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.
Last week I installed and then de-installed BusyCal, a new and hotly touted iCal replacement.
It was the product of the development team that created David Pogue’s favorite calendar, Now Up-to-Date, and I thought it promising since there really is not another iCal replacement package out there unless you adopt Entourage which means being outside the Apple suite of apps with all their interconnected goodness. Here's what I liked and didn't like about the application...
I've posted a complete outline of my File System Based Info Manager. It's the tool I use to manage all my writing, notes, reference material, bibliographies, and records. It's based on Alex Payne's architecture ideas, Noguchi Yukio's organizational systems, and input from my pals over on the Scrivener Forums.
So far it is one of the most popular posts on dougist.com.
David Pogue, the Technology Editor at the New York Times, has caused a stir with his last email update. In it he described a short list of his productivity secrets and to the gasps of GTD/David Allen proselytes the world over he declared that he uses his email inbox as his todo list.
I thought I heard the followers of Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders InboxZero program clutch their collective chests.
I joined in by posting...
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blockquote>I love todo list so much I had dozens - Omnifocus, iGTD, iCal, Things, legal pads, 3x5 cards, all of it. Then I relized the wonder of the one inbox, and I have made my email that box. Like Pogue, anything that comes in is filed, replied to, or tossed a la basic GTD principles. What is left over are todo/project emails.
The problem with using the inbox...
A great way to waste time not writing is to set up your system for managing writing time during the time when you should be writing.
I used to write non-stop, heads-down till my body collapsed, lost in the tunnel of creativity, absorbed with characters and stories. While exciting and vaguely mystical, this is not a long haul strategy for writing sucess. Eventually things (like, you) begin to break down.
Somewhere along the way, I think from the Scrivener boards, I learned of a system for working in periods of forty-eight minutes followed by breaks of twelve minutes. The idea was to train the subconscious to visit during the twelve to help the creative process along.
Easy to adopt, right? All you need is a great timer, because if it works you’re fully absorbed during the 48 and will/should/hope to loose track of time until the bell goes off.
So I had to go find the right timer. Don’t laugh, this is a big deal and it can take dozens of hours of frittering to try them all and get just the right one....
A Post-postmodernist writer, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry, and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive and IT executive, he’s found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could have made up.
He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and a graduate degree from Loyola. He’s studied with Sharon Mesmer, Sidney Offit, Josh Gaylord and Justus Rosenberg in The New School’s writing program, and since 2009, in Pulitzer Prize winner Phil Schultz’s Writers Studio. In 2010 he was selected to attend the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore at the masters level, where he studied with Rick Moody. Somewhere along the way he learned to write about himself in the third person.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, one filled with ideas re-emerging as vastly powerful things, even in the simple acts of everyday life, and the creation of long periodic sentences to explain it all.
Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
myMFA – A two year writer’s development program
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…