shudder

Taking the scorched Earth policy to your social media

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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.

Use your email as a To Do manager (no, no, no)

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There is no right or wrong way to get productive, but sometimes it feels like there is. Here’s an article for you if you fancy using your email inbox as your To Do list. I bring this to you and what you do with it is of course entirely up to you, but I’ll be off way over here with tea, a mint chocolate Aero and saying la la la. For:

They say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. I’d disagree. I think it’s the perfect place. After all, most of my tasks come in via email, and any app that can share information can share it via email. Why bother dickering with an extra app, keeping all that important stuff in two places, when it can all be easily managed in one spot?

I’ve been doing exactly this ever since I ditched OmniFocus, which is so long ago I can’t remember how long ago it was.

Wait, what, whoa, excuse me? Ditching OmniFocus – OMNIFOCUS – for your email inbox. Can I get some whisky for this tea?

Also, incidentally, I say your email inbox is a terrible place to manage tasks. That means I am they. I’ve never been they before. I can live with this.

Anyway, here’s the crux and the thrust of the article:

With a little bit of setup in your everyday news and browsing apps, you can turn your inbox into a proper universal task list. Here’s how.

This tutorial will use your email account, Mr. Reader (for RSS news items), Twitterrific and Drafts, plus one simple mail rule to organize things behind the scenes. You can gussy things up with all kinds of extras, but the core system is both solid and flexible. Like I say, I’ve been using it for months and it’s way better than anything else I’ve tried.
Email is ubiquitous, so it’s the perfect place to keep your task list.

If you make use of lots of separate projects, or have specific needs for metadata and GTD contexts, then maybe you should stick with something like OmniFocus or Things. But you’d be surprised just how far my mail-based system can stretch.

Okay, writer Charlie Sorrell gets points for that small reversal and allowing that proper To Do managers have their place. But points are removed for saying you can use one spot rather than muck around with two apps and then casually mentioning you actually need four. (Twitterrific, Drafts, Mr Reader and your email.)

But go on, if you must, read more at Cult of Mac.

By the way, did I mention that doing this could create aparadox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe? Granted, that’s a worse case scenario.