Today’s gonna be a quickie since I can audibly hear a couple deadlines whooshing past me right this second.

How much do I love my readers? So much.

Mike Harris very kindly sent me a suggestion about having a look at Remind, a swell little Unix program for doing CLI stuff to give yourself, well, reminders. It’s really quite powerful, that.

Despite my initially flipping the bozo bit by asking for technical support about installing Remind, Mike responded with one of the most useful emails I’ve received in a year. So good, that I asked him to move a couple things around and turn it into a full-length guest feature for 43 Folders. So he did.

Many thanks, Mike. I'm still getting my head around a lot of this, but already see many uses for this. Fellow Unix noobs: this looks like a pretty good first project, eh?

Moleskine Cahier Extra Large Notebooks, MoleskineUS    

                Just received my first test shipment of the new Moleskine Cahier notebooks from Moleskine US. I’ll write a fuller review when I’ve had a chance to use them more, but here’s a few quick impressions.    

Dan Dickinson posts a great, intermediate Quicksilver tutorial; how are you using Quicksilver?

Our usual Friday skip through the meadow of Merlin's marginally-productive brain.

Follow-up to the email productivity post. Short overview of how I process my inbox.

One year delivered to your fetid little house for only $35/year (cheap). Order direct from O'Reilly to have your subscription start with Issue #1.

I love that Entourage lets you link  files to any item (task, contact, appointment, etc.). I use this feature all the time to point to text files on my Mac.

Why bother? Why not just use the built-in notes capability of Entourage? Ah, if you were a fan of text files you wouldn’t need to ask that, and if you were a fan of Quicksilver, the gears would already be clicking.

Among many features—as we all know by now—Quicksilver lets you append or prepend to any arbitrary text file without changing out of your current app. Once learned and ingrained, this will become one of your favorite things to do on the Mac, bar none; but Entourage doesn't currently support it. Still, this tip helps you get around it in a satisfying way—letting Entourage handle all the busy work, while your beloved text files do all the heavy lifting.

Bunch of guides and tips gleaned from the Interweb. Finally, you will learn to estimate how big your next church should be.

Wrote a little bagatelle on blogging for the Six Apart kids. Congrats to them and Mule for a beautiful re-launch.

There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

Deez Steeles: Getting Things Done as Marriage Counciling

This is a wonderful post, and it illustrates something I hear from people all the time—how they feel more tuned-in to their personal life once they find a way to climb out from underneath their pile of ephemeral crap, and, frankly, how they are finally able to pull their head out of their ass long enough to pay attention to the really important people in their life.

In my case, my positive outcome is that my marriage is strong, and my wife knows and feels like she is the #1 priority in my life.  So then I can identify the next physical thing I need to do in order to accomplish those goals: it might be buying flowers, or taking an evening to cook dinner and spoil her, or booking a little weekend getaway.  Now, my wife doesn’t really like the idea of being treated like a “project,” against which tasks are assigned.  But, I would say that I’m just using GTD as a tool to make sure that I am constantly reminded to take actions to make her a priority.  That can’t be bad.

That’s pretty cool. Nice Valentine’s Day message for you GTD fans (and a savvy reminder never to let your loved one know they’re a project).

Categories are a powerful tool for organizing any of the information you store in Entourage 2004—whether it’s email, contacts, appointments, or notes—but I think they really shine as a way to provide context for your task list. I use Categories almost synonymously with the idea of "contexts" that David Allen discusses in Getting Things Done—as a way to identify the location, conditions, tools, or focus needed to work on a given item. As I said the other day, I try to use my Categories to provide ready answers to the "How," "Where," and "When" of a given task as clearly and uniquely as is reasonable. You want to be analyzing and thinking about this stuff when you’re planning it, so you won’t have to process it again when it’s time to actually do it.

You know the drill--items that never or shouldn't find their way to a full post. Digital Chow Mein.

In which my affection for Markdown bleeds into the domain of longhand. Hilarity ensues.

Photo entry: what do you offer "As a reward" for your Moleskine?

My theory is that the secret code for most self-improvement systems—from Getting Things Done through Biofeedback and the Atkins diet—is not hard to break; any idea that helps you to become more self-aware can usually help you to reach a goal or affect a favorable solution. That’s pretty much the entire bag of doughnuts right there.

Self-improvement juju works not because of magic beans or the stones in your soup pot; it works because a smart “system” can become a satisfying cipher for framing a problem and making yourself think about solutions in an ordered way. Systems help you minimize certain kinds of feedback while amplifying others.

Also, when you’ve undertaken most any kind of program, there’s usually a built-in incentive to watch for change, monitor growth, and iterate small improvements (think: morning weigh-in). While I don’t doubt that some systems empirically work better than others, I suspect that success with any of them has much to do with how we each think, behave, and respond to our environment.

The recent volume of email, calls, and IMs about a single issue makes me think it’s time to state something publicly and explicitly: 43 Things is not related to 43 Folders in any way. Full stop.

hipster pda Originally uploaded by leff. “Yeah, so I went to school for computers. I do live online. And yet I have never found a task management solution that works better than this stack of 3x5 cards.” More fun pix available at the Hipster PDA tag on Flickr.

Short version

I’m pleased to announce that MoleskineUS is our new partner for Moleskine notebooks.

O'Reilly's Make: Magazine premieres with Danny O'Brien and my first "Life Hacks" column.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a round of remainders—good stuff I've wanted to mention that never found their way into a full post. Here's a few to chew on over the weekend.

I finally picked up an iSight camera from Amazon the other day. Not so much to share my meatbeard with my iChat buddies as to finally play with Delicious Library, an OS X app that lets you create a personal catalog of your books, CDs, DVDs, and games by either manually entering the info or, preferably, by just scanning their barcodes with an iSight. Library is a very pretty program, and I can see why it might appeal to collectors, but it didn’t immediately click for me until I hooked up the iSight and started scanning. Even then, I have to confess a few reservations.

First—no question—it’s just really fun to use. It’s satisfying to hold up a CD, hear the little “I got it” tone, followed by the robot voice reading back the info on your latest entry (which it pulls down automagically from Amazon.com). Once entered, catalog items can be modified, sorted, munged, and grouped however you like using an elegant bookshelf metaphor. You can also view related titles and do other stuff with your collection via Amazon info and links. Although, candidly, it’s a little cheesy that a $40 commercial product won’t let me change the Amazon Associates ID from theirs to my own (or that of a favorite charity, or what have you). That really should change in a future release.