Go Plain Ubiquitous Plaintext Capture, Part 1: nvALT

In my Go Plain manifesto, I said that the first thing I plan to deal with is ubiquitous plaintext capture solution.

So here I am, trying to deal with it, having some success on the Mac, mostly failing on mobile…

This post is part 1 of several posts on the subject of plaintext capture. I am dividing it to parts because it is still work-in-progress, and I wanted to share as I go along.

To reiterate and elaborate, my expectations for a “ubiquitous plaintext capture solution” include:

  • Available across all my devices. To prioritize: MacBook, Android phone, iPad, Windows laptop.
  • Sync “captured items” across all said devices, given connectivity. Handle poor connectivity with dignity – we are talking about plaintext files here. Handle sync conflicts gracefully.
  • The act of “capturing a piece of information” must be totally frictionless. This means as few clicks and taps as possible to get to “capture mode”. No messing with filing and categorizing a “captured item”. It should just be there, waiting for when I’m ready to deal with processing it.

A tl;dr version of where I am with this, at the time of writing:

  1. Decided that “captured items” are plaintext Markdown-formatted files in my Dropbox GoPlain/Notes directory. Flat structure (e.g. no sub-directories) to force simplicity. Filename is note title, file text is note content.
  2. Decided on nvALT for capturing notes on OS X. Been using it for a couple of weeks. It’s perfect!
  3. Became frustrated with the options I evaluated on Android. Remained unsolved for now 🙁 .
  4. Got overwhelmed with options on the iPad (iOS in general). Got to join nvNotes beta testing. Loving it so far!
  5. Didn’t do anything with my Windows laptop. It just sat there, streaming my Google Music library. Just as important for my productivity 🙂 !

In this part, I go into some detail about nvALT and my “ideal capture experience”. If you stick around, there might also be a mobile rant 😉 .

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Go Plain: My Simplicity-Driven Personal Productivity System

In the previous post, I announced that I am ready to reinvent my personal productivity system.

Today, I present Go Plain: My simplicity-driven personal productivity system. Well, it’s not yet a “personal productivity system”. It’s the working title for my work-in-progress system, and this post is a high-level “manifesto” for this system. I use “manifesto” here loosely, and mostly mean “high level roadmap and requirements”. Just thought it was a fun word to use 🙂 .

You can refer to the Go Plain project page for an always up-to-date list of posts related to this project.

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My Productivity Porn Season Has Begun

My name is Itamar, and I’m an addict. My addiction is hardcore productivity porn (don’t worry, it’s SFW).

I do my best to keep my addiction controlled. Under normal circumstances, I don’t tamper with my “productivity system”, beyond minimal maintenance, and the occasional incremental targeted workflow improvement.

The issue with the statement above is an underlying assumption that “the system is mostly good, and fits my current situation in life most of the time”. That assumption has been overwhelmingly false for a little over two years now.

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Quick Evernote Template-based Note Creation with Launchy

Recently, I redesigned my GTD system based on Evernote as the main tool.

I believe strongly that the chosen tools should not “get in the way” of interacting with the system, so when I noticed that several of my Evernote workflows include too much repetitiveness and friction – I looked for ways to reduce that friction and enable me to concentrate on the content and not the meta.

Since I am already a fan of Launchy keyboard launcher, I sought for the ideal integration between Launchy and Evernote – something that would allow me to quickly create template-based notes in Evernote, whatever the active application is, in as frictionless way as possible, while still being flexible and powerful.

I found a couple of ideas, like Brandon’s My Simple Curiosity post on Evernote note templates, and Stephen’s Thought Asylum post on the same subject. These posts were inspiring and helpful, and I wound up developing my own solution, relying on stuff I learned from them.

The result is a collection of scripts and utilities I wrote, that does exactly what I want.

This Evernote-Launchy integration allows quick creation of parametrized template-based notes from Launchy on Windows!

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