[…] In effort to adopt a new productivity scheme to attack my current problem of no-productivity, I’ve turned to the Seven Things “hack.” Many of the big Getting Things Done followers try this hack, but honestly I don’t believe GTD is for me. It’s far, far, far too involved, and requiring of being part of every section of my life; not something I really want to adopt. […]

One question: what exactly do you use your moleskine for? I’ve carried one for years but haven’t been able to find a use for it since starting GTD. Do you keep your actual lists (next actions, contexts, etc.) in it? Do you use a big one or a small one?

And thanks for turning me on to del.icio.us — it’s great!

what exactly do you use your moleskine for?

It’s not specifically a great GTD tool in general, but it works for how my brain operates. For me, it’s all about capturing and sharing. Writing down music suggestions, jotting things I want to research or settle a bet. Just a reminder of someone’s name and the fact I said I’d email them some information.

I try to carry the smallest note-taking device that I can get away with. A standard moleskine if I have my messenger bag, a notebook moleskine if I’m wearing a big jacket, and more often than not—seriously—ten index cards and a binder clip.

Any kind of processing and storage happens back at the PowerBook. Although, I must admit, I have started fiddling with a Palm again for fun.

And glad you like del.icio.us. Get a bookmarklet and use it! :)

Thanks for your reply — one of the things that GTD really opened my eyes to is that you can have as many note-capturing devices or inboxes or whatever as you want, as long as you look through them once a week and sort them out. I guess I just hadn’t thought about that, re: carrying multiple moleskines! I will definitely start using mine again!

As an aside — if you’re thinking of carrying a Palm again, you should check out MacNoteTaker; it syncs plain text files between your Mac and the PDA. So, if you keep all your lists and notes in plain text files, you have a really nice system for keeping things up to date. I’ve found this simple solution to be way better than LifeBalance, ShadowPlan, etc. I just wish there were an easy way to edit the Palm’s To-Do list on the Mac without using Palm Desktop. Anyhow, it’s a big help.

I took your advice and grabbed a del.icio.us account. Not sure how much I’ll use it; I’ve just plopped one URL in there so far.

My old system for saving URLs was a folder called “URLs??? sitting on my MacOS X desktop. (Actually it’s in Documents with an alias on the Desktop.) When I found a place I didn’t feel like bookmarking but thought I might want to come back to, I’d just drag the URL from the address bar into the folder. Every so often I go through and sort, promote, or prune.

I’ve also got the folder in my Dock, so I can right-click and get a menu of the contents.

Avram, I promise once you’ve started using del.icio.us, you’ll love it. Use the bookmarklets, and it’s magic.

Avram: The power of deli.cio.us comes from tags. Sure, your desktop folder of URL works (I just finished off mine a week ago), but it’s hard to find something you want. In deli.cio.us, I look up “osx software rss” and bam, I have a list of what I want. Hierarchies are very restricting to change and hard to set up. Tags in contrast, are easy to setup (if done right) and modify. Having a URL directory also makes it hard to add comments.
Since del.icio.us it is a large public service, you can see related topics easily and subscribe to them in your inbox. Try the del.icio.us GTD tag, which has lots of neat tips in it, much like this blog.

Also, if you find yourself looking stuff up on del.icio.us alot (I would at least hope you would), get yourself a bookmark like this one: del.icio.us lookup for easyasy2k.
The nutr.itio.us posting bookmarklet is also superior to the standard one.

Leland: Thanks much for the nutr.icio.us pointer. Far superior. :-)

I use Furl instead of del.icio.us for two primary reasons:

1. The damn URL is easier to type. ;-)
2. 2. Furl indexes the full-text of every web page you archive and allows you to search through the full-text of every page in your entire archive. It’s like carving out your own personal subsection of the Web. I’ve written more about this idea of a “personal web” elsewhere.

You can create Yahoo-like categories with Furl, but I’ve found that it’s easier and more efficient to use Furl’s Keywords feature much in the way that you would use del.icio.us’ Tags feature.

Furl does currently lack the ability to search across users link archives, although it’s a planned feature. However, it does have a recommendation engine, that will recommend links to you based on the linking habits of other users (like Amazon’s “Customers who bought this book also bought…” feature).

I had no idea fat kids were so easy to topple. Tubby toppling always seemed like an act that required significant labor.

I had no idea fat kids were so easy to topple.

Oh, yes. A good breeze on a hypoglycemic afternoon would often leave me eating pavement.

I use Furl too, and I may be wrong about this, but I use it because it’s private. I bookmark tons of sites a day, as a suspect others do, so whouldn’t all of my URL’s be public all the time with del.icio.us?

Mac users may be interested in a Cocoa client I wrote for del.icio.us:

http://www.scifihifi.com/cocoalicious

re: Secure on the road. You can get additional security with “Open Firmware Password Protection”.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106482

Sorry to be a nag, but Furl is here, not there. But thanks for the link - I’ll check it out.

One thing I do to reduce distraction is to not have my email client fetch email on a schedule, but only manually. I feel like I’ve been “good” if I pull lots when I check. I know I’ve procrastinating when I don’t receive much when I check…

That’s a good one, Lorin.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m like Pavlov’s dog when new a single mail arrives. It’s certainly more efficient to react and respond in a less distracting way.

I don’t want to sidetrack the whole thread, but I’m not sure if I exactly grok the del.icio.us idea yet. Does it replace bookmarks, or just give you a central place to put yet-to-be-read or useful-but-not-frequently links?

I have to say I’ve gone through the past ten years creating bookmarks as they were intended: when I get tired of typing something out (usually the fifth or six time in a 24 hour period), I’ll drag it to bookmarks and be done typing with it. I also use three PCs in my average everyday, so something that centralizes those things is useful. Also I love the labels: categorize Jeff Wells under movies, or columnists? Both!

But what I see other people using del.icio.us for is kind of a links-n-commentary weblog with very little commentary. And I rarely find myself so busy that I can’t spend the five minutes to read a page, especially if I’ve spent the five minutes doing what it was (checking blogs/linksites/the internet in general, reading email, chatting on IM) that lead me there in the first place. Is that what’s so magical? That you can stash a bookmark for later on a different PC? Or that it encourages you to find interesting sites and share them? Or that, by classifying them as “read this later” you’re actually reading it during reading time and not browsing the internet until it’s time to go home?

Thanks for the tip on delicious. I’ve been using Powermarks (Windows-based bookmark manager) for the last several years that also eschews hierarchy for keywords. Very handy and useful (also synchronizes between work and home PCs, reads/imports other browser bookmarks, and so on). But not free, alas.

I like using keywords like “wishlist” (stuff I want to buy when i have the money), “toread”, “torecord” (use Total Recorder to record archived NPR shows and the like), “todl” (to download later), and so on. Very nice trick.

Dan: I think folks like and use del.icio.us and similar sites for a variety of reasons. I don’t think it’s meant to replace personal bookmarking in your browser (esp. for personal stuff), but it is a fast way to capture a page, comment briefly on it, and then see who else is linking to it. WRT that last bit, I’ve discovered a lot from seeing what other people with similar habits and tags link to.

As far as the time issue, I disagree. It’s not uncommon for me to set aside five minutes to Google something, but not have the time to really look at each page in detail. Instead, I’ll pop each link into a new tab, then make a del.icio.us link for each with fast, contextual comments and memory-jogging tags. That way, when I do have the time later, I can search my own bookmarks.

I do this a lot with CSS stuff in particular, which I may not need every day, but when I do need it, I want the access fast.

I’m tempted to go with delicious, but what if the company goes down? Where do they get their income from? That’s why I blog links to my blogger account (using a bookmarklet).

For folks worried about yr bookmarks being locked in, try this.

http://tinyurl.com/646gk

Basically, you do this from a terminal (with your login info):

curl —user accountname:password -o myDelicious.xml -O ‘http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000’

Also, you can set up a cron job to do that each day at a certain time so that you’ll have a constantly updated backup. It just takes a brief second to run. I have mine running each morning at 3am.

Cron. useful stuff.

There are a couple of minimally-document keyboard shortcuts in OS X text boxes that I use quite a bit.

They seem to be an evolution of emacs key bindings:

C-f: forward (right arrow) C-b: backward (left arrow) C-p: previous line C-n: next line C-a: beginning of paragraph/line C-e: end of paragraph/line C-d: forward delete C-h: backward delete (I don’t use this one) C-k: delete to end of paragraph C-y: paste what you just C-k’ed C-l: scroll to center cursor C-o: insert a blank line after the cursor C-t: transpose (swap) two characters C-v: page down

HTH.

Instead, I’ll pop each link into a new tab, then make a del.icio.us link for each with fast, contextual comments and memory-jogging tags. That way, when I do have the time later, I can search my own bookmarks.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, too, now that I’ve got a del.icio.us account. There’s always those moments when I have more time later and I’m telling myself, “There’s something I meant to read??? but I normally forget what it was. With del.icio.us, I can just peruse my list. Handy and dandy.

Those are great tips, Frank. Thanks (linked to it up on the right).

I really want to learn all the keyboard stuff that I can inside and out because it does, invariably speed things up dramatically.

I wonder if I’m the only person driven completely batty by the fact that so much great Cocoa stuff is partially or completely missing from BBEdit (even the 8.0 release)

Oh, yeah, I’m with you on the BBEdit comment, Merlin. I say this being a diehard BBEdit user for many years now. Even though they added a lot of features in 8.0, it still feels like they just slapped them onto the existing app instead of taking the opportunity to rethink some things in terms of what’s available in Cocoa. John Gruber wrote a great piece about BBEdit 8.0 this week. However, I’m not as enthusiastic about the release as he. I’m looking forward optimistically to the release (imminent?) of TextMate. MY perfect text editor doesn’t yet exist.

WRT to backing up del.icio.us bookmarks, cron is good, but doesn’t work if you put your machine to sleep during the time period it’s supposed to run.

I put together a tutorial on using iCal and applescript to back up your del.icio.us bookmarks on my (currently only semi-functional) blog here:

http://www.i2nk.com/mt/archives/000047.html

Also, a for getting use out of Moleskine notebooks: In the back, I have a page set aside with the title “Google Later.” When away from a computer, it’s easy to write down keywords to search later. You can do it in the middle of a conversation, even.

JoshD: I trackbacked your post you mention above with some alternatives to your great idea.

I basically offer curl as an alternative to wget (since it’s pre-installed on Panther and you can use it the same way as you describe) and del.icio.us’s HTML feed (documented at del.icio.us/doc/html/)instead of the XML data as a way to have a file you can save to your disk (via cron or iCal) then open it in your favorite browser via QuickSilver. QS still won’t parse it as bookmarks, but you can at least get to them through QS (and any browser).

http://delicious.mozdev.org/

del.icio.us extension for firefox.