Wade Armstrong

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Fast GTD-Style Windows and Palm Notes with Launchy, AutoHotKey, and Bonsai

Posted Tuesday April 10, 2007 in Productivity

How many times have you been working away and suddenly thought “Gah! I have to buy French Vanilla-flavored non-dairy creamer on the way home!” or taken time off from actual productivity because you were suddenly seized with the determination to know who sang “One Night In Bangkok”?¹ Random thoughts such as this fill my day. I’ve found that one of the keys to my productivity is to get them out of my head as quickly as possible — that means a fast way to take notes without actually taking my head out of the work I’m supposed to be doing.

Last week I wrote about being more productive with Launchy and AutoHotKey; I use a similar trick, this time adding in the mildly nifty Windows and Palm outliner Bonsai to keep my notes with me at all times. It works pretty well!

Why Bother?

The point of this whole project is to be more productive. Part of the challenge to productivity today is the myriad interruptions of life. In my case, many of these are internally-generated — the sudden realization that I’m drinking a cup of tea made from the last teabag, the realization that I spilled that tea on my white shirt and ruined it and need a new one, the thought that I should look up how to remove tea stains later, when I have time — all of that comes from my mind. I could quiet my mind, but that hasn’t worked so far for several decades now. Better is to catch all the useful stuff that drops out of my mind and save it somewhere.

The problem is that it can be very expensive to catch that stuff. Multitasking can cost 20-40% of productivity, and charges you every time you task switch. That means that taking a couple of minutes just to jot something down can be very disruptive.

Getting Around the Problem

So I take advantage of a trick: there are two stages to task-switching:

1. Goal shifting, in which we decide to do a new thing rather than an old thing
2. Rule activation, in which we switch our heads around to work in the new way required to accomplish the new goal

With Launchy, AutoHotKey, and Bonsai, we try to avoid switch #2 altogether, thus reducing our overall switching cost. The way I have things set up, it takes almost no thought to dash off a note to myself in a way that I find easy to use at a later time. I just (for example):

1. Realize that my jeans are just too large
2. Hit Alt+Space and type “toshop”
   
3. Type what I need to shop for in the box that pops up
   
4. Hit return

Four steps including the initial distraction, and I can do it without taking my hands off the keyboard. After a couple of times, it’s second-nature and I don’t even have to think. Later, I can read what I entered in Bonsai on my PC or on my Palm, or, thanks to Bonsai, sort through my list and discover what I need.

How it Works

Bonsai, the outliner, stores all of its outlines in XML format. Toshop is an AutoHotKey program that opens a dialog, lets you enter something, and then adds that to the appropriate Bonsai XML file.² You can download the source code for toshop here; all you’d need to do is update it to save the data in your desired file (you also have to have AutoHotKey installed)

You’ll notice in the screenshot above that, before I typed in the jeans that I needed, I typed in “Gap/BR - ” — that’s my little tag that tells me where I expect to be shopping for these items. I’ve created filters in Bonsai that let me call up only the things I need to shop for at my current location.

The system is convenient both when the idea comes up and later, when I shop, research, or just think about new ideas. Best of all, it helps me have a simple, reliable capture system for all of the little things that pop in and out of my brain all day long. That means that I don’t worry about losing important information, and that my brain doesn’t need occupy itself keeping these thoughts in my head. That, frankly, is the essence of Getting Things Done.

¹ Murray Head

² It actually adds what you just added to the beginning of the file, not the end, because AutoHotKey’s XML-parsing tools work better that way.