Notational Velocity ·121 days ago
This post is part of my productivity mini series. Underlying this series are two personal beliefs of mine. First, one is able to improve the results of ones efforts when in possession of the right tools. Second, sharing my experience could provide some benefits for you, the reader, and should be fun for me, too. Comments, inputs and suggestions are highly appreciated.
Today I’m going to write about Notational Velocity (NV), which is my quintessential information procession, organizing and archiving tool. I truly love NV and to my knowledge neither Windows nor Linux OS have a tool working 100% alike. On my desktop it has replaced Evernote, all journaling software and my task manager.
NV looks very basic and consists only of three text fields. In the first field you either type-in the title of a new note and hit enter to create it or you beginn a search also by just typing. Search results instantly show up in the second field (while you are still typing). In case you don’t do a research all your notes are listed there. If you select a note in the second field it’s contents are shown in the third field. And that’s it.
A number of keyboard shortcuts gives you full access of every aspect of the program.
Now if you take Merlin Manns advice about naming your notes in certain ways NV becomes truly magic. Above, in the picture, you can see all the abbreviations I use in the titles of my notes. For example I would give a task the following title TK clean the dishes and ideas about a certain newspaper article would be filed in as xw 国家土地督察局要求对“庄河事件“责任人实行问责. Now if I search for tk I get to see all tasks, more recent show up first.
NV does flawlessly sync with the Simplenote website and the iPhone/iPad app, which both work and look almost like NV. Each character instantly is saved and synced when you are online.
Enjoy!
workflow: optimizing rss management ·169 days ago
This post is part of my productivity mini series. Underlying this series are two personal beliefs of mine. First, one is able to improve the results of ones efforts when in possession of the right tools. Second, sharing my experience could provide some benefits for you, the reader, and should be fun for me, too. Comments, inputs and suggestions are highly appreciated
Now its holiday times and I have some spare time at hand – time also to rethink workflow and information management practices. As mentioned before, a huge part of my job has to do with reading. RSS feeds are an essential tool for me to get updated on new scientific articles published, global as well as local and China news and everything else (fail blog, xkcd). Years ago I started using bloglines as my main feed reader.
Bloglines is a fine tool if you manage just 5-15 feeds. But if you are like me and end up at least with 40+ feeds using bloglines has huge drawbacks:
- there is no efficient way to skim through posts and only read the interesting ones therefore you end up having to look at all posts in all feeds – this takes time
- there is no good way to sort postings and postpone the actual reading
- there is no API for third-party developers and therefore no third party desktop or iPhone applications (or any applications for that matter)
In short, my RSS reading in the past looked like this:
Now I have moved to a new setup basically looking like this:
At the core of my new system google reader replaced bloglines. Not only does google reader have a nice website, it also provides a much more appreciated API for third-party developer. Now I can use a nice desktop software like NetNewsWire or the great iPhone app reeder to skim though the headlines and sort out the good stuff and everything is synchronized with google reader. But how do I manage the postpone reading thing?
It’s InstaPaper. I already mentioned them during my Kindle Review as a very nice way to select stuff for later reading. Think of postponed reading as an instant gratification you have earned for yourself after finishing the stuff you actually should work on. Reeder has InstaPaper support built in but in NetNewsFire you need to add an applescript to do that job. The one mentioned here even sends a growl notification. To activate the script I use a keyboard shortcut.
PS. More optimizing is behind this posting: the drawings have been created using OmniGraffle. All done within no more than five minutes. The posting itself has been written in Notational Velocity.