workflow organisieren
I configured my NV to save plain text files as described above. For each new task I add a new record (=a new txt file) in NV. I use this syntax:
#2011.02.17 this is a task
where #2011.0.17 marks a due date (yyyy.mm.dd format) and the “this is a task” the subject of the task. NV creates from this line a text file with the name “#2011.02.17 this is a task.txt”. The leading # indicates a due date and makes sorting on Operating System level easier. Tasks without any due date have only the “bla bla task” text w/o the leading due date. In the body of this file I can now add some more information as well as some tags. I enter all my tags in the text file body instead of the tag system provided by NV (this would be a lock-in in a proprietary solution again). A tag looks like this: @today @overdue @private @work @1630
– whatever you can imagine. Three tag are very special: these are @today, @overdue and @1630.
@today indicates tasks to be done today @overdue indicates tasks with a due date in the past, so they should be reviewed and moved to a new due date @1630 or any other @hhmm tag indicates a due time on the due date
I made some very basic MacOS shell scripts to automate my todo handling (Windows users can port this to PowerShell or use Cygwin, Linux users should be able to use my scripts immediately). Luckily NV is aware of any file modification from outside and updates itself automatically.
The update_due.sh script removes all the @today or @overdue tags and reassigns these tags according to the current date. I run this several times a day by a cron job and manually as needed. The mv2day.sh script lists every @overdue task and interactively asks if this should be moved to @today. The tagcloud.sh script lists all the tags used in all tasks/notes so you avoid a kind of tag sprawl. Finally the remind_me.sh processes the @hhmm tags and creates an entry in your Google calendar by using the Google commandline tools. This is not 100% reliable due to some Google commandline issues, but for me it works quite well. With this in place you can get notifications by gmail or popup on your gcal-synced-mobile.
To spread all these task information over all my devices I use Dropbox and Simplenote. My NV saves all txt files to a dedicated dropbox folder and does a sync to Simplenote in parallel (WARNING: Only one NV installation or client should do this in parallel, otherwise you get a “sync short-circuit”. All the other devices should sync EITHER with Dropbox OR with Simplenote).
All this sound a bit nerdy, but in reality it takes 30 minutes to set up this environment. And the use is lightning fast, self-explaining and completely free of clutter.