is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Nerds and tinkering go together like pizza and coke. In fact, it’s almost as though one cannot exist without the other. In the case of pizza and coke there’s no problem, but nerds and tinkering? Hoo boy.

Writings nerds are among the worst when it comes to tinkering. Whether it’s a new app to make opening their favorite app a third of a second faster, or a “distraction-free writing environment,” there’s always something new and shiny for a writing nerd to play with.

You spend hours, days, weeks trying app after app to find The Perfect Writing App. Finally you stumble across it – and it is beautiful. Black words on a sea of white. Or white words on a sea of black, if that’s more your style.

Only, you notice something strange. There are no words on your screen. Your screen is a sea of nothingness, devoid of any words. You sir, are an idiot staring at a blank screen. Instead of you know, writing, as a writer should do, you’ve spent your time searching for the ultimate writing tool.

Buying and trying apps can be useful, even fun. But you know what it isn’t? It isn’t writing. Writing is writing. Sit down at your keyboard, open up whatever writing app you happen to have on your computer, and type. This smart cat once said that words are found in a keyboard, and you just have to bang on it to make the words come out.

I think that is close to the truth, but not quite. The words, you see, are actually in your fingers. Not everyone’s fingers have good words on them, and even if your fingers do have good words, they won’t always be good. That’s OK, just so long as you start writing. Your fingers have a story to tell. Let them.

You can use any writing app you like, on any device you like.1 The specifics aren’t important. Writing is.

Don’t be an idiot staring at a blank screen, even if it’s the most beautiful blank screen you can imagine.

An idiot staring at a blank screen Part 2 is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Inspiration is fleeting. For days on end, I will be inspired to create things. Website designs, new ways to make websites do what I want them to do, words on a screen. Inspiration is a wonderful thing when you have it, because great pieces of work flow from you fingers with ease.

Sometimes, though. Sometimes, inspiration is a real bitch. She’s hiding from you, and you just can’t find her. You look in your text editor, but she isn’t there. You check on the Internet, but she’s not there. Twitter? Nope, she’s not there either. Coda? Nah, she’s not there, though you can hear her laughing in the distance.

Lately, inspiration has been that way to me. I can’t find her. I sit down to write, but my fingers have nothing to say. I start to dream up a new design, but it’s all foggy. I try to tweak some code to make it do something neat, but my fingers don’t know what to do.

Without inspiration, your fingers are just appendages. Sure, they’re still good for basic tasks. But they will not create things on their own. For that, they need inspiration, wherever she may be.

Inspiration is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

A man is only as good as his word. I have lived by these words my whole life, and I intend to continue doing so until my time on this earth passes. When a man gives his word, he must keep it at all costs. This is not negotiable.

How, then, does one reconcile ruthlessly meeting the obligations of his word with living as simple a life as possible? Easy. Do not make promises lightly. Think long and hard before agreeing to do something. Once you’ve given your word, it’s your obligation to follow through. Choose wisely.

A man’s word is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Vacation is probably the greatest thing that man has ever invented. I just got back from an absolutely amazing vacation. My family and I visited Miramar Beach, Florida. Miramar Beach is about 20 minutes from Destin, which you may have actually heard of.

Driven straight, it’s about 13 hours from our home in San Antonio to our destination. With stops, it turned out to be right about 16 hours each way. Let’s just say, that’s a lot of time to spend in a Mini Cooper. With three other people and enough luggage for a week.

Packing light

With the aforementioned four people in a tiny car, packing light isn’t just a nice thing to do, it’s absolutely necessity. Somehow we managed to fit everything we needed into a suitcase that just barely fit in the boot [1], with a few extra things behind the front seats. If you’re a serial over-packer, one long trip in a Mini will fix that in a hurry.

Gadgets on the trip

I no longer have a notebook computer, having dropped it in favor of an iPad 2. My plan for this trip was to bring my iPad to handle any work that just couldn’t wait until after my vacation. At the very last minute, I opted to ditch the iPad too. That’s right, I went on a seven day trip with an iPhone as my only computer.

And I survived.

Indeed, I often left the iPhone in the hotel room when we went out. It served as a camera more than any other function, but my wife’s DSLR was doing the heavy lifting in that department anyway. Fortunately none of my websites exploded on my trip, or patching things up may have been touchy. The lack of reasonable WiFi would have further complicated things.[2]

A week without gadgets was… nice

One week without the distraction of shiny gadgets was pretty great. I was able to enjoy the company of my family without distractions constantly pulling me in different directions. The lack of having to work was the biggest relief, of course. If I didn’t have to work for a living, I could see myself having more gadget-free time. The gadgets do help with work, though.

Beautiful

Again and again, I caught myself thinking how beautiful Miramar Beach is. Pure white sand, crystal-clear water, fish swimming by as you’re playing in the ocean. When viewed from afar, the water is a gorgeous green color… that’s why they call it the Emerald Coast.

Did you really think I wasn’t going to include at least one picture?

This is the view at sunset from our balcony. This shot was one of the few taken with my iPhone. Stunning, isn’t it?

Vacation is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Perhaps by now you’ve seen the quick video I posted to twitter. In case you haven’t, take a quick look:

Your eyes haven’t gone bad; I did replace Things with Omnifocus. I, staunch supporter of Things, opposer of Omnifocus. I am now, officially, one of the Cool Kids. I even got my shirt in the mail.

Why the switch?
When I replaced my MacBook Pro with an iPad 2, the writing was pretty much on the wall. The first iPad app I purchased was Things, and the trouble began immediately. Don’t get me wrong – the Things iPad app is excellent. So is Things for Mac, and Things for iPhone. Individually they are all gorgeous, well-crafted apps that get the job done. However, keeping a Things database in sync between a Mac, iPhone, and iPad was at best frustrating, and at worst bordering on impossible. See, there’s that whole lack of OTA (over the air) sync thing. Turns out, it really is a Big Deal.

The Things Sync Dance
In the morning, I like to go over my tasks for the day on my iPad. Setting up the day, marking the important tasks, adding new tasks, rescheduling things, whatever. Now, my iPad doesn’t go with me when I go to work – that’s my iPhone’s job. The trick is getting my changes from the iPad all the way to my iPhone. The Things Sync Dance, as I’ve come to call it, goes something like this:

Make changes on iPad
Exit iPad app
Re-open iPad app to initiate sync with Mac.
Wait for Sync to complete.
Exit iPad app.
Open Things app on iPhone.
Wait for it to sync.
Go to work.

As you can imagine, this gets extremely tedious and annoying in a big hurry. And if I forget to perform the Sync Dance before leaving for the day? I’m left with a stale, out of date task list on my iPhone, with no solution.

Introducing a third device to keep in sync is the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s just not reasonable to keep these three devices in sync all the time… and that means I can’t always trust my task list.

So, about two weeks ago, I bit the bullet and purchased both the Omnifocus iPad and iPhone apps. Sixty dollars gone, just like that. I ran with the trial Mac app, because that was another $80 for a system I really wasn’t sure about. After all, we all know how I felt about Omnifocus before.

Three Things
Your task management system should have three important qualities:

1. It should be simple.
2. It should help you get stuff done.
3. It should be absolutely trustworthy. If you put something into the system, you need to be able to find it.

So, how does Omnifocus rate against these standards?
1. F. There is nothing simple about Omnifocus. The iPhone app is much simpler than the Mac OS app, and the iPad app simpler still… but the overall system is far from simple. It takes quite a bit of time investment to learn the app, which I’ve already begun to put it. I’m only scratching the surface at this point.

2. A+. With the high level of customization available, and especially the Next Actions perspective I set up, Omnifocus is great and telling you what you need to do.

3. A+. The seamless (and free, using Omnigroup’s server) OTA sync means you *always* have your most current task list with you. That’s true no matter which device you’re using, and no matter where you are. The same cannot be said for Things at all.

Notes
Omnifocus for Mac treats notes like a red headed step child. I have to hit an obscure keyboard shortcut to even see if there are any notes. When I click on a task that contains notes, they should expand automatically. I put the notes there for a reason, after all.

Rating the apps
It’s been said a hundred times that the iPad app is the best of the Omnifocus bunch. My goodness. It’s the best iOS app I’ve ever used. Period. It’s absolutely fantastic. The attention to detail that went into this app is mind blowing. The Review function is excellent, and Forecast is amazingly useful.

The iPhone app is very good, but not yet great. You aren’t able to create shortcuts to custom Perspectives on the main screen, and there’s no Forecast tool. Supposedly this is in the works for the next major update.

The Mac app is… terrible. More specifically, it’s outdated. Clearly this app was designed in the distant past. It uses the Inspector, for crying out loud. Apparently that was a “thing” long before I ever started using a Mac, because I’d never heard of it. However, if you are willing to install a nice theme, play with the buttons, learn the keyboard shortcuts, and play nice with the Inspector… it’s usable. I purchased it, however unwillingly. I need to be able to capture tasks on my Mac quickly and easily.

Final Notes
Dishing out $140 for a brand new suite of task management apps is not my idea of a good time. I was happy with Things until the iPad ruined the experience. Waiting around for Cultured Code to finish developing Cloud Sync is not feasible, given their rate of development, which makes glaciers seem speedy.

Switching to Omnifocus solved this problem for me. Initially it was an extremely frustrating process, and I tried to learn the new apps quickly. Now that I have a “minimized” layout set up, and a great Next Actions Perspective… I am thoroughly enjoying the applications. The concept of Next Actions is something that Things doesn’t really do, despite containing a Next list. This Perspective helps me keep all of my many projects moving forward instead of being forgotten. In other words, it helps me get stuff done. That’s kinda the idea of this whole thing, isn’t it?

The great Omnifocus switch is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Social media. Social networking. Sharing. Buzzwords, the lot of them.

Apps have a way of progressing over time. Bugs are fixed, features are revised, features are added. This benefits everyone — who wouldn’t want to use better software?

The problem is knowing when to stop. How do you know if you have enough features? When does your application go too far, do too much, and cease to resemble its original self?

Evernote

Take Evernote. I’ve been an Evernote user for as long as I’ve had an iPhone. My usage of it has changed over time (I no longer store text notes in Evernote; now I use Notational Velocity) — but it’s been a great way for me to store different types of information.

Store information.

Storing information is what Evernote does. That’s what it was designed to do. That’s why it exists.

Sharing and Sharks

The latest version of Evernote for Windows has, as I like to say, jumped over a shark. (Yes, I know the correct saying is “jumped the shark,” but my way is better.) Now you can share your Evernote notes on Twitter and Facebook.

Evernote was never designed to be “social.” I don’t store things in Evernote so I can share them with others — I store them for my reference. Things like clips of web pages to reference later. Receipts. Things that are for me, and not the world at large.

I can’t help but think, what’s next? Will Bank of America add sharing buttons? I can picture it now, you’re looking at your bank statement online, and get prompted to “Share this purchase.” Does anyone really care that I spend too much on Apple flavored products?

Sharing buttons have their place. Their place is not in Evernote. And I won’t welcome them when they finally show up in the Mac version.

Evernote, sharing, and jumping over sharks is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Time management seems like a waste of time, until you run out of time.

Organizing seems like a waste of time, until you need something and can’t find it.

Getting rid of your extra stuff seems like a waste of time until you find yourself as the star of Hoarders.

Learning how to use a Mac seems like a waste of time, until you get your latest virus or spyware infection on your Windows computer.

All of the things I write about can seem like a waste of time. Unless, of course, you are actively in need of what I’m writing about. If that’s the case… somehow you find the time to care. It’s funny how that works.

Waste of Time is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

It’s been 30 days since I began my stress-free experiment. Well, drastically-reduced-stress experiment. See, that doesn’t really have the same ring to it though. I’m going to stick with stress-free.

Semantics aside, thirty days ago, I committed to drastically cutting stress for the upcoming month. Not under actual doctor’s orders, since I despise actually going to the doctor… but rather self-imposed doctor’s orders.

Whenever I would start to feel stress about anything – work, side projects, life in general… I would simply take a moment to breathe and relax. Worrying has never been the answer in the past, and it wouldn’t be the answer this time. So, how did my little experiment go?

It worked brilliantly.

My Things Today list disappeared faster than ever day after day. Tasks were getting completed, for once, faster than I could add new ones. I was getting things done better than ever, but without the stress usually associated with work.

Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t been some sort of model of Zen behavior. I slipped up from time to time, and fell off the wagon. But I was committed and got back on, and found a better way to work. A better way to live.

For the average person, easily 75% of the stress you deal with on a daily basis is useless. Absolutely useless. Worse than that, it’s self-inflicted. You are the one worrying. You are the one putting pressure on yourself. You.

Stop it.

Relax, get some work done, and don’t worry about it. You’ll be surprised how much you get done.

Stress Experiment is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.

Ben Brooks, the fantastic writer behind The Brooks Review, understands my thoughts on the pen. Ben has been using his particular pen since 1998 – that’s 12 years if my math skills haven’t failed me. Twelve years using a single pen – color me impressed.

As a tribute to this wonderful writing utensil, Ben wrote a post about it. Using the pen.

I Have This Pen – Brooks Review is a post from: The Simple Llama - where you can learn to live a simple life today.