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Doin' it on paper
ozhuner | May 23 2006
This one goes out to all of you who are keeping it together on paper, hipster, index cards or whatever. My question relates to living in a digital world while using pen and paper to track your tasks and projects. I'd like to know what your experience is like, given that so much of our information comes to us via email or the web. So much of the information related to (my) tasks comes in email, for example. Do you re-write information on your cards or in your pen and paper system, that originated in email? Do you find this a good thing mentally or a pain? If you do use paper and pen to manage your tasks, then do you also use an electronic system? Do you print out electronic stuff and add to it with pen and then enter hand-written tasks? Basically, I'm interested in knowing how people who work with paper and pen deal with their information that arrives electronically. Thanks in advance for your insights! 12 Comments
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 Berko, could you say a...Submitted by Berko on May 25, 2006 - 9:19am.
4ster wrote: Berko, could you say a bit more about how you get those Smart Folders to work? It sounds interesting. Yah, my site is down now, otherwise I would point you to the post I wrote about it. Anyway, I accomplish this with MailTags and Act-On. I have a dumb mailbox called "Incubate." Anything that needs to be tickled goes in there. MailTags is really all you need to get this going. Set a due date and move it to Incubate. I mark mine as unread too, so it's easier to see at a glance. I am starting to find this distracting and since I am pretty good about checking my Tickler in Mail, I think I may do away with the unread bit. Time will tell. In Act-On, however, I have three rules for common lengths of time that I need to incubate things: 1 week, 2 weeks, 30 days (there isn't a month setting). So, when I get a message that needs to incubate for 2 weeks, I press ` (backtick) and then "2" and it sets the MailTags due date to 14 days in the future, moves the message to Incubate and marks it as Unread. My Tickler Smart Mailbox has two simple rules: MailTags due date is within the next 1 days and MailTags due date is overdue (It would never happen, you know.) The Smart Mailbox displays messages that match either of the rules. Thus, it's not cluttered up with things that aren't yet relevant. When I do the thing, I make a note of the date I did it in the MailTags notes, unset the due date, and file it off in Archive. My Smart Mailboxes for Next Actions and Waiting On aren't anything special. I have dumb mailboxes on my .Mac IMAP account. When I mark something as "Waiting on" (Act-On `->w) or "Requires immediate action" (Act-On `->a) the message gets file in @waiting or @actions on my IMAP account. But I wanted to have all three together, so I just created a Smart Mailbox for those two folders and the only criterion for each is "Message is in $Folder." HTH. » POSTED IN:
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