workflow

Randomly happened upon this old 43Folders post on appending text via QuickSilver. Thinking about how fast that is for certain types of lists (books for library/amazon — and right, I know I haven’t put the library first in practice, but that’s exactly why I wrote it that way!; wines – but that seems like a worthless endeavor after a while, right?; restaurants in other cities – is that really a “travel” task?; random ideas for gifts, websites, and similar things – text files all cross-link; I should put them in DVT (Pro Office FTW!) if it became useful to track them — indeed, the whole lot of text files can probably be added to DVT as part of an indexed folder.

This little tidbit will get added to my workflow post (forthcoming!) for sure!

It’s not quite zero-effort, but it’s more lightweight than my current system of adding these bits as individual items in OmniFocus and then consolidating them randomly. Not only do I create more work than is probably warranted by a reference link, the list of references isn’t a task. David Allen is already preparing to roll over in his grave. There is a burden to seeing that I still have nearly 2500 entries in OF (no lie!), even after pulling out well over 100 partly written blog posts.

Much of that material is reference stuff that got added to my Outlook task list when that was my tool of choice (platform-dependent: I bought OmniFocus very soon after getting my Macbook Air). The workflow simplicity of email something and then drag it to the task list to keep track of it (hosted Exchange is one version of a backup plan!) was commendable. But I definitely stored lots of things in the task list that didn’t belong there.

To preview things a bit, the workflow post covers the shifts in my tools, process, and thinking (deliberately ordered that way) after switching to the Mac created an opportunity for deliberate planning — path dependency no more!

So I was just watching a video of “some guy” (deliberately vague now because I’m going to sort of make fun of him in a minute) talking about how he uses Scrivener on his Mac for writing.

But he pronounced it with a long /i/, like it rhymed with ‘hive:’ scrive-ner, as opposed to scriv-ner. I’d honestly never ever heard it pronounced that way, and given the number of kids in my 11th or 12th grade English class reading Bartleby, I’m sure someone would have corrected all of us if we were saying it wrong. However, the average verbal SAT of that class was probably above 650 (and I’m old-ish, so that’s like a 730 today; look up the scaled score conversion) — I’m guessing we mostly had it right.

Anyhow, I won’t name the fellow or link or anything just because he pronounced it funny. But I am unsure about whether I want to watch the rest of this little video.

But I will because I just started using Scrivener and would like to see how other folks do it.

So here’s the quote (I really don’t have a source for this; sorry):

It’s better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool then to open it and remove all doubt.

And yes, my visceral reaction to people mispronouncing things does have some small relation to my mother’s penchant for talking about the “Gonzilla” movies that I watched on Saturday afternoons as a kid. Yes, they were in fact dubbed “Godzilla” movies. Oh well — some things stay with you.

Some things don’t belong in the task list

Pseudo-quote on getting it wrong