On New Year’s Resolution or Simply Planning any New Project

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” 

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

Adopting a new year resolution, which many will do in the coming weeks, is no different than planning for any another project…ok maybe the former tends to have a built-in guilt component. In any case, a little planning goes a long way, so let’s talk about planning.

Planning is a promise you make with yourself about work you will be doing in the future, irrespective how far in time that future is. Any task you put down is a contract with yourself for your attention, time, energy, …

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Automating collection of To Dos from meeting notes using DevonThink, AppleScript and Things

For sometimes now, I went fully digital when attending meetings (one on one, research, scientific congress or even committee meetings). I adopted the iPad for that task just a few month after it came out on the market. There are multiple choices of apps out there for note taking. Apple Notes actually is probably the most simple, and quite efficient, one. Since I bring all of my meeting documents with me in DevonThink To Go or DTTG (see my e-office series to see how I make this work), I now take almost all of my meeting notes directly in DTTG. DTTG sync with DevonThink Pro Office (DTPO) edition on my Mac. I am looking forward for the new sync features of DTTG 2.0 but for now this works really fine.

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On starting a new project…

I design, plan, execute and complete projects on a regular basis for quite a number of years now. As a researcher, it is an integral part of the job. I often notice in starting grad students that the concept of project planning is not always well-developped (and doing a PhD certainly has some planning phases).

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Digital Office Part V: making it work!

So far, posts in this digital office series this blog have tackled the hardware selection and components, OSX and iOS software, and finally the inputs or “Inboxes”. In this post, I will try to illustrate how all the pieces come together and making it all work.

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