Entry tags:

productivity

2 essential ways to access information

There are different ways we would like to access the same information depending on the circumstances.

1. When we need to access or enter an information as quickly as possible
2. When we need to browse and organize all our information.

With the contemporary softwares these 2 ways of accessing information are seldom possible for the same information.

For a simple metaphor, let's take the file system.
We access the file system in browsing the hierarchies. But we are not yet used to access instantly a given folder with a search query. These two ways are necessary for different purposes and times. It is very practical if we can use the one or the other at will depending on our needs.

I tried to implement this idea for accessing and organizing my information.

I can browse my information with mouse and links, or full-text search, or even incremental search on page names in WikidPad, but for all my daily used information I needed to access the wanted page in a few keystrokes (for my journal, for my inbox, for my logs, todo lists, projects, etc...).
This is where autohotkey becomes useful. This software can help you automate almost anything you would do on your computer. I can even imagine automatizing it for accessing immediately often used submenus in applications.
I think the tandem autohotkey/command line launcher is a killer. Since you can change your launcher software anytime, and you won't lose your time on forums asking for features for years. Even a basic launcher will suffice! No need to wait the advent of quicksilver for windows, and when it will be there no need to learn its scripting language... which certainly won't be as good as autohotkey anyway.

So I created an Autohotkey script for each WikidPad page I need to access, and I call this script with Executor (would be even better with launchy or any command line launcher that could index your scripts directory automatically).

I name the script after the name of the page, for example inbox.ahk
The script looks like :

This simple script activates the wikidpad window, switches to edit mode, launches a search on the "inbox" wikiword, and displays the page.

The advantage of this method is that everything sits on my USB drive!
Every essential information is in text files and every essential software is open source (roughly : autohotkey and wikidpad).
I can change the command line launcher I use and still have my system ready in seconds.
I can even change all the softwares and still be able to recreate the system since the working system is designed with simple concepts.
In the future, better OSes and better softwares will arise, and I may use them, but I may also keep the system as is if I am not forced to change. And most importantly the underlying concept won't change : being able to browse and organize my information as well as being able to access/append it with a few keystrokes on the fly when needed. THIS is the matrix of the system, and this shouldn't be more complicated than that. If I have problems in the future, I will tell about them ;)

By the way since I implemented this system with autohotkey, the TED notepad I was using to log my day became useless.
I could as well use a Wikipad page for teh same purpose, since i could call it in a few keystrokes.

Having everything in a single big-ass text file looked like a simple method, but maybe was just simplistic.
Because you can't organize effectively. Whereas you can in fact access almost anything rapidly.
I tried the method with VIM and there was very great features (event using the search results window of Vim to display different indexes, to have a minimum of organization)... But my whole file became heavily markupped, and it was impossible to get the whole picture easily... And was not very beautiful because of the single size fonts.

One more thing about autohotkey : thanks to the vimperator extension everything in firefox becomes accessible with keystrokes, it becomes then possible to automate almost everything... and that blows my head.