![]() What a completed note in nvALT looks like This will create a new note with the title and take you down to the “Editor” pane where you can continue to type and flesh out your note. To create a new note, start typing your note title into the “Search” bar and hit “Enter” to create a new note file. When you first launch nvALT, it looks like this: The nvALT launch screen These 3 key features make nvALT a very adaptable part of ANY workflow. There are 3 very important things that nvALT is very good at: You can get it for free from his website. NvALT is a lightweight program for capturing created by Brett Terpstra. As my day got increasingly more busy and hectic, my threshold for decision-making kept getting lower and more and more I found things slipping through the cracks. I realized that if I wasn’t 100% sure where I should put something, I ended up not putting it anywhere. When the phone is ringing and clients are clamoring for your attention, it’s easy to just not do anything with that information if you can’t make that split-second decision about where it should go. What I discovered though is that while the actual process of taking my information and putting into OmniFocus or Evernote or other appropriate application doesn’t take more than a few seconds, making the initial decisions about where things should go required significantly more effort. For awhile, I thought that since I was already at my computer I didn’t need to to have a quick capture inbox since every place I may decide to put this information is already accessible from my Mac. You can watch the screencast which has step-by-step instruction on how to set up nvALT or you can read along with the text underneath the screencast.įor a long time, not knowing where to quick capture on my Mac was a big hole in my productivity system because I’m on my Mac almost all day, every day. In this post, I want to show you how to quick capture on your Mac using a great little program called “nvALT”. Marginally-related, but too awesome to ignore: Worth a look in the land of text editors: Kieran Healy has helpfully mapped several text editors onto Lord of the Rings locations.Last week, I introduced you to the importance of capture and how it relates specifically to the GTD methodology (although the concept of quick capture is really universal and can be applied to any productivity system you choose to employ, including the Agile Results) methodology we’ve blogged about before. If you are looking for low-stress ways to turn your otters into actual writing, nvALT is worth a look. The arguably more exciting news is that Elastic Threads has released new browser extensions for Chrome and Safari that make it even easier to get information (either the current page, a linked page, or selected text) into your notes. That should make things more consistent for users. I mention all of this simply to point to two new developments this week: first, a new version has been released, and with it the announcement that, going forward, nvALT will merge with the main release of Notational Velocity. It’s the easiest way to get from “in my head” to “drafted” that I can think of. More generally, I can say that every piece of writing that I’ve done over the past 9 months or so that’s not an e-mail, a wiki contribution, or a Google Docs collaboration has been done in nvALT. Eddie Smith has often written about ways to use nvALT, and Caleb McDaniel has shown how to use Notational Velocity as an easy task management system (previously linked). LifeHacker has a video showing off the virtues of Notational Velocity here, and Ben Brooks explains some of the strengths of nvALT. Simple formatting is possible, and you can sync your notes across machines in a variety of ways. If what you’re typing matches text you’ve already entered, those notes come up for possible editing if what you’re typing is wholly new, then the app creates a new note. The basic idea of the app is that you just start typing. nvALT is a fork by Brett Terpstra and David Halter/Elastic Threads, of Notational Velocity, which is designed to be as friction-free a way to take notes as possible. NvALT is a Mac application that lies between conventional text editors and elaborate external-brain programs such as Evernote, DevonThink, and OneNote.
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