Evernote is my cornerstone productivity app. Is it yours?

In a month, my subscription to Evernote Premium is set to renew for another year. Since I've been an Evernote user for almost ten years -- and an active one for the last seven -- I'm almost certain to pay the $70 to retain the Premium account. Save for the web browser, my email client, and the core utilities of the operating system, Evernote is the most important application in my digital world. It is also the closest thing to being my personal information manager. It's where I make to do lists, plan my business, clip receipts, track my commitments. Evernote is also the first application I turn to draft any document small or large.

As part of my consulting, I plan to help people with Evernote: how to set up Evernote, how to organize notes using tags and notebooks, and how to integrate Evernote with other applications (perhaps with custom programming). I'm particularly keen to work with others on using Evernote to implement various productivity methodologies, such as David Allen's Getting Things Done. I'm currently running a GTD system on top of Evernote, a variant on The Secret Weapon: Evernote and GTD smoothly integrated into TSW. My system is a bit of a homebrew and likely doesn't match TSW exactly. It probably also doesn't match how The David Allen Company would say how to use Evernote. But it would be useful to describe exactly how my system works -- as part of my formalization process at the very least: more later.

I've joined the Evernote Community Program and will figure out whether to move up the tiers to become an Evernote Certified Consultant. I hope to get to know other members of the Evernote community, to learn from them about what it takes to be helpful to Evernote users in general.

MyBizWriMo

For years now, I've thought that November, the month for the National Novel Writing Month, would be the motivating prompt to write my next book. Not a novel -- yet -- but I did want to draft another computer book under the #NaNoWriMo-inspired #pragprowrimo umbrella.

This year, I'm in the middle of launching a consulting/training business to help people use their digital technology (computers, phones) more productively. One of the most important part of that work is to write clearly and consistently about what my business is about: what's its mission, whom do I plan to serve, and the specific services I will provide.

To that end, I'm committing myself to write something coherent every day of November for what I'll playfully call #MyBizWriMo. The pieces don't have to be grand, but they do need to be coherent. So this simple post serves as my first installment.

Don’t be WIPed

Do you struggle with having more projects than you can productively work on simulatenously? I certainly do. That's why I have been attracted to the Personal Kanban productivity system, which puts a lot of emphasis on visualizing, pruning, and limiting one's "Work in Progress" (WIP). I've not been sufficiently serious about setting realistic limits on my WIP: witness my overflowing list of projects started but essentially zombified. How many projects survive on my list when I have neither the energy to advance them nor the will to kill them?

Face it: I'm not going to cure my deep rooted habit of being WIPed overnight. Yesterday, I took tiny steps in the right direction by forcing myself to schedule dedicated times for the next steps for some of my projects. Theoretically, a rigorously maintained and enforced calendar is a good visualization of WIP and of incipient (rampant?) overcommitment. There's probably something to learn from articles like How To: Setting Your Personal WIP Limit | Personal Kanban. The start of the article is to the point:

There are only two rules in Personal Kanban.

Visualize Your Work

and

Limit Your Work in Progress

But I need to find the time to read the rest of the article first!

PIM 2020: Creating a better personal information manager

I would like to create a next-generation personal information manager (codename: “PIM 2020”) that lets users focus on what's most important to them. I’m convinced that our computers can do so much more to help us understand our own thought processes and actions in the world and thereby focus ourselves. A central challenge is to develop a plan that targets a specific doable and economically viable service.

I need to articulate a compelling vision of the distinctive elements of PIM 2020. Why do I want to create personal digital dashboards presented in desktop apps, smartphone apps, and web browsers? How will the dashboard be backed by cloud computing, data integration, and machine learning?

I suspect that I will need to find a day job (or a portfolio of gigs, paid and unpaid) that will provide me some useful skills, experiences, or contacts. At the very least, the job should allow sufficient emotional and creative space for me to plot my next-generation PIM in my off-hours.

Remember the Future

Masha Gessen ends on a somewhat positive note in her Nov 2016 essay Autocracy: Rules for Survival | The New York Review of Books:

Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

Why you might want to make phone calls for Hillary

If you’re like me, the main outcome of the upcoming election you want is to prevent the election of Donald Trump. To give myself a productive activity to work to defeat Trump, I've been making lots of phone calls
for Hillary via https://hillaryclinton.com/calls/. Right now, we're focused on recruiting other volunteers. Soon enough, we'll be focused on GOTV (get out the vote) activities.

This is something you can do from anywhere you have internet access and phone access and is made up of lots of discrete tasks. It's even fun and inspiring at times, when you connect with other people in the country wanting to contribute to our society. (Most of the time, no one picks up the phone, which I used to see as frustrating but now I see as relaxing in a funny way.)

I encourage you to join me in phone banking for Hillary. I'd be very happy to talk to anyone interested in learning more or phone banking with you folks. (You can also find events in which other people will be making calls. Sometimes it's easiest to get started while surrounded
by others making calls too.)

Magic of Morning Moleskining

This morning, after a long break from writing journalistically in the black Moleskine I carry around in my backpack, I scrawled:

Stand back to see where my handwriting hand leads me right now. Early morning writing can sometimes be downright magical, illuminating hitherto dark spaces of the mind and heart.

What followed was a trance of fluidity that I rarely have when writing on my computer. What do we know about the difference between writing in a paper journal and on a computer?

Writing on a personal blog when there’s medium.com

Isn't it positively quaint to hope that I will write in any meaningful way on this blog when so many of the cool writers on the web have migrated to Medium?

I'm actually inspired to get back to writing on this blog because Dreamhost, the current host for this blog, has made it free and easy for me to use HTTPS on my site (via letsencrypt.)   As silly as this may sound, I feel much more at home now on this blog, now I can write over more secure channels.   (yes,  I know: Medium also support HTTS --> so HTTPS cannot be the determinative factor in whether I write here.)

What we can do in response to the Oil Spill? (Running Notes)

What crowdsourcing activity has there been?  A blog post that has a pretty good analysis of the idea.

http://oilspill.labucketbrigade.org/ -- allows one to track and report incidents -- based on the Ushahidi platform.

http://oilreporter.org/ -- Android + iPhone apps to report where oil spill is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill is not a bad place to start a deep dive.

Trying to get the real scoop, I am inclined to trust ProPublica, which has published a FAQ list:

CrisisCommons: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Oil_Spill_Response

Had no idea that the official site of the Deepwater Horizon Command is http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com If you have a good idea, you might try calling: TECH/SUGGESTIONS (281) 366-5511

Lectionary readings in a new context

Over the last year, I've been attending services at The Church of the Redeemer in Pittsburgh and more recently, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley.  I have found  much needed refreshment in the worship services, leavened as they are with the  solemn beauty of written and spoken word, from the Bible and from the Book of Common Prayer.  The scriptural readings are scheduled according to a lectionary (the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), I believe though I'm still a tad confused on these matters.) As a practical matter, this means that I have a ready-made schedule of texts to study:  either to look ahead (so I can prepare this coming Sunday) or to review (so that I can reflect on what we meditated on last Sunday).

Happily, I have found online sources for the Sunday lectionary readings, including:

Ultimately, I'd like to find sources of daily readings too. In the past, I've overreached in my Bible reading ambitions.  Now I plan to start with the Sunday readings but then add daily readings as I get more regular and proficient in my Bible reflections.  So when I'm ready, I should take a look at Book of Common Prayer Daily Office Lectionary (ESV Bible Online).  I took a quick glance at Reading Plans - YouVersion.com, hoping to find lectionaries tied to this online Bible and community. I'll want to figure out how the Episcopal order of reading relates to that of the PCUSA for which I can get daily readings provided by the PCUSA (e.g., today’s reading is  PC(USA) - Devotions - Daily readings for Friday, January 29, 2010)

P.S. A post on the lectionary won't be complete for me if I don't mention how I can ultimately geek out on it. The Lectionary points to a spreadsheet that "has the RCL, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Methodist lectionaries keyed to Bible passages."  With this key, I'll be able to computationally generate multi-denominational Bible readings for different days in different forms.  Lectionary mashups, here we come!