Five Rules For Using Google Docs for Outlining

How to use Google Docs for Rapid Thought Capture.

Everyone is always wishing for the perfect outlining tool. There isn’t one and everyone’s preferences (insane, petty, or whatever) drives the launch and design of thousands of outliner applications. But a cloud-based word processor can be abused in just such a way to make a decent outliner if you restrict your use of its features instead of relying on the bells and whistles of an application. If you like Markdown, look at this as being the in-between of WYSIWYG and just using plain-text.

Don’t waste your time making outlines and fiddling with styles while you’re thinking and brainstorming with these simple rules.

Rule #1: Never touch the mouse.

You see that thing to the side of your keyboard? It’s poison. Don’t touch it.

Just about everything you need to do for functional outlining can be done with your keyboard. If you need to do something with your mouse, chances are, you’re about to commit a thinking error involving styling your text. Change a font? Are you kidding? What are you doing? Does that font make your thought more pertinent? Of course not! Concentrate on your text first, and you’ll get your thinking done in less time.

You’ll be learning various keyboard shortcuts to apply when you need some semantic oomph, but the first one you’re not going to learn is TAB. Like this paragraph? You know how you get a paragraph? You hit enter, twice. Done.

If you think you can’t navigate your text without the mouse, well, you’re wrong. The keyboard has HOME, END, CURSOR and modifiers like CONTROL and SHIFT that do magical things with the cursor and your text. Learn them.

Rule #2: Never indent your text.

Don’t touch your TAB key. Indenting your text is just a different way of styling it. Not even for quotations.

Oh, I know, outlines are all about indenting. Screw it.  Once you fall into the text-indenting trap, you’ll fight with indents when and wherever you move your text around in your outline. You have a quotation? Well, use a fine keyboard invention called “quotation marks.” For example:

“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Respect your quotation marks. Use paragraphs. Stop arranging deck chairs fighting with indents when you can be writing your thoughts.

Rule #3: Write your headings first.

Fill in your thoughts after you use the headings to define their containers.

In the Google Docs hosted version of this document the table of contents is built exactly from the headings and provides you an excellent summary of what your document is about. Hey, look, you can even click on them to navigate inside your document.

Control-Alt-1 is Heading 1

Control-Alt-2 is Heading 2

Control-Alt-3 is Heading 3

(ARE YOU SEEING THE PATTERN?)

Control-Alt-6 is Heading 6.

You get six different sizes of headings. If you’re going deeper than that and require a smaller, 7th heading, you’re confused and you’re not organizing your material effectively to summarize your content.

Rule #4: Judiciously use use italics and bold.

There are a couple things you can do with text that is stylish from the keyboard. Don’t go crazy with it and reserve their use for selected tasks.

Reserve italics for emphasis and summary. Use bold for popping concepts out inside of your text when they’re not a needed heading. Don’t bother combining them or you’ll find yourself fighting with whether you intended to have bold italics or not and wondering if you mean to emphasis or describe at the same time. Maybe you can handle that, but in general don’t overload text like this if you can help it, it’s less work and simplifies writing.

Rule #5: Limit your blocks of text to what fits on your screen.

Where the headings are labeling, some selective italicized text summarizes, your textual meat should fit on screen.

You’re outlining, not writing a novel. Don’t write a novel between your headings. Make your point succinct.

The Worst Part of This Exercise

Is using the HTML exporter from Google Docs, which fantastically avoids using the HTML elements of I and B (or EM and STRONG) for representing italic and bold text. So if you’re going to live with the quirks of Google Docs, you should plan to stay within Google Docs.

Now, if only Evernote and WordPress had Control-Alt-# shortcuts for headings…

Don’t Be Under the Cloud (Part Ⅰ)

Using TaskWarrior for Project Management

I know they’re sexy. They’re beautiful. They’re everywhere: To-do list and project managers like Asana, Behance’s ActionMethod and Nirvana. [You can go on forever listing these, they're easy to make, easy to market and extremely competitive.]  If they’re free, eventually you’ll run into their limitations. I especially enjoyed PivotalTracker, but they since changed their business model and it was no longer useful to me (on my budget).  Lessons learned: Free + Online always means you’re going to be vulnerable to Internet, weather, or market conditions. Get off the cloud whenever it makes sense.

Enter TaskWarrior.

Taskwarrior (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always been a CLI-person, since learning UNIX back in the good ole’ days in the late ’80s.  There are just some things that are more reliable when you’re not fighting the latest GUI fashion of the day, whether it be in your web browser or your operating system.  I needed a CLI-task/project management system, something that wouldn’t require a web server to install or web browser to display. TaskWarrior (which I’ll abbreviate TW) fills that bill and I don’t have to be nagged to “upgrade” when I exceed a number of tasks or projects. I won’t regurgitate how you can use it here when there’s a very short 30-Second Tutorial and a Longer Tutorial already there to use. What I do want you to know about are the reporting features.

Shaving Milliseconds

Add:

alias tw=task

to your shell configuration and you’ll save a couple of keystrokes invoking TW.  You could use TW’s built-in “shell” command but since TW may-or-may-not have GNU Readline support built-in, it’s easer to edit and run from the shell. If you don’t make this alias, mentally replace tw with task in all of my following examples.

The Default Report and Other Reports

The default report is what is shown when you simply run tw– you’ll get a list of tasks ID, Project, Priority, Due-Date, Age, Active-Tasks, Urgency (a unique TW feature) and Description. This report is good enough to clue you into what you should be working on next and will highlight what you’re actively working on if you have started it. 

Urgency

Urgency is TW’s way of weighting tasks so they bubble up to the top of your heap. Tasks not assigned to projects aren’t as urgent as tasks that are and tasks with closer due-dates are more urgent than tasks without due-dates, and so on.  If you really want to nuance (or waste your time) urgency, you can also set priorities on your tasks.  I prefer to use wait:<duration> task-modifications to take the tasks out of my immediate horizon, giving myself permission to ignore a task, knowing that when the time comes, it will come back.

The first command you should know about is of course the report command. This tells you all the possibilities you have with TW:

• active shows you the tasks you have started.
• all shows you all the pending and completed tasks.
• blocked becomes useful when you start relating tasks to each other as being dependencies of other tasks—blocked tasks can’t be started until other tasks have been completed.
• burndown if you’re familiar with SCRUM project processes, is a view of how much left there is to a project, which can be useful for estimating completion dates.
• completed of course shows you what has been done.
• ghistory gives you a graphical bar-graph of Added, Computed and Deleted tasks. You can view it by month (the default) or annually by adding .annual to the end of the command. If you don’t want the bar graphs, use history instead.
• information is the complete laundry list of details about each task.
• list is just barely more verbose than next, but without showing Urgency.
• long will fill your terminal with task information including: ID, Project,  Priority, Added, Started, Due,      Recurring, Countdown to ready, Age, Dependencies, Tags and of course, its Description.
• ls shows the tasks by ID, Pri, Project and Description.
• minimal shows the tasks by ID, Project and Description and nothing else, it’s the same as ls without Priority.
• newest shows you the tasks you’ve added by their age.
• next is the default action when you run tw without any arguments, showing you the next actions.
• oldest is the opposite of newest and will instantly show you your greatest goals along with your worst procrastinations.
• overdue is exactly what you think it means.
• projects gives you the bird’s eye view of collections of tasks you have. It doesn’t show you the tasks, but it shows how many tasks of each priority there are in each project.
• ready appears to be the same as next.
• recurring is your life-hack to reminders of things that you have to do periodically. I use it to remind myself and track my Omega-3 supplements.
• summary gives you a feel-good progress bar view of your active projects.
• tags shows you your other task classifications other than project. You can use tags for GTD contexts or other project management concepts like tracking assignments to other people.
• unblocked shows you what’s ready to be worked on.
• waiting shows you the tasks that you have pushed into the future.

This just gives you some idea of what you can do with the reports—of course, read the tutorials so you can see how to use TW for adding, changing or removing tasks. If you have any CLI chops, I think you’ll enjoy having TaskWarrior available as a tool without having to resort to vim with a simple text file as your TODO list. Not that there is anything wrong with that…