Skip to main content

Planning next year revisited

So I used it for awhile today, and quickly realized it had to be simpler.

* To Do, as I first set it up, was a comprehensive list of all my tasks. But I already have that in Hivemind, and don't want to try to duplicate things just so I can get to them on various devices. So instead, I'll leave everything in Hivemind, then begin each work day by reviewing, and pulling out the four or five that I intend to tackle that day and putting them in Notecase Pro (from now on, NP). But I eliminated the whole "To Do" heading.

* Journal. Dragging things from To Do to Journal was an unnecessary step. Now I just have one heading: "Daily Log." I open a new node, use Shift-Ctrl-T to insert the date, then (as above), plan my day from consulting Hivemind and my calendar, and cross them off as I complete them. That gives me a work record without having to drag things anywhere.

* Goals and Projects - just cleaned it up and renamed it from Projects. The idea is to keep those big ideas in front of me all day.

* Key Contacts. Dunno how much I'll use this. From my work computer, I already have contacts where I'm likely to use them (email, etc).

* Misc is now just three little reminder notes, mostly logins. (NP is encrypted, so I don't worry about security.)

* Organizations. This might still be handy. It's hard to remember what I've promised to all of those institutions sometimes.

* Talks. This one is very handy. But I need to consistently use a tag for my calendar to help me track this more consistently. (I just went back and did that!)

So Daily Log, Goals and Projects, Key Contacts, Misc, Organizations, and Talk gives me a tidy list of just six things. And - the best part - it's in alphabetical order. Joy.

But overall, yeah, this will work. Oh, and another little trick. NP lets you toggle between three screens: just the leftmost outliner pane, just the rightmost text pane, or a split screen. Toggling between the outliner and text pane seems to aid in focus.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Uncle Bobby's Wedding

Recently, a library patron challenged (urged a reconsideration of the ownership or placement of) a book called "Uncle Bobby's Wedding." Honestly, I hadn't even heard of it until that complaint. But I did read the book, and responded to the patron, who challenged the item through email and requested that I respond online (not via snail-mail) about her concerns. I suspect the book will get a lot of challenges in 2008-2009. So I offer my response, purging the patron's name, for other librarians. Uncle Bobby's wedding June 27, 2008 Dear Ms. Patron: Thank you for working with my assistant to allow me to fit your concerns about “Uncle Bobby's Wedding,” by Sarah S. Brannen, into our “reconsideration” process. I have been assured that you have received and viewed our relevant policies: the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read, Free Access to Libraries for Minors, the Freedom to View, and our Reconsideration Policy. The intent of providing all tha

Installing Linux on a 2011 Macbook Pro

I had two MacBook Pros, both 13" models from late 2011. One had 4 gigs of RAM, and the other 8. Both of them were intolerably slow. In the first case, I wound up installing CleanMyMac , which did arcane things to various files, and put up alerts to warn me about disappearing memory. But it made the machine useable again, albeit not exactly speedy. I changed some habits: Safari as browser rather than Firefox or Chrome. I tried to keep tabs down to four or five. The second Mac had bigger problems. Its charger was shot, but even with that replaced, the battery tapped out at 75%. More importantly, the whole disk had been wiped, which meant that it wouldn't boot. Recently, I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions ("distros") on USB drives. Elementary OS 5.1 (Hera) was reputed to be a lightweight, beautiful distro that shared some aesthetics with the Mac OS. So I thought I'd give it a try. Ahead of time, I tried to read up on how difficult it might be to

The enemies of literature

Every year, apologists for the restriction of reading stumble over themselves to "mock" Banned Books Week. Walther (Oct 1, 2023's " The Enemies of Literature ") upholds the grand tradition. Complaints about banning, the argument goes, are simply false. Walther writes, "In zero cases since the advent of Banned Books Week has a local or state ordinance been passed in this country that forbids the sale or general possession of any of the books in question." Yet Texas HB 900 was passed on June 13 of this year. It requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based only on the presence of depictions or references to sex. If a book is "sexually explicit" and has no direct connection to required curriculum, it must be pulled from the school. (One wonders what happens to the Bible, and its story of Lot's daughters, first offered by their father for gang rape, and whom he later sleeps with.) In Arkansas, legislation stated that school and pu