GTD with Python & TextMate

I've recently been reading 43Folders, initially as a great resource for Mac "productivity" software (aka stuff on which to waste my time), but after reading more and more about Getting Things Done, I decided to get the book and see if I could sort my chaotic life out.

Well, I haven't got there yet, but I reckon it's improving.

Being a geek, though, I wasn't prepared to implement it with having some automated way of producing the various lists that it requires. I'm not going to go into loads of detail here about what the method entails, only to say that the basics consist of:

• capture all the stuff you have in your life in an Inbox (or inboxes, e.g. e-mail and paper)
• regularly process that stuff
• decide whether to the item you're processing now, defer it, or delegate it
• if you defer it, where does it live? Assign it a context in which it can be done, e.g. @Home, @Work, etc.

Various geek solutions have been proposed, using things like OmniOutliner, VimOutliner, etc, but something was lacking for me - it's probably the way I'm "interpreting" the GTD system (I haven't finished the book yet!), but I couldn't cope with having Next Actions in both Contexts and Projects lists - I couldn't persuade a tool to produce a Contexts list from the Projects lists. Obviously a bit of sed/awk/perl/grep trickery was in order.

Except... a bit of browsing brought me to this page. Which almost gave me the answer - automatic generating of action lists...

A little bit of tweaking later, and I have a script and some snippets which let me enter all my next actions in a single file : projects.txt, in the following format

    Project Title
    -------------

    [ ] @context: Task [Project Title]

for agenda items, then I have date and time fields too. Now, there is a bit of duplication (entering the project title twice), but a little bit of tweaking should sort that out too.

The TextMate snippets to create that are:

    [ ] @agenda: ${1:date} ${2:time} ${3:action} [${4:project}]
    [ ] @calls: ${1:action} [${2:project}]

And I assign a tab trigger of @c or @a, etc.

The ruby code to extract the data from the above into a context list is exactly the same as that on the web page I mentioned earlier. So, basically, none of this work is mine!

All plugged into GeekTool, and my next actions list appears on my desktop...

The best bit? It's all text-based, so it'll work anywhere, ready for the next time my Mac blows up...

Digital Cameras

A while ago I posted that I'd had a good experience using a digital SLR, which made me, at the time, feel I needed to take a shower.

Well, since then, I've gone out and point a digital SLR (Nikon), and haven't looked back. I've picked up my Mamiya twice, I think. Once to put it in its bag, the other to bring it in to the office to lend it to someone. Shame, because it's a beautiful camera.

I've shot around three thousand frames since I got the Nikon late last year, and here are some observations about shooting digital:

• You shoot more crap
• Digital sensor dynamic range is roughly equivalent to shooting slide film (i.e. the range in stops between black and white is roughly 5)
• Viewfinders this size are nigh on impossible to manual focus with
• All your mates get bored of the RAW vs JPG argument very quickly :-)

Markdown & Humane Text Service

It seems that I've been missing out doing clever stuff with my Mac. Most recently I've been reading 43 Folders, a site dedicated to "Getting Things Done", but largely, for me, a great resource of tips and tricks for "productivity toys" on the Mac.

Most recently, I've been introduced to:

• Markdown
• Humanetext Service

Now, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. At first. Mostly because I couldn't actually get the damn thing to work.

In order to get it to work, I followed the instructions for Humane Text Service, then:

• went to ~/Library/Services/HumaneText.service/Contents/Resources
• rm forward
• ln -s Markdown.pl forward

And, suddenly, everything worked.

The beauty of it all is that you can write plain English (with a few syntax quirks), and the whole thing is completely readable. In fact, this blog entry is being written in Markdown format and is totally readable. At least, as readable as anything else I write!

The beauty of it is that it plugs into any Mac app that supports services, so I can type away in Markdown inside a textarea in Safari or Firefox, then hit convert text->html ( Cmd-{ ), and voila, I have nicely formatted HTML. Now, for most applications, I don't really need it, but it does mean that I can easily write documents in plain english for any media...