It is time for New Year’s Resolutions, and the new habit I aim to pick up is setting aside some serious, concentrated chunks of time for writing each day. In taking a high-level review of goals and tasks at the end of the year, I found that I was tending to put off writing actions and had a significant number of them that had piled up. So I’ve decided to set aside the first 60 to 90 minutes of the work day focusing exclusively on writing. I know my mind is freshest at that early morning time, so I think it would be possible to knock out some good work then. Here are my thoughts on the process thus far.

Late last year I also encountered the Pomodoro technique of breaking up tasks into 30 minute chunks: 25 minutes of concentrated activity followed by a 5 minute break of something unrelated to the original activity. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I’ve started using the Pomodoro timer Mac application to help keep me on task. I like it because it includes a constant ‘tick-tock’ audio cue that reminds me to stay on task plus it has spoken warnings at various intervals to help you keep track of time. I don’t use any of the interruption tracking or reporting features of the software at this point, although it can be helpful to look back at the day’s activities as I make reports of time allocation for grant reporting purposes. So, for those of you instinctively good at math, my morning writing time would consist of two or three Pomodoro sessions.

My morning routine as encoded in OmniFocus actions

You should review a few things in the morning, but no your email. This is the one thing you won’t find in my Daily Review. I check emails twice a day at 10am and 4pm (if I stick with my principles) and my Daily Review typically happens before I check my emails in the morning. The risk of including ‘Check email inbox’ into the Daily Review, or even worse check it before, is that you can easily be rat-holed by only one email in your inbox and before you realise you have reached the afternoon and lost control a fair bit.

My use of daily task folders actually extends past the morning routine because I have an entry each day that is set to start at 4:30pm and be due at 5:00pm to enter the day’s time allocations in a time tracker. Those start and end times make the task stay out of the way for most of the day and pop up to remind me to end the day with it. (By the way, the “Walkabout” context refers to the name of my laptop, so those are tasks that I can do on my laptop without needing to connect to the internet.)

(I’ll also admit to being unable to break the habit of checking e-mail first thing in the morning for anything important. Perhaps it is just the position I’m in, but others expectations of me means I can’t let some important e-mail go unanswered until mid-morning or later. I have gotten pretty good, though, with being able to turn off new e-mail updates/prompts/alarms and only checking for new messages a few times a day.)

Where I’m stuck at the moment is when I should add the writing block to my morning routine. I definitely need to put it after the “Check calendar” task — there might be entries in the calendar that would supersede the writing block — but I don’t know how far I should let myself get into through the collection stage of the Getting Things Done day. I’ve experimented with right after the Check calendar task, but the inbox tray full of miscellaneous stuff is a distraction — especially after living with the habit of emptying that tray as one of the first activities of the work day for about six months. But putting it as far down as the “Process OmniFocus Inbox” can burn up a lot of time and energy completing the 2-minute actions that I encounter in those collection steps. It is going to take some more experimentation to find the right balance of clearing-the-morning-clutter and concentrated-writing-time before I get this right. Any advice on what has worked for you would be most welcome.

Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen keyboard. Before making the suggestion, I searched the OmniFocus User Forum for “voice recognition” to see if anyone else had suggested the same thing. As it turns out, there were a few posts that had instructions from people using Twitter as an intermediary. Unfortunately, they either required a desktop Twitter client to be running all of the time or used the now deprecated BasicAuth-based Twitter authentication scheme. So I created my own.

The Script

Registering your Application with Twitter

Tweet Privacy Checkbox

Because I marked it as private, the script can’t read the home timeline of tweets without authentication. In order to authenticate with Twitter, I need to register the script with the Twitter API service to get a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret”. The registration page looks similar to below, but you’ll need to pick a different name. (Application names must be unique across Twitter.)

New Twitter Application screen for twitter-to-omnifocus

After submitting that form, you’ll see a page that will have your key information. Replace the sample keys in the tweettoOmniFocus.cfg file with the ones from this page.

You’ll need to run the twitter-to-omnifocus application once interactively on the command line in order to complete the process of registering the script with Twitter. First, change the mode of the script so that you can execute it, then run the script:

  chmod u+x twitter-to-omnifocus

  ./twitter-to-omnifocus

You’ll be promted to go to a website to get a PIN:

  Authorize this app at http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=nnn and enter the PIN#

When you get the PIN, paste it into the terminal window and hit return. Two new security tokens will be added to the configuration file.

Getting the Script to Run Periodically on the Mac

Lingon configuration for twitter-to-omnifocus

All Done!

iPhone Dragon Dictation screen

In the end, this is quite an effort and a moderately fragile setup for doing what I want. In particular, the dictated entries don’t immediately appear in my iPhone OmniFocus app database. I’d like some tighter integration between the applications, but I’ll settle for this for now.

I’ve been a fan of Getting Things Done as a technique for managing projects, but it was only recently that I settled on OmniFocus as the “trusted system” collecting all of my next actions. One of the things I like about OmniFocus — as a rich, Mac-only application — is its ability to hold links to messages from Mail.app as notes for each action. This occurs, for instance, when you use the “Clippings” function of OmniFocus to create a new action based on the message that you are currently viewing in Mail.app. (There are other ways to do it, such as the method described by Adam Sneller.)

One of the things I find myself doing is creating actions in a “Waiting” context based on e-mail messages I’ve just sent. Initially, I’d just create the action via the OmniFocus Quick Entry window. But I found myself needing to refer back to the message I sent when the person I’m waiting on doesn’t come through. So I started clicking and dragging the message from the Sent mailbox to the action. But to do that I’d have to click into the Sent mailbox and have the Mail.app and the OmniFocus windows set up just right. Or I’d have to follow a select-sent-mailbox, select-message, OmniFocus-quick-entry-with-clipping, select-Inbox, select-next-message workflow. And that took time and effort. So I’ve created an AppleScript ditty that does the work of creating a hyperlink on the clipboard of the last sent message. The results can then be pasted into any RTF-aware application, including OmniFocus.

The script is based heavily on Speedy creation of rich text links to Mail messages by Brett Terpstra. In particular, he had the missing link about creating RTF hyperlinks on the clipboard using a bash shell script. The meat of the AppleScript is:

tell application "Mail"
 
	-- Ask the user which account to use
	set _accts to get accounts
	set _enabledAccounts to {}
	repeat with eachAccount in _accts
		-- Only offer the enabled accounts for the user to choose
		if enabled of eachAccount then
			set the end of _enabledAccounts to name of eachAccount as string
		end if
	end repeat
	set _selectedAccount to (choose from list _enabledAccounts with title "Select Account" with prompt "Select the account from which to copy a link of the last sent message..." default items (item 1 of _enabledAccounts))
 
	-- Quit script if the user selected "cancel"
	if _selectedAccount is false then
		return
	end if
	set _selectedAccountName to _selectedAccount as string
 
	-- Get the "last" message of the Sent mailbox of the selected account
	set _msg to first message of mailbox "Sent" of account _selectedAccountName
 
	-- Get various properties of the message
	set _date to _msg's date sent
 
	try
		set _recipient to name of first recipient of _msg
		set _test to _recipient
	on error
		-- if the Recipient's name property was blank, use the e-mail address instead
		set _recipient to address of first recipient of _msg
	end try
 
	set _sub to _msg's subject
	if _sub starts with "Re:" then
		-- Remove the "Re:" prefix from messages
		set _sub to text 5 through (length of _sub) of _sub
	end if
 
	set _msgid to _msg's message id
 
	-- Create the URL to the message
	set _msglnk to "message://%3C" & my urlencode(_msgid) & "%3E"
 
	-- Create the anchor text for the link
	set _anchorText to "Message sent " & _date & " to " & _recipient & " regarding '" & _sub & "'"
 
	-- Execute the external script to generate the RTF hyperlink on the clipboard
	do shell script "/bin/bash -c \"" & _script & " \\\"" & _anchorText & "\\\" \\\"" & _msglnk & "\\\"\""
end tell

It first prompts the user for which account to use based on the list of active accounts. Then it gets the last message in the Sent mailbox of that account, gets various metadata properties, and sends the results to the bash shell script. The shell script comes from Brett; it creates the RTF snippet and pipes it into ‘pbcopy‘ to put it on the clipboard:

#!/bin/bash
# Places a rich text link on the clipboard
# usage: rtflink.sh "Title of link" "URL to link to"
#
# This will paste *nothing* into applications that don't recognize rich text
 
echo "{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf949\cocoasubrtf270
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
{\field{\*\fldinst{HYPERLINK \"$2\"}}{\fldrslt 
\f0\fs24 \cf0 $1}}}" | pbcopy -Prefer rtf

The end result is a hyperlink with an anchor that looks something like:

    Message sent Thursday, May 15, 2008 8:36:33 AM to Jane Partner regarding 'Can you pick up milk?'

…waiting on the clipboard to be pasted into an action note. With that bound to a keyboard trigger via QuickSilver, copying a link to a message is now a simple matter of keystrokes.

If you are interested, you can download the “Copy last sent message as RTF link” AppleScript bundle and try it yourself. Let me know what you think.

Update 20080516T1219 : I had to modify the part of the code that gets the recipient name or (for recipients without name parts) the e-mail address. The downloaded version has been updated.

Update 20110405T1946 : The script has been improved! See this thread on the Omni Group forums for the update. Thanks to whpalmer4 for the modifications.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/triggers on January 28th, 2011.

This one goes out to all of the MacOS X users out there. (For the rest of you, why aren’t you switching?) Perhaps you have seen PocketMod — the origami-like manipulation of an 8 1/2″ by 11″ piece of paper into an 8-page booklet.

Example PocketMod, courtesy of the Boston Globe.

Touted as a way to “get back to the basics” using analog media over digital media, it is a scheme by which you can transform pages of text into a pocket-sized form for carrying around. Many use it as a way to synchronize their digital to-do lists with the analog world, while others use it document shortcuts and cheat-sheets in a convenient form.

I’m migrating from Thinking Rock to iGTD as my Getting Things Done tool-of-choice. One of the things I’m missing about Thinking Rock is its built-in ability to create PocketMods for the actions in the GTD system. The only real easy way to create the PocketMod format was via a Flash applet or a Windows application. Some have set up shell scripts or worked with other programs, but I was looking for something as simple as the MacOS X print dialog box. And with a little bit of Automator, Java, and shell scripting, it is possible!

Step 1: Get the “Multivalent” PDF Manipulation Toolkit

Step 2: Create the Automator Action

In the ‘Run Shell Script’ action, change “Pass input” to “as arguments” then replace “cat” in the command box with this (ignoring any line breaks that may appear here — this text should be entered without line breaks):

cat "$1" > /tmp/temp$$.pdf && java -classpath [location]/Multivalent20060102.jar tool.pdf.Impose -dim 2x4 -layout "1l,2r,8l,3r,7l,4r,6l,5r" -paper letter -verbose /tmp/temp$$.pdf 2> /tmp/temp$$.err && open /tmp/temp$$-up.pdf

Replace [location] with the complete file path where you downloaded the Multivalent20060102.jar file. The final results should look something like this:

Now save this as “PocketModMac” in either the “/Library/PDF Services” directory (to make it available to all users of your machine) or to “Library/PDF Services” in your home directory for just you.

Step 3: Using PocketModMac

After a few seconds, the Preview application will open up with the PocketMod-ed document. Print this document as you would to any printer, then follow the directions for folding and cutting the page to create your booklet.

Troubleshooting and Known Issues

This isn’t necessarily a very nice solution because it leaves files laying around in the /private/tmp directory after it is done. The /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily maintenance script will clean them out automatically after three days, but still — it is somewhat sloppy to leave them around.