Following on from my previous, a complete storage rethink

Productivity
#1

Having written previously about my move to Things from Omnifocus and looking at why I don’t use notes I decided to spend this week on reorganising my systems, it’s been interesting.

Gone is DEVONthink, for day to day usage although I do have stuff archived in there which I will probably leave. Everything else moved to Dropbox filing system which now mirrors my “Areas of Focus” Things set up. Code snippets and related notes are now all in markdown managed via VisualStudio Code and a “WikiLens” plugin.

I moved my client CRM out of Notion databases and into plain text files catalogued with saved searches via Houdahspot. This means client details sit within the same folder as their website files, documents etc. Much more logical.

Saved reference bookmarks such as CSS Tricks or Stack exchange are in Safari, other less used bookmarks are saved in Raindrop.io most of these are temporary things I want to read or reference within a short time frame.

So basically I now have a lot of information in plain text, and my reliance on apps for storage has been reduced. VSCode is somewhere I spend a fair bit of time coding so using it for text editing (and wiki linking if I need to) seems logical.

Previously I had files in DEVONThink and Drafts, client info in Notion and OmniOutliner. All files relating to a subject/client all now live in the same root folder, which makes more sense.

I had played with Houdahspot before but having spent time with it this week the ability to save very granular searches (for example all icon files with certain pixel dimensions in three non related folders tagged “red”) means I can find almost anything or combination of things very easily, including searching mail.

I have also culled most of my Shortcuts most of which I never used, and tidied up Keyboard Maestro.

Lastly, we have contracts with several clients to produce weekly blogs which means over the years we have accumulated well over 1,000 of these (all written by my partner). These have now all been converted to individual Markdown files and and uploaded to our server where we can search, read, share etc using https://www.files.gallery/ which is a really nice file/image browser giving easy shared access and more features than simply using Dropbox.

So, that’s it, a pretty big change round, but I now have flexibility, I can change text editors easily, files are somewhat future proofed in plain text, and things are much less complex.

My Daily stack is now

  • Things 3 for task management
  • VSCode for coding and text files
  • Drafts for temp storage (cleared daily)
  • Mailmate for email (I use Fastmail)
  • Safari (when web browsing)
  • Firefox (when testing code)
  • Forklift (Finder replacement)
  • Launchbar (for navigating everything)

A week well spent and actually quite relaxing. The weekend task, clean my partners iPad up. :grimacing:

4 Likes
#2

Thanks for sharing @TheOldDesigner !
Appreciate the details into your workflow and the reasoning as well.

I thought it might have been a hectic week for you, but was not too surprised to hear say it was relaxing. Last few months, I have become more conscious of how good it feels when we declutter, and stuff is organized well, and productivity improves. Relief actually the first time around.

I am in the process of cleaning up Keyboard Maestro and Devonthink myself. Also, trying to decide between Dropbox or Google One.
And reconsidering getting back to Mailmate as well (got to dig up that license).

Cheers ! :smile:

2 Likes
#3

I just don’t trust Google with anything, and Dropbox as it only uploads changed elements of a file rather than the whole file each time is much much quicker… and easier on bandwidth.

Mailmate is without doubt the best mail client by a mile as long as you are happy with markdown, and the rules/filtering is insanely powerful.

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#4

I agree with you 100% about not trusting Google with anything.

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#5

Yeah a good, proper declutter (if you can get over the overwhelm to start :sweat_smile: ) always feels nice!

Does it still look like it was made on Mac OS X 10.0? :slight_smile:

I kid – but while it is powerful in function, its form is a bit lacking. Good UI design is hard though!

1 Like
#6

It’s had a sort of refresh but basically the same. Whatever it’s UI faults its still the best mail client for Mac. :grinning:

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#7

That’s very true! I wish the mail client environment was better on Windows. It’s basically Outlook, Postbox, or webmail these days.

#8

Just popped in to see if there was any activity and caught the tail end of this thread. I’ve been using the Mimestream beta for about 4 months now and it has been solid. It’s Mac only but worth giving it a try: https://mimestream.com

2 Likes
#9

Clever! Looks like what Mailplane should’ve been back in the day!