In academics, like every other corporate entity, meetings are a necessary evil.
I’ve tried all sorts of solutions for capturing notes and action items from my meetings. For many years, I would haul my MacBook Pro into the room, relying on a slew of software invoked through Launchbar.
Next, I transitioned to the cool LiveScribe Echo. The Achilles Heel of Smart Pen Technology for me, true to the physician stereotype, is that I have awful handwriting. Most of my handwritten notes were illegible. To make matters worse, sending handwritten notes to OmniFocus was a kludge.
Recently, I’ve been carrying my iPad + Zagg Folio to meetings. Although convenient and portable, I have continued to depend on a slew of software to capture my notes and to-dos. None of my methods were standardized; my notes would constantly get lost.
This inefficient workflow was why I was so interested in the 512 Pixel post, The Capture Form. The author developed a standardized PDF form to capture meetings. But that wasn’t what I found interesting. It was the very last line of the article, with a link to a TextExpander version of the form.
I riffed on his work and developed a new workflow for my iPad + Zagg that I’ve been trying out.
My workflow starts with setting up the following TextExpander snippet:
MeetX - Untitled - %Y-%m-%d at %H:%M
ATTENDEES:
JMT
BACKGROUND / REFERENCE:
NOTES:
ACTION ITEMS FOR ME:
ACTION ITEMS FOR OTHERS:
The first line automatically names the note as a meeting, appending the current date and time. I use the title "MeetX" to help me with search. I know if I search for MeetX I'll only see my meeting workflow notes (instead of every document that had Meet or Meetings). All that's left to do is fill in the title. Since I synchronize TextExpander between my Mac, iPad, and iPhone using DropBox, my snippet is immediately available on my all my devices.
The second part of the set-up involves OmniFocus and their Mail Drop service (note: in order for this to work you have to sync OmniFocus with the Omni Sync Server). If you haven’t done so, log onto the Omni Sync Server, and apply for the Mail Drop Beta (when I applied, I received my invite in a matter of minutes). Once accepted, you set up a unique email address that is your direct link to Sync Server. To learn more, check out the Omni Mail Drop story at MacSparky.
When I want to take meeting notes, on my iPad, with TextExpander running, I launch Drafts. I expand my snippet (in my case by typing “.mtg”), fill in a title, and am ready to go. If I’m preparing for a meeting in advance, I type in my reference material under the appropriate heading, then fill in the remaining fields during the meeting. Most days, I get started with my note taking immediately when I enter the room.
When the meeting is over, within Drafts, I forward my notes to Notesy Simplenote. Since I’ve set up Notesy to synchronize with NValt on my Mac (as I wrote about previously), my meeting notes are immediately available and searchable on all my devices.
If personal to-do items came out of the meeting, I have another step. From within Drafts, I select “forward to email,” type out a subject name, then email the note to my personalized Omni Mail Drop address. When I open OmniFocus, the item is waiting for me as an Action in my Inbox. Even cooler, the complete meeting text is available in the "Notes" field . If there are multiple actions embedded in the original meeting notes, I spend a few minutes processing the set into single unique actions.
An alternative: from within Drafts select "Send to Omnifocus as note" (of course you have OmniFocus installed on your iPad for this to work). Drafts will launch Omnifocus and the notes of your meeting will be placed in the appropriate section of a new action. The only thing left for you to do is type in the name of the action.
This workflow has helped me immensely. I now have an efficient, standardized, searchable, multi-device method for recording and retrieving my meeting notes.
I’m really excited about this workflow–I hope it works for you too. Let me know what you think.
Appended March 2, 2013: Read this entry on why I switched from SimpleNote to Notesy.
The OpenMeta Tags box lets you tag files before saving them, sparing you the need to go back and label them at a later time (I’ll cover tagging in a later entry).
I usually work on several concurrent projects. Using the Preference menu of the app, I can designate current project folders as “Favorites.” I can then open these folders through key combinations, greatly speeding up access to the information contained within.
Default Folder X is another program I use dozens of times each day. You can download a copy and try it yourself for 30 days at 
You also have to designate the key combination you wish to invoke Launchbar in the Launchbar Preferences. 
In order to appreciate the broad range of possibilities with Launchbar, take a look at the 
Within the Papers preferences, I’ve configured Papers to launch a PDF in a new tab (using Papers itself, NOT an external PDF reader).
If I find a paper I’d like to read that’s not in my library I copy and paste the title and author to my 
A limitation of Papers is that it can’t export each note or highlight separately–it dumps all my annotations into a single file. I open the file and cut and paste each individual note (that represents a single highlight) into its own file. I then comment on the highlighted passage. Finally, I use the “Magic Manuscript” feature of Papers (invoked by hitting my Option Key twice) to append the citation reference to each statement.
Finally, I drag each RTF into to the “Supplemental Files” tab of the Papers. This saves each comment in a supplemental folder residing side-by-side with the manuscript in the Papers Dropbox hierarchy.
The next step of the workflow uses the “Indexing” feature of 
This all sounds complicated, but trust me, it’s worth it. What this allows me to do is open Devonthink and find any statement, concept, or related item quickly. I can then cherry pick comments related to my search and paste them into a draft document with little modification.When I’m writing, I take all related concepts and paste all of them into a single card in 
I’ve found having Hazel search for the word “References” within each PDF works the best. When a PDF whose contents contain the word “References” is matched, Hazel automatically launches Papers and imports the manuscript. While importing, Papers fetches metadata, renames the PDF to the convention I’ve specified, and files the manuscript in a specified hierarchy on DropBox–all automatically. Another preference in Papers erases the original file once it’s imported.
I’ve tried other search words for Hazel including “abstract,” “methods,” “results,” and “discussion”–none work as well as references. Most every scholarly manuscripts has references (unfortunately, even the word “references” will not be 100% reliable–in a minority of publications, references will be called a "bibliographies" or "citations").You are probably wondering why I don’t just use the built in unified search window in Papers. My answer: it is faster and less frustrating to find full-text directly through our Library’s web page. Papers unified search will work through a fire wall (using proxy URLs in the search interface) – but it’s hit-or-miss whether a link in Papers will lead to a full-text article or merely a frustrating publisher’s login screen–most usually the latter. My hit rate is much higher on the web. I use Papers built-in search engine primarily to retrieve metadata (after the full text pdf has already been imported).When I’m collecting full-text articles I save EVERYTHING to my Downloads Folder and let Hazel do the rest. When she finds a match, she launches Papers and imports each manuscript without any additional effort on my part. Using this method, I can conduct my search for scholarly information with minimal interruptions - Hazel does the rest.Searching on my own is the most common way I get information into papers, but occasionally a colleague will mail me something they think I should read. For these situations here’s what I do. I have Hazel monitor my Mail Downloads folder (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads ) and copy EVERY attachment to my Downloads Folder (I do this for a host of reasons–not just publications–I’ll talk about why in a future entry) Once the paper is in the Downloads folder Hazel can work her magic using the rule mentioned earlier. Apple now hides the Library Folder by default. Here is a 
So there it is: how I use Hazel to speed up the collection of information when writing or researching. I hope it’s helpful to you. In a future entry I’ll talk about an emerging trend in research paper management: social networking.Cheers, Jeff
