Thursday, June 28, 2007

Technology to Write With



The beauty of a Mac is in all the widgets that can do countless things automatically for you. I've just started reading Timothy Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek and have downloaded the new (to me, at least) iGTD program to go with Quicksilver, because between David Allen's Getting Things Done and Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek, I realized yesterday, I waste way too much time in trivial administrative tasks. I also have too much in my head. I need technology to help me. (You can do this too, just go over there . . . see my blog roll? There you go. Now click on 43 Folders!)

I'm even starting to program in Ruby, which astonishes me to no end in order to get Quicksilver, iGTD, and Growl to work together on my Macbook to automate my to-do list. This is going to be great!

But first, some back story: Last week I began putting together a writing notebook to organize my writing life. Well, I quickly found out that I didn't want to write down every single task, because it took too long. I didn't want to record each query on a paper form; again, it took too long. So I figured out how to configure the Mac widgets. If I get it to work right today, I can be in the middle of another project (surfing the web, backing my data up to .Mac, writing), and suddenly, as I remember a task, I can call up the Quicksilver widget, type in the task, and if I did my Ruby programming right, that task will automatically be filed into my iGTD exactly where I want it.

Life is good. I may have to email my Ruby expert over in North Carolina though, because me writing Ruby? This is so not me.

Keep Moving Forward.

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