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Fundamental shifts of position
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:18 PM
Sometimes something comes along that causes you to fundamentally rethink the way you do things.
I’ve had one of those moments.
Just to provide some context: I’m working (almost) exclusively on Mac and iOS.
I’ve spent a fortune on task management apps. My most recent was (still is, actually, but won’t be for much longer) ‘Think’, which is one of the friendlier heavyweights. I’ve tried its two main competitors (2Do and OmniFocus), as well as a plethora of lightweight but friendly apps (my favourite being ListBook). But they all suffer from one major problem. Despite all the cleverness and cunning, they constrain you.
In a recent enraged flurry, I found myself surfing the web (again!) looking for something that would accommodate the way I work best. Above all, that means rich-text and cross-platform support (by cross-platform, I mean MacOS and iOS, the latter both iPhone and iPad). Oh, and minimal memory footprint - I work on a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, and no longer have any patience with the monoliths that snatch all system memory for themselves (with the sole exception of DEVONthink Pro, and then only in specific contexts).
As a matter of fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a truly cross-platform notebook capable of holding multiple notes in rich-text format. The only candidate, it turns out, is Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks, which is also capable of acting as a task manager. And admirable as it is, I already use Notebooks as a useful repository for heavyweight information - it’s become slightly too slow to use as a task manager plus information dump. Also, its Dropbox synchronisation, while very solid and stable, is slightly cumbersome and time-consuming (not least because of the millions of words in my Notebooks repository).
I played with various different Markdown editors, in the hope that one of them would do the trick. Nope, really not. Until the iOS version of Ulysses comes out, there’s too much discrepancy between the notebooks you use on the MacOS desktop and those available for iOS (Byword, Write etc. etc. etc.). Also, many cross-platform solutions don’t actually work very well!
Simplenote was too… simple. Other alternatives like Smart Notes, Notesmartly, Notefile etc. etc. either don’t work very well or are too simplistic.
What to do, what to do? Go back to OmniFocus and attempt to bend it to my will? It’s powerful, it does support rich text, it even supports attachments.
Then something else occurred to me. Alongside my task management software, I usually have at least one other application open on my desktop all the time. I use it to save general stuff I encounter on the web, in my RSS feeds and so on. I started by using DEVONthink, but it’s a heavyweight - having it running all the time was a real drain on resources. So I moved over to EagleFiler. This was much better, and saved web pages in the same formats as DEVONthink, meaning I could transfer info from EagleFiler to DEVONthink at regular intervals. In my favourite format (single-page PDFs), too! More recently, however, I’ve moved to Keep Everything, a relatively recent arrival that has an unusual feature: it saves web pages both as web archives, but also as Markdown-based articles.
Hm. My tiny brain started to churn. Was the answer there in front of me all the time…?
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:27 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
> Above
>all, that means rich-text and cross-platform support (by cross-platform,
>I mean MacOS and iOS, the latter both iPhone and iPad). Oh, and minimal
>memory footprint
For the above I would have suggested WorkFlowy (though it depends on what you mean by “rich text”. WF can do italics and bold and that’s it, I think). But then you mention syncing attachments, PDFs, and web captures, which it can’t do. Your requirements seem quite complex and go against each other, as speed and footprint do depend on the type of data you’re syncing (which is why WorkFlowy is so quick, as it’s just pure text).
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:48 PM
You’re right. I tried Workflowy, as well as Omnioutliner (the only rich-text cross-platform outliners around). They’re good, but as you remark, not good enough.
If you’re going to have a couple of apps open on your desktop all the time, they have to be fast and resource-efficient. The same applies (more or less by definition) to the mobile operating system that is iOS.
So I took a closer look at my relatively new acquisition, Keep Everything.
Keep Everything saves web pages you drag and drop onto it as two things: a web archive (usually quite bulky, as those who work regularly with web archives will already know) and an easy-to-read article based on information (text and graphics) extracted from the main part of the web page. Each entry is saved in these two formats; the article is displayed in the list of entries by default, but you can switch between article and full web-page view using a convenient pair of tabs at the top of each page.
Unusually, however, Keep Everything encodes the article in Markdown. The default display is non-editable - but you can edit articles by pressing a simple ‘Edit’ button.
This means you can also use Keep Everything as a Markdown-based notes manager. The ‘Add note’ function in the menu bar allows you to add material directly from the clipboard, by downloading from a URL, or by opening a file from disk.
Or as a ‘New text’ note - meaning, a Markdown note.
The Markdown editor is not sophisticated (no ‘hybrid display’, no menu bar of convenient Markdown shortcuts). But Keep Everything does something I wish all Markdown editors did by default: it displays the read-only formatted web page by default. To edit the underlying Markdown code, you press the ‘Edit’ button. This is much more information-friendly.
Other Markdown editors tend to do one of two things. They either display a hybrid view (Ulysses, Metanota Pro), or they use a dual-pane view (Markdown on left, preview on right). LightPaper is the only Markdown editor that does both of these things - the editing pane displays a hybrid view, and you can toggle the Preview pane on/off as you prefer.
But Keep Everything displays the fully formatted preview by default. The app is, after all, optimised for viewing web pages. For me, that’s a big plus. If I’m scanning quickly through information, I like that information to be clearly formatted, ergo easy to evaluate. Even a hybrid view is annoying.
So why not use Keep Everything as the information manager for managing ALL my day-to-day information?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:57 PM
I had already got into the habit of doing something some people will regard as slightly peculiar.
After saving a web page to Keep Everything, I quickly review the article view of that page and ensure that all the content has been preserved (not always the case, due to the difficulty of extracting all relevant data from highly complex web pages).
Once I’m happy all the content is in the article, I go into ‘Edit’ mode and copy all the Markdown code from the article.
Then I create a new text file and paste the Markdown code into it.
This creates an identical article to one associated with the original web page - but without the cumbersome web archive. Saving, on average, megabytes of data for each entry.
Then I delete the original entry with its web archive. I have all I need in the simple article.
I’ve written to the developer suggesting this workflow could be automated. I’m delighted to say he agrees.
It means that unlike the data I have saved in DEVONthink Pro, EagleFiler and even Notebooks, almost all the data in Keep Everything is preserved as straight Markdown text (with a few web archives for super-complex pages where the article extraction hasn’t worked properly).
This means that despite the growing volume of data in Keep Everything, it’s still very nippy, with a minimal system footprint.
So I reviewed the other things task management software does. Notably, remind you of deadlines etc.
Just how crucial is this function, really? You know what? It isn’t. It really isn’t. The thing that most frequently causes me to see red when using conventional task management software is the speed with which your entries for ‘Today’ start to fill up with stuff you haven’t done yet, meant to do a few days ago but forgot, would like to do sometime but don’t quite dare to shove into the ‘Tomorrow’ or ‘Later’ piles. That stack of guilt-inducing reminders that tell you you’re not being efficient enough.
Most task management software isn’t very flexible in this respect. Yes, GTD has improved things here, but most actual task management apps still expect and encourage you to specify ‘due dates’ for your various tasks. It’s a fundamental part of the way they’re structured.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 04:21 PM
Keep Everything has another trick to play here.
Not only can you put all entries into ‘Categories’ (= folders), you can also ‘group’ them.
What does this mean? It means you can select a group of items and instruct the program to group them together. This means they appear as a single item with a coloured button on one side with a number on it (representing the number of grouped items). If you prod the button, the item opens up to reveal its contents. Because Keep Everything is effectively a three-pane outliner, this means the central pane now displays the sub-items in the group (rather than all items in the relevant folder).
This is similar to the way certain outliners (Word, Ulysses, Taskpaper) use headings as navigation points in outlines.
And it makes Keep Everything perfect for task management.
You don’t have to have a single large note with all your tasks on it. Or even multiple smaller notes in folder. Instead, you can create multiple notes (e.g. equivalent to GTD categories like ‘Today’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Later’, or based on any other scheme you like - I tend to use type-of-work categories like ‘Projects’, ‘Admin’, ‘Home’, ‘Personal’ etc., with one ‘Right NOW’ category) and then group them together.
If you drag and drop your task management notes onto each other, Keep Everything will group them in the order you dragged and dropped them, using the target note as the overall ‘container’. Very simple, very elegant.
So when I look at my grouped tasks, they appear in my preferred order, in easily edited, bite-size chunks.
If I really need to remind myself of a particular deadline, I put a reminder in Apple’s Reminders or Calendar. They’re always running behind the scenes, and automatically sync with my various iOS devices, so they’re the most logical place to store actual reminders.
Everything else is now managed in Keep… well, Everything.
Just one caveat, the one pothole in my otherwise smooth transition to a new way of working: Keep Everything supports HTML, text files and images (of all kinds), but doesn’t store PDFs.
Funnily enough, I don’t really mind.