Paper

NYT on a Paperless World

wood.tang — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 15:44:16 -0500

Pushing Paper Out the Door - New York Times

Is it just me, or is the Times tossing softballs for organizational nerds on purpose? Today's story on the ways people are purging paper from their lives gives lots of ink (digital, of course) to our friend, the Fujitsu ScanSnap, and comes with the kind of grand statements that no trend piece should be without:

[M]any families may be closer to entering a paperless world than they realize. Paper-reducing technologies have crept into homes and offices, perhaps more for efficiency than for environmentalism; few people will dispute the convenience of online bill-paying and airline e-tickets.

Not that I disagree. I like the way Brewster Kahle, who knows a thing or two about digital archiving, puts it: "Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is." That isn't too far removed from what Merlin wrote back in October:

When we rely on a paper document as the final, unique destination for information, we create physical and cognitive limitations that seem crazy once you’ve spent a chunk of your life living on Google. No one disputes that.

Those statements by themselves may make some of you index card shufflers sweaty, but the value that all of us have found in paper isn't as the permanent storage medium to which the Times is delivering last rites; rather, it's in that Platonic scratchpad we all need sometimes to shake out a good idea. As Merlin said, "As an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time." Even when used as part of a trusted system, paper works best when its data storage duties have a limited life span.

”NYT on a Paperless World” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 10, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Page-a-Day PDA

wood.tang — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:36:08 -0500

Every year, somebody gets me one of those Page-a-Day calendars for Christmas. I never have the heart to tell them that I really don't want another, and every year I try to stick it out and dutifully tear off a sheet each morning. "There has to be something interesting in this 'George Washington Carver's 365 Interesting Uses for Peanuts' calendar," I say, then here comes the third week of the year and it's still stuck on January 8, "Anthropomorphic Dandies."

Even if you don't have the stamina to put the calendar through its intended use, you don't have to waste it. Chuck it in a drawer to make an excellent notepad. And folded in half, the pages by themselves make a fair substitute for the venerable index card, with the added bonus that when you pull them out of your pocket to jot a reminder, you get to bone up on the provenance of Prohibition era agricultural byproducts.

”Page-a-Day PDA” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 23, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life

norbauer — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:43:11 -0500

It seems that many of us otherwise computer-oriented geeks have a surprising and earth-unfriendly confession to make: we love paper. Notwithstanding the entirely digital nature of my own trade, for example, I'll freely admit that there is really nothing quite like the smooth glide of a mechanical pencil over a big sheet of crisp, white office paper to facilitate good writing and thinking.

I can't plan out a new piece of software—or write an essay for that matter—without first messily scribbling my ideas out as mind-maps or rough user-interface sketches onto paper. My brainstorms are too messy and flow too quickly for the computer to be able to accommodate my chaos, yet that early disorder is essential to crafting the order and structure that will follow.

And yet I used to have serious reservations about this tendency to spoodge my thought process onto tree carcasses. It wasn't until I finally learned how to get rid of paper, that I was able properly to embrace its use in my work.

You see, paper has a number of problems in addition to its environmental implications, not least of which that it tends to hang around and pile up well past its period of usefulness, cluttering offices and making one look embarrassingly Victorian in one's mastery of information technology. Paper also lacks a number of the affordances of its digital counterparts: pen and paper don't offer very good full-text search, for one thing—and the spell check is even worse. But as a medium for encouraging unbounded creative thinking and planning, nothing quite beats a hunk of the old papyrus. As Merlin and Danny O'Brien aptly put it, paper is "the purest and most durable instance of the WYSIWYG interface."

"When working with paper no longer represents a path to messy clutter, one is less likely to avoid using that medium for tasks where it is truly the superior tool."

The trouble seems to be with the shallow-minded Manichean view of paper-vs-paperlessness. Many of us 43folk like to have an omnibus "system" for our work, so we tend to find ourselves in the midst of an awkwardly ambiguous relationship with paper. We seem to want either to turn away from it entirely or to run our lives exclusively out of a Moleskine notebook. However, rather than burning all our old books and "going digital," or insisting on writing our next article solely with quill and parchment, perhaps a slightly more nuanced approach is in order.

For my part, I have recently arrived at a happy hybrid workflow that exploits the best of each medium, thanks primarily to an amazing little Japanese scanner and Amazon's new data backup service. In the process, I have found that through embracing paperlessness in the way my documents are stored, I have freed myself for a more creative and enthusiastic relationship with paper in my actual daily work. When working with paper no longer represents a path to messy clutter, one is less likely to avoid using that medium for tasks where it is truly the superior tool.

The tools of paperlessness

As many before me have pointed out, the key is to recognize that paper is all about process, whereas digital media are all about information and retrieval. One mustn't be afraid to whip out a scrap of paper when it's time to scribble impromptu notes, mark a manuscript for edits, or do some visual thinking. Equally, one must not hesitate to scan or transcribe and then throw away a piece of paper that has value only in the potential future usefulness of the information it represents, once the drafting and scribbling are done. Embracing paperless reference filing is not the same thing as rejecting paper's important role in your work.

Part of my longstanding vacillation on the question of whether or not to go "paperless" with my reference filing system was that, until quite recently, there were no scanners that made this digitization process easy, or delivered a final digital document that was worth the trouble. Flatbed scanners are impossibly clumsy and slow, such that what I always end up with is not a clean workflow for nicely scanned documents, but rather a large pile of papers on top of my scanner so that I can "do them all at once" at some future moment that will never arrive. Just as much, the post-scanning process has been a pain with all of the scanners I've owned in the past. Most scanner software either rams your document through OCR and spits out an RTF with almost all the formatting and images gone, or it requires you manually to open a separate piece of software to convert the image to something useful. Then there is the issue of what to do with the physical document once you've scanned it. I've never previously trusted my backup system well enough to shred my precious documents and trust in the permanence of their digital copies.

But a confluence of a few wonderful tools has recently turned me into to an evangelist for paperless reference filing. The workflow is sufficiently slick that bumph doesn't stack up "waiting to be scanned," the final product is a PDF document with all formatting and images intact but searchable as text (including via Spotlight on OS X), and it all gets automatically backed-up to a geographically-distributed multiply-redundant remote backup store so that if both my computer and one of the data centers where my backups are stored both simultaneously exploded, I could still hop on the internet anywhere and access my files more or less instantly.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap

The first and perhaps most important aspect of my paperless workflow is my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap. I have been using my S500M (that's the Mac version) for a few months now and have praised it in the past. I also just recently got a demo model (full disclosure here) from Fujitsu of the rockin' awesome S510M [Amazon, Info.] I never thought I could get excited about something so traditionally mundane as scanner before, but I really, really love this device. In fact, the ScanSnap is probably my favorite piece of consumer electronics not made by Apple. (Check out the video.)

Firstly, they make a special version just for Mac users (yeah, they have a Windows one too,) which is specially designed in sleek white with a tiny footprint. When folded up, the thing is about 11" x 5" x 6". It also integrates nicely into OS X—and from my past couple days of testing, it works as smoothly on Leopard as it did on Tiger.

Here's the premise: the SnanSnap is the first consumer scanner (that I've used anyway) to truly be about information storage. It's not for ultra high-resolution photo scanning; it's all about documents and speed. Firstly, you initiate scans by piling your documents into the stacker and simply pressing the one big button on the face of the device. It then rapidly (and I mean damn fast) gobbles up your papers and spits them out at the bottom. Fujitsu says up to 36 pages/minute in duplex mode, and that sounds about right. The resulting digital document gets dumped right onto your hard drive in searchable PDF format, which every OS seems to understand natively these days. It automatically corrects for mis-aligned papers, auto-detects whether the document is color or monochrome, scans in duplex if it detects a back side to the page being scanned, and detects the size of the paper being scanned and intelligently crops the digital version to the right size. You can mix and match document types liberally and it stitches them all together into one PDF with each page automatically adjusted to its own parameters. I love that there is just one operative button: you just tell it to go to town, and it gets out of your way and makes smart guesses based on what you give it.

My only complaint is that, after a few months of operation, my S500M would occasionally start grabbing two pages together when it should be only grabbing one at a time. But this was only for documents that had previously been folded or stapled together. The new S510M doesn't seem to be doing that, which could mean that they've either improved the mechanism or I just haven't given it time to start having this problem.

Unlike some folks, I'm not especially keen on the concept of keeping multiple DevonThink databases or storing my precious papers in their wonky proprietary format, so I take a cue from Ethan Schoonover and just have the ScanSnap drop my scanned documents into an "inbox" folder on my desktop, which I process every day or so. In this way, the ScanSnap is just like any other GTD inbox for me. Rather than piling stuff up in my physical inbox, if something is scannable and is valuable to me only for its information, I remove any staples and wham it through the ScanSnap and then either act on or file each document as I in-process my digital inbox. For filing, I use a simple old A-Z filing folder in my home directory, which I call "Archive." If a document relates to correspondence, I take David's advice and upload it to the associated contact in my Highrise account.

The originals get recycled (or shredded and then recycled,) so I get to feel better about the environmental impact of the paper that churns through my life. Rather than sitting around in my filing cabinet never being looked at, the paper goes immediately off to another better use.

Nota bene: A lot of people have been linking to the S500M lately, but be aware that one-button searchable PDF creation only comes with the S510M. The S500M can make searchable PDFs, but you have to do several manual steps to run the OCR on them, which kind of obviates the whole point of the otherwise speedy ScanSnap workflow. The S510M also comes with a carrier sheet for irregularly shaped or crinkled papers like old receipts. So if you're going to be buying a ScanSnap I highly recommend opting for the newer model, which is more or less the same price as the older one.

The industrial-grade paper cutter

As if my gay credentials weren't fully established, I have to confess to an extreme affinity for Martha Stewart Living magazine. But perhaps more embarrassing is that I have about 100 back issues piled up in my library. They arrive in my mailbox; I flip through them; and then they go straight onto the shelf. I've always had this nagging feeling that I should really go through those things and get some informational value from the content. But, as readers of any instructional magazine know, it's really annoying to sift through an ad-stuffed rag just to find the three or four pages of interesting, actionable information in a periodical that you browsed a few months ago. So there they sit. They're full of recipes that I'd love to use but could never possibly find if I ever wanted to get to a particular one of them. They weigh a ton, and yet I've schlepped them between five houses in the past few years holding to this ridiculous notion that they'll come in handy "someday." (As you may have noticed, the purely notional "someday" plays a big role in my life.)

So I decided for an extremist approach to my magazine problem. I figured since I had this awesome scanner that I have been using to digitize my paper filing system, it might be worth experimenting with attacking these old magazines too. The potential payoff was great: I would both eliminate many pounds of paper that have been hanging around in my life, and I would actually start to make use of the information in these magazines that I've been collecting for so long. So I decided to spring for a super-fancy, and fairly intimidating, paper cutter, the "Come 2700" (I shit thee not.) This contraption will literally and effortlessly slice the spine off a phonebook (I tried it!) So it certainly has no trouble cleanly removing the spines from my old magazines.

With the spines removed, I sit down and leaf through the pages in my spare time. I find the three or four pages that either inspire me to actually undertake a project, or that I want to keep for reference. I run these through the ScanSnap, file them as searchable PDFs in my digital reference filing system, and then recycle every page from the magazine. Not only am I far more likely to use this information than I ever was, but I can actually search the information without having to remember what appeared in which issue. It is, as it were, a good thing.

This also works really well for all the sorta-kinda-maybe-someday-useful appliance and electronics manuals that hog space in physical filing systems. Just hack the binding off, scan, and jettison.

Just mind your fingers.

Amazon S3 + JungleDisk

Now that you have all these sublimely useful digital documents, you need to feel comfortable recycling the paper originals or you're only getting half the benefit of this whole paperlessness thing. It wasn't until S3 backup came along that I really felt OK with the idea, and to be honest, without those backups I'd would have been very uncomfortable letting go of as much paper as I have.

I use JungleDisk to automatically back up my "inbox" and "Archive" folders to S3 each night (not to mention iTunes and iPhoto.) Now it actually seems more dangerous to keep a single physical copy of a document than to have digital copies on my hard drive and redundantly backed up to S3. You can read here all about the baroque lengths Amazon goes to in order to safeguard your data on S3.

Oh, and it's really cheap.

ScanCafe

As I mentioned previously, I've also ditched all of my paper photographs by commissioning ScanCafe to cheaply digitize the negatives. I figured since I keep all of my new digital-camera pictures in iPhoto, I might as well have everything in there (with the appropriate backups in place, of course.) Photographs may seem like they have physical emotional value, but unless we're talking daguerreotypes or something, pictures are really just a way of recording visual information. So there is no reason why not to store them digitally. This is particularly the case of you use Leopard's built-in iPhoto library panning screen saver, because it means you'll be far more likely to actually look at the photos than if they were sitting in some shoebox.

Leopard (QuickLook and Preview)

The crema on this particular paperless espresso is how easily Mac OS X Leopard makes it to zip around, search through, and rejigger PDFs. Before Leopard, my biggest complaint about ScanSnap-generated documents was that if I wanted to rearrange or delete pages in a PDF I had to open Adobe's god-awful and painfully-slow Acrobat Professional 8.0 software, which I was actually dumb enough to buy a few months ago. If you've ever used Preview on a Mac, you know how snappy it is to navigate around PDFs. Acrobat is just the opposite, because it ponderously reloads the thumbnail cache every time you scroll around a document. Now in Leopard, Preview includes the ability to delete and rearrange PDF pages, and it's just as speedy as ever. Goodbye Acrobat!

Armed with these tools, I think you'll find, as I have, that paper is nothing to be reticent about. Use it when you need it to be creative or to collaborate, but then just don't keep it around. Scan in those mind-maps, or transcribe their information into a more useful format. Then throw them away (preferably into the recycling bin.) If you have neglected documents that have been lying around forever, figure out how to extract the useful, actionable information from them and then get rid of them too. Not only will you be unburdened of their physical presence, but you'll find that you're actually in a far better position to use the information those documents contain.

”Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 06, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

An Ass Pocket of iCal

wood.tang — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:56:51 -0400

A few posts back, I professed my love for paper. That affection runs deep already, but I stumbled onto a trick this week that makes me lust after the power of a sheet of 8.5" x 11" even more.

As I'm wont to do, I returned to the Lucky Charms, marshmallowy goodness of iCal recently to organize my stuff. I know it isn't perfect, but it's my comfort zone, and after flogging myself publicly over my tendency to switch systems, I decided to stick with the ol' July 17 icon for better or for worse.

In my paper post, I mentioned that I like to jot down a few tasks at the beginning of each day, to focus my energy. It's not GTD orthodoxy, but with a job like mine, I have to make a plan of attack or else it will be lost in a pile of board books and Legos. Normally this does the trick, but on days when I have lots of reminders, or appointments with accompanying notes, it can be tedious copying this all down. So one day this week, when I was in a hurry out the door, I decided to print out an agenda from iCal.

Maybe I'm a dope for never experimenting with this, but have you seen what you can do with iCal's print dialog? Merlin has written about this before, but the ability to pick and choose which calendars to print, restricting the view to a day, a week, a month, or my favorite, a simple list, just made me reaffirm my vows with iCal. Here's what I do (in Tiger, mind you, so Leopard early-adopters may have to adjust accordingly ... I'm upgrading this weekend, promise):

I keep my Next Actions/To-Do's in separate calendars, and set tickler reminders as all-day events in the calendar. Each morning, I set a due date of that day for the items I'd theoretically like to tackle by EOB, and sort my calendars by due date so they float to the top of the list.
Next, I pop open the print dialog ("File > Print" or "Cmd-P"). I select "List" from the "View:" dropdown, then make sure all the right calendars/contexts are selected. I also check every other option except "Black and White", because I'm accustomed to the various colors I assigned to my calendars as visual reminders (if this doesn't matter to you, check that box and save yourself some ink).
Finally, I fold it up in quarters and put it in my back pocket. Throughout the day I can cross things off and use the white space as an inbox. Then, at the end of the day, I reconcile everything with the mothership. On days when I'm going to the gym, I even print my workout routine checklist on the backside to really feel the burn.

Maybe this isn't rocket science, and iPhone and mobile sync bandits may scoff at the manual approach. Personally, I hate printers too, but this little trick has given my sad little Canon i960 new life.

”An Ass Pocket of iCal” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 01, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Backs of Envelopes are Blank for a Reason

wood.tang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:15:59 -0400

I wanted to piggyback off Merlin's post about paper yesterday because, A) I thought it was spot-on, and B) he scooped about 90% of what I wanted to write today. Nonetheless, he nailed something that sent me into a tizzy of note scribbling and bedtime brainstorming, about paper's sweet spot:

Still, for thinking, capture, and live collaboration, paper is one of the best friends you’ll ever have. And as long as we use it properly, it’s going to continue to enhance the creation of all downstream media.

This struck such a nerve because lately, I've become increasingly aware of how paper plays that role in my work. Like I said before, I'm the last person you should be listening to for advice on personal systems, but no matter what shape or form of digital doodads I'm using to hold my stuff, I always have some paper handy when I really want to get busy. Lately, it's been a Moleskine notebook, but it could be index cards, Post-It notes, or some good old fashioned college-ruled; it doesn't matter. My best work always comes out of sitting in front of the word processor with a pen and paper right next to me, ready for brainstorming, ad hoc project planning, and straight-up doodling. Sit down at Grandpa Wood-Tang's knee and let me tell you a story. Back when I had a real job, I worked on a project where I got to visit a number of clients overseas. Before I left on my first trip, my manager handed me a Boorum & Pease notebook with a Gordon Gekko-tastic, faux-cordovan binding and said, "Here, I don't want you looking like an asshole carrying some cheap legal pad around the world." I carried that notebook for the entire project to six different countries, and I still have it today. I can leaf through it now and recall specific meetings, conversations, and arcane details about the project that never would have stuck in my brain had I taken all those notes in some neutered software outliner or mind mapper.

The reasons that notebook feels like an old friend are probably familiar to long-time 43 Folders readers: the tactile experience, the creative, actively engaged act of taking notes by hand. But it's become the psychological artifact that it is because it captured my mind as it was working when I used it, not hours later when I copied my thoughts into a status memo, or even seconds later as I tried to translate brainwaves into keystrokes. The underlines, the bolded, twice-drawn letters, the double-back arrows and squished-in elaborations are still there, documenting my thought process in all its flawed, hungover 24-year-old consultant glory, with no tags, metadata, or other digital nonsense weighing it down. I turned in some of the best work of my career on that project, because I was able to work off my slick little notebook and its recurring backups of my brain.

All that information eventually made its way into permanent, digital storage in the form of the various design documents I produced, but they would have been useless boilerplate without that notebook. I'm as computer-centric as they come. I shunt every communication I can through the internet tubes and save every piece of digital flotsam and jetsam that floats my way on my hard drive. But I'm never without a piece of paper like that notebook to use as a mental scratch disk.

At the risk of sounding like some dreamy New Ager, my point in spinning that yarn is that sometimes we just need to let it go, man, and let our brains do what they will. Paper is the perfect place to do that, and if you're really rolling, for Pete's sake, don't stop to inbox-it, process-it, tag-it, and contextualize-it into some whizbang piece of software (or some formal paper system, for that matter). Save that shit for later, when the dust has settled, the bandits have fled, and you see how many horses are left to feed.

”The Backs of Envelopes are Blank for a Reason” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap?

Merlin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:18:28 -0400

In comments about yesterday's "Making friends with paper" post, I was reminded by 43f member Adam Hooks...

A couple months ago, on a MBW episode, Merlin, you recommended some scanner/pdf solutions and you said you would elaborate on that on 43f at some point. I thought this was related to reducing your reliance on paper. How did your scanning experiment go?

Adam remembers correctly that I purchased and preliminarily fiddled with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M for OS X (Info, Amazon). It's a small-footprint, high-speed document scanner that a lot of people have been talking about lately. I'd read so many reviews and blog posts about how easy it is to use that I was intoxicated by the dream of a life -- if not without paper storage -- where I could at least try to minimize my unnecessary paper clutter and start making document archiving easier and more searchable.

Given the not inconsiderable cost of the unit, I'm embarrassed to say that I got busy with other stuff and haven't yet returned to using the ScanSnap in any automated way.

Doesn't mean I'm not interested or haven't gotten started...

ScanSnap S500M
by Fujitsu

My initial experiences, while tentative in terms of time commitment and true workflow integration, have been very positive so far. It's easy and fast to set up the S500M and then start scanning one- or two-sided documents. The beauty part is that the included "ScanSnap Manager" app not only stores your document preferences, but directs the USB input from the ScanSnap right into the destination app of your choosing (which can, of course, be an OCR app -- that's where it gets powerful).

Initial experiments scanning directly to image-only PDFs were very positive, while scanning into "Yep" and "DevonThink Pro Office" (which has on-board OCR) seems to point even closer to the direction I eventually hope to go.

I know at least a few of you are ScanSnap studs who have come up with workflows that are really happening for you (hint: looking at you for a blog post here, Mr. Norbauer). In the absence of a more detailed report from me, I'm hoping a few of you can chime in here.

The Question to You

How are you integrating the ScanSnap (or another OS X-friendly document scanner) into your workflow? What are you using for OCR? Having particular success with ReadIris, Acrobat, DevonThink, or Yep? Any sexy Automator workflows to share?

”Vox Pop: Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making friends with paper (again)

Merlin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:03:07 -0400

Information R/evolution

I really enjoyed this video presentation by Michael Wesch on how we make, find, and share information in a world where we've shed the idea of paper as our sole medium for storage and communication -- where ideas can munge and mix freely, thanks to digital collaboration.

Gorgeous.

Now, of course, as a fan of paper for certain kinds of work, I always feel like jumping in at this point to defend our pulpy little friend from what sometimes turns into a blanket party.

See, the key is to use paper for what it's great at and to avoid relying on it for what it famously sucks at -- the second part of which I think this video does handsomely.

Still, for thinking, capture, and live collaboration, paper is one of the best friends you'll ever have. And as long as we use it properly, it's going to continue to enhance the creation of all downstream media. Even the shiny, embeddable, Web 2.0 kind.

Danny and I did a column about this topic for MAKE a while back, and I still feel like it's a point worth underscoring (again).

Friends, we’re here today to unveil the august secret that we hope will save potentially dozens of Important Technology Writers from needing to produce another wide-eyed report on how very odd it is that all these geeks seem to love paper so much. The trick is that there is no paradox, no more so than suggesting that people who buy screwdrivers must necessarily hate drills.

Geeks rely on paper for the same reason that the normals do: paper — along with conceptual cousins like whiteboards and magnets — is simply the most efficient tool for completing certain kinds of cognitive work. And no amount of enhanced technology will likely diminish this anytime soon.

And, I have to say, I still love that line I'd quoted from Malcolm Gladwell's The Social Life of Paper. Wraps the central point up with a bow:

It is only if paper's usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous. The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all?

And ain't that really the heart of the matter?

When we rely on a paper document as the final, unique destination for information, we create physical and cognitive limitations that seem crazy once you've spent a chunk of your life living on Google. No one disputes that.

But as an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time.

No content types. No taxonomy. No typefaces. Just you and your ideas -- in a bunch of little piles that make sense to you.

Final funny thing: As the putative "inventor" of The Hipster PDA, I still get the odd phone call from some doofus journalist who wants to write yet another penetrating piece on how people decide between paper and digital as The Way to run their world.

And somehow a special irony is almost always lost on these folks. Who use a mobile phone to call me. To ask about paper fandom. Who record our conversation to a digital device. While taking notes on a sheet of paper. Who then type the draft into a PC. And then proof a paper print-out before deadline. Who then submit their completed story to a multi-bajillion-dollar networked CMS. And who then finally get to read their clever work the next day at Starbucks -- thanks to the papery dead-tree edition that has filled newspaper boxes throughout their city.

I'd call that a blended approach to media that -- while showing much potential for streamlining and improvement -- perfectly illustrates how paper spackles the cracks between cognition and creation and dissemination.

Paper's not perfect, but it's perfect for what it does.

[video link via Boing Boing]

”Making friends with paper (again)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates

Merlin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:11:12 -0500

Active Voice Writing & Editorial Services in Baltimore -- Downloads

Cool-looking collection of CC-licensed Hipster PDA templates include iconic "capture notes," research notes, and (here's a new one for me) a "yarn sorting card." Neat stuff.

Simply drag and drop them to your desktop, or right-click and "save as." Templates are formatted as .png graphics and can be printed as-is or inserted into a formatted document. They can be resized to fit everything from a 3x5 card to a daily organizer to an 8.5x11 sheet.

Kvet.ch features an excellent article on how to print D*I*Y Planner HPDA cards (see the end of this page) directly to 3x5 cards for Mac users. The technique should also work nicely with the templates offered here.

”Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remember names at meetings by making a map

Merlin — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:41:52 -0500

Meeting Tip: Learning Names | Gurno.com

As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam's idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc. Adam writes:

Step 1 - Reconnoiter

Draw a quick map of the table/layout of the meeting. Place yourself on it, to give yourself a reference point.

Step 2: The Combatants

As people introduce themselves around the table, fill them in. If you feel last names are necessary add those too, but don't do it at the expense of writing down someone else's name. You can guess at the last names later. If you miss one, leave it blank and fill it in as soon as you can - if someone else refers to them, etc, etc.

In the times I've used similar tricks, like Adam, I also go a step further by adding some "file card" sort of fact that will help jog my memory about who was who months later. E.G. "Jim - weird frat ring; Kathy - said she likes applesauce; Bob - Tall with a toupee."

I think making everyone into a character of some kind also tends to help me digest their thoughts and ideas more completely.

Good post, Adam.

”Remember names at meetings by making a map” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 12, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Patrick Rhone: Excellent productivity whitepaper

Merlin — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:41:42 -0400

patrickrhone.com: Org-Fu Überpost - Productivity Whitepaper

I'm a little late to the party on this one, but if you also hadn't spent much time with it yet, I suggest you check out Patrick Rhone's whitepaper on his version of a GTD system.

Some high points:

paper-based capture and task tracking via a Moleskine notebook
sexy "dash/plus" notation system for identifying item status (scroll way down for an image showing all the characters he uses)
Backpack for tracking projects and tasks
OmniOutliner Pro for "vertical mapping" of higher-level outcomes (20,000-foot view and up)
inbox kept at zero in Mail.app
further details on physical note-taking using notebooks

Great and thorough post -- and, for what it's worth, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping people will post to the new "Projects" forum on the 43f board -- in my experience, people really enjoy hearing about implementation systems and love discussing how they can be improved and tweaked.

Good work, Patrick.

”Patrick Rhone: Excellent productivity whitepaper” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 18, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"