The Lonely Savage

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’ve written more than one entry about note-taking techniques, software and hardware for taking notes and other ways that notes and note-taking can be integrated into daily routines in simple and efficient ways. Today, I revisit the old and begin to sketch out a new and more efficient way to handle things.

My notes are all over the place. For those of you who remember my previous entry on the subject (and I urge all my new readers to read it first), you’ll remember that I mentioned three major note-taking locations. They were:

• My Moleskine Notebook, where I add new thoughts, ideas, notes, plans, suggestions and other that I need to remember in the future. A short thing will do, such as “Buy Birthday present for mom!” or “Research weaving in mythology” or “Maybe Book Character X should be a veterinarian?”. These ideas will later be made into either notes or tasks by being transferred into one of the following two pieces of software.
• Things is a wonderful piece of software from Cultured Code that I use to handle my tasks. It reminds me 10 days before any of my contacts has a birthday (and again on the birthday, just in case), it keeps track of my work-related tasks, my personal tasks and my more long-term projects. It’s a fantastic piece of software and I would recommend it to everybody.
• VoodooPad is another fantastic piece of software, brought to us by Flying Meat. Basically, it’s a local wiki-type installation where you can create notebook pages that interact with each other. My first page has a number of different topics that then have sub-topics that link back and forth to each other. My book-writing project has a VoodooPad-project of its own where I have notes on all characters, places, religious festivals, seasons and historical events that are relevant to the planning and writing of the book. Again; it’s a fantastic piece of software and I’m only sorry that I didn’t discover it sooner.

In most day-to-day cases, this is enough. However, sometimes situations pop up where I need other software. Sometimes I need to save information that isn’t as simple as taking notes. Enter four more applications:

• I use OmniGraffle to help me visualize the family trees of the characters in my epic fantasy series that I’m writing. It makes it easy to add and edit things as I move along instead of having to update multiple pages in VoodooPad every time I make one little change.
• I use OpenOffice when I’m working on my book. It’s a great combination of minimalism (when you turn off enough visible features) and functionality. Unlike Microsoft’s Office package, OpenOffice still hasn’t come to the point where there is feature bloat with features that actually come in the way of your writing and editing.
• I use Evernote when I see quotes or pictures that make me feel “I’m sure I’ll need that in the future”. Over time, as my Evernote Inbox swells, I begin sorting things into distinct categories that may (or may not) crystallize into a blog post, a short story or a new project. Other things are just discarded as their relevance or my interest in them dissipates.
• Lastly, I use Instapaper for all of my “Read Later”-things. I very often happen upon interesting things on the Internet while I’m at the office or just about to go to bed. Using Instapaper, I can queue these things (and get rid of sidebars, advertisements and other pointless trivia) for reading later, usually on my commute to or from work on my iPhone. I’m really looking forward to seeing an iPad version of Instapaper as this would make things so much easier to manage.

What’s beginning to become more and more apparent to me is that all these four main applications have overlaps in functionality and purpose. I open Things for my planning and give myself a schedule of 2 weeks to finish creating the family tree of a certain person in my fantasy series. Then I’d use OmniGraffle and VoodooPad to plan and plot everything. Finally, once the information is available, I’d have it as reference material once I started writing about the relevant people in OpenOffice. There must be better ways of doing this?

That’s why I’m going out to you guys, my readers. Do you have any suggestions for ways that I can improve upon this process? I’m open to the suggestion of trying new software or new ways of using the current software that I’m using. Pitch me ideas and suggestions; I’d love to hear from you!