Productivity

What’s in my Simplenote?

Minimal Mac is asking what’s in your Simplenote. Here’s what’s in mine:

  • Project scratchpads (notes, URLs, process lists, todo lists, etc.).
  • Kind words people say about me (for when I’m feeling down).
  • A list of book/design project ideas.
  • A list of books I want to read.
  • A list of fonts I want to get someday (mostly book typefaces).
  • Agendas and meeting notes.
  • Drafts for some blog posts and occasional emails.
  • Short snippets of stories I’m working on.
  • Drafts of my Twitter profile bio.
  • Odds and ends (the VIN on my car, phone numbers, URLs).

Once again, let me just say that I love Simplenote and use it every day. And the new 3.0 release is quite nice.

Writing tools I love

I do a lot of writing (not as much as I should, but a lot nonetheless), and since I spend so much time in word-related apps, I figured I’d give them some gush time.

I’ve dabbled with tons of word processors and text editors — Bean, OmmWriter, WriteRoom, TextMate, you name it — and yet I always come back to Vim.

It’s my wordmaking home. Vim is a geek tool, certainly, and the learning curve is oh so steep, but it does exactly what I want it to do, it has extremely powerful text editing commands, and MacVim gives me distraction-free fullscreen mode (Cmd-Shift-F). Plus, it’s a keyboard-based editor, and I love the keyboard something fierce. So fast, so smooth, so easy to dump what’s in my brain straight into a file with hardly anything getting in the way.

Vim suits my needs 95% of the time, but when I’m away from my computers, I use my Field Notes if I’m feeling analog, and Simplenote on my iPhone if I’m not.

Simplenote is wonderful. It just works. It syncs over the air and I can get my plain text notes anywhere — on my iPhone/iPad, on my computer via Notational Velocity, or anywhere else via the web app. Beautiful.

I didn’t discover Notational Velocity until a few months ago, but wow, I’m in love with this app.

(The weird spacing has to do with how Old English poetry is formatted, by the way. It’s not a Notational Velocity glitch.)

The keyboard shortcuts are delish. Even better, NV is free (open source) and syncs with Simplenote. And it gets better. NV lets you store notes as text files in a directory, so I’ve got my laptop storing NV notes in Dropbox for extra redundancy. Bonus: This means I can drop a text file into my NV folder on my laptop and it’ll automatically sync it with Simplenote. (To be honest, I’ve never done this. Maybe someday…)

And that’s it.

Disclaimer: While it’s fun to talk about tools, tools do not a writer make. Words are words, regardless of whether you put them down with a pencil or in Word or on your phone or via dictation software. Tools can make it easier, but the more important thing is the writing itself — getting words out of your head and onto paper or screen — and you can do that with pretty much anything.

Earplugs, revisited

It’s now been a week since I unplugged (or plugged, I guess, depending on how you look at it). What’s the verdict?

Mixed.

I liked having more time for reading and making things. And my mind did feel quieter, less distracted and more focused.

But (and you knew there was a “but” coming because of my use of the past tense in that last paragraph) I missed being social on Twitter. Apparently I need that. I love people and I love talking with people and that’s basically what Twitter is. Also, I get enough time-sensitive emails that checking Gmail only twice a day isn’t going to cut it. (This was news to me.)

So, no more 2x/day limit.

My new goal is where I should have been all along: the middle ground, sane and healthy and ruddy-cheeked. I’ve coaxed my subconscious into monitoring how often I’m checking Gmail et al., and if my middle ground frenzies itself into a frothing every-other-minuteness, I’ll pull back and take a breather for a few. That should do the trick. (If it doesn’t, you’ll be getting another blog post.)

Now to go tweet about this…

Earplugs

My life often feels like a series of endless interruptions snatching at my mind, pulling it like taffy in a dozen different directions. It’s enough to drive a man crazy. In fact, I do feel a little crazy when it’s happening — just a tad insane, out of my mind, if you will. It’s not healthy.

The Internet is a magical place. I love the Internet. Much of my life revolves around it. Because of the Internet I was able to start an online magazine which led to my meeting my wife. My day job is web design, and I applied for it because of a LinkedIn forward I got. I’ve made a lot of friends over the Internet, through mailing lists and blogs and Twitter, and I value them.

But the Internet is almost too much, you know? Too many voices, too many things to do, to watch, to read. A steady patter of pings begging for my attention relentlessly, and if I turn my head every time they come, I spend my life turning my head instead of actually doing things and making things and being a real person.

I like this line from Jack Cheng’s article Habit Fields:

Just because you can have instant access at your fingertips doesn’t mean you should.

More and more, I’m finding myself turning things off, trying to silence the buzz so I can get some actual work done — and regain my sanity. I’ve disabled all incoming email and Growl notifications. And even then, I’m still checking Gmail and Twitter every two minutes hoping I’ll have shiny new emails or tweets waiting for me. I have to exit out of the apps entirely if I want to stand a chance at avoiding distraction.

What I’ve discovered: The longer I go in between checking Gmail/Twitter/Google Reader/whatever, the better I feel. I don’t know how long is ideal (a day? half a day?), but I’ll tell you what, it sure as heck isn’t every five minutes.

It’s not just Gmail and Twitter, of course. It’s the whole idea of multitasking. Peter Bregner’s article on how and why to stop multitasking is beautiful. Also, if you haven’t already read the Nicholas Carr’s Wired article on how the web is rewiring our brains, go read it. Now. I’m not convinced that this rewiring is entirely a bad thing, but I do find that it’s harder and harder to finish reading books (which are so much longer than blog posts). And the more I multitask, the less I get done and the worse I feel. (This is one of the reasons why I like the iPhone and iPad — you’re effectively forced to singletask, and it’s an oh so beautiful thing.)

Big blocks of focused time are delicious. Spurts of attention timesliced every which way, not so much. I want more quiet, less noise.

Unplugging is hard for us Internet junkies. After all, feeling the pulse of the world in your fingertips is heady. No man is an island, and extricating ourselves from the web, even for a short time, can be sticky.

But people have been doing just fine for thousands of years without the Internet, and a few more hours away from my email or Twitter really isn’t going to make anything blow up, much as I’d like to think it would. A couple years ago, I couldn’t for the life of me understand people who didn’t have email or who only checked it once every week or two. Now, though, I envy them.

I want to try something radical, something completely crazy like, oh, checking my email and Twitter only twice a day. ;) Twice a day. Man, it feels almost impossible, but at the same time my heart wants to sing at the thought. I’m giddy thinking how much more I could get done each day with all that extra time — more time reading, more time with my family, more time just thinking. Peaceful time. Mmm.

Okay, I’m going to do it. From now on, I’ll check my email and Twitter once in the morning (around 9:00) and once at night (around 9:00), and that’s it. Period.

Which means I can’t check my email for another four hours. Goodness, this is already getting hard. (Yeah, I’ve got it bad.)

Here we go.

Rock solid action

In January I blogged about next actions, but I didn’t realize till now just how important it is that todo items be concrete. Not vague. Not fluffy. Not general. To get things done, todo times have to be rock solid and mentally tangible.

If I have any items on my todo list that aren’t concrete, my brain clouds up and I don’t get anything done. But as soon as I wipe those abstract items off my list, voila, my mind clears up and I can finally do stuff again.

Example: “Russian edition of Crime & Punishment.” First, there’s no verb here. Verbs help. Second, this is not an actionable item. It’s a goal, but not something I can directly do. So I think about it for a second and decide that the first thing I need to do is “Look for a copyright-free online edition of the Russian C&P text.” That’s something I can do. (Even more basic, I could start with “Find out how ‘Crime & Punishment’ is written in Cyrillic so I know what to search for.” It’s “Преступление и наказание,” in case you were wondering.)

The trick is noticing those vague items when they show up on my list and then moving them elsewhere (I’m using my Things inbox at the moment) until I have time to process them and figure out what real actions I need to take.

Honestly, vague todo items are to blame for probably half of the productivity I lose. (Bejeweled accounts for the rest.)

Fear of illustration

Naturally, after I announced to the world that I wanted to be an illustrator, I promptly stopped illustrating. I wish I could say that the past month has been filled with a movielike montage of training, with my spending every waking moment drawing and painting and learning my craft. Instead, I’ve hardly done anything.

What happened? I got scared.

Doing illustrations for a living is daunting, and now that I’ve announced my intentions — now that I’m serious about it — I’ve gone and frozen up.

So now it’s a matter of thawing. Of realizing I don’t need to be perfect. Of making myself practice and produce. Of smushing the fears.

This is what Steven Pressfield calls resistance in The War of Art. And it’s too dang effective. I’ve been telling myself all sorts of excuses, using almost every avoidance tactic in the book to keep from illustrating — from doing the one thing I want to do. Sigh.

But I’m not going to let the resistance get me down.

I don’t exactly know how yet — I’ve thought about making myself draw one illo each day, but I also want to finish more complex pieces that take longer than a single day — but I’ll figure something out, so help me.

On doing hard things

So, my last post was about how I’m going to write this genealogy app, right? Beyond, as it turns out, is a fairly difficult project with lots of spiky hurdles and design challenges growling at me. A few days ago I was staring straight into the maw of this slavering beast, my eyes open to how hard it’s going to be to actually pull this off.

And I got scared. Overwhelmed. My next thought: “You know, I’ve abandoned this project before. Like, five times. I can abandon it again.”

But then (and thankfully there is a “but” here) as I was walking home later that day, I was visited by the first of three epiphanies. (Hmm, this is starting to sound a little like Dickens’ Christmas Carol.)

Epiphany #1: Writing Beyond will be hard. Very. Hard.

Corollary #1: It’s still worth it.

As usually happens in these cases, supporting evidence quickly rallied to my side.

Exhibit A: After dinner, I was reading Seth Godin’s book Small Is the New Big and came across an essay on hard work. “It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable,” he said, and it grabbed me by the collar and shook me, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Beyond.

Exhibit B: My friend Janssen told me about an article on the perils of praising your children — if you tell a child they’re smart, it actually inspires them (despires them?) to underachieve, whereas if you tell them they’re a hard worker, they do better. That’s the story of my life, folks. People told me I was smart, and as a result, whenever I ran into something that I couldn’t coast through easily, I gave up almost immediately. I put too much trust in innate talent (which may or may not have been there at all) and almost completely ignored effort. This is a recipe for failure. Edison was right: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

We now turn to the epiphany of Creativity Present. As a brief bit of backstory, I’m about 15,000 words into the first draft of Tanglewood, my young adult fantasy novel. Last week I decided to put it on hold so I could focus on writing short stories, because they’re shorter and thus easier (in my mind, anyway). Then on Wednesday I was walking home and had yet another epiphanic visit:

Epiphany #2: Writing Tanglewood will be hard.

Corollary #2: It’s still worth it.

I’m sensing a theme here. I decided that yes, writing a novel is something I really want to do, and jumping ship now isn’t going to help my goal. So I’m going to write short stories after I finish the book.

The third epiphany, tall and cloaked, came yesterday — also while I was walking home. (Seriously, my best thinking time is while walking home from work. And in the shower.) As you may have noticed, I’m an artist (with a very, very lowercase ‘a’). I like making art. But I’m not very good at drawing, particularly at drawing anything that remotely resembles a human. And I’ve been stuck at the same level for a very long time.

Epiphany #3: Learning to draw will be hard. Corollary #3: It’s still worth it.

In retrospect this all sounds completely obvious, but dang, I’ve wasted a lot of time avoiding hard work — and I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I’ve been evading the hard stuff by doing easier things, or by telling myself that I wasn’t cut out for art or that I shouldn’t spend my time programming when I really should be spending my time doing x, y, or z.

Bzzt.

Lesson Learned #1: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.
Lesson Learned #2: Worthwhile things take effort. Always.
Lesson Learned #3: Recognizing that it’ll be hard somehow makes it easier.
Lesson Learned #4: Doing things that stretch my skills is exhilarating.

So I’m going to forge onward with Beyond, keep writing Tanglewood, and practice drawing humans until they look real and not like hobgoblins with elephantitis.

And yes, I know I’m sort of bending the actual meaning of the word “corollary.” :)

My new filing system

After years of living with a lame file organization scheme, I finally took a look at how I was working and revamped my system to match it. This new system is bliss.

The main difference is a “current projects” folder, which I’m calling sandbox/ and which lives in my Dropbox folder. Everything I’m working on goes in there, one subfolder per project. When I finish a project, I move its folder to the archives.

As I mentioned in my minimalist desktop post, I’ve cleaned off my desktop and switched to using an inbox/ folder, which lives in my home directory. All my downloads and other temp files (quick HTML prototypes, etc.) go there.

And finally, we have the archives, which are the standard Mac folders: Documents/, Pictures/, Movies/, and Music/. I’ve sorted Documents/ into general categories (Art/, Design/, Books/, Writing/, Receipts/, etc.) which contain finished projects/files.

That’s that. With the sandbox/ folder, I can see exactly what projects I’m working on at the moment and access those files no matter where I am. Oh, and did I mention the peace of mind of knowing that my current work is always backed up in a handful of different places? (My two computers, my external hard drives at both home and work, and the cloud. That’s five places. Mmm.)

Todolistitis

I used to be a man of many todo lists. They were a badge of honor, a kind of nerd street cred that I took silly pride in. They were also out of control.

See, the whole point of a todo list is (a) getting it written down so it’s out of your head (freeing up mental RAM) and (b) reviewing the list so you actually do the stuff on it. With my twenty-plus lists, I was nailing the first part — oh, man, I was (and still am) so good at writing todo items down — but doing a spectacularly bad job at reviewing those lists. Things fell through the cracks. A growing sense of guilt would perch on my shoulders as I watched my piles of post-its and index cards grow, waiting for me to go through them.

And yes, there were piles. Post-its on my desks both at home and at work, index cards stashed in my Field Notes, and items all over the place on my computer — text files, Simplenote, Things, my Glider wiki, Todoist, you name it.

Then I learned a simple lesson: having a bazillion systems is almost as bad as not having any system at all.

And so I decided to consolidate (one system to rule them all, one system to find them, one system to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, that sort of thing). I took a hard look at what I needed out of a todo list and came up with this list:

  • Quick item entry
  • Available everywhere
  • Sortable into projects
  • A daily prioritized “I need to do this soon” list

I almost started writing my own system, then realized that Things for the iPhone already did everything on my list, and it had the advantage of already being written. :) So I committed. I gave up post-its cold turkey and abandoned all my other todo list stashes.

And it worked.

So, whenever I realize I need to do something, I add it to Things. Each day I decide what I want to do that day and put those items on the “today” list, placing them in the order I’d like to do them in. And then I do them. It’s that simple.

What I’ve learned: keep the “today” list short, and only let concrete verbs in as items (next actions, basically). When I follow those two simple rules, things don’t get out of control. When I don’t, I end up ignoring the list and it’s as good as useless.

So now I have a single home for my todo items, a warm, cozy place where I can actually give them the attention they deserve. Because there’s only one place to check, I remember to check it daily (usually many times a day). And todo items don’t fall through the cracks anymore. I’m happy.

(Postscript: I keep my work todo items completely separate, in Things for Mac. It’s nice, but I still much prefer Things for iPhone, though.)

My minimalist desktop

Continuing on with the minimalism trend in my last post, I’ve stripped my Mac’s desktop bare:

Update: If you want the wallpaper image I used here (which I made in Photoshop), you can get it from Flickr — I’ve posted it in 1920×1200 (which I use on my iMac) and 1440×900 (which I use on my MBP).

Less really is more here. This feels so much less cluttered and so much more productive than it did when my desktop was full of files.

What I did

I’ve turned off all desktop icons (no more using the desktop as a storage area), gotten rid of as many menubar status icons as I could (I’m keeping battery, clock, and Spotlight because I use them, but I haven’t yet figured out how to get rid of Dropbox or JustNotes), and trimmed my dock (which has been on autohide for a while now) so it’s just a list of apps that are running.

Also: I used the Secrets prefpane to move the default screen capture location from the desktop to ~/Documents/Screenshots. Works like a charm.

How I get by

To launch apps and get to folders, I use Quicksilver and Finder. I also have Visor, which lets me pull down a terminal at any time (I’m using Control-. for the shortcut) (I’m also using Control-< and Control-> to move between tabs in Visor).

The future

I wish I could autohide the menubar the same way I do the dock. (MenuShade looked like a solution until I realized it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard.)

I also want to figure out how to get rid of the menubar icons for Dropbox and JustNotes. Update: I used Dock Dodger to get rid of the JustNotes dock icon and set JustNotes to hide the menubar icon. (Thanks to Wade Shearer for the tip.) Second update: I found a screencast on hiding the Dropbox menubar icon. But I’m not sure anymore that I actually want to get rid of it — it’s useful for seeing if things are fully synced. Hmm. We’ll see.

I’ve thought about using GeekTool to put a clock straight on my desktop, but that really just goes against the whole minimalism philosophy. If I can get my menubar to autohide, then I don’t want to see anything on the desktop.

Next on my agenda: figure out a file organization scheme that actually works.