I get asked all the time how I can get so many things done. One of my favorite tools to help get things done is a text macro program on the Mac called TypeIt4Me.

Everyone who sits in front of a computer for extended periods of time or who answers a number of emails should have a text macro program. The idea behind a program like TypeIt4Me is that you type a short macro and it expands into a entire paragraph, letter, article template, etc.

So for example. For the Amateur Traveler I exchange email all the time with people about coming on the podcast. “What kind of questions do you ask?” is the most common query. My answer to that question is always basically the same. So in my email I type “atp-questions” and that expands to:

I do interviews by either phone or Skype (you need a computer and a headset). Generally an interview is about 30 minutes.

The kind of questions I usually ask
Why should someone go to XXX?
What were the highlights of your trip?
What should you see?
What do the guidebooks recommend that you think are a waste of time?
What do the guidebooks / tourists miss?
Where should you stay?
What should you eat?
How do you get around?
What side trips would you recommend?
What was the biggest surprise?

What I am looking for is travel information, but also personal travel stories that lend color commentary, that give us a flavor of a place.

If I want to mention press citations I type “atp-press” and it expands to:

—
•    1.5+ million travel podcast downloads in 2010
•    The Chicago Sun Times included the show in their list of 10 “Best travel sites”.
•    Oxford University uses the Amateur Traveler to teach English as a second language.
•    Men’s Journal says: “One of the 4 best adventure travel podcasts”
•    Best Life Magazine named the Amateur Traveler one of the 10 best podcasts on the internet.
•    Nominated for a People’s Choice Podcast Award in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
•    Popular Vote Winner for a Lonely Planet Blog Award 2009 in the Podcasting category
•    Named by tripbase.com as one of the 10 best looking/most accessible travel blogs on the internet
•    Named in a study as one of the “50 Most Influential Independent Travel Blogs”

I don’t have to type this yet again and as a bad typist and lousy speller I only have to proof-read my template once… or maybe twice.

I have macros for my site name, site url, email address, mailing address, a short bio, an Amateur Traveler episode post. The second time I need to type the same paragraph of information I make it into a macro instead.

There are other programs like Text Expander which have pretty much the similar functionality as TypeIt4Me. Both get good reviews, I use TypeIt4Me because it is the older program and I have used it for years.

I had a number of things that I needed to get done today. I had 2-3 podcasts to produce and a few blog posts I wanted to write. It was not my intention that this be a lazy Saturday. But while I still lay in bed I had the overwhelming desire to re-organize the apps on my iPhone. They have become disorganized over time and I had an idea for how to better organize them.

I like being organized, but sometimes the act of organization becomes a nice distraction from actually getting things done.

A Sloppy Desk

The Engineering VP at my first startup was a gentleman by the name of Shiraz Shivji. Shiraz had already had some great success in computers before I worked for him having already worked on early computers like the Atari ST and the Commodore 64. Shiraz had an interesting filing system that I have been known to mock. He threw things on his desk. When the piles got large enough that things fell on the floor he threw them away. How could someone be so productive and yet so disorganized I wondered. What I learned is that if he had something he really wanted to save he gave it to someone else to keep.

I started to understand the value of his filing system as things got very very busy at that company. It got to the point that I went from my organized filing system to opening up the bottom drawer in my filing cabinet and just throwing things in. The surprising thing to me is that I seldom opened the drawer back up to try and find a specific document and when I did it was often one of the last 3-4 I had chucked in there. My last in first out filing system was sufficient for the task.

Minimize

Over time my email filing system and electronic document systems have also simplified some. With the advent of better search on my computer it is often more convenient to search for information than filing it in some elaborate system. Similarly sometimes it is easier to search for specific information on the web rather than having a complicated bookmark system. I find with email that I can delete many emails that I receive immediately and trust that my trash on my email system does not get emptied for a month.
What is the minimum amount of organization that you and I need?

I find that I do need to have a calendar with appointments and reminders because I get to easily involved in my current task to remember when a meeting will start. I find it useful to have a to do list if for no other reason than crossing off things feels good. I find I need to put my car keys in one spot. I do not find that having my apps well organized is as life changing as I might have thought.

del.icio.us

The first change I have made is a return to del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a popular bookmarking tool that you are probably already using as was I but not for my main bookmarks. I use Safari on the Mac as my main browser in large part because of the hundreds of bookmarks that I have in the browser. I am experimenting with adding all me newest bookmarks to del.icio.us instead.

Advantages of del.icio.us :

• My bookmarks are now backed up on someone else’s hardware
• My bookmarks are now shareable
• My bookmarks become browser independent
• There are plugins for both Safari and Firefox to let me use my bookmarks in an integrated fashion
• I can now tag and describe my bookmarks

Disadvantages of using del.icio.us :

• When I am offline I no long have access to my bookmarks
• I have to decide what information is public. When you watch my bookmarks you get insite to what I am thinking these days. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Evernote

Chris Brogan had twittered about Evernote recently which made me look again at this service. It is a difficult to describe service that allows you to put your notes (including pictures of hand written notes or any other pictures) into a database. The database is automatically mirrored onto the Evernote servers on the Internet. The idea then is that you could collect scraps of info on your computer or even from your cell phone. You can then organize or view them from anywhere you can open a browser including your cell phone. The service even has built in OCR functionality so that pictures of a sticky note, for instance, can be searched via a text search. I have just started using the service but could easily see it replacing my current solution (SOHO Notes) for those little bits of information you want to find again.