Category Archives: Productivity

TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad

By Doug | Published: June 7, 10

TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad

We’ve been having a great conversation over on the Literature & Latte forums about TaskPaper, Scrivener, and note taking on the iPad. I’ve clipped

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SimpleText, TaskPaper, WriteRoom, Notational Velocity – Going minimalist with my notes

By Doug | Published: February 14, 10

Going minimalist with my note taking tools has been a fantastic boon to my work flow. Using applications and tools that let me access my data set of files, without taking them over and making my work flow conform to the needs of those applications, has removed a whole set of steps, perhaps most importantly the one between capturing ideas and processing them to finished work.

Before, there was always the PITA process of transiting from flaneur to writer, now they are one and the same act; in other words the technology is doing what it is supposed to do.

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My policy on email

By Doug | Published: January 27, 10

I get a lot of email, I mean a lot — not as much as I did when I was in commerce, but still what could justifiably be called a deluge. Some if it is of my own making, most is not. Almost all of it demands a thoughtful reply, and each reply takes, for me at least, emotional energy, if the response is going to be more than the web 2.0 version of a grunt.

In addition to the volume of mail I get, emailers have increasingly imposed their own ever shortening version of response times on that torrent. Besides whatever they wrote, they implicitly say: I wrote you. I want, demand, will extort, a reply NOW.

Here's what I do...

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Notational Velocity – Show in Finder

By Doug | Published: January 18, 10

Missing in Notational Velocity is an apparent command to “Show in Finder” but it's easy to use Spotlight to do the same thing.

Here's how I do it...(and why it matters to interface architecture)

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myMFA – A two year writer’s development program

By Doug | Published: January 11, 10

A few months ago a writing pal passed along a link to Dennis Cass’ post discussing his version of an idealized MFA program, an alternative MFA. Cass’ point of view was that traditional MFA curriculums were filed with blanks, specifically outside of craft development, as done through workshops, and outside (perhaps) literary criticism, as done through massive reading work.

This struck a cord with me, it sounded about right, so I went off and built one of my own, what I call myMFA, it’s outlined in detail, along with the schedule of how I implemented it in 2009 and 2010, after the jump…

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WriteRoom and Notational Velocity

By Doug | Published: January 9, 10

A modification to WriteRoom’s SimpleText application has me looking at Notational Velocity again. What I find is a near perfect minimalist integration and text management system that supports long term data storage.

My description of the applications, and how I use them in my infobase system follows after the jump.

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