Category Archives: Tags and folders

MailTags and OmniFocus Projects

MailTags is a great way to organize your Mail. It allows to tag each message with specific Keywords or assign it to one or several Projects as well as create reminders and notes associated with an email. The good news … Continue reading

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Filing in a hurry: using message flags in Mail for ‘hot’ projects

I have recently started to use differently colored flags in Mail app. My past advice on email reflecting the GTD wisdom and the Inbox Zero principle was that an email message is either something which can be dealt with in less … Continue reading

Posted in Email, Projects, Tags and folders | Tagged | 4 Comments

Openmeta tags, DefaultFolderX and Papers

A simple search is usually sufficient to locate a reference in Papers2. It is triggerred from any application by pressing Ctrl-Ctrl and typing search terms (e.g. author’s name or title). This is excellent for citing, emailing or quickly consulting individual … Continue reading

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Note-taking on a Mac revisited

David Sparks just explained in Macworld once again why plain text is best. This prompted me to update several entries from April and March on taking notes on a Mac. In this post, I describe some recent software developments and share … Continue reading

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Revisiting reference files

Academics deal with thousands of reference files (text documents, data sheets, images), which are sent by email, downloaded from the Internet, or obtained in other ways. To use MacPowerUsers‘ terms, ‘gathering’ of these files in neat hierarchical folders is not an … Continue reading

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Linking email to action: reference, calendars, to-do and reading lists

My email organizing sounds so surprisingly simple because I do not use email for managing any critical information, such as reminders, reading materials, or references. I try to spend as little time as possible working with email and still get … Continue reading

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Organizing email

What do you do with an email message after you have read it, responded and made the necessary notes? Or after you have deliberately decided to ignore it? You have to tackle your fear of forgetting and ask the two … Continue reading

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On refrigerator notes, the fear of forgetting, and the craft of organizing

“Don’t forget to remember important things!” said a note on a friend’s refrigerator. How true and how sarcastic! True, because our information-age lives are filled with the angst of forgetting. Sarcastic, because each thing is important in its own context, that’s when … Continue reading

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Note taking software part 2: tango with a twist

In this post I focus on the practical side of my note-taking. The main application I use is called Notational Velocity (NV). I started to use NV with Simplenote following MacSparky’s excellent post on Simplenote – NV Tango. After a … Continue reading

Posted in Notes, Tags and folders | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Tagging

Tagging is attaching “tags” or keywords to your files (pdf documents, images, data tables, mail messages, text notes, etc.) which would allow finding them easily. Tagging is a more advanced method of organizing information than sorting it into hierarchical folders. … Continue reading

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