There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
Dave Barry, “Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn”
Note: This is a sticky posting that stays on top of the blog for a while.
The second edition of Organizing Creativity is finally available:
There aren’t enough days in the weekend.
Steven Wright
The introduction is currently being written, sorry, will take a few hours more (BTW, I meant Sunday GMT+1, it is 18:16 at the moment of this posting.)
“Writing a book is an adventure: to begin with it is a toy and amusement; then it becomes a master, and than it becomes a tyrant; and the last phase is just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude – you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
Winston Churchill
I am currently doing the “finishing touches” on the second edition of “Organizing Creativity”. It will be available on this site on Sunday (fingers crossed! 
).
All in all, I am very happy about the second edition. It took a huge chunk of time, but I think it was worth it (and I am very, very happy when the work is done).
It currently looks like this:
and has the following description:
Creativity, deliberately creating something that is new and useful, is more than just one idea.
Whether in art, science, or for private creative projects, a good idea needs countless other ideas. An idea for a plot needs ideas for characters, settings, and dialogues, an idea for a study needs ideas for dependent variables, instructions, materials. And even private projects need to be fleshed out.
To deal with these ideas and to actually realize the projects, creativity needs an unlikely ally — organization.
In this book, we look at creativity, organization, ways to organize creativity by mastering the topic, generating ideas, capturing ideas, collecting ideas, realizing creative projects, and archiving ideas, and at tools, general tips, and resources.
This book aims to enlarge your options when working in science (incl. engineering and commercial projects), art, or on private projects to improve the chance of realizing creative projects. The focus is on creating the infrastructure for having ideas and realizing them.
More information on www.organizingcreativity.com
Until it is online, I have pulled the draft version and the links to the PDF of the first version. BTW, I have met my goal of staying below 400 pages (more or less, it has 400 pages) and reduced the word count (less long-windedness).
More on Sunday.
I am currently doing the (hopefully) last revision of the second edition text of the “Organizing Creativity” book … it will hopefully be finished end of this week.
I am still waiting on the foreword of a good friend though, and it seems I missed my target of staying below 400 pages (427 so far, although the word count should be much lower). Anyway, I think it is way better than the first version and there are some big improvements to the first draft I put online a few months ago.
Hope to put the finished version online soon.
All the best
Daniel
“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
“Nouvelles Nourritures” by André Gide
Today’s xkcd by Randall Munroe is … brilliant — and perhaps for some people very hard to stomach:
xkcd comic by Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com)
If after several trials you still don’t succeed, perhaps it’s time to seek a professional … it doesn’t have to be the great success, but at least incremental successes should be achievable.
“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.”
Red, a prisoner in Shawshank, hearing “Canzonetta Sull’Aria” (The Marriage of Figaro) over the prison speakers, in “The Shawshank Redemption”
After the more technical tips in the last postings, now for something completely different. Some videos showing the beauty of music — and what professionals can do with it and YouTube. Some are rather old, but still watchable.
Lara6683-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/lara6683
Lara6683-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/lara6683
ViolinTay-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ViolinTay
ViolinTay-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ViolinTay
Walk Off The Earth-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/walkofftheearth
Walk Off The Earth-Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/walkofftheearth
OKGo Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/OkGo
Best blackboards: At Fermilab, every office has at least one that stretches from the floor to the ceiling.
“Studmuffins of Science” Calendar
I love whiteboards — they are great to sketch out ideas, plan projects, leave notes on them for longer timeframes, look at them occasionally, and add to them whenever you have an idea. Besides the normal whiteboard, there are other very interesting alternatives:
Thin plastic foils sold by Legamaster (amazon.de, similar products available on amazon.com) that stick to nearly any smooth surface due to static electricity. They can transform a plain wall into one large Whiteboard (erasing is possible). They can also easily be taken down, rolled up and stored, or hung up somewhere else. You can also put them over each other, although you might see the one below the top foil. Perhaps not very ecologically friendly, but a very powerful way to use your walls. If you cover a wall with them and overlap the pages about a centimeter like scales facing away from the direction of the wind, they are less likely to be torn down by the wind. Of course, they can be enhanced with print-outs, post-its, etc. to have the information ready while you are standing in front of the wall.
Special wall paint that allows you to write on it by turning the wall into a dry-erase surface. The more permanent version of a Whiteboard or Magic-Charts. Ever dream of drawing on walls (or allowing your children to draw on walls)? This is your chance (http://www.ideapaint.com).
Lord grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can.
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people
I had to kill because they pissed me off.
J.G. Bullers
The pretty much only software I have to use that I hate with visceral dread is Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, it is still the de facto standard for file exchange in large projects (I still have hopes for GoogleDocs). I have avoided giving tips for Word here and strongly recommend Scrivener for writing, but a short time ago I stumbled upon Arno’s Tech Tools page, who has a lot of information about using Word without going insane (and a lot of other useful links).
So if you want to use Word without it driving you insane, it’s well worth a look. 
Well, unlooking the secrets of the brain took a lot longer than I expected.
Lewis Robinson in “Meet the Robinsons”
One important advice regarding “to do” lists is that whatever you put on it, you should be able to do it in relatively short time. About 30 minutes. Otherwise, it’s not a todo-list, it’s a reminder. There is nothing wrong with reminders, but they serve a different function.
For example, imagine a todo like “read literature about topic x” or “grade essays in course y” — that’s a reminder. It is unlikely that you can do it in a day and it will stay on your todo list at the end of the day — very discouraging.
On the other hand, suppose there’s a todo like “read Goodwin, 2006″, or “grade essay: Miller” and “grade essay: Jenkins”. That’s a todo, providing Goodwin is short enough to be read within a normal work day.
Todos, whether you keep them on paper or in OmniFocus or Things, should be something you can do. There should be a lot of movement in your todos and at the end of the day, you should have done our todos for today.
So, never put something on your todo list that you cannot do in the given day — keep a separate reminder list for that and use your todo list only for your todos.
It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
Unknown
DEVONthink has a lot of useful features, one of them is tagging. Whereas it does not support hierarchical tags (like Sente or Aperture does), it is useful nonetheless. Great for literature (to_read, read, topics, articles_for_paper_x, etc.), images (subjects, quality, etc., see Aperture for some ideas), video, and much more.
DEVONthink itself has one huge disadvantage regarding tagging — when you want to tag multiples files that already have tags, DEVONthink does not allow you to assign tags (instead you get the message “Multiple Selection” in the tag field). Might be useful for some purposes, but in many cases (especially if you tag the files later) it is very inconvenient. However, John Sidiropoulos from A Digital Workflow for Academic Research has written a great AppleScript that easily allows you to add tags to multiple files even if these files already have tags that are not the same: Add tags to many DEVONthink items at the same time.
You simply copy the script into a text file, save it, open the Scripts folder in DEVONthink (there is a Scroll Icon between “Window” and “Help”, select “Open Scripts Folder”, go into the “Scripts” folder in the Finder window, create a subdirectory (e.g., “Tagging”), copy the file there, then you only need to select “Update the Scripts Menu” in DEVONthink again.
Afterwards, you can select multiple files, go to the Scroll Icon again, select your script, and enter it. The tag will be assigned to these files.
Super-useful and a great idea by John.
