evernote

A bit specific: using Drafts to log what I’ve done

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I do a monthly report about what I’ve done – last year for a project called Room 204, this year for you, both years really for me – and it’s always been a bit easy because I make proper notes as I go. Except I forgot to do that in May. For the entire month, I forgot. Not once did it enter my head. Must’ve been a quiet month.

But these things really do help me so I didn’t want to forget again. If that sounds obvious, this will sound more obvious: I decided to use my iPhone to help me.

This is going to be really specific but please treat it as an idea of the type of things you can do rather than a recipe for exactly how I think you should do it. Also, please treat it as being infinitely faster to do than it is to describe.

This is what I do when I’ve done something I want to note:

homescreen_400

Tap on Drafts on my iPhone

There’s rarely a minute my iPhone isn’t with me so whatever I’m doing, whatever I’ve just finished, I can easily tap on the Drafts app I keep on the home screen.

The thing with Drafts is that when it pops open, you start writing. (See second shot down there on the right.) Think later about where that text will go – is it an email, an iMessage, an Evernote entry? – just type for now. Plus I use TextExpander which is yet another app but it works with and within Drafts so I just type the letters XTD (TD for Today, X for just in case I ever need to write a real word beginning with TD) and the date appears.

Drafts_400

Note written and Drafts has sent it

It’s the date plus a dash and a space. After that, I type as quickly as I can and then tap the Share button. What you’re seeing here is the end result: I’ve written my note about a thing I’ve done today (or am about to do, actually), then I’ve tapped on Share. Tapped on “Save for That Was Month” and Drafts has done it. It has sent that text to Evernote. It’s left up here so that I can choose to send it somewhere else but instead I just put it away. Next time I open Drafts, I’ve got a blank screen ready for anything else.

That’s it.

Except look at the shot below: that’s a grab from Evernote on my iPhone and you can see it shows that same text I just wrote in Drafts.

evernote_400b
Drafts has sent that text to the end of a note. So I have a That Was Month note in Evernote and Drafts just keeps adding to the end of it. In some ways it’s even more satisfying than my old manual notes because you don’t think about it, you don’t see any of it but the latest, until you go in to check and there are all these things entered.

I should explain that you have to set up Drafts to do this. I don’t find that as easy as some people do but you can see I’ve done it a few times: as well as this That Was Month business, I have a Story Ideas option that does much the same thing. I think of something I can use in a script or a book, write it down, tap Story Ideas and it’s off into an Evernote note.

And I have a general Save to Evernote which, actually, I’ve never used. There are other options below it such as Send to OmniFocus or Email or whatever. A lot of those come with Drafts, the others I’ve gone through setting up what I want. Telling Drafts I want to send text to this particular app or service, to add it as a new note or append to a particular old one, that kind of thing.

How long did that take you to read? Divide it by oodles and that’s how quick it is to use this thing. Which, frankly, means I use it. Did I mention that I have Drafts on my iPad too? So if I’m working on that, wallop, same thing. I don’t believe there’s a Drafts for Mac and maybe I wouldn’t buy it if there were: it would seem daft using it on a Mac when I have Word and Pages already.

So you know, this is what all this costs and where to get it. Everything but the iPhone, that’s up to you:

Drafts for iPhone: £2.49 UK, $3.99 US

Drafts for iPad: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

Evernote for iPhone: free

Evernote for iPad: free

TextExpander for iOS: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

Evernote Market reaches Europe

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The Evernote company has just announced it will now ship to addresses in Europe. What it will ship is a collection of bags and clothing that are fine but also some hardware that is rather good. In particular, there is this:

evernote-scansnap-e1380217395237

That’s an Evernote edition of a ScanSnap scanner of which the company says:

The ScanSnap Evernote Edition, a collaboration between Evernote and Fujitsu, is not only the first of its kind – it’s the best in its class. You can put nearly anything in it, push one button, and with lightning speed it scans, senses, and autofiles your photos, receipts, business cards, and documents into your designated Evernote notebooks. Before you can walk away for a cup of coffee, you’ll get a simple notification to let you know Evernote has done your filing for you.

Except, you pay a lot for the Evernote colour and logo. I mean, a lot. This model costs £475 through Evernote Market but is functionally equivalent to the ScanSnap iX500 which you can currently get from Amazon UK for £318. In the US, the Evernote edition is $495 and the iX500 equivalent is $424 from Amazon USA.

I started telling you this because I thought it was good that Evernote Market was expanding outside the USA but now I’m just going to stick to Amazon. Still, take a look at Evernote’s description of the scanner as it’s good – and the market has other products.

Save your emails into Evernote for quicker searching

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I’m not convinced by this because Mail in OS X is quick at finding things but I can see a lot of advantages to saving emails into Evernote because it’s a good pot for all things. It’s a good place to save everything and know that it’s all there, to know that everything you save is therefore everywhere you go.

But the official Evernote blog is persuasive about all this – and has a lot of tips for how to do it. Take a read, would you?

Produce your phone calls to make them easier and quicker

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18th Street Phone-1I’ve only got three phone calls I have to make today but I started at 11am and as I write this, it’s 11:13 and I am finished.

As you can expect and fair guarantee from any round of phone calls, they aren’t all finished and done with: right now I’m waiting for a call back from two people with more information and an email from the third. But the calls are all made and these issues are all underway and the response rate would be no different if I’d spent the day fretting over them.

And I do fret. Given that I’m a journalist and it is routine to phone people up, I find it really hard calling for myself. So I do several things to make it better. To make me do it, really.

There’s quite a bit about this in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) but since writing that I’ve been focusing on one particular piece of advice I learnt for it. I’ve made making calls be my thing, be the work I have to get better at. And I’ve done it by making days like this. All of which boil down to this:

Produce the calls.

You don’t go into any meeting and you don’t ever pitch without knowing who you’re talking to and what it’s about. So I take some time during the morning to build up a list in Evernote of who I am calling. I run my life through the To Do software OmniFocus and it’s very easy to use that to get a list of calls to make: I just tap or click on a button marked Phone and it shows me every call I have to make in every project, ever. But if I then start writing that out in Evernote, I can build up this:

Who I’m calling at what company

What their phone number is

The specific aim of the call and the most recent conversation or correspondence we’ve had about it

All obvious stuff but each line does something in particular. The first one, who I’m calling where, that acts as much as a heading as it does a To Do. Then the bit about their number is crucial – I know that sounds obvious, I know you’re thinking that without it I won’t have much luck calling them but it’s more than that. The point is having the number right there. See the name, ring the number, go. That’s the plan.

Then the specific aim is equally important to both sides. Usually there’s just one thing you can get done in a call so I pick that and we’re off. Knowing it, knowing it precisely and having written it down focuses me on it so that I am right on the topic and they get a quicker call out of me.  And similarly, how we last left something means I sound like I am on top of things, I am fully aware of what we’re doing and also that I’m moving this stuff on, I’m not hanging about, I’m not kidding. Without being rude or abrasive, you know I am working and this is business and as much as I may like nattering with you, today we’re doing this thing.

So I’ve spent the morning building up that Evernote note in between other jobs, then it comes to 11am and I start. See the first name, see the number, I’m dialling it before I can hesitate and it’s ringing while I’m fixing the rest of the information in my head. Ring, speak, done, next. See the second name, see the second number, I’m dialling.

I do also use Evernote to make notes about the calls and that’s not brilliant yet. What I find is that I will build up a lot of information under a call but then the next time I have to call them, that information is back in the previous day’s call list. I need to get more organised about copying the information out and into a single place per person or per project or per something. Not sure what yet.

But it’s surprising how much sheer data you can write up about a call. I record just whether I got them or voicemail, I make a note that I said I’d call back and perhaps when if I said a particular time. Also any numbers they need to tell me like fees or contracts or purchase orders. The list goes on and on.

One extra is that I also record the time of the call. I do that in Evernote but using a TextExpander snippet. As the phone rings and as I’m reading, I will type the words “Called at…” and then the TextExpander snippet ;ttime – a semi-colon and the word ‘ttime’ which pops in the current time. If it’s a long call or I’m routing through a hundred service desks who keep me waiting, I’ll log the time along the way because why not?

Then the last thing I do after all the calls is I make a note of them in a separate Calls Made list in Evernote. This has no function at all except to make me want to make more calls. It’s showing me that I’ve made 162 phone calls so far this year and, hand on heart, I wish I hadn’t looked because I thought it would be more impressive than that. Just 162 in five months? I promise to do better.

Starting now. I’ll just add today’s 3 to the list and I’m on 165. That’s a bit better.

Write down your process for doing things

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Write it down now.

A very long time ago, I used to be a computer programmer and there was a culture that documenting what one did was a waste of time. A good coder just got on with it, a good coder didn’t need to leave namby-pamby notes in the code.

That reminds me of how my brother used to refuse to wear a seatbelt because he (believed) he was a great driver. It’s the same level of idiocy and it’s got the same shockingly, overwhelmingly stupid blind spot. If you were this great driver, if you were better than anyone else, that means everybody else is worse than you and they are all on the road heading your way.

Similarly, coders who didn’t believe anyone should document what they’re doing were bollixed when they had to update someone else’s spaghetti of a programme. Talk to me about elegance in coding, talk to me about the language of the very finest programmers, just talk to me about it all later ’cause I’ve got this mess to sort out now.

I’m minded of this for two reasons. The Evernote company blog just said it and said it thisaway:

Whether your business is a one-person shop or a multinational corporation, it’s very likely that you have a number of repetitive processes you go through on a regular basis. Some of these tasks could include preparing reports, submitting expenses, ordering office supplies, or responding to customers. Whether big or small, Evernote is the place to document your processes and maintain consistency.

Save Time by Documenting Processes – Joshua Zerkel, Evernote Blog (27 May 2014)

That’s not really a blog, it’s a sales brochure for Evernote and the full piece goes on to detail just how that software is good for this. But it does sound like it’s good for it, I am convinced.

But I’m really convinced because I helped a friend out with her website recently and it took me quite some time because the things she needed to do I had already done on my own site. I’d just forgotten how I did them.

I got it all working, I figured it out again – it was a WordPress installation, need I say more? – but I wasted a lot of time and actually while I got it working, I didn’t get it working quite the way I’d like. Not quite the way I have it on mine. I just could not find the specific plugins and settings I wanted for her and so I’d had to compromise.

So I’d compromised and it took a long time to get to the point of compromising. If I’d kept a note of what I’d done on mine, we’d have had hers running in a jiffy.

Much as I say about To Do tasks: if you have a complex thing that you do or even a simple thing that you have to do a lot, write down all the steps as if someone else is going to do them for you.

Let’s turn to the phones

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I swear to you that this is a thing. It really is. Just Google “iPhone home screen” and you will find literally half a dozen articles with people talking about what’s on their iPhone front page. I don’t think it’s such a big with Android users but then I wouldn’t be bothered looking. So. Maybe it’s Android too, maybe it’s everyone, maybe I’m not crazy. But I do have one thought about showing you my iPhone front screen.

Is there any better way of recommending software apps to you than showing what I actually use?

And since we’re talking about the front page, these must be the apps that I use the most. Yes. I use these to run my life. One caveat: I also have an iPad but that would be far too big a screengrab to show you. I also have a 27in iMac, but let’s be serious. You’d have to serialise a screengrab from that.

So here’s my iPhone and this is what it’s got on it that is practically worn out from the amount of use I put it all to:

iphone homescreen today

 

Some of this stuff you know, some of it just does what it says underneath. Phone, for instance. Music. Let’s just wallop through the biggies:

Top row, second from the left – Fantastical 2 for iPhone. I’ve already talked about that and also Mynd, way down there toward the bottom, one up from Music, in Three Calendars, No Waiting. I was testing out Fantastical 2 then and also Mynd, which I’d only just realised is also a calendar. (I thought it was about meetings. It is. It’s just more.) Time has moved on and you can see that Fantastical 2 has kept its space on my home screen so I must like it. Whereas Mynd – wait, Mynd is still there. Bugger. It’s very good when it’s very good and when I need it but, oddly, I haven’t needed it much. Despite having many meetings. I’m afraid Mynd may be on its way out. I’ll think about it and get back to you. But Fantastical 2, unreserved recommendation: get it here.

Second row from the top, first on the left – Pocket. Read something here on the phone in Safari or in my RSS reader, or on my iPad, or my Mac or someone else’s PC, anything and anywhere, and I can lob it off to Pocket. Pocket is not the first Read It Later service, but it is the first that I used consistently often to save things and also to later remember that I had them and finally read the things.  Pocket is free, by the way. Off you go.

Second row from the top, second on the left – OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. Need I say any more? Can I say any more? I can? Start reading here – and bring a mug of tea. Then go buy this version of OmniFocus for your iPhone. It’s been updated fairly recently and the iPad one hasn’t so I’m havering over whether to recommend that to you. Up to a couple of weeks ago I’d have said yes even though it’s not quite as whizzy as the iPhone one. The iPad version of OmniFocus has traditionally been the best of the three – but that third one, the Mac version, that’s zooming up. It used to be very hard to use, now a vastly easier yet still powerful one is in beta and I’m addicted to it. Right now, I think the Mac one is the best. Go to the Omni Group’s website and find out about all three.

Third row down, second from left – Drafts. I don’t use this remotely as much as I would expect and chiefly because that’s Evernote right next to it. I’ve now got muscle memory that if I want to write anything quickly, it goes in Evernote. Drafts is possibly a nicer writing experience and it is definitely more flexible. Anything you write in Evernote stays in Evernote and that’s great because it stays there in Evernote on your phone, your computer, your tablet and so on. Anything you write in Drafts stays in Drafts but with one tap can go almost anywhere else. Write something and send it from Drafts to OmniFocus or to a text message or to an email. Or, I’ve just this week found out, to Fantastical. I found it tricky to set up but now it works so smoothly that I wonder if it’s even working. All I definitely do with it at the moment is jot down ideas that it then automatically appends for me to a Story Ideas note in Evernote. Get Drafts here and Evernote there.

Fourth row down, first on the left – 1Password. Actually, see today’s The Blank Screen newsletter for more details of this and then go buy it while it’s on sale. If the sale is over by the time you catch this, go buy it anyway. I paid full price, I’m happy. And buy 1Password for iOS here.

Fourth row down, second from the left – Concise Oxford Dictionary. Not only the dictionary text but also an audio pronunciation guide for many words. Every word I’ve ever tried, actually, and I’ve had this app since about 2008. I use it a lot. I wish it were upgraded for iOS 7 or even just to the stretched out iPhone 5 that I use and I wish all sorts of things, but it’s a great dictionary. Unfortunately, it is sufficiently old that I don’t think you can get it anymore. You can get many similar versions but not quite the one I know, so I can’t recommend a particular one. But do have a look at them all, okay?

Fourth row down, third from the left – Awesome Clock. I use this as a bedside analogue clock. It’s very customisable but now I’ve found an arrangement of clock face and hands that I like, I like it a great deal. Unfortunately, it ain’t around. Not today, anyway. Vanished from the App Store.

Fourth row down, fourth from the left – XpenseTracker.  That fourth row sees some action, doesn’t it? I use this for recording all my expenses. Are you okay? Did you just faint with surprise? Someone, bring us hot towels and some whisky. And tell me how much that costs because I need to pop it into XpenseTracker

Fifth row down, first from the left – HulloMail. I used to be on O2 and got Visual Voicemail. (Whereby instead of dialling in for your messages and listening to eight spam calls before you finally get to one from your client and, wait, hang on, she said a number there, bugger, where’s my pencil, you just tap. Here’s a list of the calls you’ve missed and which left messages. Tap on the one you want to hear first, you hear it first. Missed a phone number or couldn’t quite catch a word? Scrub back and forth through the recording.) It is so good that I had no idea there were iPhones that didn’t have it. Until I left O2 for 3 and despite in all other ways being far better, it didn’t have Visual Voicemail. HulloMail brings it back. It brings it back with ads and I keep meaning to upgrade but it’s a subscription and I’m not certain I use it enough. Take a look at HulloMail here.

Fifth row down, second from left – Where To? I keep wanting to call this Exit. Actually, I keep calling it Exit. And I rotate between using this and Localscope: both are easy of finding out what’s near you. I love this kind of app and I pummel mine: the first App Store review I ever wrote was for one called Vicinity and I could not get over what a stunningly great and useful idea this is. Where’s the nearest bank? Where’s a pizza place? Tap, there it is. With business details. I can’t remember why I fell away from Vicinity but I regularly bounce between Where To? and Localscope. Where To? looks very old to me and I just don’t enjoy using it as much as I do Localscope, but it’s given me more accurate information somehow. And I also understand it: I find I have to keep thinking with Localscope about where a certain feature is. But here’s Where To? and here’s Localscope: do have a look at both, would you?

Last one. Fifth row down, third from the left, Reeder 2 for iOS. This is my RSS reader of choice and I have done an awful lot of choosing. Here’s what I wrote about it when a new version came out late last year. There’s now also a Mac version in beta, which I enthused about here. But just go buy the iPhone version.

I’m worn out from enthusing.

My iPhone home screen, like everybody else’s I presume, changes a lot. You can see I’m havering over a couple of these apps. But the rest, the ones that stay there, tend to stay for the very good reason that they are very good. If you want a recommended app, this is what I recommend.

I hope you find they are as good for you as they have been for me.

I’m having this – link Evernote to OmniFocus

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If you don’t already use Evernote then, fine, that’s your choice and maybe at some point you could check it out on the official site. It might be great for you.

If you don’t already use OmniFocus, proceed directly to The Omni Group and buy it now. It might be that you have to buy an iPad or an iPhone or Mac but it will be great for you.

But if you’re one of the many of us who use both – actually, use isn’t a strong enough word. Let me try again. But if you’re one of the many of us who live in both, then you want this:

Let’s talk about two popular programs: Evernote and Omnifocus. Omnifocus excels at managing tasks but it is weak in storing lots of information. Evernote is weak as a task manager but excels at storing lots of information. If you use them together, they should solve all your productivity problems… right? Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. You have two separate systems that do not automatically work together. It is up to you to figure out how to do that and this is usually causes problems for some.

For example, if you store something in Evernote, how do you make sure you will revisit that information at some point in time? The obvious answer would be during your weekly Omnifocus review. However, that means you need to create a task in Omnifocus to remind yourself to review that note in Evernote. This is where the hiccup is – that extra step that people tend to forget. Fortunately, we have a script that will automatically transfer notes to your Omnifocus inbox. You will never ever forget information in Evernote again.

How to Automatically Transfer Evernote Notes to OmniFocus – Asian Efficiency

It takes some setting up and the full article is very detailed but I’m off to use it now.

Is it a task? Is it an event? No, it’s… er… um…

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I was in a meeting last night and was told I had to do something – but only if certain other things happened. Broadly, if any of these things go wrong then I have to do this or that or the other depending on what and where and when.

It all makes absolute sense but it makes sense to me now. I don’t know that it makes so much sense that I will remember it in a year’s time when one of these things goes wrong.

Plus, I got into a state recently because my OmniFocus To Do list was so full of stray ideas and stuff that I will never get around to that I wasn’t getting around to the stuff I needed to do. I was seeing trees instead of wood. I was feeling like I’d lost all control of everything. And while I’m back now, while it feels great to be on top of it all once more, the road to that misery is to bung in things that you shouldn’t.

And I don’t know. I can’t put this particular instruction in my calendar, that’s obvious. But I can put it in my task list. Yet if I do, when exactly do I tick it off? Possibly never, certainly not for a month, probably not for many months. It would sit there forever, really.

This is starting to happen more and more. I don’t know how I’ve coped with it before, I’m not sure that I have coped with it before, but it’s happening now and I need to deal with it now. So what I’m trying is this: I’m creating Evernote notebooks devoted to the organisation or the project. Those instructions are now one note that will stay in Evernote forever. Because that’s what you use Evernote for: it’s for remembering forever. And if I never look up the notebook again, it’ll be because I don’t need to. Fine.

But will this work? It sounds sensible to me. Except in a month or a few months or a year or if ever this thing goes wrong, then will I remember that I have these Evernote notebooks?

I should add a task to OmniFocus that says “Check the Evernote notebooks you created in order to not have tasks in OmniFocus that you need to check”

You don’t have to be creepy about it

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But do your homework about people. I just had a terribly fun meeting with someone – er, I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did – and before I got to her, I'd read her blog. I'd seen her professional pages, I'd read what she did, I had an idea of some of the work she did.

I intended to stop there. The idea of coming to a meeting entirely cold makes me wince but equally I'm there to meet you, I'm not there to show off my deep research. I really want to meet you: easily the best part of journalism is that you get to bound off and say hello to people you might otherwise never come across. Utterly love that.

And I stopped intentionally looking into this woman's background. But I've been trying a free iPhone app called Mynd and it did some digging for me without my realising it.

Mynd is like a calendar assistant; I found it because I was exploring calendars and looking for why I nearly missed an appointment recently. I also found it because it got mentioned a few times by Katie Floyd on the Mac Power Users podcast. All it does, I thought, is show me my entire day in one screen: how many events I've got to get to, where the next one is, what the weather's like today. I also found that it calculates how long it's going to take me to drive to somewhere and it will say so right there on the screen: you need to leave in 10 minutes if you're going to make the appointment. Sometimes it sounds a notification too. I haven't figured out why it's only sometimes.

But I have figured out that it believes I drive everywhere when really it's more that I drive almost nowhere. So I got a Mynd notification that I ought to get out of Dodge and start the car right now when I was already on a train to London.

I was going to ditch it for doing that. I have Fantastical now that does all the work I need of managing my appointments and events. (Fantastical 2 for iPad is £6.99 UK, $9.99 US. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is £2.99 UK, $4.99 US. The iPad prices are launch offers and will shortly increase by about 33%.) Plus I don't care about the weather and when I do have a mind to wonder about whether it's going to rain, I ask Siri.

But.

There is a panel on this Mynd screen called People and up to now it has always been blank. Today it showed a photo of the woman I was meeting. And it got that photo from LinkedIn. When I tapped on that photo, it showed me her short LinkedIn bio and then it had options for calling her. If you're running late, you open Mynd, tap the person's photo, then tap to send her a message. If you've got the number of her mobile, anyway. Or an email address.

That would be spectacularly handy if I were ever late for anything but usually I'm cripplingly early. Still, it's impressive.

What was even more impressive is that I scrolled to tomorrow, saw the first meeting had a fella's photo there – and behind it was a list of related Evernote documents. It's just reminded me of the last note I made when talking to him. Right there. I'd forgotten I'd ever made a note but there it is.

It's like Mynd gives you a personal briefing before you go to meet someone. I don't think that means you should skip looking in to them yourself, but I feel wildly efficient about tomorrow now. And I won't feel wildly stupid if he mentions the topic of my last note.

Mynd is free for iPhone on the App Store. There's no iPad or Android version.

Have a look at the Mynd website too. It proposes using the software as your sole calendar for a week and I've just learnt that you can do that. Bugger. I think I'll continue using it as an adjunct to Fantastical but it's handy to know that all the ordinary calendar functions are in this Mynd app as well.