Posts tagged as:

yojimbo

capture everything: ideas

by John on February 4, 2008

This is part 3 of 5 in a series on capturing everything. Other entries:

Once you start to really get serious about capturing every thought of value (and some that aren’t), you’ll quickly realize there are two types of thoughts you want to remember. On the one hand, there are the tasks that we’ve already talked about. These are items that you need to remember to do, usually, but not always, within a certain timeframe.

On the other hand, there are ideas. They are usually incomplete thoughts — maybe a concept you want to develop for a new project, or a notion that will fit in well with something that you are already working on. These are ideas you want to live with, to sit with, to revisit over and over and develop more substance around them. To add them to a task list isn’t helpful, because they usually aren’t something that you can or want to just complete and check off. On a task list, they only serve to distract you when you are really trying to get a few things done.

I think it is critical to have an idea catalog — a digital moleskine. I know that many like to fill notebook after notebook with ideas and then shelve them to revisit later. There is something glamorous about notebooks full of ideas, but I prefer to capture them on my computer. It helps me easily organize thoughts or track them down later. For Windows users, I’d recommend OneNote. When I switched over full-time to a Mac a few years ago, this was the only program I worried about not being able to replace. On my MacBook, I’ve settled into Yojimbo and I love it. The rest of this entry will be Yojimbo-centric, but I hope anyone might be able to find motivation, at the very least, from it.

Just like when capturing tasks, I want to be able to quickly and reliably capture ideas with minimal distraction from what I might be working on at the time. Though it is easy enough to create a new note in Yojimbo itself, there are two main ways I capture ideas with Yojimbo.

Similar to OmniFocus, I can quickly capture a thought and add it to Yojimbo with Quicksilver. There is a convenient little Yojimbo plugin that is available in Quicksilver. I just type -space to activate the Quicksilver window, type a period followed by the thought I want to capture, tab over and hit ‘Y’ for Add to Yojimbo, and then hit enter. The thought is tucked away for later, and I’m back to whatever I’m working on in seconds.

The main shortcoming of this first capture routine is that Yojimbo just inserts whatever I type into both the title and the content of the new note it creates. If there is a little more I want to capture, Yojimbo has features to help me easily capture a thought from whatever I am working on. I can type F8 no matter what I am doing, and a quick-entry windows opens up. (This keystroke can be set to whatever you like in the preferences.) A window pops up where I can type a title and then the content of a note. If there is something in the clipboard, it is automatically included as the content of the note which is also really handy.

Yojimbo also includes a little dock that sits on side of the screen. Anything can just be dragged to that tab, and it is added to Yojimbo. However, I like to keep my desktop clean, so even that inconspicuous little dock is a little too conspicuous for me. Between the two techniques I describe above, I don’t really have much use for the dock.

Of course, all of this just gets the ideas into Yojimbo, which can quickly fill up with notes. I use it for capturing ideas, research notes, book notes, software licenses and even my daily pages. In a future post, I’ll share how I organize all of that within Yojimbo so that I can review what thoughts are in process and tuck away others that I don’t want to see all the time.

Popularity: 73% [?]

{ 0 comments }

capture everything: buckets

by John on January 24, 2008

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.

Popularity: 42% [?]

{ 1 comment }

workflow tools: software

by John on January 18, 2008

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.

Popularity: 37% [?]

{ 2 comments }

Newer Entries →