There’s a nice post over on LifeHacker that talks about SlickRun - like it took them soooo long to figure out how cool it was! Anyway, one of the comments refers to app.bat, a batch file that will let you append text to any file. Turns out that I wrote that batch file, but forgot about it. I was pleasantly reminded when someone commented on one of my old posts about Slickrun. Then, when I checked out the LifeHacker post again, I see that my legions of fans have come to my rescue already! Thanks Jimmer and/or Jim, and to Blog Jones for correcting himself/herself. :) :) :)

And for anyone who wants to see the original post on the app.bat file, check it out here.

As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote an essay for the great guys over at Black Belt Productivity. I wasn’t sure when it would be up, but here it is already! Head over there and check it out. And yes, that’s an order ;)

Categories: GTD

You may or may not have heard of a new blog out there called Black Belt Productivity. The authors, Jason and Michael, have created a very nice-looking, well-organized and overall interesting blog devoted to “encouraging higher levels of productivity through the use of Getting Things Done.” I’m linking to them here for two reasons:

1. It’s a great blog devoted to GTD and includes an awesome collection of posts called the GTD Primer, where they walk you through David Allen’s book through their eyes.
2. There’s another amazing series of posts called the Black Belts Series. For this series, the authors have invited other folks from the GTD blogosphere to share their views. I say the series is amazing because I was actually invited to participate ;) The first part of the series has just started, where contributors were asked “how has GTD changed my life?”. The first post, by bsag, is here.

I don’t know when my contribution will appear, but I’ll make sure to notifiy you all :)

Categories: GTD

Welcome back to

GTD Wannabe’s MiFi Implementation

Previously, we had:

• Part #1, where I outline my motivation for this series of posts and detail my hardware tools and how I use Outlook.
• Part #2, where I talk about how much I love EverNote and how it fits into my GTD process.

Once again, it’s time for me to plug away at this massive post. I have a funny feeling that by the time I get to the end, I’ll have changed my implementation and have to start all over again ;)

As before, I’ll keep the headings in, so that you can follow the flow better…

I am mostly a hifi girl, with a little lofi thrown in for good measure.

• HiFi (Hardware)

• Laptop (discussed in Part #1)
• Palm (discussed in Part #1)

• Outlook: (discussed in Part #1)
• EverNote: (discussed in Part #2)
• OneNote: I can’t really tell from the blogosphere if most people love, or hate, OneNote. I can say that for me, I kind of liked it when I first saw it. It was the coolest piece of Microsoft Software that I had ever seen. The whole notebook concept was fascinating. But I didn’t have a tablet PC, and that’s who I think probably benefit the most. But, I did give it a shot for my stuff right at the beginning.

• In fact, I even implemented GTD in it for a while last summer. That required me to create some stationary that looked like a calendar, because with the notebook paradigm, I wanted something like an old fashioned day planner thingy.

• As well, I made copious use of the flags that OneNote provides - now that’s pretty cool. It was a great way of pulling things together from various sections/folders. But you could only use so many flags, and making retroactive changes was a pain.
• Then I found EverNote and dumped OneNote almost right away. But a couple of months later, I came back to OneNote, not for my primary notetaking, but because I decided that EverNote didn’t do some things the way that I wanted.

• For example, making a collection of my crochet patterns is possible in EverNote, but it sucks, to be frank. Sure, I can have a category for patterns, and then each pattern is a note. Sure, I could search if I knew the name of the pattern, but there was no good way of browsing. And when I’m looking at patterns, or recipes, or even LaTeX table formats, I want to browse, not search. OneNote is good for this because you can organize things into sections, with pages/sub-pages, and each page can have a title.
• So, I reincorporated OneNote into my stable, and now it’s a tertiary source for me. OneNote is where I store things that I want to flip through leisurely. It is not intended to be a “go-to” place, i.e., if I have a question about something that I’ve seen before (e.g., Perl command), I’ll do a quick search in EN, or just head for the Web. But if I want to flip through pages, like I would a scrapbook, or album, I’ll go to OneNote.
• I find that the scrapbook paradigm works well for me - it makes it easy for me to decide where something new is going to go. If it was a piece of paper, would I want it in a binder that I could look through later, or would I want it right at my fingertips? The former means send it to OneNote; the latter, send it to EverNote.

• SlickRun: Now that I’ve been using SlickRun for a few months, I can’t believe I ever worked without it before! It’s touted as a “free floating command line utility for Windows” but that doesn’t quite explain what it does for me.
  

• Basically, you could use it for quick navigation to places on your computer or the Internet. But I don’t do that - I tend to use the Address bar that comes with Windows XP for that, because I like the auto-completion feature.
• I like SlickRun for the magic words - create a magic word to open a particular file on your computer, open a particular program, etc. This in itself is very useful and time-saving if you tend to open the same few files/programs all the time.
• The super-functionality of SlickRun comes in when you’re dealing with DOS stuff a lot. For example, I’ve been experimenting with a text scratch file, that I can put anything into as it pops into my head. This is good for when I’m busy with something and don’t want to stop to scribble stuff down. With SlickRun, I have a magic word “.” that just echoes what I type into my scratch.txt file. Very clean, very fast.
• Since I was a doubter when I first heard about SlickRun (”How useful can that really be - it’s not that hard to move your mouse around, yadda yadda), I’m not going to try to convince you that this little gem will save you big time. You’ll have to try it out and see. All I know is that this software is always running on my machines.