On The Getting of My Act Together

Admittedly, as a life-long packrat and keeper of factoids, I work more or less all the time and with very mixed success to supplement my lapsing organic memory with its silicon counterpart. I strive to at least start to commence to begin a “plan” for keeping up with words, images and ideas as they pile higher and deeper on my desk and in my overloaded brain.

The Mac and OS-X (back in January) was a large step in that direction, and the software purchases and free downloads since then have been smaller, halting steps–some outright stumbles–along that same path. No one program out there does it all. So how to make a couple of core tools get the job done?

I won’t say I’ve arrived. But I can see the destination in the distance, and maybe it isn’t a mirage. From foreground to background, here are the stations along the way.

Brainstorm, organize, prioritize and list in OmniOutliner. For writing projects large and small, drag pages from VooDooPad as links into OO and mark them as “in progress” or by due date in a OO column. Do the actual writing in the more comfortable space on VDP pages where I can see the image I’m writing to, if that’s the case, and quickly create collateral pages wiki-style.

Once completed, especially if it is something I want to save–like a longer piece for the papers I write for or if it’s more thoroughly researched with a resources list, send it (via the Services menu) to DevonThinkPro to archive, classify and later, to possibly find related documents stored in the database. Then delete the piece from OO and VDP and make room for more, even as DTP grows richer. So in short…

Omnioutliner: Directory Structure. VooDooPad: content writing and editing. DevonThinkPro: information archive, organization and relationships.

Towards this end of info-gathering and taming, darn it, Firefox is rather worthless compared to Safari, where inline links are imported as links, and from which the Services menu is active and not greyed out like in the Fox. And in the web-clipping department I will mention both Evernote (for mac) and Diigo as very good ways of saving pages or pieces of pages; both allow tags for the topic under study.

LEAP, in a similar way, helps me find just the image or other file I want by date, type or tag. If any of these bits of software code could only help me keep up with my car keys and billfold!

My apologies. I see your eyes crossing terribly. But this might help some poor soul get their ship together, even as the warranty lapses on their formerlly perfekt memery. Hey–it could happen.