The Prince Of Swords

Over the weekend I spent some time trying organize all the stuff I have going on….again. My hipster has never left me but since I’m on a number of projects, my ToDo lists have gotten a little crazy. Luckily we’re using Basecamp for most of them so I can feel a solution coming.

Through the MacHeist thing a few months ago I upgraded to DevonThink Pro. It rocks but takes a little time to get used to. I’m using it as my supplemental brain. First, I “indexed” some of the key folders on my MacBook, like my Sites folder which houses all the source code and design documents for all the apps we’re writing. I also imported all my bookmarks and all the emails I’ve sent. I imported all the ebooks I have, although Devon couldn’t read my DRM’d copies of the ITIL books I’ve got. As I visit sites, I end up “capturing” a lot of interesting things. I imported an entire portal I setup years ago to put all my ideas, meeting notes, etc.
Overall this gives me a good start to my personal knowledge base. When I search for “Riva”, Devon gives me all the connected items I have, links to sites, diagrams I’ve done, papers I wrote, documents I’ve downloaded. It rocks! Here’s some stats:

• 10,724 Groups
• 18,974 HTML files
• 35,758 Text Files
• 10, 352 Images
• 12,352 Links
• 380 QuickTime movies
• 106, 257 Total records
• 39,930,853 Words (309,992 unique words)

The fact that I know that is kinda cool. The idea that out of 39M words, only 300K are unique, points out how much repetition there is in our language. Somebody should look into that.
This weekend I experimented with using DevonThink as my new GTD tool of record. To GTD, I started with a simple directory structure for In Box, Projects, @Home, and @MacBook. @ just means it is a context. In the Project group, I have all the projects I know of each in their own group. Within each group I then add an “outline” for each task. An outline is a snippet of text with a checkbox. Any record can be “labeled” which just turns them one of seven colors. I used orange to indicate “Waiting For” (which now that I write this gives me a better idea!).

So here’s the problem. I have 306 groups in “Projects”, meaning some projects have multiple sub-folders. Tasks for each project get buried in a hierarchy. As I add “tasks” to each related group, I don’t want to have to open up all these groups to see my tasks. The first step was classifying tasks. I just add “(N)” to a task to mean Next. So a task for a Project looks like “(N) Paper prototype dashboard”. If I’m waiting for something I use (W). Looking through some Applescripts that shipped with Devon, I was able to tweak them to suit my needs. I now have an Applescript that grabs all the items I marked with (N) and replicates them to a group named “(N)ext”. I attached the script to that group so every time I click it, it re-runs the search and re-populates the folder with my Next items. The feature that makes this possible in Devon is its ability to replicate an item, which is effectively a linked copy so any changes to a replicant flows back to the source and all other replicants. I then repeated the process for a “(W)aiting for” and “(S)omeday/Maybe” groups. I also created a script to rename an itemand append a (N), (S), or (W) to it. Ta-da! Problem almost solved.

Things to look into:

• Remember how I am adding (N), (W), etc to each task and then collecting those items into special “smart” groups? Now that I’m thinking about it, I can trigger the task based on their label which is easier to change than having to rename them manually or run the script for it.
• Basecamp has an API in Ruby. DevonThink Pro supports Applescript. There is a library ‘rb-appscript’ that lets you write Applescript in Ruby. Seems to me I should be able to use the Basecamp API to pull all the ToDo items from all my projects on Basecamp and import them directly into DevonThink.

Lots to do to get things done.