Day One | Daily Journaling Made Pretty
DayOne is a magnificently designed daily journaling application for Mac OS X and iOS. It’s simple and beautiful interface makes it a pleasure to keep a personal journal, take notes, write 750 words or just add little snippets from your mind, and it’s Dropbox sync feature makes it easy to keep your journal in sync across all your devices. Both the iOS and Mac app feature lock-out security features, and the Mac version features a handy export tool, so that at any time you can stop using DayOne and take your journal with you in an easy-to-read text file. You can pick up this particular piece of writing goodness on both the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store, for $10.49 and $1.99 respectively.
Index Cards | Incoherent Mumblings
Why do people still laugh at me when they want my number, my address (email or otherwise), or a reminder to do something at a certain time, and I pull out an index card and start writing? In the last couple of days, I was able to:
- Provide my phone number and address to a new friend when he…
A post I wrote in defence of 3” x 5” index cards, a productivity tool you should already have.
JumpCut | Simple Clipboarding for your Mac
JumpCut is a free and simple way to give yourself access to previous items you’ve copied to your Mac’s clipboard via a menubar accessible menu. Great for anything from copying chunks of text between two documents, to recovering the URL you copied just before you had to copy some login data for another service.
My Setup | Lachlan Harman
My setup, as can be seen via the community page of The Setup
LifeHacker Readers:
Are you becoming a little tired of the new, sub-par standards of writing/reporting over there?
How I Use Things
Things for me is a great combination of iOS and Mac software designed to let you organise all the stuff you’ve got in your mind and store it in a safe, reliable system. That’s great. I love it. I know a lot of people who use Things on their Mac for all their input and sorting needs and refer to their iOS device througout the day to know when they need to get things done.
I don’t think that works for me. For me, the input and organisation all happens on my iPhone.
“BLASPHEMY!” you all say, and I understand your reaction, but if I’m sitting at my Mac when I’m adding all my tasks, something comes up and bites me, and it’s the urge to create thousands of incredibly detailed tasks and projects which will make the weekly review ten times longer.
If the little badge says that I have five things to do today, I’m a lot more likely to do them than if it said fifty, or even five hundred. If my inbox badge on my Mac reads 100+, I won’t touch it. I’ll throw out the entire database and start my task input from scratch, which is far from productive.
So I add tasks on my iPhone, where the input process is so restricted that I have to think about what tasks I’m putting in, and whether they really need to be as detailed and as many as there would be were I sitting at my Mac.
A tip from this that you might find useful? Find a balance between the detail of your tasks and the quantity of them. Not too detailed that your list becomes too long, but not so short that your tasks aren’t detailed at all.
Paper GTD
Something I’m becoming more and more of a fan of is using paper task lists and organisers.
Currently, I’m using a legal pad for my inbox and next actions, stored inside a compendium, with a single index card acting as my projects list. The extendible mobile system, in case I don’t have the compendium on me, is a stack of index cards and a binder clip in my pockets, where anything I’ve written on get dumped into the compendium’s card-holder for review at the end of the day.
If software solutions aren’t quite working for you, try paper.
Wunderlist - A Cloud Syncing, Cross Platform Task Management Application that's Simple, Beautiful, and 100% Free
Currently using it with two classmates to collaborate on an assessment task.
Did I mention it has list sharing via Cloud.app and email? And the customisable backgrounds?
It’s well worth the download onto your PC/Mac/iOS Device, even just to try it out.
Pomodoro Timer for iOS
Simple, elegant, and cheap. Recommended.
Simple Solutions
I want to talk to you about Simplicity. No, not “that desk is simple”, but about looking for simplicity in the solutions to your problems.
Beware of the non-work
I felt really productive yesterday. I’d spent about an hour and a bit doing work, and I really felt as though I had accomplished something. I felt a level of satisfaction that meant I could spend an hour or so playing games, or writing poems, or talking to a friend.
The feeling soon subsided.
I took a look back over what I’d done, and the feeling of satisfaction turned to a feeling of great fear. The time I’d spent “working” was spent doing ‘non-work’: the silly administrative tasks that you do to make you feel better about the fact that you haven’t done what you were supposed to. I ruled lines, I dated things, I rewrote notes, I cleaned out my school books, I check my todo list, I cleaned my todo list, and then I went through my inbox, when I should have been writing a 1500 word essay.
Please, beware of the non-work. Make sure that when you’re being productive, you’re actually being productive.
Tip:
The best tip I think I can personally provide: Never, ever start a project you can’t see through to the end.
