When I got a chance to be an early reader of David Sparks’s Paperless Field Guide, I got so excited. Then sad.

Excited because it was the best multimedia e-book I’d ever seen. Sad because I couldn’t tell anybody about it.

Fortunately that long wait is over. David’s book is out, and it really is fantastic.

Maybe you’ve already been attempting paperless. Maybe you're curious about it. I don't care—you’ll learn something new. David covers it all, from capture to file management. And all the tools in between.

Beyond being extremely informative, Paperless is a beautiful work. And I do mean work. David sweated all the details. There’s no telling how many hours he spent perfecting the many screencasts embedded throughout the book. He also took care to select very high resolution images that look amazing on the new iPad’s Retina display.

If a book can be aesthetically practical, Paperless is it. It’s the best $5 you can spend in the iBookstore today.

Reader Jeff asks:

I keep trying and failing to use something for task management… I keep trying OmniFocus (and other task management apps) but the problem is I enter things, I watch screencasts, I get everything setup nice - and then I never see that window again…

What is it that makes you look at OmniFocus? I’m sure it is second nature to you by now, but how did you come to use it and rely on it in the first place? Was it something you had to adapt to or did it just fall into your life like a perfect Tetris piece?

I’m tired of not getting anything done - or at least I say I’m tired of it. Then I watch a screencast, put a bunch of things into OmniFocus, and then don’t look at them ever again for the umpteenth time. Maybe I just don’t actually want to do anything. I hope not, though.

I loved this question. For one thing, it’s just so beautifully honest. It’s superficially simple, yet it slices through the evangelistic aura that enshrines any popular productivity system.

I especially liked it because it made me think.

What is it that makes you look at OmniFocus? After all, what good is any system if you don’t want to look at it? What makes it enjoyable?

What follows is my answer. Maybe it's yours, too. Maybe it's not.

Defining OmniFocus

Forget about GTD canon. Forget the apps. Forget sync, AppleScript plugins, and themes. Let’s call it what it is.

OmniFocus is a brainless messenger. It’s a channel through which my planning self directs my doing self. When I’m creating projects and actions, I’m a manager. When I’m checking off actions, I’m a worker.

OmniFocus is not a manager. It doesn’t ship with a ball-busting boss that can threaten to make my life worse if I don’t do things.[1] And so using OmniFocus for self-management requires a lot of self-discipline.

I believe good self-discipline falls naturally out of self-trust: knowing that I’m doing the right thing, right now. Worker-me trusts manager-me. I’ll come back to this in a second. (Trust me.)

Good cop >> OmniFocus << bad cop

In a very idealistic sense, I think all tasks in OmniFocus should fit into one of two categories: 1) things I enjoy doing right now or 2) things that will lead to later rewards (or avoid negative outcomes).

I would probably look at OmniFocus a lot less if I only put the un-fun there. So I don’t make it the bad cop:

Instead, I tell OmniFocus to tell me good news, too:

For me, OmniFocus doesn’t just include reminders to pay bills or make unpleasant phone calls. I put reminders to Huffduff podcasts, try interesting apps, and to watch videos. You know, fun things that I want to do—not now, but later.

Syncing it all, starting with me

If my life had an extremely narrow focus, I’m not sure I would need a system like OmniFocus.

But I don’t have a one-dimensional life. I have a family. I have a full-time corporate job as an actuary. I work on the side. I volunteer. And I have an irrepressible urge to write stuff.

I do all of these things because I’m fulfilled by all of them in their own special way. My life challenges me to constantly to rebalance my attention, to sharpen my focus on the now—whatever that now happens to be any moment of the day.

OmniFocus continues to be a daily presence in my life not because it’s a very well-made product, not because it’s used by people I respect, and not because I think I should use it. The honest, if unintuitive truth is that OmniFocus works for me because I’ve made a choice to pursue things I care about.

OmniFocus can’t make me love what I do each day of my life. And OmniFocus can’t make me look at OmniFocus. OmniFocus can only tell me what I’ve told it to tell me. I just have to look and listen.

And I look because I trust myself.

The fact that physical inactivity—specifically sitting all day—increases one’s risk for a variety of nasty health side effects, including death, continues to shock and astound internet readers the First World over.

Also breaking: eating fewer calories can cause weight loss.

What’s most troubling, I think, is that the latest round of sitting studies are leading people to believe that exercise is pointless. The general takeaway, collectively paraphrased, seems to be “If you’re sitting all day, then it doesn’t matter if you hit the gym at the end of the day.”

The ever-observant and part-time New York Times watchdog, Dr. Drang, offers a welcome, if lone, voice of reason among the hubbub caused by a couple of recent sitting studies reported on by the Times.

I agree with Dr. Drang’s dissection of the Australian study. Alas, I don’t subscribe to PubMed.gov and don’t have access to the full study, but I think the key sentence lies in the abstract’s conclusion:

Prolonged sitting is a risk factor for all-cause mortality, independent of physical activity.

No matter how the researchers sliced and diced the 200+ thousand adults in the study, those who sat a lot had a greater risk of dying than those who were more active. It just so happens that one such group was defined by physical activity.

Suppose you selected a sample of adults who all jogged, say, three days a week. Some of the adults in that group sit more than eight hours a day, while others are more active, sitting four hours or less.

Which members of that group do you think would be healthier?

Sure there is a point at which too much activity becomes unhealthy, but I know I’m lightyears from that threshold, and I bet most other adults are, too.

And so here’s where we are:

• Sitting a lot is bad for us
• Our jobs require us to sit a lot
• We’re doing something wrong
• Oh look, I’ve got email

… which is where we’ve been for a while now.

I think what bothers me the most is the all or nothing fallacy. Some exercise is always better than no exercise. And it’s true of so many other things, too.

Humanity was never meant to sit still, figuratively or literally. Neo-sedentism is likely our greatest enemy yet.

I used to know this guy. I’ll call him B. We met at a local social media club event a few years ago, which is kinda fitting. I’ll explain in a moment. B seemed like a cool guy. He was about my age, seemed interested in the same things I was, and he seemed driven to succeed on his own—something I admired.

So we started meeting up for lunch every couple of weeks. And like clockwork, about 30 minutes into the meal, he would reach into his bag and pull out a catalog of stuff he was selling to support some of his entrepreneurial endeavors. I mean, every single time we met he would try to sell me stuff. Aggressively.

After a few months, I got tired of it. Outwardly, he was friendly and open, but it became clear that his agenda was not friendship or lunch. It was to sell me household cleaners, vitamins, and other crap I could buy at Target for the same price.

I stopped hanging out with B.

I’m beginning to feel the same way about Google, Facebook, and any other service that approaches me under the guise of a non-business relationship only to collect.

It’s becoming the great 21st century con: They make friends with you, then take as much as they can—only they’re not getting your money; they’re taking your privacy for their own gain.

At the same time, I’ve started appreciating traditional business-customer relationships more than ever. I enjoy paying for things because it’s an explicit business transaction. There’s nothing phony about it.

Apple doesn’t give me an iPad because they want to be friends with me. They give me an iPad because I pay them for an iPad. My accountant doesn’t do my taxes because he’s a philanthropist. I pay him to do my taxes.

With money, comes accountability to the customer. If my iPad stops working, Apple has to answer to me. If my tax return has errors, my accountant will be answering questions.

No one is answering my questions at Google, Facebook, et al. Why would they? They have customers to attend to, and I’m not one of them.

Privacy is fast becoming the de facto currency with which we transact online. And so few people understand how much they’re spending or who it’s going to. Most people don’t even know if they’re the customer or the product.

I still use several Google services, and I still have a Facebook account. But my usage has been trending down for a while now. I understand that there is an incremental cost to using those services.

I also understand that the value of privacy is changing this century, and I haven’t changed my views on the irreversibility of where we’re headed. I think the collection of personal data via mobile devices has a lot of benefits. For example, I’m fine paying a location “privacy tax” to Google for the benefit of using Google traffic data. At least there’s a direct return to the privacy tax payer in that case.

It’s when I get cut out of the deal that I take issue.

If you do nothing else before signing up for a new web service, stop for a moment and ask, “what’s in it for them?” It’s fine to use services that don’t require monetary payment. Just understand that these things are not free, and make sure you’re comfortable with what you’re getting in return.

These are not friendships. These companies are not giving you things because they’re your buddy.

One of the first things I did after upgrading from the iPad 1 to the new iPad was dash to the App Store to find a scanning app. I had already been using my iPhone to create PDFs from photos of documents, and I wanted to do the same with the new iPad.

I came up empty. I think that because the iPad 2’s camera was so poor, no one cared enough to create iPad-optimized versions of scanning apps.

But now, several weeks after the dawn of the the new iPad, things seem to be changing. Scanner Pro ($7), my favorite iPhone scanning app, is now iPad-ready. Version 4.0 is fantastic.

I really like the simple, intuitive interface for cropping pages. I can’t really describe it in words, but the cropping area just naturally moves with your finger. Very fast, fluid, and efficient.

Building multi-page PDFs is also very easy:

1. Take photo
2. Crop
3. Tap done
4. Repeat for each page

You can file the resulting PDFs into folders, email them, or send them to Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

Scanner Pro is blazingly fast on the new iPad. The camera launches almost instantly, takes photos quickly, and PDF processing happens in split seconds.[1]

Now that the new iPad has an iPhone 4S-grade camera, it functions remarkably well as a portable scanner. There’s just something right about being able to preview my scans on the iPad’s larger, Retina screen. It almost feels like I’m lifting a piece of paper off the table and into the digital world.

And this is just the beginning

I'm more smitten with the iPad every day. Just think: you can turn a paper page into PDF in seconds, open it in an app like PDFpen for iPad to annotate and sign it, then send it to someone. All without touching a PC.

I’m pretty sure even non-geeks could get excited about that, though I would need to observe one in the wild to be sure. I wonder if Chris Pirillo’s father is available.

It’s a place you should want to visit. It shouldn’t be feared. Or avoided.

You should love your calendar for simplifying your life by constraining what’s possible. A calendar is a recurring reminder of how our universe works:

1. Events involving an individual must happen one at a time
2. Time can’t be saved; it can only be spent

Time is much more like food than money. Time arrives, perishes the moment it’s ingested, and then gets excreted in the form of memories.

If time is food for memories, a calendar is a buffet of your time. If you don’t get in line and help yourself constantly, others will help themselves—to your time. They’ll be responsible for your memories.

Few task management systems arrange actions spatially such that each action’s size is proportional to the time required to complete the task. Most calendars, on the other hand, make it easy to “size” appointments based on durations.

To fail to schedule work that you, yourself, deem important is to put your wants last in line. You should regularly schedule non-meeting time on your calendar.

It’s your time after all. Until it isn’t.

Markdown is about liberation. Liberation from bloated desktop publishing software that’s carried far too much baggage forward from the 1990s, a time when the world got drunk on WYSIWYG.

Markdown is almost anti-software. And while my Markdown toolbox is mostly air-filled, there’s at least one tool in there I can’t work without.

Marked 1.4 is out. Thanks for your dedication to the Markdown community, Brett.

I really like the concept underlying Byword’s design. I use Byword for nearly every web-bound thing I write on my Mac. When it showed up in the iOS App Store not long ago, I immediately put it on my iPhone and iPad. And things have gone well. Well, mostly.

Byword, particularly on the iPad is filling a void (I created) when I left Simplenote earlier this year for Notesy.[1] I missed the way Simplenote showed a list of notes on the left side of the screen with the contents of the selected note on the right side (a la Mail).

Byword lets me tap across text files quickly in a double pane layout like I used to in Simplenote.

It’s possible that Byword may end up nudging Notesy off my home screen as well, but it doesn’t really matter. Since so many of these text apps sync with Dropbox, choosing one is like picking out a pair of sunglasses. They all let you look at the same world; you’re just choosing how you want to view it. [2]

While Byword is moving toward the top of my most-tapped, it’s not ready to be my one and only. I have some of the same complaints Brett Kelly has with Byword, though they aren’t as much of a deal breaker for me as they are for Brett.

Like Brett, I’ve found Byword’s Dropbox sync to be quirky at times. On more than one occasion, a file that I created elsewhere, say, in nvALT on my Mac, didn’t appear at all in Byword. The files always show up in Notesy, though, and I’ve found that if I make a small alteration to the file in Notesy, then hop back in Byword, the file will show up.

My gut tells me that these sync wrinkles will get ironed out pretty quickly. Byword for iOS is still new. I’m very happy that Byword is in iOS because it is, to my knowledge, the first cross platform (iOS to OS X) text editor. [Update: Peter points out in the comments that iA Writer is also cross-platform.]

The concept of a device-dependent, plain-text-oriented writing application that offers consistency in UI, feature set, and syncing is very cool.

There are two applications that I use every single day for file browsing: LaunchBar and Path Finder. I mean every single day.

The first is great for getting to files and folder quickly. The second is better for working out of folders.

For way too long I used these two applications independently. Today it finally hit me that I can use LaunchBar to get to a folder, then

1. tab
2. Type path
3. return

… to open a folder in Path Finder. Best of both worlds.

Email has the illusion of being a private archive. In reality, it’s just one nook in a giant echo chamber.

When you click send you aren’t sending so much as duplicating. Forever.

Your email isn’t just going to the recipient. It’s being bounced and copied over innumerable servers, the security and lifespan of which are completely out of your control.

The strength of your email password doesn’t matter. Just look through your email archives. Every message that has someone else's address in the To or From field isn't just on your hard drive. It's on theirs, too. How's Aunt Sally's password security?

Email is not an information storage facility. It's a communication device that accumulates a personal store of data as a byproduct of use.

Email is Schrödinger’s cat’s litter box. Every sent or received message necessarily exists in multiple places at once.

Your email is in the wild. All of it.

A little control. I said a little.

No one can guarantee the complete security of any form of digital data. It’s just too easily copied. But you can at least pare down your exposure by limiting what you put in place like email.

So before you click send, think. In this order:

• Do they really need that social security number? If not, just skip it.

• So they do want the social security number. Then fill out everything but that part, email the form, then call to have the recipient enter the sensitive stuff themselves.

• If you’re sending something that already has sensitive information, use PDFpen to redact the parts you don’t want others to see.

• If you absolutely must send something with sensitive information, use Dropbox to send it around, not through email.

• When all else fails, hold your nose, and fax it.1

Startup

“Ideas might earn investment, but not returns.”

“Beat my expectations, and I’ll beat a path to your door.”

“Just ship. I won’t care how until you’re big enough to be evil.”

“Make my life easier.”

–The Market

Big company

“That’s a great idea. You should submit it in our idea contest.”

“Give me what you gave me yesterday, but faster today.”

“Work smarter, not harder… as long as you work the same amount of time.”

“Make my life easier.”

–The Management

The good

• Text is gorgeous. No backlit screen has ever come so close to paper.

• My eyes don’t strain late at night, even after working late.

• I’m probably going to use the iPad even more because looking at it is so much easier than looking at any other display.

• Speech dictation is awesome, fast, and accurate. Last weekend, I dictated an entire home project into my iPad as I walked room to room.

• Battery life is at least as good as what I experience with the first iPad.

• It’s easily the fastest device I’ve ever used.

The bad

• Don’t use the new iPad next to your MacBook. The new iPad makes every other display look worse. It’s that good.

The conclusion

Is this the future of computing? Yes. But we won’t use words like “computing” much longer.

Most parents of young children know how significant an accomplishment it is just to get out of your home in time to be where you need to be—somewhat on time. Leaving with all the objects you need for the day? Well that’s just icing on the cake.

Today my money clip and credit cards didn’t leave the house with me. Fortunately, I averted embarrassment at the first cash register of the day. Since I store credit card numbers in 1Password on my iPhone, all I had to do was hand my iPhone to the cashier, who typed the number in manually.

I’m not sure I could survive this parenthood gig without my iPhone, and apps like 1Password are a big reason why.

Imagine if Google.com and Wikipedia were only available to groups of 3-5 people from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday. What if web services went dark at night. . . or when their kids got sick?

I guess we'd have to find alternatives to Google.com and Wikipedia so that more people could access information concurrently and independently.

But what would a world like that look like?

Probably like the typical workplace before the mid-1990s. Before always-on and infinitely shareable information sources, we relied on people for answers, especially at work. And we recognized that one mind could serve only so many other minds.

We still rely on people for information, only there are fewer people in a typical 2012 office than there were in a typical pre-1990s office. Salting the wounds of downsizing further, I think we tend to treat modern “human resources” more like web services because, like web services, we now have always-on access to people.

We treat people the same way we treat web servers: we query them with a keyboard. And we don't give two shits who else might be doing the same thing at the same time.

When you unwrap the truth like this, it’s easy to see that the way we work today is unsustainable. Because unlike Google.com and Wikipedia, the human mind isn’t infinitely shareable. It never will be.

* * *

Something I said on Twitter the other day:

The knowledge worker’s progressive tax: The more successful you are, the more emails you will be copied on.

It’s something I’ve noticed in my own career, and it’s certainly something I’ve observed about those above me. The more you know, the more you'll be asked. The more hits per hour your cerebral API will get. The more your day involves reacting—to the unsolicited.

It's a topic that, to my eyes, appears in this excellent post by Michael Lopp of Rands in Repose:

When an engineer becomes a lead or a manager, they create a professional satisfaction gap. They’ve observed this gap long before they became a lead with the question: “What does my boss do all day? I see him running around like something is on fire, but… what does he actually do?” The question gets personal when the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don’t feel much like progress.

As a knowledge worker realizes success, I believe his value rises because he becomes an information asset. On paper, successful knowledge workers may be promoted to make more things, but in practice they’re promoted to become servers of answers to those actually moving 1s and 0s around.

But being in a constant state of information-giving can result in the kind of busy-for-nothing Michael talks about. Call it an over-taxation of the human mind: being forced to give back more and more until there's virtually nothing left for self-investment.

As with a progressive income tax—which tacitly asserts that the more money an individual makes, the more of it they owe back to society—a successful knowledge worker eventually finds himself at a point where he owes so much knowledge to those around him, he can’t use his knowledge to move forward himself.

A free economy stalls when individuals stop moving forward. The same is true of companies. When you punish success, people stop seeking it. More accurately, individual success becomes antithetical to organizational success. Interests misalign.

Perhaps companies will find real success again with an approach that’s more contrarian to the contemporary: reward success with increasing isolation from interruption.

It sounds so crazy it just might work.

Tammy Erickson:

Until roughly fifty years ago, there was a tacit understanding between employees and corporations: If employees worked hard and demonstrated loyalty to the company, the company would reward them with a steady career and comfortable retirement. This equation had been at the heart of the relationship between individuals and organizations throughout centuries of Western economic tradition.

I would argue that this tacit understanding persisted much farther into the latter half of the 20th century. Then, Enron by Enron and GM by GM, promises were broken.

But unfortunately, as Tammy points out in her article, companies continue to make promises that not even they believe. It’s no wonder the once-trusting children in our paternalistic factory-based society have become estranged. Companies just don’t make good parents.

I agree with Tammy’s view of the present and future:

… the new equation will be an adult-to-adult relationship between organizations and those who perform work. Organizations should expect that everyone who shows up to work will be fully present, engaged, and have the relevant skills to do the job at hand. Individuals should expect the opportunity to choose interesting, challenging work, suited to their skill set, and to be compensated through fair, transparent arrangements.

[…]

Already progressive companies are beginning to focus on measuring results, while leaving the choice of when and where to perform the work to the individual. They may specify the desired outcomes and principles under which the work should be performed, while leaving the exact approach to the discretion of the individual.

This will be the century that the employee grows up.