a break, and he found pleasure. He has a new sense of confidence and discovery as he moves into each day.

I know it might not be reasonable for you to jet away to Tuscany for two months. It certainly isn’t for me! But the play that Fiore describes captures some of what my friend experienced. To play is to temporarily let go of control and engage with possibility:

It is in playing that we build confidence in the reliability of our creativity and our excitement about discovery — the movement from not-knowing to knowing, from lack of control over problems to control and resolution of problems.

Play is a leap of faith, a step into an arena of unknowing. And as we create a way forward by making it up as we go, we remember that we can do the same in the “real world”. We can step into the next moment knowing that we don’t need to have control, but that we can form the way as we go. Play leads us into the world of possibility — a possibility that is a launching place for creating and producing what we haven’t yet imagined.

And by the way, if you don’t even know where to start…I always recommend a good solid reading of Dr. Seuss. He started with And to Think That I Saw it On Mulberry Street; maybe you could too.

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of play, possibility, and productivity

I lost count, but there are well over 60 apps, utilities and games available. Buy 3 and get a 20% discount, buy 4 and get a 30% discount, or buy 5 or more for half price. I purchased a handful of programs through this promotion last year that I still use regularly. WIth such a diverse collection, you might find a few that are useful or interesting to you as well.

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give good food to your mac

This week, we focus on Recovering a Sense of Faith, but it will also serve as a place to post your wrap-up thoughts. Please share your experiences with week 12 and/or your thoughts for the experience as a whole in the comments below…or post a link to your thoughts on your own blog.

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the artist’s way collective: week 12 and wrap-up