October 2010
Productive document workflow
I’ve had a small new idea for a more productive workflow. Most of my work can be conveniently batched into projects. Every project tends to generate a few documents and versions of documents. Whenever faced with a new project, I make a new folder, which becomes a receptacle for files that are downloaded from email. This folder is also located under dropbox, so that the files are available on each computer that I work at. After a project is over, the folder can be moved out of dropbox and back into the appropriate place in my file archive.
It is also possible to place within the project folder other files with information about the project, and to label emails with parallel project name in my email system. Files that need to be shared while working on them can be placed in a Dropbox public folder.
One of the ways in which this system is preferable to the one I was using in that I would download files from email either into a holder directory or to my desktop, and work on documents in various places – sometimes from a folder on the desktop, sometimes in Google Docs.
Social network afterthoughts
Social networks have been for me an interesting experiment, but finally, I think I prefer keeping my thoughts to my blog. Perhaps if Facebook would have a setting to place information only on the profile page and not in the newsfeed, I might prefer that. And maybe occasionally, it could be appropriate to place a link to a blog post up on one of these networks. But I don’t really want to entrust anything to a network that regards me as a commodity. I’ve kept my facebook account in order that people can contact me. I’ve kept Twitter as a news service, after detaching myself from my followers (of whom there were never many). I’ve kept identi.ca because it’s open source, but I’ve never really liked that service. First because I never find anything interesting there, and second because all tweets (I forget what they call these on identi.ca) end up in the public feed. There should at least be an option.
Regarding this blog, I’ve done some careful SEO, i.e., set it to “noindex” so that Google won’t index and cache it. I’ve also removed the links from my blog to my personal name.
For anyone who really wants to follow this blog, there’s the RSS newsfeed, which I personally still prefer over Twitter and Facebook as my primary means for keeping up with web sites that interest me. On the ipod, I use a service called My6sense” which combine RSS and Twitter together.
FocusWriter – Gott Code
About FocusWriter
FocusWriter is a fullscreen, distraction-free word processor designed to immerse you as much as possible in your work. The program autosaves your progress, and reloads the last files you had open to make it easy to jump back in during your next writing session, and has many other features that make it such that only one thing matters: your writing.