How Awesome Is Scrivener

Scrivener continues to pop up here and there, like Planet Money's Adam Davidson on the Evernote Podcast. Its fans cut across a wide gamut, such as novelists, lawyers, students, professors, and reporters. And now it's even on Windows.

What makes Scrivener so amazing is that it changes long-form writing into something manageable. Instead of scrolling through endless pages of a long document, or trying to create some sort of document map or thumbnail drawer, you have the document split up as you like, and you can navigate and move effortlessly, when and where you like. It can be "chunkified," broken into chunks of material in ways that are useful (and then combined at a later point). You can zoom in and out on the material as you like, getting an eagle's eye view or a very granular view. This is precisely what long-form writing requires. Plus, it passes one of my main tests for a piece of software: IT DOESN'T CRASH.

An interesting experience for many Scrivener users is how many amazing features are under its hood. Many have commented, in blogs or podcasts, at how a "wish it could do this" became a "it does do this!" moment. The software has been extensively thought out, with powerful features that can be discovered with a quick search of the menus or the manual, but without a lot of bloat or endless icons.

I had a "it does do this!" moment not long ago, when I was wanting to search and modify the synopses of a project while in another section of the project – Scrivener can do precisely that, allowing you to edit the found synopsis from within the search panel. This means you don't navigate away from your current place; you can search, edit and add, close, and keep going. Amazing! Quick References are also terrific, they allow you to open different parts of a project in mini-windows, so that you can work on multiple sections at the same time.

So here's to Scrivener, the most powerful long-form writing tool on the planet.

All Theology is Historical

All Christian theology is historical. It is rooted in history, influenced by language, culture, and story. We see this in how Plato and Greek philosophy greatly impacted the Church Fathers, Aristotle ("The Philosopher") was a key shaper of Aquinas, and Enlightenment thought made a tremendous shift in Western theology. We continue to try and grapple with what Jewish and Greek words meant in their original Biblical context, as we try to understand why that particular word was chosen and its linguistic significance for then and today. Language, concepts, and culture have a left a consistent imprint upon Christian thought.

For two of my recent classes, the textbooks have spent their first sections on this topic of Western history. They do this because history is so key for theology and the class needs a common footing. But the books also delve into Western civilization because they have to assume that the students know next to nothing of Western intellectual history. Sadly, it's true. Students seem taken aback about Modernity versus ancient times. Most of their historical notions are fairly populist: the Middle Ages were a time when the Church and the Pope were bad, and then the Protestants fixed things up, and now we can have freedom and shop when we want.

The frustrating result is instructors have to spend a third of the semester's class time on history that students should largely know. These are kids that presumably did well in high school and have gone on to college, but who live in a world of popular historical memes and notions. Rather than doing more advanced work with the material or even the history, we must cover the basics.

I know that instructors have complained about students' knowledge and preparation for centuries. What makes this generation different are the endless distractions they have available: cable television, internet, facebook, you name it. Students could always blow off their work in the past, but the threshold was higher; to go fishing you had to get your pole and worms, maybe pack a lunch. You had to walk all the way to your friend's house and then walk to town to see a movie. In today's world, many students have movies in their pockets (that is, on their iPhones) and numerous ways to contact and hang out with each other. These aren't bad things, but they are far easier and thus more seductive than they used to be. Who wants to read chapter three when you can watch Star Wars for the tenth time?

Interestingly, however, philosophy has a different relationship to history. Although a bit of history helps explain larger trends and interests among philosophers, their ideas to stand on their own more easily. One can read a dialogue by Plato and not have to know that it's from Greece, that it's 2,400 years old, or that it's pre-modern (although these things will help). Understanding that Kant is responding to Hume helps Kantian ideas make more sense, but it's not necessary; Kant can stand on his own. Philosophy's rational underpinnings really show here – the dependence on rationalism means that philosophy doesn't need history quite as intimately as theology does (that's not to say that philosophy can escape it, but that it is more independent of it). Theology is more rooted, as we've come to realize, in narrative and history, and so the Enlightenment project failed.

Lessing's ditch remains, which in the end is just fine. We ourselves are, after all, creatures of history.

Going Paperless: The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M

I made the move into the paperless world some months back, with the ScanSnap S1500M from Fujitsu. This scanner really is remarkable. It's a workhorse (War Horse?), chomping through documents as it scans double-sided and spits them out.

I'm using it in the following ways:

• Scanning new important documents: tax-related stuff, auto repair files, that I need to archive for that "just in case" scenario
• Archiving old material, such as class materials and lectures (from 20 years ago!), that I want access to
• Saving children's artwork and school materials

It's key to have the scanner nearby. If it's not within reach of your computer, you will end up with a pile of to-be-scanned documents that becomes overwhelming. It's best to scan as you go, in small batches, rather than letting it stack up for weeks and then having to separate out papers and scans into different groups.

For materials that are being archived, I use Evernote, which has terrific tagging, categorizing (in notebooks), and cloud service. Scans can be sent directly into Evernote to be preserved, both locally and in the cloud, and then available on mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.).

For items that are sensitive (such as receipts, tax documents, banking, etc.) I store them locally on my hard drive; things for immediate use, I put them in Dropbox.

The only snag I've run into is, well, snags. Old papers, such as my decades-old notes from college courses, don't always do so well. Some of the papers have been in a folder a long time, so the papers are bent, stuck together, or had a staple (now rusted) stuck in them, so they don't separate properly. You sometimes have to do work with a stack of papers, fanning and separating and turning them around, to get them to pass through individually through the scanner. This is more a fault of the paper than the scanner.

Some papers don't need scanning. Why should I scan my bank statements or car insurance policy? I can file and replace them quite easily. For things that change regularly, or that a financial institution is keeping on file, I don't bother with scanning--it's not always useful or time-saving. When I scan, I either need it archived, or I need it available digitally. For things that don't meet that criteria, they get sensibly filed. I don't know that you can ever truly go paperless, but you can certainly cut down on the bulk of it.

Instapaper, Reeder, and the iPad

Lots of people use the iPad for different things, from video to news, games, or as a laptop replacement device.

The indispensable thing I use my iPad for, besides class lecture outlines (PlainText) and keeping attendance, is reading stuff from the internet. And this is where Reeder and Instapaper are indispensable.

Used to be, I left a browser window open with lots of tabs, which were all the things I came across during the day that I wanted to read. Stuff would hang around there, and I would either go through them to close the window, or forget about the page, and then quit Safari or restart, and then run into, what do I do with these pages now? If Safari crashed, I would rebuild the links through the history, but it was a real pain.

With the Instapaper link on my laptop browser, I can send stuff to my Instapaper account whenever I like. I can even do this from the iPad and the iPhone. Then, when I launch Instapaper, either as a webpage or in the iOS application, there it all is, beautifully preserved and ready, and sans the ads and extraneous links--just glorious information. Links can be sent from anything on the internet, such as facebook, email, and twitter.

Reeder is the great RSS experience, where subscriptions to websites can be quickly scanned and sent to Instapaper with a simple swipe. I almost never use an RSS reader on the Mac, since Reeder on the iPad is so terrific.

So my late evening ritual? Time with Reeder and Instapaper on the iPad, where I get caught up on news, technology, stocks, and so on. They are the applications I use daily, and which make the iPad such a great experience.

So thanks, Marco and Silvio.

Experience helps

We've moved numerous times in our lives, and it's always taken at least a year to become comfortable with a new location and environment. Where's the grocery store? What's the best way to get from A to B?

The reality is, experience helps with pretty much everything. This is a lesson that is perpetually forgotten, especially by me.

There is so much stress with something new: a new route to get somewhere, a new place to find, a new class to teach. I'm reminded of this as I teach one class that I've taught twice before, and a class that is brand new to me. It's a bit like reading a book for the first time; only by going through a class once does one get a feel for the course material as a whole, its shape, tempo, and emphases.

A new textbook, a new course, a new classroom--these are all sources of stress, as well as ambiguity. There's no way to tackle the problem except for gain the experience you need, which requires patience and a generous helping of forgiveness. After several semesters, the material becomes comfortable, clear, and develops its natural tempo, but until then you're in the wilderness. Reading the textbook through multiple times won't give you the same perspective as teaching the class, week in and week out, for 15 weeks, and doing it again and again for several semesters. Being an expert in a field doesn't mean you can effectively teach the class, especially if you've never taught it before. Experience helps.

Productivity Apps: OmniFocus and Things

This is a long and nerdy post. I apologize.

Recent years have seen a blossoming of productivity applications, as well as the popular Getting Things Done approach, pioneered by David Allen.
At its heart, GTD is a method of keeping lists. It's not that different from what my mother-in-law did: she kept careful lists for her family camping trips, so she wouldn't forget something when they were 20 miles from a grocery store (think toilet paper).

What separates GTD is a greater clarity in your tasks (that is, you should create tasks that are clear and actionable), a series of different lists, projects, and contexts in which items are placed, and a careful review of all those tasks on a regular basis. (There's lots of information in Allen's book and on the internet, if you care to read up on GTD.)

With computers, GTD has moved to our various devices, and there's an astonishing number of very powerful applications out there to manage your lists. Although you can get by with pencil and paper, computers keep the lists cleaner, protected (they are backed up and in multiple places), and can automatically sort and hide tasks as needed. The dreadful bit of GTD before personal computers would be the endless re-copying of the lists. The dreadful bit of computerized tasks is the easy ability to fiddle and click, instead of actually getting things done (yes, this is highly ironic).

The debate on Macs is between Things and OmniFocus. Like a decent number of people, I was a Things user until just recently, when I switched to OmniFocus. Both are terrific programs, with pros and cons to each. Both have iOS applications that synchronize with your data. Both can kick to-dos down the road to a future date, which is one of the killer features of a GTD application; that is, you can tell the program, I don't want to see or think about this until 2 months from now, and instantly it is gone until the 2 months have elapsed. Both have quick entry panels for the Mac, so you can enter a task on the fly without switching into the application, and both can put projects on hold. On the cost side, neither application is particularly cheap, with Things being slightly cheaper (Remember the Milk is online, cute, and free, but lacks the power of these other apps).

Things

Things is easier to start with, prettier, and very user-friendly. One grasps its essentials fairly easily. It has a powerful system of tags, and a good system of keyboard shortcuts. The iOS apps work well, especially the iPhone app. The Today (that is, your highest priority) list is terrific, and you can quickly make things appear on the Today list, or take them off. Its downsides, however, become obvious with time: there is lots of flipping and scrolling through lists, and there is the need to synchronize your iOS devices on your local network via wifi (as well as wait for the sync to complete). Worse, after launching Things on your iPhone, you will have to wait for the sync to complete before doing anything, then enter whatever it is you wanted to enter, and then relaunch it to sync with your computer. This gets real old (they are working on a sync with their server, but it is taking forever to launch). The application is not updated very often, as you can see from their blog posts; the iPad version had a bug that lingered for months. This was one of the final reasons for my switching, as I tired of waiting for them to fix things or catch up to OmniFocus. The iPad app has page turn animations that get tiresome, and there is a lot of tabbing in and out of things on it and the iPhone; for example, you have to click on the task and then click edit to rename it, and then click again to save, instead of simply click and renaming it directly. If you include with a task an attachment or link to an email, you can't later delete or move that file or email, or the link is broken and unavailable to Things.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is a workhouse, and powerful beyond belief. It has even better keyboard controls than Things, lots of flexibility in terms of its appearance and handling of your tasks, and a really powerful quick entry panel. It's easier and faster to schedule things into the future than Things is, and you can even schedule things according to a certain time (such as 2 pm). Projects can be dropped, which means the data is still in your system but it is gone from your lists. Projects can be made into templates, so they can be duplicated. You can have folders and containers, and tasks can become subtasks. The sync is terrific, as there is a free sync with their servers, so your data is synced, anytime anywhere (although the sync can be frustratingly slow, and sometimes it crashes). The iOS apps are great, with home buttons to get out of something you've tabbed deeply into, and the totally, completely amazing Forecast view. There is also a quick entry button so that you can enter a task on an iOS device while it is still syncing with the servers (although this does crash on me, from time to time), and even a map/GPS feature so that tasks can be keyed to GPS locations. The Omni Group is quick to update, fix, and innovate, which has led many people to abandon Things.

On the downside, OmniFocus is very granular and not easy to grasp at first, nor is it as visually appealing as Things (I have a strong feeling that 2.0 will change this, as the OmniFocus iPad app is gorgeous, and, like Apple, The Omnipresent Group will follow their iPad design leads). The Omni Group insists on using inspectors instead of a some sort of panel, and my inspector is always getting lost or in the way. Search the internet and you find people frustrated with OmniFocus' sharp learning curve. There's some early feelings of fear when you don't see the actions that you know are there (until you finally realize that you're in the wrong view, and those tasks are still in there). OmniFocus also forces you to put your actions into projects, which doesn't always make sense; if you're like me, you have lots of tasks that don't really belong in a project. Further, The Omni Group keeps their applications rather pricey, even in the days of the App Store and digital downloads that are driving prices down. Fortunately, there is a generous academic discount.

I must say that it was fairly scary to switch. I was surprised how nerve-wracking it was; that data is rather precious, and the fear of losing or missing something is surprisingly powerful. Going from a trusted system to a brand new one is stressful. After a week or so, however, I found myself relaxing and trusting OmniFocus.

Whatever you use, the goal is to be productive and stress-free, and to create as little friction between you and the plates you are currently spinning. Good luck.