I don’t know, you come here and the first thing I do is send you away again. It seems so rude. But we’re here to be productive so while you head off in these interesting directions, I’ll put the kettle on for us.
A To Do application for Macs and iOS. If it also worked on Windows, I might not have needed to write a book.
David Allen: Getting Things Done (UK edition, US edition)
A book that in so many ways is a really clever answer to clearing our heads and then clearing our desks effectively and fairly easily. Maybe only writers understand how one can both recommend something and yet not recommend it at all, though. Getting Things Done was written in the early 2000s and it reads like an antique: it’s from a day when you couldn’t, for instance, make a business phone call until you were in your office 9-5am, Monday-Friday. It’s also not written for creative types like us and I think you spend a lot of effort translating it to the kind of messy working life we tend to have. Yet Allen is a smart guy and stuff he’s come up with here I have used and I rely on. Try out the sample chapter in the Kindle version and see what you think.
You could say that most podcasts are style over substance but that would suggest that at least the style is good. Most podcasts I’ve tried lately have tended toward the American or zoo format radio model where a group of presenters have a far better time than their listeners. But Mac Power Users is more like the BBC Radio 4 model where the presenters have been chosen to complement each other rather than compliment. Katie Floyd and David Sparks have similar Mac interests and are similarly power users but they have sufficient differences that they bring contrasting detail and information to their topics. Naturally they’ll never be so great that Windows users could get anything from it, but I found one episode when I was researching a product and I’ve since listened to eighty or more editions.
And don’t forget my own book:
The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers (UK edition, US edition)