I was very pleased with it. It has a tagging system, so that I could save web page addresses to it and assign whatever tag(s) I wanted. Plus, I could save receipts, quotes, text files, pdf files, and pretty much anything I wanted to, again assigning them to whatever tag(s) I wanted.

I loved it, and built up hundreds of items in it within a short time. Then, an update to the Mac OS came out, and I decided to upgrade (from Tiger to Leopard). The upgrade went “kinda okay,” but there was some slowness in startup that had not been there. And there were a few other quirks. So, I blamed it on software, and stopped using Yojimbo and a half dozen other tools.

It turned out that the problems were not at all related to Yojimbo (or any other regular software product), but I had gotten out of the habit of using it. Worse, in my debugging attempts, I deleted its data. Lots of good data gone forever. Bummer … makes me wish I had been smarter at debugging and doing backups.

Anyway, I was recently reading some of the entries at The Setup (lists software and hardware used by a variety of professionals), and noticed that notables John Gruber, Khoi Vinh, and John Siracusa sang praise for Yojimbo. Vinh notes that it’s his “main note keeper and idea vault” and that he uses it for drafting posts, and Gruber noted that he has over 4,600 items in it. Gruber has even written some AppleScripts for Yojimbo, one of which I tried out (creates Yojimbo bookmark of an item selected within NetNewsWire).

So, I am back to using it, and I am delighted with how it lets me organize. One of the things it does so much better than delicious, which I have used for about 3 years, is that I can just clip some text from a website and save it without having to bookmark the entire page. For example, here is me clipping some text (highlighted in blue) from a 37signals insight: [Click to enlarge]

I just select the desired text, CTRL+Click it, select Services, select New Note in Yojimbo from the services, and then assign whatever tag(s) I want to the new note. This is something I use a lot. I’m also moving a lot of my Kindle highlighted text to Yojimbo by taking the My Clippings.txt file and going through it using this technique. Note that this works for the Instapaper files that I read on Kindle as well as for the purchased books and as well as for my subscriptions (right now that’s limited to Wall Street Journal). Again, I can tag these items anyway I want to, putting similar items together, pretty much independent of source.

Another great thing: all the stored items are searchable, and the search mechanism works great for pinpointing the item(s) I am looking for.

I do have a lot of material built up within my delicious bookmarks that I’d like to import into Yojimbo. I haven’t found a for-sure way of doing this yet, although there is this Google Groups entry with a Ruby script that looks like it might do the trick. I have not tried it yet, because I haven’t fooled with Ruby at all (I know … shame on me, eh?). I think it would be nice if the Yojimbo developers would post useful scripts on their site. I’m sure there are a lot of useful scripts for it, but finding them is not always easy.

While I haven’t tried it yet, there is also an iPad version of Yojimbo. It synchs with the desktop version, but currently provides a read-only experience. Good to see the developers get their initial version out there, though.

Yojimbo is well-maintained, as is everything developed by Bare Bones Software. It’s currently at version 3.0

In hindsight, I wish I had been using this regularly for the whole time I’ve had my iMac: I’d be a lot more organized. I’m trying to get better about really using what I buy (I’ve owned LaunchBar for a year and am only now getting around to using it regularly … something I wish I’d done much sooner).

Anyway, I wanted fellow Mac folks to be aware of this software. I clearly like it, and, as noted above, some folks who are a lot smarter than me make good use of it, too.

Of course that post referred to the “final end” (what some call “the big chill”), but the principle of keeping the end in mind also applies to projects and goals. It is so important that David Allen, in his best-selling Getting Things Done, emphasizes the importance of specifying a Successful Outcome for each project (and goal). I think this is so important that I wanted to emphasize it. You may very well be aware of it, but needed a reminder to get you to do it more consistently. I know I’m not always consistent on it: it’s easy to not specify it for smaller projects, but sometimes those are the ones that benefit most from our specifying the successful outcome(s) we expect.

Just about any software will let you specify the outcomes you want, even if it’s just by giving you room to do it in the Notes for each project.

I also encourage you to write down the resistance you might face in achieving the goal or completing the project. Writing down any barriers you might have will help you anticipate how to deal with them. It’s important to consider any internal resistance you might have, too. For example, you might have a goal of obtaining a promotion but you might also internally resist it because you kinda fear the added responsibility it will bring, along with a potential change in friends and so on.

The point about writing down the resistance is something I learned long ago from Zig Ziglar, although I cannot now remember which book of his it was in. (It may have been in his How to Get What You Want.)

Your thoughts?

Screw productivity and productivity products, I win with sheer will ….I know I am dumb

In other words, he is saying he will not whittle away his life reading productivity blogs and books, but will overcome the resistance of getting things done by sheer will power.

Good old-fashioned will power can be very effective. Seems to me it’s in short supply, though, as people look for easy answers. For many things, there are no easy answers, and will power is the only way to work through the resistance.

• Aaron Wall, in his Why do a fade in a web page, makes some good points about branding. This is a term that has been popular in social media for a long while, and one that I have detested because it points out that I am a brand (as are you), even though I like to think of myself as a person. While I have disliked the term, because it seems to me to sell humans short, I am finally coming to understand its importance and what it means. If you haven’t tried thinking of yourself as a brand, doing so is a good exercise.
• GTD Times has an article entitled A day in the life of Fred. It’s a short testimonial from a guy who “gets GTD.” Emphasizes, among other things, the value of a good weekly review.
• Alex King talks about his difficulties in syncing contacts across multiple computers and a BlackBerry, and why he has decided to use MobileMe.

Via Twitter, Jason Fried of 37signals points out that he uses a tea that has theanine, because it helps him focus:

@kadavy Nope, it helps me focus. The theanine works with caffeine to help you focus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine

I’m certainly going to check this out, as focus seems to become more difficult as we are subjected to so much information.

In his comment, Andrew mentions Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. He gives a great summary of its features, and it was enough to convince me to purchase the app. I look forward to putting it to use. Note that it is not only useful, it is also budget-friendly: when I downloaded it, it was only $3.99.

• Putting a barrier between you and your weaknesses, uses a personal case study to show one way to address your weaknesses head-on
• Chris Anderson’s book “Free” available for Kindle for Free for a week, a heads-up. If you have a Kindle, you’ll want to grab this book before it costs money.
• The importance of good passwords, uses the example of Twitter confidential document theft to emphasize an important point.
• e-books from The Simple Dollar
• GTD and Covey implementation via “Things” [Mac and iPhone], my write-up on my initial experimentation with the Things app. By the way, I am leaning more and more toward purchasing this and making it my task management system.
• Google Apps (Premier) now syncs with Outlook Mail, Calendar, and Contacts, an important new development in the competition between Google and Microsoft.
• Continuing developments in advancing our evolution, a look at a couple of developments that are making it all the more likely for us to control our own evolution. It is starting to seem plausible that we could evolve more in the 50 years than we have in the past 150,000 years.
• Microsoft Office 2010 rollout has rough start, but be patient, this is a heads-up on Microsoft’s Office 2010, which, among other things, will compete directly with Google’s Premier Apps. I think articles like this are important because competition is important: it helps ensure we consumers get better products and choices.
• Making time to THINK, in which I emphasize the importance of dedicating time to the important job of Thinking.

While I hope these articles are useful as they are, you can further their value by adding your insights in the comments.

This is a huge enticement for me. I’ve been using the standard edition of Google apps for a long while and hugely benefit from them. To have this full-fledged syncing ability added really makes the premier edition appealing.

From the Google Overview Document, we have:

Overview
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is a plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007 that synchronizes email, calendar, and contacts data with Google Apps. It provides access to Global Address List data and enables users to schedule meetings by looking up when attendees are free or busy. It also includes a simple, two-click migration utility which enables users to easily copy their data from a previous Outlook data source, such as Microsoft Exchange servers.

IMAP users will notice a significant performance improvement with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which includes a high-performance synchronizer built upon MAPI, a low-level interface to Microsoft Outlook. It also uses an efficient email synchronization
protocol, originally used in offline Gmail. Users can further optimize Outlook performance by specifying the size of the local copy of their Gmail mailbox.

Key Features
Email, calendar, and contact sync Synchronize all Outlook fields in both directions, keeping email, calendar, and contact data up-to-date between Outlook and Google Apps. Google Apps Sync leverages a Google-native email protocol to provide high performance in low-bandwidth environments and access to Gmail even while offline.

The calendar-sync utility has existed for some time, and I mentioned it recently in a post entitled gluing together Outlook, Gcal/Contacts, Tasks, iPhone, and more. The expansion to include mail and contacts is likely to send a good bit of business to the Google folks.

[Source : GigaOM]

By the time I had read only about 20 pages, I felt like my $10 had already been paid back: in discussing eliminating the non-essential from our task lists, Leo noted that we should ask questions like the following for each task:

• Will this have an impact that will last beyond this week or this month?
• How will this further a long-term goal of mine?

When I read this, I was embarrassed that I had gotten away from asking myself these sorts of questions. When I was working, I regularly used questions like this in going through my tasks. But, now that I have been retired for over 2 years, I have gotten into the mode of just doing what I want to do, when I want to do it. That may sound like fun, and a certain amount of it is, and I do deserve to be at the point where I can do it. But, too much of it is not good for me or for anyone.

Anyway, other things from the book which I found helpful were:

• Identify 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) for each day, and ensure you complete them. Ideally one of the tasks should relate to one of your goals.
• Create new habits. If you need to feel more peaceful, for example, create a habit in which you wake up 15 minutes earlier each morning and you give that time totally to yourself to gain a sense of peacefulness (via meditation or whatever means works for you).
• Make the best use of the power of focus: for those important tasks you need to complete, dedicate focused time to them, ignoring email and other distractors.
• The section on motivation (getting motivated and “remotivated”) has a lot of good tips.

But, there were some downsides to the book, too:

• It has far too much repetition.
• Many of the techniques simply would not work in Corporate America. For example, Leo insists on limiting yourself to 3 open projects and not doing any other projects until those are complete. Many has been the time when I’ve gone in at 6:30 am, worked on 3 projects by 7:30 am, and was at the point where those projects could not be completed until I heard back from others … I assure you I did not set around the rest of the day, nor could anyone in the “real world.”
• One of Leo’s recommendations is to not schedule any appointments. This is another example of him preaching something that just doesn’t work in Corporate America. Furthermore, it is disrespectful of the time of other people to not plan the time you spend with them.
• The recommendation to reduce email to a few times a day just will not work for a lot of people. In many professions, you never know when you’re going to get an urgent email, so you have to stay on top of it.
• A couple of the book’s recommendations are just plain nonsensical: His recommendation to pay bills as soon as they arrive (rather than when due) is not good cash-flow management, and will cheat you out of some interest income. And his recommendation to “ignore other drivers” when driving is guaranteed to reduce your life span in many cities, mine included.

In general, it seems to me that Leo comes across as too dogmatic. His principles of simplicity and mindfulness are sound, though, and one should try to focus on the “why” he is making a recommendation instead of on the “how” of the recommendation.

For example, while I have noted that many people must stay on top of their email, as a matter of corporate survival, I have seen too many people who could not even enjoy a dinner with friends because of their perceived need to check email every five minutes. While they sure couldn’t cut back to twice a day, these people would be better off if they could cut some slack on the email, especially in the company of friends and family.

Similarly, his principle of “limitation” is good, if you keep it in the right perspective. One has to keep in mind that the real objective is to be effective, not to follow dogma.

Should you buy this book?

As I noted earlier, I got my money’s worth out of this book while early into reading it. But, in reading all the way through it, I also recognized that the book is not for everyone. I think the best way for you to know if it is for you or not is to check out Leo’s Zen Habits site and see what you think of the material. The book is based on material from the website, so you can get a good indication from his blog whether the book will serve you.

A theme that runs through the book is mindfulness, which we have discussed before. If you already know that you really are just looking to be more mindful, there might be better resources for you on this. Some of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s material, such as his Wherever You Go, There You Are, might be a better book for you, because he has done research in this area for many years. Or, maybe you just want to grab both books.

You might also have noticed that it is easy to add work that isn’t worth doing. Something pops into your head and you write it down. It’s good that you write it down, of course: it keeps you from losing the thought. But, if it turns out to be something that’s not worth doing, are you disciplined enough in your weekly reviews to cull it out of your lists?

I’ve found that, for me, it’s easy to get into a sort of “automated weekly review,” where I blitz through my list of Someday and Maybe items and say “Yeah, I might do that someday.” Doing this sort of “brainless” review winds up leaving actions in my lists which really do not belong there. That contributes to making the lists long, which contributes to me doing a brainless/automated review of them instead of a thoughtful one.

So, what are some ways to cull the lists?

• A key one is to ask “Is this item unimportant and non-urgent, and, if so, is there any reason to keep it?”
• Another question to ask: “Is this something I will do whether it is on a list or not?”

As an example for the second bullet, two items I deleted from my lists this weekend were “clean carpet” and “cut grass.” I will do these items when they need to be done, whether they are on my task list or not. For me, it makes no sense to look at those items every week when they are not relevant every week and when I know I’ll do them when the time comes. (It especially makes no sense to look at “cut grass” every week when it is Winter.)

My examples of what I culled may be ones that you would want to keep on your lists to remind you to schedule time for the activities. My life is not so busy that I need to do that, but yours may be.

Regardless, the point is that you may be carrying some items on your task lists that probably do not belong there. If you are like me, you will feel better when you clean them up.

I used such a file for several years. It evolved from my use of a daily planner, which I used for recording events and thoughts as well as for planning. Then, when I got my first Palm handheld, I started keeping notes on it. There was a program, whose name I cannot recall, that let me convert Palm notes to text files on a PC. Modifications to either the PC note or the Palm note were kept in sync.

I liked this a lot. The Palm search functions were very fast and I could always find my reference information quickly. And, as another aid to finding information, I began assigning tags to my entries: _FAM_ _BUS_ _MED_ _MAJOR_ etc. It was also great for a weekly review.

Then I got my first Pocket PC, and I migrated to using Microsoft Word files instead of text files. That works, of course, but as Matthew points out, you lose portability when going away from the simple text file format.

Anyway, this is something for you to consider. I find that it not only helps me keep up with information, it also helps me have more of a sense of peace, knowing that I’ve recorded information instead of just letting float around in my head. I wish I had not stopped using text files like this … there are a lot of things that have happened in the past few years that I wish I had written down. Hopefully, I won’t stop again.

Matthew has some good points on how to make the most of the text files, and I highly recommend a read of his article.

Related post: Using a How-To Directory