There’s a fascinating new thread over at the EverNote Forum about “best practices” - how are EN users actually using their databases, how does EN make people more productive, etc. etc. If you’re an EN user, or are thinking about exploring it as a new tool, this thread is a great place to start for ideas on exactly what you can do with it. It’s not necessarily laid out in the most logical fashion - imagine walking into a room of people, all yammering about their favourite things. However, the enthusiasm of the users is most evident, and can be infectious.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. There’s a particular post in the thread, by marcclarke, which I found extremely interesting. Not because he was talking about EN, because he wasn’t. Someone noted that Marc is extremely prolific on the board, and how did he do that? Marc replied that he cheated, and proceeded to tell us exactly what he does to make himself faster/more productive, and what tools enable him. I loved the reply and asked Marc if I could reproduce it here. I think it’s begging for a larger audience, and I want to share his ideas with you.

So, shamelessly copied and pasted, and only slightly redacted, here’s Marc’s reply to the question “How do you find the time?”:

How do I find the time? I cheat. Shamelessly. Although I type at speeds well over 100 words per minute, I type only as a last resort. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking v9 and a good noise-cancelling head set with a speech-optimized USB sound module to talk to my computer. Dragon will happily take what I say and transform it into text at about 180 words per minute, even on my little laptop’s modest CPU. The version of Dragon that handles Excel spreadsheets (as well as everything else out there) runs about US $200 these days, and anyone in the business world who does not use it is just plain crazy, IMHO.I can see that I am going to have to start another thread titled “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword, and the Tablet is Mightier Than the Pen” or some such, to talk about how productive one can really be. I treat computers as nothing more than tools, just another chisel or hammer. I geek to live; I don’t live to geek. (I shamelessly stole that one from Gina Trapani over at the LifeHacker Blog.)

EverNote is the foundation tool in my tool suite, let there be no doubt.

The Getting Things Done gurus all seem to use Tablet PCs. I had a terrible time figuring out why. I thought it was just because a Tablet PC was a cool ubergeek toy. I was wrong.

One of the first people to really open my eyes was author Michael Linenberger and his great GTD book “Seize the Work Day: Using the Tablet PC to Take Total Control of Your Work and Meeting Day” and his GTD and Outlook-specific book “Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management“.

I was listening to a podcast interview with Micheal Linenberger and James Keating (JKOnTheRun) and Marc Orchant. Both James and Marc are Microsoft Tablet PC Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and both hold Linenberger in high esteem. The interview was a real productivity eye-opener for me. Author Linenberger said that he wrote his books without every touching a key. He uses the Tablet PC OS’s voice recognition feature to capture his speech and then uses editing gestures with a pen on the Tablet PC in Microsoft Word to do all his mark-up and editing. Here was alpha-geek Linenberger blowing the socks of two of the most formidable alpha-geeks I know of (Keating and Orchant).

I have both written and edited a few large books in my day. I used EMACS outline mode and LaTeX. I thought I was one of the most productive authors anywhere in the world (and I have had publishers tell me that). I about fell off my chair listening to the interview with Linenberger. Here was someone explaining true high productivity to some of the most formidable high-productivity alpha-geeks in the world (IMHO). As I had both of Linenberger’s books on my shelf, I immediately cut an order for Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the optimized hardware to run it (noise-cancelling head set and speech-oriented sound dongle). I have never regretted it.

Linenberger writes his books using MindJet’s MindManager mind mapping tool, voice recognition (part of the Microsoft Windows Tablet PC OS), and a Tablet PC. He has a webinar on how he uses this combination of tools on the MindJet web site.

All the GTD and Tablet PC alpha-geeks seem to agree that one keeps three applications open on one’s Tablet PC all day: Outlook, MindManager, and OneNote. Personally, I have Outlook, MindManager, and EverNote open on my laptop all day every day. I think EverNote is even more powerful than Microsoft’s OneNote (though not as well integrated with Outlook, a minor problem that I easily work around by dragging links from EverNote notes to Outlook appointments, tasks, and contacts).

Microsoft claims that a Tablet PC is about 20% more productive across the board for an average user.

Quote:

“Results from post-deployment surveys exceeded expectations, showing that productivity improved by an average of nearly 20 percent per user. Longtime Tablet PC users reported much higher levels of productivity and were particularly impressed with second-generation technology.”

I tended to discount that claim as marketing fluff until I had a chance to play with a friend’s HP TC1100 Tablet PC. For the power user, I think Microsoft’s 20% number is low by at least an order of magnitude.

Mind maps are about an order of magnitude more productive than even the best outliners. In fact if you turn off almost all of MindManager’s brains you can run it as a classical textual outlining tool (and you can switch back and forth between the textual outline mode and the graphical mind map mode). MindManager understands the Tablet PC and pen gestures. My buddy with the Tablet PC can blow me off the map when we race making mind maps, me with my laptop and him with his Tablet PC using his pen.

For uber-productivity, you use a Tablet PC, Dragon NaturallySpeaking for voice recognition, and MindManager. You enter information from your brain using Dragon. You edit using the pen and the Tablet PC. You organize using MindManager. You capture bloody everything in EverNote. You do your e-mail and task management in Outlook. You cross-load projects and tasks from MindManager to/from Outlook. You schedule your day using Taskline.

As I said, I found Marc’s post fascinating, and quite inspiring. I’ve always wondered about a tablet PC, and decided that I probably would only use the tablet part for marking things up, like highlighting a document that I was reading, or maybe making a few quick drawings. In addition, I’ve always thought that voice recognition software was not worthwhile for me - after all, I’m a pretty quick typist, and pretty quick on the mouse too. But Marc’s experiences hint that I should rethink my position. I’m planning on checking out his links, and who knows, maybe, when I have more disposable income, I can think about ramping up my productivity with some pretty neat tools.