A while back I wrote about different ways of capturing my thoughts in the moment to process later, GTD-style. As I mentioned then, this was dead simple in Palm OS because of an application called Slap, which provided a basic notepad and the ability to arbitrarily convert lines of text to appointments, contacts, tasks, etc. There is no such application for Windows Mobile, so I tried to figure out how to emulate it.
And the winner is: a text file. Yup, a simple ASCII text file that I’ve dumped into the Personal folder in My Documents and called !Notebook.txt.
Now the key is how I use it. I’ve created a shortcut directly to that file and put that shortcut in my Start Menu. Not in the Programs screen, but directly into the Start Menu itself. And because of the ! at the beginning of the name, it’s always sorted to the top, alphabetically. This puts it directly under Today in the Start Menu, as few taps away from any other app as possible.
But wait, there’s more.
I also have that shortcut mapped to a button, in my case the voice record button on my Mogul. So now it’s just a single button press away no matter what I’m doing.
Instead of using Word Mobile, which could take up to 2-4 seconds to load, I have PHM Notepad installed and associated with text files. That way when I open any text file, like this one, Notepad pops up just about instantly.
One of the features of PHM Notepad is defining the behavior of the OK button in the upper right corner. It can be set to close the app, smart minimize or the standard Windows Mobile OK behavior. I have it set to OK, which means that when I’m done typing in a thought, a simple press of either of the Mogul’s OK buttons or tapping the one on screen automatically saves my changes and closes the application. No prompts, no worries. It just goes away.
I use Touchpal as my default input method, which gives me the ability to quickly, easily and accurately enter text one handed on the go. I could also use the the Mogul’s thumbboard if the idea is a little more involved.
And lastly, because the file is in my My Documents folder, it gets synced to both my work and home desktops. And guess what? I have shortcuts on both PCs on the desktop to go right to it, making it just as easy to quickly jot something down when I’m at my desk.
Every so often, I go into the file and convert each item to a task, an appointment, a new text file/Word document as needed. But that’s not capture, that’s processing, and that’s a whole different post.
3 Comments
Jeff, first its good to see you posting again - I look forward to seeing more.
On “ubiquitous capture”, I meant to respond to your post back in December, but never got logged in. I have become big fan of two tools to get things into “bits”. The first is jott.com - I’m sure you’ve seen this. I have my jott account set up to send thoughts, to-do’s, events and just whatever off to my e-mail, Remember the Milk and Google Calendar (which is sync’ed with my desktop calendar and my phone). I’ve found Jott’s speech-to-text system to work well, even through my Okie accent. Sure, its at least partly handled by a human, but I really don’t care if someone in India knows I need to pick up something at Walgreens or the name of new restaurant I want to try.
The other tool I’ve got hooked on is the new beta version of Evernote. With its capability of being able to automatically sync notes across multiple platforms and on the web, your info really does become available just about anywhere. The web interface and search capabilities even work reasonably well in Blazer on my Treo. Plus, combine the ability of e-mailing information to your Evernote notebook with Jott’s voice to e-mailed text, and its become a slick powerful ubiquitous capture tool. You can really get quite a bit into a 30 second “jott” message. And once I get it into one of the digital destinations, I can then massage it or transfer it to another app as needed. But like you say, that’s processing not capture.
I’ve heard of Jott, but haven’t tried it yet. I really need to. But I’m just not voice-centric at all. I hardly even talk on my phone as a phone, much less use things like the voice-based search in Windows Live Search. (The one time I used that, it was pretty cool, tho)
I’m in the Evernote beta, but I haven’t downloaded the latest WM client. I need to get that up to date. I’m very impressed with Evernote overall. It’s not quite as flexible as OneNote, but they “get it” a lot better than Microsoft that people aren’t always at their PCs anymore. OneNote’s WM client is a joke, and they have no web-based version I’m aware of. Evernote seems to understand that you might want to enter AND retrieve data anytime, anywhere.
That said, I’ll probably still stick with a text file. When I explain my mobile GTD implementation, you’ll understand why.
RE: Using a text file for GTD-style ubiquitous capture on Windows Mobile
I’ve been doing something similar, but found that the delay in launching apps was a bit of an obstacle. I’ve been playing with a Today screen widget that gives you a text box for capturing text. This can then be appended to any previously nominated text file.
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this sorta thing.
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