Category Archives: Tags and folders

Searchable PDF annotations: Automating conversion to Skim notes

Posted on 2012/12/20 by

Many academics now read journal articles on screen, as PDF files. Holdouts—and they are everywhere—print out forest-sized stacks of paper that teeter on crowded desks. Freedom from clutter is just one advantage of digital reading. Another is searchability: a large … Continue reading →

Posted in Annotation, Automation, Tags and folders | Tagged , , , , , | 14 Comments

Goodbye MailTags … and see you soon (?)

Posted on 2012/11/26 by

I enthusiastically used MailTags starting almost from the day I got my first Mac and until the last Friday. The reason I gave up was that my Mail.app has been choking on MailTags for the last several months. Working with email … Continue reading →

Posted in Email, Tags and folders | Tagged | 1 Comment

MailTags and OmniFocus Projects

Posted on 2012/09/19 by

MailTags is a great way to organize your Mail. It allows to tag each message with specific Keywords or assign it to one or several Projects as well as create reminders and notes associated with an email. The good news … Continue reading →

Posted in Email, Projects, Tags and folders | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Filing in a hurry: using message flags in Mail for ‘hot’ projects

Posted on 2012/07/11 by

I have recently started to use differently colored flags in Mail app. My past advice on email reflecting the GTD wisdom and the Inbox Zero principle was that an email message is either something which can be dealt with in less … Continue reading →

Posted in Email, Projects, Tags and folders | Tagged | 2 Comments

Openmeta tags, DefaultFolderX and Papers

Posted on 2012/04/08 by

A simple search is usually sufficient to locate a reference in Papers2. It is triggerred from any application by pressing Ctrl-Ctrl and typing search terms (e.g. author’s name or title). This is excellent for citing, emailing or quickly consulting individual … Continue reading →

Posted in Files, Tags and folders | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Note-taking on a Mac revisited

Posted on 2011/08/21 by

David Sparks just explained in Macworld once again why plain text is best. This prompted me to update several entries from April and March on taking notes on a Mac. In this post, I describe some recent software developments and share … Continue reading →

Posted in Notes, Tags and folders | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Revisiting reference files

Posted on 2011/08/05 by

Academics deal with thousands of reference files (text documents, data sheets, images), which are sent by email, downloaded from the Internet, or obtained in other ways. To use MacPowerUsers‘ terms, ‘gathering’ of these files in neat hierarchical folders is not an … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Files, Tags and folders | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Linking email to action: reference, calendars, to-do and reading lists

Posted on 2011/07/28 by

My email organizing sounds so surprisingly simple because I do not use email for managing any critical information, such as reminders, reading materials, or references. I try to spend as little time as possible working with email and still get … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Email, Tags and folders | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Organizing email

Posted on 2011/07/24 by

What do you do with an email message after you have read it, responded and made the necessary notes? Or after you have deliberately decided to ignore it? You have to tackle your fear of forgetting and ask the two … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Email, Tags and folders | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

On refrigerator notes, the fear of forgetting, and the craft of organizing

Posted on 2011/07/20 by

“Don’t forget to remember important things!” said a note on a friend’s refrigerator. How true and how sarcastic! True, because our information-age lives are filled with the angst of forgetting. Sarcastic, because each thing is important in its own context, that’s when … Continue reading →

Posted in Tags and folders | Tagged | 5 Comments