Really big books of photographs are great, and one example of where I’d never want to replace them with a “reading device.”

Pretty sure this qualifies as a “minimalist” workstation.

The desk belonged to my grandfather and it’s beat up pretty bad. I like it, and am using it just like you see it.

An office from the around 1930. Pre-Mad Men. It belonged to the grandfather of my brother-in-law. Does this look like a place you could get stuff done in or what? Let’s see…

• Desk, check. Nice wood. Solid.
• Chair, check. Not terribly ergonomic, but serviceable
• Phone, check. No blinking lights or voicemail to worry about
• Pen, check. And a place to keep it
• Safe, check. I don’t really need a safe, but cool to have just in case
• Big-ass map on the wall. For keeping an eye on the invasion plans.

Now, where to I get me one of those desks?

I’m seeing a lot of articles around lately suggesting that failure is not only inevitable, but that it’s a good thing. That’s a load of crap.

An example from this today…

“Let’s start a company, let’s watch it fail, and then let’s start another one.”

My goodness, if you’re planning to just sit and watch it fail, perhaps you shouldn’t be starting a company in the first place.

I suppose what most of these folks mean is that we shouldn’t be afraid to fail. I get that, but that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying it’s good to fail. It isn’t. That’s why it’s called failure. “Don’t be afraid to fail” is good advice. “Fail early, fail often” is terrible advice.

Thomas Edison is supposed to have said (after creating many non-working light bulbs,) “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Who here thinks he wouldn’t have preferred getting it right the first time?

Please don’t encourage people to plan on failing early, or often. People are going to read it wrong and think that it’s okay to make half-assed attempts at everything and then hide behind the idea that it was simply an early failure.

Try really hard right from the start so that you won’t fail. If for some reason you do, try again. And learn from it of course, but don’t pretend failure was the plan all along.

Less than a year ago I decided that everything should live as plain text files in folders somewhere on a nearby drive. Things that weren’t text could be managed in other folders and found via Spotlight. DEVONthink crashed a few times so I threw away the whole system and started over.

I’m beginning to doubt myself. Again.

The arguments for keeping everything in text files vary, but usually involve things like future-proofing, portability, edit-ability, simpleness, and so on. I fall for them every time.

The future-proofing argument goes something like, “No matter what computer I decide to use in 20 years, I’ll still be able to read my files.” I like this argument, and I use a version of it when arguing in favor of film photography. But I don’t believe that I won’t be able to read my PDFs or RTF files in 20 years. Even fancy editors such as Scrivener and Apple’s Pages store plain text or RTF somewhere in their files’ bundles, so even though it might take a bit of effort, the text is all there.

Text files are nice, and I loathe things like Pages or Word, as they lend themselves to endless fiddling with layout rather than content, but a little bold or emphasized text is nice once in a while, no? To that end, I’m back on with the dream team of DEVONthink, Tinderbox, TextEdit and newcomer VoodooPad. I’ll bet you in 20 years, whatever software or computer I’m using, the stuff I put in those apps today will still be around and readable.

Where does this leave my new favorite combination Notational Velocity and Simplenote? They’re still very much in play as the best setup for quick capture and syncing between all devices.

I’ll sum up how this all goes together some other time, but for now, I’m happy with my complex, incompatible, propietary set of tools that help me get my work done in a seriously sophisticated way.

When the gentleman handed me several packages of old film negatives recently, he was handing me the original photographs. I can be fairly certain of this, since they are the negatives. I can pick them up, hold them up to the light and see the image made by light striking that precise piece of film 100 years ago. The effect is magic. It gave me goosebumps, knowing that so many years ago, some photo technician stood in the dark and pulled the same negatives out of their chemical bath, holding them to the light, much the same as I do now.

Each negative is medium format and a simple contact sheet is enough to get a usable print. Again, by simply passing light through film and soaking it in chemicals for a minute or two.

I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic when I think about how it will feel 100 years from now when all our cell phone photos are gone and our grandchildren can’t log in to Facebook to look at them. And even if they could, the “originals” would have been long lost. Not that there ever were any originals to begin with.

Having a shoebox full of prints or negatives is a treasure that we are going to miss one day.

My approach to Getting Things Done (GTD) is cyclical, and goes like this…

Phase One - Go all in.

I keep forgetting to do things. Stuff is not getting done. Time for some serious GTD. Time to bring out the big gun, OmniFocus. This is followed by 4 hours of brain dumps, project organization, and inbox cleanup. I create perspectives, set repeating tasks and basically prepare for war. Stuff gets done, dammit! This phase lasts for about two months.

Phase Two - Simplify

After a couple of months of religiously doing project reviews, capture, and inbox processing, I start to get bored with it. “Omnifocus is just too fussy and complicated,” I say. Thinking it’s the tool’s fault, I move everything over to Things. Things is so much cleaner and simpler! No more wasting time with perspectives, nested tasks, folders, contexts and all that nonsense. Spending less time on the “system” has gotta be good, right?

Phase Three - Going retro

Using Things is so simple that I become enamored with the idea of making the system even simpler. So simple in fact, that I don’t need some stinking computer program telling my how to run my life. I then move everything into one of those awesome Moleskine notebooks. Think of it, just a pen and paper! What could be easier? Plus, I probably need a new pen. No more worrying about syncing or futzing around with software. This is definitely all I need. Why I bothered with those silly other systems is a mystery.

Phase Four - Return to Phase One

I love my notebook, but it’s hard to capture everything. Writing by hand is work, so I don’t always bother. I then promptly start forgetting things. Or I accidentally leave the notebook at home. And copying unfinished tasks forward manually is such a pain. That’s what computers are for, right? Time to go all in, and I need something serious, so I install OmniFocus and get to work.

Repeat.

Speaking of This and That, I use both Atlassian’s JIRA and more recently Pivotal Tracker for issue/story management. Both are great, and I don’t want to give up either of them, but it’s always been sort of an either/or proposition. The good news is that this weekend Tracker released some new features, one of which is integration with JIRA. Issues created in JIRA can be viewed within Tracker and optionally added to an iteration or the “icebox.” You can read about it in more detail here. I’ve been playing with it today and it looks to be a great start. They’re still working on 2-way integration so that Features created in Tracker will also automatically be posted to JIRA. For now, it’s just JIRA->Tracker.

We use a single JIRA project per client. Same goes for Tracker, so this works out well. It’s early, but here’s what I’m doing so far…

1. Create filter in JIRA for all “Open” issues on a project that have been labeled “pivotal”
2. Add a new JIRA “Integration” to the Tracker project, entering the ID of the newly created JIRA filter.
3. View the new “JIRA” column in Tracker and simply drag and drop the issues to track into the icebox column.

Any issue dragged from the JIRA column into either the icebox or iteration columns is then displayed with an “e” overlayed on its icon, indicating that it’s linked to a JIRA issue. As the feature is moved through the Tracker workflow, all comments and transitions made in Tracker are instantly posted to JIRA.

At first glance, I think this will be a great way to collaborate around a collection of features using the strengths of both JIRA and Pivotal Tracker. Can’t wait for them to figure out how to get 2-way integration implemented.

Note that this new feature is only hours old. I’m looking forward to see what we can do with it

It occurred to me today that when there are two choices in any particular product category, I have a hard time choosing just one. In fact, I seldom end up completely in one camp or the other. If the choice is this or that, I choose both! Here are a few examples…

Scrivener and Ulysses

I rarely write more than a few paragraphs at a time, so I don’t even need a significant writing tool. And yet, I use both Scrivener and Ulysses. Love them both. Scrivener’s MultiMarkdown support is awesome, and it’s less tweaky than Ulysses. But Ulysses does the whole semantic writing thing so well, and can output things just about any way you like. So, it’s both for me.

Safari and Chrome

Can’t use Chrome until it works with 1Password, but I can almost guarantee that I’ll run it side by side with Safari eventually.

TextMate and BBEdit

I’ve been using BBEdit for a very long time. When TextMate was released I jumped ship right along with everyone else I knew. TextMate made editing code fun again. But its single character undo and completely feeble project handling and search keeps me in BBEdit for any significant text manipulation. So, for coding or writing it’s TextMate and for text mangling it’s BBEdit. They’re both terrific.

WriteRoom and OmmWriter

The first time I downloaded WriteRoom and fired it up I knew it was perfect for me. I’m just so easily distractible and WriteRoom goes to great lengths to help me stay focused. Love it. Recently I was introduced to OmmWriter, which is just weird. Love that too. So again, I use both, depending on my mood.

Things and TaskPaper

Things is terrific for managing and scheduling tasks. TaskPaper is lightweight and works great for making lists of stuff. Things is my GTD thing and TaskPaper is my jot-a-list-of-things-down app. Besides, I can always open a TaskPaper document in, say, BBedit, WriteRoom, TextMate or (oh hell just see above.)

Film and Digital

Why fight it? Digital is where it’s at. It’s quick, easy and there’s no film to buy. But film is just too great to forget. It’s fun to play with, it’s real (by real I mean physical) and it makes me feel like I’m making photographs instead of playing with a computer. Besides, film cameras are cheap. I say keep them both.

Books and Kindle

Books are awesome. They feel good, they smell good, and they last forever. You can share them, write on them, or level a wobbly table with them. I buy real books all the time. I also have a Kindle and love it more than any single electronic device I’ve tried. Instant access to just about anything I want to read, free wireless for eternity (whatever that ends up meaning) and all in one, small, lightweight device. I love having a choice.

Mac and PC

Don’t be silly. Everyone knows Windows is stupid.

Every 6 months or so I tend to throw out whatever “systems” I’m using and start fresh. It happened again this past weekend after I stood behind someone and watched him open up TextEdit and make a note in it. TextEdit! Can you believe it? What year is this? I kept watching and he just wrote what he needed to write and saved the file to a folder on his drive with an easy-to-remember name. Done.

I went about my day muttering things like “…but DEVONthink this,” and “…Yojimbo that,” and “…EverNote that other thing.” Then 4 things happened.

The first was that DEVONthink kept crashing while I was launching it. The bit of information I needed was in DEVONthink and I couldn’t get to it. Yes, the files are all somewhere on the filesystem, but that’s not how I find things.

The second event was this post by Douglass Barone which reminded me how cool Notational Velocity is and that it can now save its notes as, you guessed it, plain text files.

Third, I realized that I’d been writing tons of stuff in WriteRoom or the nifty OmmWriter, both of which are nice and simple text editors. Text only editors.

And finally, I (almost accidentally) used Spotlight to find something, and it was fast, easy, and accurate. I’d bailed on Spotlight years ago, disabled the keyboard shortcuts and moved on. I should’ve been paying attention. It actually works.

So these things started to add up. What if I kept everything in plain old text files? Oh what the hell, I spent most of the day exporting everything from DEVONthink and Yojimbo into text files. Then, using A Better Finder Rename (which is awesome), I named everything using a simple format: “YYMMDD-CODE My New Text File.txt” CODE can be a project name or shorthand for whatever I want. Doesn’t matter.

I then took everything and dropped it into an appropriately named “~Everything” folder in my DropBox folder. The ~Everything folder looks like this:

~Everything/
–Notes/ –Projects/ –Reference/

That’s now where nearly everything goes. In Projects I have sub-folders for each client or project, and within each of them is a folder called “Files and Assets” for things that aren’t just text files. Each day (or week or whatever) I’ll look through the notes in Notes and move things into either a project or reference folder. Everything is synched by Dropbox and the text files in Notes are also synched with Simpletext.ws so I can edit them with WriteRoom on the iPhone.

Not bad, and the coolest part is that I can use Notational Velocity as a sort of front end to all the files in the Notes folder. But I don’t have to. It’s just text. So that’s it, my entire system is now not much more than some folders with text files in them. They’ll always be there, readable, portable, and simple.

Update: told you I’d change my mind again: But what about all those text files?