Yojimbo for GTD lists
I have to say your use of Yojimbo as an everyday GTD tool is pretty impressive. Just the ambition to try and use it that way is impressive. I don’t really see that as the purpose of Yojimbo. (It’s really just considered an archival application.) The purpose of Yojimbo doesn't encompass making lists and notes and updating them frequently? Seriously? Yojimbo seems excellently suited to this task for me -- it's the part of my use of Yojimbo that I don't have any trouble at all with, in fact -- the part I'm wanting one layer of hierarchy for *is* the archival part, not the GTD part. GTD is essentially just list-keeping and filing. So is project planning. I need to be able to have up to maybe a dozen lists open at a time, and I need to be able to switch back and forth from lists of projects and my to-do lists as I add and delete items and comments from the lists. I find it easier to do this in a program like Yojimbo than in individual text files, because if it's eight or ten separate windows I'm constantly having to search for the window I want. I did go through a period when I was doing this in text files, keeping them their own folder and opening them all together in TextWrangler, which like Yojimbo gives me a list of all the files to one side so that I can easily switch to the one I want. If that was the extent of it, I'd still be using that method, but the difficulty there is that sometimes this process also triggers a thought that I want to add to a project's notes, and finding and opening up those other notes all the time is a small nuisance, and then the newly opened files are alphabetized in with the GTD files, which starts getting to be another small nuisance if I've opened several. When I was doing this in TextWrangler I was giving all my files prefixes so they'd sort by category in the alphabetical list, but still, in Yojimbo the notes for every one of my projects are quickly accessible by clicking on the folder for that project, and when I'm done added to the project notes, I switch back to the GTD lists by clicking on *that* folder. Scott Marley -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working correctly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dragging to a tag collection *should* assign all associated tags
What would happen if the tag collection had several tags associated with it? Would you assign all of the available tags to an item dragged to that collection? Absolutely. Why else would I be dragging it to that collection, if not because I wanted it to appear in that collection? -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working correctly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: More about how I use Yojimbo
Sounds like you need OmniFocus. I find it works perfectly with YJ - any detailed notes, saved documents I have relating to a task in YJ can be linked to from OF by pasting the item link as a note for the task making the two work pretty seamlessly together. T. On 6 May 2008, at 13:26, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I read and re-read your post. I find your system impressive but very confusing to me. Maybe I made things sound more complicated than they had to be by giving too many details. Basically, whether I'm doing a GTD review or I'm making plans for a particular project (which are two different things, though similar), I'm switching back and forth fairly rapidly among a lot of notes, maybe just three or four or five, maybe as many as a couple dozen, as I think of things to jot down. If you saw me working at this, you'd see me focused mostly on one note at a time, but frequently skipping to another note as I thought of a to-do item, or an idea to think about later, or an issue I need to be sure is cleared up by a certain time, or something I need to remember to speak with someone about. Then I skip back to whatever note I'm mostly focused on. The part I'm having trouble getting to work to my satisfaction is the archival part. I want to be able to put away my completed notes for a project, and yet be able to easily bring them up again as a group at some point in the future, maybe three months later, maybe two years later. But in the meantime I don't need to have them on the top level of my collections. I want to get them out of sight, without making them hard to bring up again. If I could put those folders into a superfolder, I could bring up a set of old project notes with two clicks, one on the Completed projects superfolder and one on the specific subfolder. And filing away a set of notes once a project is completed would be as easy as dragging the folder into the superfolder. I can't think of anything I can do with tags that isn't *more* work than this, not less. Somebody wrote that they didn't need hierarchy so much as just one higher level of collection in order to gather collections and tag collections into groups. That's my case exactly. I just want ONE folder that I can gather my less needed collections into so that my list stays short. (The reason David Allen recommends a simple A-to-Z filing system as part of the GTD method, it seems to me, is less about ease of retrieval and more about ease of filing. If you're in the middle of a productively heated bout of planning and you have to give every item even twenty or thirty seconds of thought and preparation before you can file it, you'll start putting things in a To be filed pile, so as not to break your flow of thought, instead of filing each item immediately. The point isn't to put thought into your filing system so that you can find things again easily; the point is to make the filing effortless so you'll do it for each item right away the very moment you generate it, and if that means that when you're retrieving it you have to look in a couple of wrong places first because you can't remember whether you filed something under Banana cream pie or Desserts or Recipes, big deal, it's nowhere near as big a drain on your system as it is to let a To be filed stack pile up. The fact is, whether you use tags liberally or not, the fear that you're going to lose a file forever is 99% illusion. The only way you're really likely to lose a file forever is if there's a software glitch or a hardware failure that destroys the file; if you stay backed up, the worst that's likely to happen is that it may take you three or four tries to find your file instead of one.) S -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's workingcorrectly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working correctly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Why I don't use tags -- I'm not a spatial thinker, I'm just lazy
You’re definitely not alone in your hesitance to use tags. David said this weekend that humans are spatial thinkers. Which is why stuffing things into an established hierarchy makes more sense than tags. While it’s true that - some - people are spatial thinkers, there are also people who are relational, oral, experiential, and a number of other types of thinkers. I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't feel to me like that's why I don't use tags. It's because they seem like a lot of extra typing for not enough benefit. If I give each file a title that makes sense to me, and I can search by keywords for files that I forgot where I put, then I don't find much further advantage to tagging. (To give a title, I imagine myself trying to find this file six months from now and ask myself what's the first word or phrase I'd look for it under, and I put that at the start of the title.) One thing that occurs to me, though, is that a lot of folks are talking about having separate items for things that I would be compiling into a single list instead. If I come across a review of a book I want to keep an eye out for, I don't make it a separate item and tag it something like book I might want; I add it to my list of books. The advantage is that the list is itself a single block of text that I can easily cut and paste into the notes of a phony contact, so that I can access it on my iPhone if I find myself in a used book store on the spur of the moment. In pre-iPhone days, I syncked these lists to my PDA. In either case, I find the information handier to use as a single list that I can scroll up and down through than as several dozen individual items. (Oh boy will I be happy when I can actually take a long text file from my desktop and get it ONTO my iPhone without this dumb kludge.) If I want to keep the review as well to read or refer to later, I save that, too, either in my To be read collection or in my big catch-all general reference folder. But that's separate from my list of books to keep an eye out for. Scott -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working correctly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: More about how I use Yojimbo
On 5/6/08 at 5:26 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (The reason David Allen recommends a simple A-to-Z filing system as part of the GTD method, it seems to me, is less about ease of retrieval and more about ease of filing. For me, this is where Yojimbo excels. With the current model, I don't need to give any thought to the filling system. Simply tag the item with something simple and let Yojimbo stick the item in the Library. If you're in the middle of a productively heated bout of planning and you have to give every item even twenty or thirty seconds of thought and preparation before you can file it, you'll start putting things in a To be filed pile, so as not to break your flow of thought, instead of filing each item immediately. The point isn't to put thought into your filing system so that you can find things again easily; the point is to make the filing effortless so you'll do it for each item right away the very moment you generate it, For me, this is exactly the issue with nested folders. I have to think about where an item should go which takes more thought than simply adding a one or two word tag to the item. and if that means that when you're retrieving it you have to look in a couple of wrong places first because you can't remember whether you filed something under Banana cream pie or Desserts or Recipes, big deal, it's nowhere near as big a drain on your system as it is to let a To be filed stack pile up. This is debatable. There is a time cost with either method, the time I spend looking for an item that I just don't recall where I put it versus the time going though a group of items to be filed and filing them. I think which costs more time for a given individual will depend on the individual. The fact is, whether you use tags liberally or not, the fear that you're going to lose a file forever is 99% illusion. The only way you're really likely to lose a file forever is if there's a software glitch or a hardware failure that destroys the file; if you stay backed up, the worst that's likely to happen is that it may take you three or four tries to find your file instead of one.) Depending on the size of your hard drive, the number of items you store etc, this could easily be more than three or four tries. Given a sufficiently large drive with a sufficient number of files, a misplaced item could be effectively lost. -- -- This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list yojimbo-talk@barebones.com. To unsubscribe, send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List archives: http://www.listsearch.com/yojimbotalk.lasso Have a feature request, or not sure if the software's working correctly? Please send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
