Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

If you’re constantly trying to put out fires, David Allen says in a new column, you may be ignoring the small signposts that are warning you in advance. Ubiquitous capture is a cornerstone of any successful GTD variation, and Allen says that if you’re not taking note of potential problems as they arise then they’re that much more likely to blow up in your face later on. He calls it “The Curse of the Eternally Urgent”:

I’m not talking about ignoring priorities. I am talking about capturing, deciding, and organizing action steps about everything we have our attention on, big and little. The little, unimportant things too often demand much more attention later on than they deserve, and become too important because they weren’t handled when they would have been easy.

It’s really all about the law of cause-and-effect: positive, proactive action gets positive feedback. Be aware of what’s around you, take note of what’s important or possibly problematic, and “process” it when you have the time to do so. If you do that, you’re much more likely to nip problems in the bud and avoid another crisis.

What tools do you use for ubiquitous capture? How do you keep an eye out for blowups?

The Curse of the Eternally Urgent @ Huffington Post

In the digital era, with ubiquitous grammar check & spell check, grammar nazis are so passe. The new frontier of perfectionism belongs to the self-described “typography nazis!” A new post at Receding Hairline lists and explains common typographical errors that have become convention by way of lax standards. You’d think good word processing software would catch this sort of thing, right? Wrong! Hyphenation errors are still remarkably common and “smart quotes” can still leave your work riddled with issues that would drive a typographist mad. To wit, citing “I am 5?10? tall” as an example:

So those ’straight’ quotes aren’t for proper quotes, but they represent feet and inches, right? Wrong. They’re not actually for anything. Feet and inches should be represented by primes, which look a bit like straight quotes tilted slightly to the right. If your browser supports the characters, the above statement should read: I am 5? 10? tall.

These issues may seem nitpicky, and the author seems ready to admit that they are, but if you want to stay on the bleeding edge of pedantry this is the kind of stuff you’ve got to stay up on!

Ten Typographical Mistakes Everyone Makes @ Receding Hairline