Just found your substack while in the throes of organizational despair, and I want to thank you as a newly minted early career faculty member! I will be perusing the whole GTD set of articles since it seems a stepped up version of what I do already, although less effectively.
Regarding in-the-shower capture: I came across a waterproof writing pad on Amazon that has suction cups and attaches to the shower wall, also comes with its own pencil. I have used this frequently and feel it justifies its $7 cost very well!
Ha! Unfortunately that won't work because my wife is long gone by the time I hit the shower. Unless I start calling my Google Home "honey"... which might be a little weird.
Thanks, I enjoyed this! Looking forward to hearing about your processing flow since I think that is where I could use a tune up.
I wonder if you’ve experimented at all with some of the new note taking tools which support back links? I’ve been using Logseq for a while now and it has some nice features for quickly capturing in a way that is also easy to link to other ideas and process later on a different machine. Also supports audio messages which is handy.
Of course it’s always good to be wary of shininess of new fancy tools over the old faithful methods (like your handy post-its) but I’ve found this one to be a valuable tool in my toolbox. Some other useful features too for academics like Zotero integration and some nifty PDF viewer features.
I have - I'm using Obsidian right now and really liking it, mostly because it's very simple. It's mainly no more than a fancy wrapper around a directory of Markdown files. I think Logseq is similar. It was definitely a step up from my previous note-taking system which was, well, nothing. (I used to be a big Evernote user but for various reasons stopped using that tool some years ago.)
Obsidian isn't really part of my capture workflow, though, mainly because the post-it note + Keep + ToDoist setup is so habitual for me that I think it would mess me up to switch away from it. The exception would be that I keep a daily note open on Obsidian when I'm at the computer, and I rapid-log thoughts during the day; but if something is actionable I am more likely to put it in ToDoist straightaway than I am to log it in my daily note and *then* put it into ToDoist.
Just found your substack while in the throes of organizational despair, and I want to thank you as a newly minted early career faculty member! I will be perusing the whole GTD set of articles since it seems a stepped up version of what I do already, although less effectively.
Regarding in-the-shower capture: I came across a waterproof writing pad on Amazon that has suction cups and attaches to the shower wall, also comes with its own pencil. I have used this frequently and feel it justifies its $7 cost very well!
Hi. To capture ideas while in the shower, have you tried bellowing “Hey honey, please remind me to…”?
(Best I’ve got. Sorry.)
Ha! Unfortunately that won't work because my wife is long gone by the time I hit the shower. Unless I start calling my Google Home "honey"... which might be a little weird.
🤣
Thanks, I enjoyed this! Looking forward to hearing about your processing flow since I think that is where I could use a tune up.
I wonder if you’ve experimented at all with some of the new note taking tools which support back links? I’ve been using Logseq for a while now and it has some nice features for quickly capturing in a way that is also easy to link to other ideas and process later on a different machine. Also supports audio messages which is handy.
Of course it’s always good to be wary of shininess of new fancy tools over the old faithful methods (like your handy post-its) but I’ve found this one to be a valuable tool in my toolbox. Some other useful features too for academics like Zotero integration and some nifty PDF viewer features.
I have - I'm using Obsidian right now and really liking it, mostly because it's very simple. It's mainly no more than a fancy wrapper around a directory of Markdown files. I think Logseq is similar. It was definitely a step up from my previous note-taking system which was, well, nothing. (I used to be a big Evernote user but for various reasons stopped using that tool some years ago.)
Obsidian isn't really part of my capture workflow, though, mainly because the post-it note + Keep + ToDoist setup is so habitual for me that I think it would mess me up to switch away from it. The exception would be that I keep a daily note open on Obsidian when I'm at the computer, and I rapid-log thoughts during the day; but if something is actionable I am more likely to put it in ToDoist straightaway than I am to log it in my daily note and *then* put it into ToDoist.