Right now there’s a couple of workflow projects I’m tinkering with, in the hope of not just getting more done, but more of what I want done.

Leaving the the laptop at home

I haven’t managed to do it yet, but this is about trying to use my iPad as a laptop replacement. My backpack is ridiculously heavy, and while it is a small triumph of The North Face baggage engineering the temptation is always to fill all of the useful little pockets so that I am never without everything I might possibly need to establish a mobile office. Travelling light is definitely not my style.

Despite my laptop being a wafer thin MacBook Air, it is still the heaviest thing I carry, especially when the power cable is along for the ride. So, iPad-only is what I will try to do and then whittle down what I carry to a more reasonable weight.

This will require discipline: for instance, not tinkering with presentations up to the last minute (they will need to be exported to PDF before I leave) and making sure I have all the files I need for the day in Dropbox or saved locally, but I think it should be possible from reading the accounts of Adam Tinworth and others.

Evernote

I signed to Evernote an age ago, but despite giving it ago and the consistent praise for it from all quarters, it it only in the last few months that I have really grasped how useful it can be and brought it into my ways of working.

One feature I particularly love is the ability to email things to specific Evernote notebooks. Using this feature with some of the trends research I do regularly means that I will be

Recently, I have even started to deliver analysis reports to Brilliant Noise clients using Evernote (if they are already users). It makes so much more sense than documents – fitting in with their workflows and making it easier for them to share snippets of information with colleagues.

Connecting platforms

Now that Delicious is looking useful again, I’ve started synchronising my Diigo with it again. It’s a shame that Delicious is now missing a few months’ worth of links – maybe I will work out a way to import those soon.

Diigo’s still the centre of my reading world. I’m keen to find ways to connect it with Evernote and other platforms I work with though – I sense that sometimes I am spending too much time in collecting mode and I need to put more emphasis on analysis and writing/sharing modes.

It helps when you are able to connect platforms easily. It really saddens me to see Twitter shutting down possibilities in this area, witnessed by IFTTT’s announcement recently.