Change of Plan - Journalling

Following my previous post on journalling, I have (in a quite typical fashion) completely changed my mind!! I don't think this is a bad thing though and I think that systems and tools should be constantly reviewed to see if they are still the best option. Granted, this is a pretty quick change, even by my faddy standards!!

I was trying out iGTD at the same time as Scrivener and it was proving to be quite a useful tool, the interface was good and I invested some time in getting all of my inbox transferred into it. Something happened though and it appeared to reverted to a set of data that was a few days older and I had lost a considerable amount of tasks and thoughts.

I turned then to the trusty Merlin Mann at 43Folders and looked for a similar product and decided to try kinkless GTD (I like the look of OmniFocus but that isn't available yet). From what I can see OmniFocus and kinkless GTD are similar and the developers appear to be friendly by reading the blog posts. I'm guessing that as kinkless uses OmniOutliner as its engine, that there may be a path of upgrade.

The long and the short of it is that I figured I could also use OmniOutliner to record my weekly journal, so I've held back on the purchase of Scrivener for that reason. It is a good tool, but it didn't quite feel right in the end.

As an extention to this post I also took the GTD book back off the shelf and have started reading it again, just to polish the edges on technique!

Journalling Review

As you know I’ve had a few applications on trial. This post is about the apps I’ve looked at to do with journals. I chose to look at Notebook and Scrivener. From my PC days I was used to OneNote for journaling and Notebook kind of replaced that directly. It looked and felt very similar, but perhaps in a slightly cruder way. I thought I’d struck lucky and found a great tool, until I also tried Scrivener. This is a completely different tool and is geared towards writers. It can, I think, be used to document any kind of project. Its very adaptable and at first glance seems to satisfy my journaling needs for both work and blog topics in one area. The cork board is good to just take an overview of what is going on. After only a few days I found myself dropping the Notebook in favour of Scrivener.

Work journals are written (at the moment) on an index card per week, his seems to be sufficient at the moment and I can normally summarise what I’ve been working on in the whole week in the synopsis area.

Blogging topics can be allocated an index card as ideas appear and then developed as time goes on so that an archive is built up - as they are posted their status changes to DONE which can be seen from the corkboard overview.

Its a new way of working for me and is taking some getting used too, but I feel that I will be happier with this product.