The idea behind ubiquitous capture is that you can dump things on your mind into a storage medium (notebook, what have you) so that you don’t have to tie up attention re-remembering things to keep them fresh in your mind. I have David Allen and Merlin Mann to thank for convincing me this is a good idea.

Today, after listening to Brett Terpstra on Mac Power Users, I’m trying a new (to me) ubiquitous capture workflow. It’s slightly different than what’s discussed on the show.

The lingua franca is Markdown. The more I use it, the more I like it.

Software

  • nvALT 2.1, Brett Terpstra’s fork of Notational Velocity
  • Byword 1.4, a minimalist and sexy Markdown-friendly text editor ($9.99)
  • Dropbox
  • Nocs for iPhone, a Markdown-friendly editor with Dropbox support

Setup

  • Change the note storage location for nvALT to a Dropbox folder
  • Add .md as a text extension in nvALT (see this Skitch)
  • Tell nvALT to store and read notes on disk as Plain Text Files

Let me know what you think.