Productivity
First you think Evernote is just another notebook app. Then you wonder how you use it. Next thing you know, you are completely incapable of living without it – or able to explain to anyone why it’s so great.
The Verge has a good go. If you’re havering over whether to Evernote then the short answer is yes, do it. The slightly longer answer – about 5’46” – is this:
Note that the mobile version of Evernote has been somewhat radically updated since the one you see here and I like it much more.
…wait, let me tell you what those are. They are gorgeous. Now read on.
Okay. OmniFocus is my beloved To Do task manager and it comes up a lot on this site. If you’re not sure what it does, wait ten seconds and I’ll have a new mention of it. Keyboard Maestro is different: I have mentioned it but usually in passing or when it’s been on sale. It’s one of those tools that you set up and forget, so I rather set it up and forgot about it.
Keyboard Maestro lets you tap a couple of keys and set your Mac off doing all sorts of things. I have a key that opens OmniFocus. (Told you.) There’s a fault on my MacBook Pro where the Q and W keys don’t work and it looks like getting it fixed would be both expensive and time consuming. So I’ve told Keyboard Maestro to type a “w” when I press Command-1. And similar for capital W, q and Q.
I think there are more, but you come to believe that your Keyboard Maestro setup is just a normal part of your Mac. I’d need to go to another Mac and use it for a while before I could tell what Keyboard Maestro does by seeing what that Mac doesn’t.
But I have been the very smallest, slightest user of this software and that will change by about a pixel today as I’ve discovered a way to use it to solve an itch:
Using Keyboard Maestro, I was able to create a script that, when executed, creates and sends a custom-built email to my OmniFocus Mail Drop—and containing a direct link back to the original Mail message.
Specifically, here’s what the script does:
It executes a Keyboard Maestro script called “Get Message URL” which calculates the URL to the currently selected Mail message. (That script simply executes some AppleScript, which I’ve included below.)
Prompts me for a short text to be used as the todo title.
Sets a variety of Keyboard Maestro variables.
Creates an email message whose subject and body content are built from those variables—including the link to the original message—and then sends that email to my Mail Drop address.
Archives the original Mail message—since at that point, I’m done with it.
Did you get that? The full feature has much more of an explanation plus diagrams – I should have more diagrams on this The Blank Screen, shouldn’t I? – and it’s also got the specific details you need to use this yourself.
Which is the specific detail I am this very minute taking in order to do this myself.
Nearly forgot: Keyboard Maestro for Mac costs £23.05 in the UK and is available here.
UPDATE: Done. Took me 17 minutes by the look of it. From a standing start, an “eh?” to running, working and using this.
As featured in this week’s email newsletter, you can currently get a free six months subscription to the premium version of Todoist.
The deal is via Appsumo, it’s here and it’s worth looking at – but before you buy, check out the free version. It may well be all you need in which case Premium is a waste of your money. It’s a nice waste, mind: you’d be supporting the firm that makes this To Do app you so like, but still.
When you follow that Appsumo link, scroll down. The front page looks like a big ad for Appsumo but it’s just the top: scroll down for a lot of detail about Todoist.
I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.
Reboot or Die Trying – David Roberts, Outside (2 September 2014)
That’s serious social media use. I had no idea that there even was a daily limit on Twitter. But after hitting it and generally just going far too far on all of these things, Roberts quit. Cold turkey, near enough, for a year.
He claims to have five things to tell you, five things that you can only know from having a year away from technology – or, presumably, reading about it.
I’d tell you some of the five but this is on Outside magazine. Outside. I barely know what the word means. Read the full feature and if it’s that crucial, let me know.
I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.
That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.
This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.
For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.
I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.
This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.
If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.
Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.
Previously… I first enthused about the Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard for the IPad Air, then I had some problems with it and posted a little less enthusiastically.
Not so much less enthusiastically that stopped using it.
But while I was writing about this, I did mention how I’d previously used a couple of external keyboards for my iPad. One went to Angela, a very good and quite cheap Logitech one that she still uses and an Apple wireless keyboard. In some ways better than the Logitech, in some ways not as good. But more expensive. And when I had that and Angela had her Logitech, we would even write together. Sitting in a café in the Lake Distract, propped-up iPads leaning against each other.
Now that I’m used to carrying the Belkin keyboard case around, though, that Apple wireless keyboard has lain forgotten in my office.
Until this weekend. I’m behind on a book and we were going to lose quite a bit of time to a workshop I ran in Newcastle and then a London trip to see Kate Bush. (Yes, by the way. Yes. Astounding. It wasn’t a concert, it was a delicate shotgun.) But Angela then got a thing to do during both Saturday and Sunday and I planned to hole up and write.
And for some reason, I brought my old Apple Wireless Keyboard. As well as the Belkin case.
I am persistently tapping the wrong keyboard; there’s a handy iPad key on the Belkin one that isn’t on the Apple one. Plus, I had thought I would never get used to a particular design decision on the Belkin where they moved the semi-colon to beside the keyboard. I still get it wrong when I’m writing on that but it turns out that i must be at least seeping in to my muscle memory because I keep pressing the Belkin key on the Apple keyboard.
But I can’t pretend that this isn’t true: I’m enjoying the writing and it is working faster because I’m on a very good keyboard. A very good and also full-size keyboard.
And if you think I look daft typing with two keyboards, you’re right. I’m just fine with that.
I’m all for working long hours and I remain convinced that I am contributing to the work/life balance argument by not having a life. But:
In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the “sweet spot” is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.
Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week – Geoffrey James, Inc (24 April 2012)
That’s the crux of it, really, but read the full piece for a little more of the history of the 40-hour figure and how it’s applying to office workers as well as Ford’s factory ones.
It’s still not out in the UK so you’ll just have to trust me here, but there is this iPhone app called Refresh which parses your calendar and prompts you with conversation starters for people you’re about to meet.
Refresh is very clever and it seems supernatural how it combs sources like LinkedIn to present its information. But as well as the fact that I will never use its suggested conversation openers – I prefer “Hello” to “Say, weren’t you on holiday in Marakesh from 16 July to 18 August?” – there are oddities. And these oddities keep reminding you of how Refresh is sitting on the very line between useful and creepy.
It’s meant to prompt you before a meeting and it does so, but not always. I forgot that I still had it after reviewing the app. Until one day, two months later, it pinged with details of the woman I was meeting to discuss a writing project. I showed her what it said and she revealed that it was all wrong: she had purposely lied on LinkedIn and Facebook in order to defeat this kind of thing.
But then I had a meeting right after that and Refresh didn’t do anything. But then I had a third meeting and it pinged.
A few weeks later, I was going to an event I’d produced and it pinged with what it called a dossier about a particular someone else who was going. That was freaky-plus because my calendar just had the event name and there was nothing I could see that named her – and didn’t name half a dozen other people that Refresh was ignoring.
But still, you know, even though I could just delete it and walk away, I am drawn back to it. There is something so smart about what it does that I’m fascinated at the algorithm. Plus, it gave me the name of someone’s partner and I’d forgotten it. So thank you, Refresh.
Except, last night I got something new. Have a look, see what you think. Is this what I was really doing last night?
Previously… each month I account for what I’ve done in order to make me think of how you’ll look if I haven’t done anything. Especially, especially, as I keep telling you to do things.
It spurs me on and thank you for that but it does sometimes backfire a little. I went into August expecting that I wouldn’t get much done at all: I lost a good ten days, maybe two weeks to a holiday. It was a special one: my 20th wedding anniversary.
I know you look at this list and think that there is something here, I did something. It is solely because I do a little every day. So losing all that time was going to make a big dent in the month. Yet I think I may have over-compensated because I ended up doing about 20,000 more words than in July.
So August wasn’t as rubbish I feared, I’ll give myself that. September’s dire, though.
Writing: approximately 86,440 words
Book: “Filling the Blank Screen” (70,000 words with 50,000 taken from The Blank Screen website)
Book: “The Blank Screen Writers’ Guide: Blogging” wrote approximately 13,600 words
The Flare, a GISHWHES short story (140 words)
Guest blog for Marianne Cantwell’s Free Range Humans (approximately 500 words)
124 The Blank Screen news site entries totalling approximately 42,300 words
6 Self Distract news site entries totalling approximately 9,900 words
Press and publicity:
Bio to Roz Goddard for West Midlands Readers’ Network book
Pitches:
4 (1 successful)
Approaches to me, like reverse-pitching:
3 (3 successful)
Events and copywriting:
Producing Steven Knight event for BBC, Writers’ Guild and RTS
Producing Erica Whyman event for Writers’ Guild
Asked by Birmingham Rep to contribute to programmes
Other:
Delivered drama, acting and diversity votes for Royal Television Society Awards
Joined Reddit productivity subsite and began posting
Meeting re ongoing audio project
Attended:
Chateau Impney tour
Doctor Who: Deep Breath in cinema
Shed Heaven II
Polly Tisdall’s leaving do
ENDS
Yesterday I told you of how iThoughts is on sale and also said:
It looks to me as if there are really two contenders in mindmaps for iPad. I have one – MindNode – and the other is iThoughts.
Today another one goes on sale – and this one goes down to free. Dream-X isn’t as slick as the others: it’s variously spelt Dream-X and Dream X, for instance, and while it is very good at having tutorial videos built right into the software, they’re a bit fuzzy. You can only get the mind maps out of it via an image: you can’t export in a way that other applications can pick up.
Specifically, you can’t export in OPML which means you can’t take the image and have it be read by a To Do app or project manager.
But you may not want that at all, you may prefer keeping a map as a map. And Dream-X lets you explore the whole idea of mindmaps. If you’re musing about mindmaps or know what they are and just aren’t sure whether they’re for you, give Dream-X a go.