Graham English
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Rescue time is an application that has become very important to my weekly GTD review. It’s helping me put some metrics to my writing goals. Read on…
A Unix program called Remind is one of the greatest tools for keeping your goals and projects on track. Where calendars like iCal and Google Calendar come up short, Remind fills in the gaps.
In preparation for my 2008 song-a-week project, I wanted some numbers to give me an idea of how much writing I would need to do. Using the 80/20 rule, here is what I came up with.
2007 was the year of social networking. Twitter occupied most of time which led to much less blogging. But 2007 was not without its controversies and celebrations. Read on…
I used to be an Ecto user but I have since seen the light and call TextMate my be-all-end-all blogging tool. The only thing I missed was being able to use Ecto as my external blog editor while reading feeds in NetNewsWire. Not anymore!
In an attempt to hack their creativity and artistic output, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards they called the Oblique Strategies. Whenever they came up against a creative dilemma–and especially while under a moment of pressure or deadline–they would pull a card and follow the directions.
I’ve used this technique constantly in [...]
There are lots of tools out there to expand your Google AdWords keywords by adding brackets (exact match) and quotes (phrase match) to your keyword list. Some of them are free, some are not, and even fewer options are available for Mac. But if you use TextMate a lot, like me, then you’ll enjoy this [...]
I’ve been hacking this auto-journal script for a while and I’ve recently settled on using a local install of WordPress combined with AppleScript and Quicksilver. It’s really pretty easy.
Follow MacZealots’ tutorial on Installing WordPress on Tiger. If you have any trouble along the way, you might need to check out Mac OS X Server 10.4.4: [...]
With a little help from Dave Taylor, author of a number of cool tech books, including the book that inspired this time-saving tip, Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, I was able to save myself a tremendous amount of time and energy. Time that I used to spend doing mind-numbing repetitive data entry can now be used [...]
For some people, Quicksilver doesn’t work as advertised. For example, I can’t get the ‘append to…’ action to work as a trigger. And since there’s one file that I’m continually appending, I wanted to customize my workflow. That’s why I created my own Quicksilver append action.
I’ve recently started using TextMate’s GTDAlt bundle for a number [...]
Merlin Mann just pointed to a New York Times Magazine article about Jonathan Coulton and The Hold Steady. These artists are thriving in the post-CD music world through intimate virtual relationships with their fans.
Music promotion through blogs and social networks like MySpace is getting more and more powerful. Managing this vast world of Web 2.0 [...]
I’ve been AppleScripting my @blogging context workflow. At first, I created a simple script that launches TextMate, NetNewsWire, and Safari along with some URLs to help me get started. It basically launches my workspace for my @blogging context. But I wanted something a little more flexible that would accept some initial user input.
Now what I [...]
As bloggers, we tend to do the same repetitive tasks over and over again. We open the same URLs. We launch the same apps. We ftp, we search Technorati, we comment, we do this day in and day out. The 80/20 rule would tell us that creating content in the form of blog posts, [...]
I’ve been thinking more and more about focus. So much competes for my attention second by second (that’s you, Twitter and BlackBerry) that it’s never been more important to practice sustaining focus. The quality of my consciousness and the quality of my attention determine the quality of my life.
What needs to remain a touchstone in [...]
Most repetitive tasks are energy sucks. Opening the same web pages every day, clicking our way around the cybersphere, answering the same questions to our customers, all of these tasks are relatively low-value and cumulatively add up to a large chunk of our lives. The 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of the things we [...]
I got really tired of updating my online status on Skype and iChat every time I had to step away from my computer. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if I could update all my instant message apps at once with a few keystrokes using Quicksilver?
My previous attempt at a time-tracking script worked well for a while. But I wanted something that was self-contained so I could share it with my friends and coworkers. I also wanted to cut down on key strokes.
I’m into systems. I love figuring out how to get from point A to point B and then optimizing the process as efficiently as possible. Better yet, I love being able to turn a system on and not have to think about it again.
This is one of those systems. I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t have [...]
I’m finding more and more that what stops songwriters from finishing songs isn’t a lack of good ideas but a misdirection of songwriting focus. Based on the comments I receive, musicians are spending more time on tasks that do little to move the song closer to completion.
For example, if you just spent 15 minutes on [...]
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
– Leonard Bernstein, conductor
about grahamI'm a songwriter and recording artist who sings, plays keyboards, and explores the vast world of sound hoping to find some magical moments along the way. I'm also a Mac geek.
Listen Up, You Twits: The Twitter Jazz Network http://ff.im/-hs5QT 21 hrs ago
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Loading ...
