In my Go Plain manifesto, I said that the first thing I plan to deal with is ubiquitous plaintext capture solution.

So here I am, trying to deal with it, having some success on the Mac, mostly failing on mobile…

This post is part 1 of several posts on the subject of plaintext capture. I am dividing it to parts because it is still work-in-progress, and I wanted to share as I go along.

To reiterate and elaborate, my expectations for a “ubiquitous plaintext capture solution” include:

• Available across all my devices. To prioritize: MacBook, Android phone, iPad, Windows laptop.
• Sync “captured items” across all said devices, given connectivity. Handle poor connectivity with dignity – we are talking about plaintext files here. Handle sync conflicts gracefully.
• The act of “capturing a piece of information” must be totally frictionless. This means as few clicks and taps as possible to get to “capture mode”. No messing with filing and categorizing a “captured item”. It should just be there, waiting for when I’m ready to deal with processing it.

A tl;dr version of where I am with this, at the time of writing:

1. Decided that “captured items” are plaintext Markdown-formatted files in my Dropbox GoPlain/Notes directory. Flat structure (e.g. no sub-directories) to force simplicity. Filename is note title, file text is note content.
2. Decided on nvALT for capturing notes on OS X. Been using it for a couple of weeks. It’s perfect!
3. Became frustrated with the options I evaluated on Android. Remained unsolved for now 🙁 .
4. Got overwhelmed with options on the iPad (iOS in general). Got to join nvNotes beta testing. Loving it so far!
5. Didn’t do anything with my Windows laptop. It just sat there, streaming my Google Music library. Just as important for my productivity 🙂 !

In this part, I go into some detail about nvALT and my “ideal capture experience”. If you stick around, there might also be a mobile rant 😉 .

In the previous post, I announced that I am ready to reinvent my personal productivity system.

Today, I present Go Plain: My simplicity-driven personal productivity system. Well, it’s not yet a “personal productivity system”. It’s the working title for my work-in-progress system, and this post is a high-level “manifesto” for this system. I use “manifesto” here loosely, and mostly mean “high level roadmap and requirements”. Just thought it was a fun word to use 🙂 .

You can refer to the Go Plain project page for an always up-to-date list of posts related to this project.

My name is Itamar, and I’m an addict. My addiction is hardcore productivity porn (don’t worry, it’s SFW).

I do my best to keep my addiction controlled. Under normal circumstances, I don’t tamper with my “productivity system”, beyond minimal maintenance, and the occasional incremental targeted workflow improvement.

The issue with the statement above is an underlying assumption that “the system is mostly good, and fits my current situation in life most of the time”. That assumption has been overwhelmingly false for a little over two years now.