The Weekly Review

Most users are aware of how important it is to back up your stuff. The same goes for running a website. For this site, I use a plugin that emails me a copy of the Wordpress database once a day. In addition, I back up the actual files of the Wordpress directory once a week to my local machine.

On my local machine I have two directories for The Weekly Review. One is for development – trying out new things before making the change on the site itself – and lives in my MAMP directory. The second folder is where I keep the backup files as mentioned above.

Backing up those files is the focus of todays Great Moments by Design. Ever since I moved to using a Mac at home, Transmit by Panic has been my FTP application of choice. It has a ton of great features, many of which I don’t even use. But there is one that really makes it an essential tool for me. Syncing: this feature (more like a feature set) makes it really easy to add new items or make style changes on my development folder locally and then sync those changes to my live site.

My workflow is usually as follows:

• Test change in local development setup
• Copy files affected by any changes to my backup folder
• Sync backup folder with my theme folder on host server

So that’s the normal workflow. But sometimes I need files to be updated in the other direction. That’s when the sync functionality is really great. As seen in the screenshot below, Panic has incorporated enough options that make the sync work for almost any scenario you might encounter.

You can choose upload or download depending where the changes need to be made. As well, you can update (only copy modified files) or mirror (make exact update). Whatever your need, Transmit can get it done.

Syncing makes Transmit an essential application for me and earns it a spot in my dock.

Ever since purchasing my first Mac, which had Tiger installed, I’ve been interested in the potential of Automator. Unfortunately, time and opportunities have both been lacking and I’ve been unable to spend much time with the application.

But that’s one of the nice things about having your own blog – things that once were categorized as ‘play’ can now be categorized as ‘work’ or ‘research’. And since getting serious about my site and posting regularly, there have been a couple of workflows that I thought could possibly benefit from some automation.

Since I like to write about software, I have been including a good number of screenshots. I had been keeping those image files on my hard drive, as well as uploading them to my blog. I was also uploading them to my Flickr account for archiving purposes. Here was my workflow before Automator:

• take screenshot with Skitch
• drag image to blog post images folder on hard drive
• insert image in blog post in MarsEdit from aforementioned folder (this step also uploads the image to my WP uploads folder)
• upload images to Flickr with FlickrUploader and add to existing TWR set

This is a sequence that was screaming to be shortened or simplified. So I thought it was a good opportunity to get more familiar with Automator. Hopefully I could improve my workflow and save some time.

So after creating my first automator plugin, here is the new workflow:

• take screenshot with Skitch
• drag image to desktop
• Right click on selected images and choose Automator workflow from contextual menu
• insert image in blog post in MarsEdit from Flickr

The Workflow

The following table lists the actions that make up the completed automator workflow:

Action Type	Action Name
Finder	Get Selected Items
Mail	New Mail Message
Mail	Send Outgoing Messages
Finder	Get Selected Items
Finder	Move Finder Items to Trash

This workflow makes use of a Flickr feature that allows users to post images via email. A small warning here – this is for use only with small numbers of images. The Flickr help page states that the post via email method supports neither large numbers of images nor very large images. This is not an issue for me as I usually have two or three small images at once to upload. And so far the usage has been fine.

After taking the needed screen shots, I ensure they are all selected on the desktop. Then a simple right click and I choose the following option from the menu: More -> Automator -> [Workflow Name]. After a few seconds, the plugin kicks in and a new mail message is generated, filled out with values I have specified within the workflow. The images are added as attachments, the message is sent and then the images are moved from my desktop to the Trash.

Now I can return to MarsEdit and use the Media Manager to grab the files from Flickr and insert to my blog post. Pretty easy.

There are a couple of settings that need to be updated to use this workflow. First, you have to enable your Flickr account to be able to post images via email. This can be done under your account settings on Flickr iteslf.

Secondly, you must authorize MarsEdit to access your Flickr account. You can do this by selecting the Flickr tab on the MarsEdit media manager. See here:

The one negative of this setup comes from using the upload via email. Currently this function does not allow you to specify a set or collection to add the photos to. I hope Flickr adds this in the future.

The positive changes are that the images are stored on Flickr and not my blogs upload folder and that my workflow is much faster and more efficient. The number of steps is the same, but the new steps are much shorter. No more updating files in multiple locations.

Summary

Although it was fun to play around with Automator for a while, this exercise was not without it’s frustrations. This was a relatively simple workflow, but it took a longer than I would have thought to get it working the way I wanted. Perhaps it was operator error – it’s not like I took time to read the manual…

Whatever the reason, I found that it took a lot of playing around with the actions to get them in just the right sequence so the whole workflow ran correctly. There were a lot of test versions that resulted in duplicate images. Others never moved the desktop items to the trash before completion. In the end, it seems the workflows perform the best when each action passes values on to the next, as this one does.

At the very least, I feel more comfortable with Automator now. I’m looking for the next opportunity to automate a repetitive task.

Rands, in his latest article about saving time and personal productivity hacks:

Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.

Amen brother!

I was reading a post in the New York Times about the latest in the Microsoft-wants-to-buy-Yahoo saga, when the following paragraph caught my eye:

Many traditional media companies worry that the rise of advertising networks is undercutting their prices and turning their precious advertising space into a commodity to be traded like pork bellies. There may well be an opportunity for Yahoo to define itself as the ad network that is especially friendly to mainstream media.

This idea hits me every time I see ads in my local newspaper. I make the assumption that those ads cost less than they used to, because they certainly are not seen by the same size of market as they used to.

With the rise of blogs and lay journalism in the last ten years, I would think traditional media companies would be realizing they need to adapt to the change in culture.

SecondGear announced their new task management app named Today. Built on the same event and task data as iCal and Mail, this tool is intended as a enhancement to these Apple applications.

The product page has this description:

Today is a powerful, easy to use event and task management application for Mac OS X Leopard. Built on top of the same data engine as Apple’s iCal and Mail programs, Today let’s you quickly see what events and tasks are on today’s agenda with the click of a button.

This is really similar to Anxiety, another lightweight alternative to more involved task management apps.

Here is the product page description for Anxiety:

Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

These two apps are quite similar, with one big difference. Anxiety is focused on all your tasks, while Today focuses on…well, today. That is, it is solely built to give you a heads up of your calendar events for the current day and your tasks.

For those folks who are hesitant to succumb to the cult of GTD, but are still looking for tools to track tasks, these could fill in nicely. The fact that they work with Mail and iCal makes them even more appealing.

I have a confession to make. As I’ve mentioned before, I change my default browser only slightly less than my socks. Today I’ll add default email clients to this list.

I’m a GMail user – have been since I first got my account. But ever since starting to use a Mac, I’ve often switched between using the GMail web interface and OS X’s Mail.app. And since upgrading to Leopard, this chore has gotten so much easier.

With the current version of Mail, one extremely handy little feature has been added. When you are adding a new account in Mail’s preferences, there is an option to automatically setup your account, as seen here:

How much nicer is this as opposed to trying to remember all the pop, imap and smtp information for GMail accounts? The fact that Apple is willing to keep track of settings for a third party account is great in itself. Adding this functionality to one of their own applications is a great design decision.

It just makes a tedious process easier for the end user. That’s great design.

Notice: The entire GTD Overview series can be found here.

Effective task management – the organization of the building blocks of your ’system’ – is crucial to getting things done effectively. In part 4 of this series I will be demonstrating how I manage my tasks using Things from Cultured Code. The information included will be both a review of some of the features of Things, as well as I how use the application in my workflow.

But it’s important to remember that the actual application is not the key, but the concepts which govern how you use it. Most of this article should also be pertinent to readers who use other tools.

Overview of Things

There is no doubt that Things is a good looking app. The interface is sleek, even in beta. For me, this is a feature in itself. It was one of the reasons I was quite interested in Things when I first read about it.

After several months of usage, it’s clear to me now that the good design is more than skin deep. Even in beta, Things offers most of the features I’m looking for. And the developers are promising more by the time the 1.0 version is released. More importantly, the way in which the features have been implemented makes Things a real pleasure to use. The gang at Cultured Code clearly spend a lot of time considering how the end user will interact with their application.

Basics

If you have never seen Things in action, the first thing to know is that there are three categories under which your tasks may fall. They can be assigned to a Project, an Area or stand alone completely on their own. Understanding Projects and Areas is key to using this app. Projects are simply a list of tasks to accomplish a goal that has an end. On the other hand, Areas (areas of responsibility in the world of GTD) have no final end. There is no date or final task that will complete an area – a person will continue to accumulate tasks in this regard.

This is the most basic understanding a person needs to get started with this application. But if you would like more of an introduction, spend some time at the Things wiki.

The first aspect I want to focus on is the setup of the application. It’s simple – there are two main sections. The tasks pane and the sidebar.

Tasks Pane

The tasks pane is where you work with your actual tasks. You can create, delete, check off or rearrange tasks here. As well, this is where you add any metadata necessary (title, tags, due dates, or notes). The navigation in the task pane is very fluid and moving tasks around is intuitive – average joe user could figure this out without reading any documentation. Clicking on the name of a project or area that a task is assigned to will take you straight to the project or area itself.

Also, you can drag and drop tasks into a project, area or even a focus source list in the sidebar. There are a few drag and drop operations that are currently not supported, but all documentation indicates that this is a priority to the developers and will be addressed soon.

One feature that could be added to the task pane navigation would be a browser style back button. I often find that I’ve dug down into a sub-project and simply want to go up one level. But I have to start over by navigating in the sidebar. A couple of Finder or browser style navigation buttons would fix this.

Sidebar

The sidebar is where Things really shines. It has three headers – Collect, Focus and Organize – and resembles a source list that is quickly becoming the de facto standard in applications for OS X.

Collect Section

This section is straight forward. This is where the Inbox is located. There is nothing else currently located in this source list. Perhaps the developers will add more in the future, but for now the Inbox is where you can add tasks that will be processed later. Most often these tasks will be added via the Quick Input panel rather than directly in the Inbox itself.

Organize Section

The organize section is where the aforementioned projects and areas are listed. This is where you can reference everything related to each project or area and where the user would go to move tasks around.

A nice design touch should be mentioned here – I’ve done so before. When viewing your list of projects, Things shows you how many tasks a project contains as well as giving the user an idea of how many of those tasks are already completed. It does this in a subtle way, as seen in the screen below. The two shades of blue elegantly indicate a percentage of overall completion.

Another nice touch here is with due dates. If one of the projects you are viewing has an item that is due today, or is overdue, then the text of the project is red, as seen here.

Focus Section

And lastly, and in my mind most importantly, there is the Focus section. This section is where I spend most of my time in Things. The four sources under Focus are somewhat like smart folders in the OS X Finder or smart playlists in iTunes. The items that show up in here can do so based on values you have assigned to individual tasks. Example – if a task has a due date, it will display in the Today source on the day they are due. You can also manually assign tasks to one of the Focus source lists.

• Today – the Today source list consists of any tasks that you have assigned the Today flag or any tasks that are due today. It can also include overdue tasks – if you do not check off a task that comes due, it will not be removed from the Today source list until you do so manually. Even updating the due date will not remove the Today flag.
• Next – this source list simply lists the next couple of actions for each project or area (you can modify the number of next tasks that display under the View menu option). In addition, tasks that have been added to Things but are not assigned to any project or area will display at the very top of the Next source list.
• Someday – this source list is simply your archive. This is where you can assign tasks, projects or areas that you eventually want to complete, but are not able to get to now.
• Scheduled – lastly there is the Scheduled source list. Cultured Code published a great blog post regarding all the different iterations they considered for just one aspect of this feature. In the end, they implemented a really great way to schedule tasks and create recurring tasks.

Quick Input Panel

One other feature to touch on is the quick input panel. This feature uses one of the newer, HUD styles that have become so popular in Mac applications the past couple of years. You can assign your own hotkey combination to initiate this panel to appear from any other application. This is the easiest way to add tasks to Things.

You have the option to choose here to file your new task to a focus source list or any existing project or area, as seen in the drop-down list here.

But my usage has been that 90% of all tasks added via the quick input panel go to the Inbox. I then process the tasks at some later point.

Tags

One last feature to mention is the use of tags. Tags are one of the most attractive and powerful features of Things. This is a tag based application, meaning you can apply any keyword or tag to each task (and projects and areas as well). The purpose of tagging – searchability and focus through filtering. You assign certain keywords to your tags so that even if you have a large number of them, you will have an easy time of finding what you want. Things makes this feature really easy to use via the Tags bar at the top of the task pane.

If any task has a tag, the tag bar will display no matter what source list or section you navigate to in the sidebar. This makes it easy to filter to any particular tag – essentially making use of the idea of contexts in GTD.

The developers have also made Things usable for everyone. If you are a strict, by-the-book GTDer and have your entire life in your system, you can make use of tags to manage the crazy amounts of information that comes your way. But Things works just fine even if you don’t know a tag from a hole in the ground. If you do not use tags at all, Things simply does not display the tag bar.

So that is a summary of the features that have stuck out to me in my usage of this application. Now I’ll briefly summarize how I use the application with my GTD process\habits.

How Things Fits in My Workflow

Collect

As I mentioned above and in part 2 of this series, the majority of my tasks are entered into Things via the quick input panel. I do this when I’m on my computer and working on a particular task. Often I’ll have a thought come to me that I need to get out of my head right away. So without greatly interrupting my workflow, I hit ctrl+alt+space (my choice for hotkey combo) and enter in my task with minimal details and hit return.

Now I have a new task sitting in my Inbox source list in Things.

My other major source of tasks is email. So if I’m processing emails and have one that involve tasks for me, I follow the exact same procedure. Occasionally I will fill in a few details like due dates or notes, but most often it is simply the title.

The idea behind collecting is that it’s quick and easy and does not take your focus away from what you are doing. Of course, when you are working away, some part of your brain is being creative and thoughts come to you that need to get into your system. The quick input panel in Things is a great tool to get those thoughts captured while allowing you to keep doing – whatever your doing happens to be.

Process

Again, as referenced in part 2, I process my collection buckets at least once per day. Email is usually processed two to three times per day and my binder at least once. My Things Inbox generally is about the same as my main binder.

In part 2, I listed the processing of the Things Inbox under the habit of Organize. It could go under either Organize or Process – it crosses the line between the two – the actual work involved could fall under both categories. When I process the task, I remove it from the Inbox. Where I move it to is organizing in action.

What happens here is that I take all the tasks in the Inbox and make sure they have all the necessary information included. Once completed, they get filed — they are added to an existing project or area if one applies. If the task is a single action then it is moved out of the Inbox to the Next source list.

Tasks that require more than one action are dragged to the sidebar to be converted to a project.

Organize

So organizing is basically the process listed above. But there is one further point I will go in to here.

When I mentioned the Scheduled source list above, I did not get into a lot of details about the implementation of this feature. At first I didn’t really use this source list – I was missing the intended point the developer had in mind. After using it a few times, the usefulness of it hit me hard.

This is basically your tickler file. You can schedules tasks that need to occur on a particular day and for which you need to be reminded.

At first glance, this can be mistaken for a calendar replacement. However, you must remember that a calendar is a hard landscape – calender entries have a date and a time and should be reserved for meetings\appointments. The tasks that are scheduled in the Scheduled source list can occur any time during each particular day. I find it very helpful to open Things, navigate to the Today source list and see all my tasks that are scheduled for that day as well as tasks that have become due.

The developer also recently added recurring tasks as well. This was a feature that was a high priority for many users, and Cultured Code delivered it well. Adding in those weekly\monthly tasks only once is great.

The entire source list is summed up nicely in the screenshot below. Scheduled tasks come first, followed by recurring tasks (indicated by the circular arrow symbol beside them). Information about each task is listed on the left, as well as above each task. In addition, if a task is assigned to a project or area it is indicated in muted text immediately preceding the task title. All in all, it’s an effective attribute of the application.

Review

And lastly there is the review. I generally keep to a weekly review with additional, smaller daily reviews. Thie weekly review is a complete look at each project and area to ensure everything is up to date. Using Things, this has not been the tedious process I have found it to be in the past. Rather, it’s enjoyable.

Do

Things is not really used here at all. After all, it’s a tool to help you keep track of the items you need to do, but the doing happens elsewhere. All you use it for here is to reference any information you have saved as a note for any particular task.

It ended up taking a lot of words to go over something that’s actually quite simple. That’s part of the beauty of this application – it’s simplicity makes it easy to use – yet it has powerful features that are waiting to be used should you have the need or inclination. For anyone trying to get a handle on everything they have to take care of in their life, I highly recommend giving Things a try.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the series.

One application that is quickly becoming a favorite for me is OS X’s Dictionary. It’s a simple utility, but since I started writing more frequently, this tool has become indispensable.

There are a couple of features that made this application the focus of today’s edition of Great Moments by Design.

System wide integration

Perhaps the design features of this app can more appropriately be attributed to the operating system. The overall design of OS X is superb, and with the launch of Tiger (10.4), the dictionary was [re]introduced.

The following integration features make this utility shine:

• Contextual right click menus - right click on a word in any app and you will see the following menu option: “Look Up in Dictionary”. Choosing this option brings the dictionary app to the forefront with the definition displayed.
• Spotlight searches - you can invoke spotlight, type out a word and a search result of type Definition will be near the top of the list (the key here is that you need to type out the full word).
• Ctr+Command+D - hover the mouse over any word in any application and hit this system wide shortcut. Rather than opening the dictionary app itself, you see a pop up window in the application itself as shown below. This is really handy when you don’t want an interruption in your workflow.

These are all great touches to the overall feel of the operating system. I’ll add one caveat though - it would be great to be able to specify the thesaurus in Dictionary.app from Spotlight. I haven’t found or read of a method to do so. This option is however available using the Ctrl+Command+D option.

Dashboard dictionary widget

In addition, OS X ships with a dictionary dashboard widget. Like the weather widget, I find this to be the perfect usage of the dashboard.

This is a small tool with few features. But due to the useful, user-friendly design, it’s an app that has earned a spot in my dock.

Judi Sohn at webworkerdaily posted an article today describing how she lives Inbox Zero with Gmail and Remember the Milk (RTM) . I’ve looked at RTM before and was quite impressed. It integrates with a good number of services.

Judi sums up the experience of using GMail with the RTM Firefox extension:

I can’t sing the praises of this utility high enough. It gives you a list of your tasks right in your email window, which is where tasks belong if you live and die by email.

If the majority of your tasks come via email, this looks like a pretty good GTD solution.

Update: The Google blog posts their explanation of what occurred. Truth or fiction? Time will tell.

Thanks to TechCrunch, there’s some speculation now that Google is possibly launching a new task management application soon.

So far it’s just speculation, but this definitely makes sense to me. Google already offers all the tools needed for people to GTD. Tying them all together and adding tasks would be the direction I’d expect them to take.