As a follow up to my last post on mobile communication with Sandy, here’s a trick I use to communicate with her when I’m sitting in front of my computer.
My favorite super-fast way to tell Sandy about new reminders is nearly identitcal to the famous Quicksilver append trick. In that legendary tip, Merlin Mann advised combining Quicksilver’s raw text entry option with it’s ability to append information to existing text files in order to quickly add items to lists for tracking everything from TODOs to groceries. My Quicksilver-Sandy technique is almost exactly the same, but here, instead of popping our text on the end of an existing file, we’re going to have Quicksilver stick it in an email and send it off to our favroite fictional personal assistant.
If you’re experienced with Quicksilver, you can probably figure this out for yourself, but for the rest of you here are the gritty details:
- Invoke quicksilver.
- Hit period so the first pane goes into text mode.
- Type your message to Sandy (i.e. “reminder thrusday meeting with mikey”).
- Hit tab to bring up the second pane for selecting an action.
- Type “e”, “m” (enough for Quicksilver to pick “Email To…(Send)” as the action). Caveat: Make sure you have the “Email To…(Send)” option checked in Quicksilver’s Actions preference pane or it won’t be available.
- Hit tab to move to the third, “indirect object”, pane.
- Type “s”, “a” (enough for Quicksilver to select Sandy from your contacts (obviously, this presupposes that Sandy is amongst your contacts — which happened for me simply from emailing her a lot; I don’t use Address Book).
- When all three panes look right, hit enter.
- There is no step 9.
That’s it. Just like the tips for mobile Sandy communication, I really like this way of telling Sandy about my stuff because it reduces for adding new information so much that it makes it easy for me to actually achieve the “ubiquitous capture” the GTD geeks are always talking about.
Next time, to complete my trifecta of Sandy-related posts, I’ll talk about how I access the info that Sandy’s storing for me using the new Dashboard “web snippets” feature so that it’s always easily available to me.
Tagged: iwantsandy, quicksilver, append, 43folders, email, gtd