Academic notes in one big text file + tag clouds

Congratulations to Merlin Mann and his wife Madeline on the birth of their girl Eleanor.

Christopher

I can tell I’ll be spending a lot of the next few days exploring TextMate. In the interest of efficiency, I’ll park all my preliminary notes and “gee whiz” stuff in this post. I may do a fuller review/intro later, but I want to share what I’m learning since there’s so much interest in this app.

In the few weeks since I wrote my first plea to trim the fat from your iTunes library, I've continued purging my own collection. On the first pass, I simply deleted the clearly objectionable stuff, things that I couldn't understand what made me want to keep them in the first place. It was rather easy, and like I said, it slimmed my corpulent media collection by a third.

Now though, it's getting down to brass tacks, and I'm making some hard decisions about what to keep. I don't need to do this for disk space, mind you, but as I've been trying to do a better job of organizing all my music and video with smarter lists and ratings, I've come to a simple conclusion: even if I still think it's good, I just have too much.

Classic joke (originally related by Matt, if memory serves). Sent via email so many times this week that I had to share.

Q: How many people with ADD does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: HEY! Let's ride bikes!!!

Funny 'cuz it's true.

Even the most diligent among us can't always remember to pocket a pen and paper everywhere we go (or, shhh!, won't admit that sometimes we just don't want to), but of course that's always when our best ideas hit us. Last night when I was walking my dog, I'm convinced I came up with the answer to global warming, but before I got home to write it down, I had a conversation with a neighbor, checked my mail, and watered the plants, so I might as well have been thinking about the lyrics to "Sussudio" for all I could remember. And try as I might, I couldn't bring it back.

• Google Trends Reveals People's Predictability - The correlation between searches on "rain" and "depression" is fascinating.
• apophenia: algorithms for dumb security questions - Great idea for creating a reusable "security question" pattern. (cf. previously here) [via anarchaia]
• David Allen Company :: GTD Gear :: *New* The GTD® Tickler File - Pretty pricey, if you're asking me, but a quick way to get started with your own 43 folders (and they do look well-constructed). [via]
• I need examples of things and secrets only a very in the know sort of person would know about - Wonderful ideas for "stuff normal people won't know." And, yes: Grenyarnia is much more exclusive than Svenborgia. Psh. Can't believe you didn't know that.
• An Entirely Other Day - Utterly Failing to Get Things Done - Greg Knauss should totally write something for 43 Folders. Am I wrong? Am I?
• Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School - Terrific post that gets you thinking at a much higher level than your more quotidian "Try not to say 'um.'" tips. Highly recommended.
• Quantification Table for Site Owner - Leslie Harpold's fun personal Harper's Index makes me melancholy to see her again. Sure do miss her.

Mad Professor: Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done has occasionally been criticized for lacking a focus on what I call Capital Letter Nouns -- as an action-based, tactical toolset for managing life's verbs, it was never intended as a top-down treatise on generating Big Life Decisions. I happen to think that's a big part of what makes it so appealing to people (esp. the techies who crave "actionable items") -- it takes you as you are and says "Okay, let's get to work."

But, funny thing: the folks who stick with GTD past the experimental try-on phase often discover it gives them sharper insight into their goals and values than some of the theoretically more lofty systems that are out there.

It's always satisfying to see folks make that big breakthrough, and that's what I hear Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder saying over at Mad Professor:

I bought the book and read it last year, and incorporated a lot of what I learned into my daily routine. But I re-read the book recently and came back with a deeper understanding of what the book is really about. The best summary is on page 19: "The real issue is how to make appropriate choices about what to do at any point in time. The real issue is how we manage actions."

That's the GTD process in a nutshell. It's about setting up a system that allows you to quickly review every single thing you want to do -- large (writing a book) and small (changing the wiper blades on your car) -- so you can decide on the best next physical action you can take to elicit the changes in your life that you desire.

Get those verbs under control, folks, and it's a shitload easier to even see the big nouns.

Circa System Review