The JOY of Text

Forgetting great ideas is the bane of my life. Whether it is loosing the fleeting fragments of a dream or forgetting to add a tube of tomato puree to the next shopping list I just hate it when important information goes missing.

Information is important. Backup is important. And while it is also crucial that I make sure I have my precious memories in the form of movies and photos backed up what’s even more important to me, as a thinker and writer, is that my ideas get captured safely.

Today the rather great minimalmac blogged about Ubiquitous capture, mentioning specifically his setup for plain text.

He starts by quoteing LifeHacker Australia

Ubiquitous capture — that is, the ability to snag any thought or idea any time and anywhere it happens to crop up — is a key component to nearly every productivity philosophy. You want to capture those fleeting ideas before they’re gone, and you don’t want to waste brain power obsessing over remembering it until you can write it down somewhere. Below, I’ll walk you through the best ubiquitous capture system I’ve ever encountered.

Minimalmac add’s his twopenneth:

Great writeup on how to use Simplenote as a hub to get your plain-text files available to you anywhere. This is pretty much the setup I roll with but, as you may have read in a recent interview, I take the added step of storing my .txt database in Dropbox. This gives me the added bonuses of deletion protection and versioning.

I could agree more. This is by far the best system I’ve discovered for capturing. Outside a paper and pen there really is no better way. I do still use a paper and pen occasionally (when I force myself to write away from distractions) but most of the rest of the time I’ll just capture straight into my iPhone.

Like Minimal Mac I use Simplenote, Notational Velocity and Dropbox. I’m pretty sure it’s a the securest safest, most accessible system I’ve ever used.

The round trip

On a Mac:

Write new notes in Notational Velocity
Notational Velocity syncs with Simplenote
There is no 3. All notes are saved atomically to Dropbox as you type.

On iPhone:

Write notes in Simplenote
Simplenote syncs

Loop back around

All notes are seamlessly saved in the cloud, with version control and backup. All notes, wherever created, @mac or @phone, are updated and synchronised immediately.

Job done!