![]() ![]() In this post, I want to show you how to quick capture on your Mac using a great little program called “nvALT”. It would also have some mechanism to allow for random browsing.Last week, I introduced you to the importance of capture and how it relates specifically to the GTD methodology (although the concept of quick capture is really universal and can be applied to any productivity system you choose to employ, including the Agile Results) methodology we’ve blogged about before. My ideal system would handle this very large set of data with grace, and make it easy and pleasurable to search and peruse by tag, content, or source. I'm not averse to spending money on this either. That said, I'm not averse to a set-up that requires a large initial time commitment. Buying a cheap printer and putting everything on 5x8 cards could work too, but again, huge initial set-up time. The resulting objects would be extremely delightful, and having a physical copy is good practice in terms of long-term accessibility, but the initial set-up would be a huge, time-consuming undertaking. ![]() I've also thought about actually printing up my collection as a private series of self-published books. I've thought about starting a private personal wiki, but am intimated by the technical side of setting it up, as I have little patience for any kind of coding nowadays. If I do buy a program or subscribe to a service, it would need to have robust and stable backup/ export options for the long-term stability of my data. I'm not adverse to buying a program or subscribing to a service to help me manage all this data, but I need to be certain that no matter what companies or programs come and go, or whatever evolutions in technology occur, my collection will be fully accessible decades from now. This is also why I've always been resistant to something like Evernote, or putting everything into an online blog (privacy is also a concern there).Ĭurrently, I am dependent on simplenote, but if they shut down tomorrow, I'd still have everything I've collected in plain text. This has happened to several people who've asked similar questions here in the past. I am extremely resistant to the thought of adding all my collection to some proprietary app, only to have the company that owns it shut down or change their business model at some point in the future. Still, as my collection grows, this set-up's failures in terms of searchability, interconnectedness, and serendipity have only grown more acute, and have sent me looking for new options.Ī complication in my search is that long-term accessibility of my collection is a major priority. Making a practice in recent years to add tags to each new fragment and dividing my category notes into smaller and smaller sets has helped somewhat. More and more, it seems like the stuff I collect just disappears into my archives, never to be seen again. This system has worked pretty well in most regards for many years now, but as my collection has grown into several hundreds of thousands of words, navigation has become increasingly creaky and cumbersome, with nvALT crashing on the regular. ![]() I use nvALT for Mac and the simplenote iOS app to interact with my collection. These notes are synchronized via simplenote, and backed up regularly in a variety of locations as plain text files. The pieces in my collection, which I also call 'fragments', run from a sentence to several paragraphs, or the length of a short article.Ĭurrently, my collection exists in the format of plain text notes organized into several dozen categories (examples: quotes_general_a-c, quotes_nonfiction_, quotes_fiction_, ephemera, textposts, etc.) which are then organized alphabetically or chronologically within that note category. ![]() For many years now, I've been a collector of words and quotes. ![]()
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