My OmniFocus experience is ThinkingRock

Now, that was mean, I admit. For the people that are not so into GTD, or productivity, OmniFocus is one of the most hyped GTD applications for Mac OS, and ThinkingRock is a Java application that closely follows the GTD methodology. And being Java is cross-platform, obviously. OmniFocus is not launched yet, but has had is share of buzzwords allready.

The guys at Omni just started a discussion related to their upcoming product, which is not even in beta for now, and, hey, I was a little provoked by this. Why not trying to clarify my own techniques and processes. For that, I only have one piece of software and that is ThinkingRock, so far.

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Digital Cults: Reboot Your Epiphanies

In the 19th century, the populations from Melanesia saw a bunch of ships, with white people on board, carrying a lot of goods, called, generically, cargos. In their culture, white was also the colour of the dead people, so they assumed that those ships were the ships of the dead, returning their deserved goods. So the colonists quickly realised that they were treated like mithological characters. And so was born one of the most recent religions, called cargo-cult.

A religious movement doesn’t necessarily have to be old. It can be as effective as an old one, if it correctly replaces and enhances (sometimes) the need for catharsis. An epiphany can be a momentarily lost of conscience at a rock concert, or even a happiness boost from a family reunion. As long as it touches your inner chords and make them sing, it does the job.

In a world where the actual spiritual connection has lost its privileged space – the church – the epiphanies are held in a digital space and form. On the internet, at the computer, by holding your BlackBerry or Palm. As long as it touches your inner chords and make them sing.

I am not talking about those well-known cults that are using the digital media to gather sustainers, featuring tv shows of priests and so on. They are traditionals religions. I am talking about movements or so-called organisations that most of the time doesn’t even know that they are acting on a religious field. The Open Source fans. The Linux movement. The Apple fans. The GTD followers. To name only a few.

MAC OS X – Quicksilver: instantly create text files and prepend or append text to them

Suppose you are in the middle of something, reading a post on a blog, or writing a fine article in your editor of choice, or even writing some code for your ground breaking web 2.0 application. And ka-boum: you have an idea! Something so interesting, so juicy and fun to think about crosses your mind, than you feel you can’t live anymore until you actually write down that piece of thought. Somewhere, somehow. So there you go:

  1. leave your current activity/application
  2. open Finder (or some other program menu containing an outliner application shortcut, for instance)
  3. open that outliner application
  4. open a new file in it
  5. start writing the marvelous idea
  6. hit save as menu item
  7. chose location and save
  8. close the outliner application
  9. return to your current activity/application

But here’s how it would look like, if you would use Quicksilver:

  1. type CTRL + spacebar to invoke Quicksilver window (while having the current activity/application still in front of you)
  2. type “.” and start writing your marvelous idea
  3. hit TAB and type “cre..” meaning the first letters of your “Create file” action of Quicksilver, and then enter (this really counts like a single action)
  4. chose location and save
  5. hit escape to hide Quicksilver window

Huh! We are four steps shorter than the original approach. That counts for less physical work, and less time, almost half, right? Nice, isn’t it? But that’s not the only advantage: you actually remain in the flow, while your thoughts are free to fly. Isn’t that really nice?

So, how we actually do that?

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Digital Tools I Use

I want to jot down some stuff about the digital tools I use to get things done. This would be very sketchy at the beginning, and I’ll try to add more as I go along… As I already said, I was a Linux guy for about 10 years and I just turned to Mac several … Read more