Productivity hound, writer, and inspiration to life hackers the world around, Merlin Mann has been an instrumental force in the ever-increasing GTD movement. Check out how Merlin gets things done:
LH: What desktop software do you use every day?
Merlin:
Mail.app - Augmented by MailTags, Mail Act-On, and Mail Template, Mail.app can be a whizzy little chunk of func for beating back the invading email armies. Without them, it's more like the Maginot line; very clever but functionally limited. Having said that, in the last few months I've been loving Smart Folders. Staring at hundreds of unprocessed and unflagged messages at the top level of your Inbox is a sucker's game. Smart Folders give you orthogonal views into your email world that flat mailboxes just can't do. Adding a few more searchable attributes (e.g."Message is NOT flagged" and "Date Sent" are two that come to mind) I could be a happy little man.
TextMate - I write practically everything in TextMate, mostly structured with John Gruber's lovely Markdown, but sometimes in straight plain text or XHTML, depending on where it needs to go next. (It is in fact where I'm typing right now.) I also love TextMate for coding — the tab-triggered snippets and range of configurable commands are golden for the repetition-hating geek mind.
Safari - Safari's a solid B-plus by itself. But bolt on PithHelmet, Saft, and SafariStand, and, baby, you got a stew going! I like Firefox okay — I love love the extensions — but, brother does it every feel slow some days. I always get this close to switching over, then inevitably find myself coming back to Cupertino. Maybe it's Safari's natural good looks and sense of Mac-like familiarity. I dunno.
OmniOutliner Pro - I'm a big fan of Kinkless GTD for managing my projects and tasks, and that's built with AppleScripts as an OmniOutliner Pro document. It rules. OO's also just my ideal vision for outlining functionality. You can even build the outline for a presentation and export it for Keynote in a couple seconds. Swish.
iCal - Again, in association with kGTD and its sync capability, I end up spending a lot of my day in iCal. Like a sweetly retarded cousin, iCal receives a baffling amount of patience from long-suffering Mac people; we apparently will put up with a lot. The lack of automatic alarms, in particular, really makes my ass hurt. But it's simple and non-byzantine and at this point in my life, that's a good thing. It's one of the few factors mitigating against how painfully this application needs to be updated for battlefield geek usage. Help me, Steve. Send your flying monkeys to my calendar!
Quicksilver - And, of course, what talk with Merlin would be complete without a high-profile mention of Quicksilver? This application is the alpha and the omega — that without which. This morning alone, Quicksilver baked fresh cinnamon rolls, gave me a hot stone massage, and pulled a couple of pandas from a falling eucalyptus tree. It's also an excellent way to append lines to text files. But you knew that.
LH: What web sites do you use every day?
Merlin: Oh, man. Don't make me embarrass myself by revealing my insanely unproductive surfing habits.
Just in terms of raw weekly hours, Google is definitely number one. In addition to regular old searching, I use it for looking up definitions, as a calculator, and for checking stuff like maps and weather. I do love the Google.
Wikipedia is a surprisingly close second. A lot of stuff I used to use Google for is actually much faster to locate with Wikipedia — if I just need to know the basics on virtually any given thing, I can usually find it quicker on Wikipedia than anyplace else. My latest little tic is sucking a web archive for any interesting wikipedia entry right into DEVONThink. I like to think that this will, one day, make me informationally invincible.
I also like visiting Mule Design's weblog (or "blog"), my Flickr friends' photos, and, of course, Stuff On My Cat.
LH: What PDA/personal organizer/system do you use to keep organized?
Merlin: Since I hardly ever leave the house except for court appearances, liposuction, and the occasional drumming circle, I don't have much need for a heavyweight "on the go" system. Luckily, as it happens, I'm also a big fan of "punting" on any screechy demand for instantaneous commitment to anything, so it's not like I need my calendar with me when I go to lunch or whatever. All my "stuff" lives and stays on my laptop, so that, whenever possible I can travel very light once I'm out and about.
I always carry a small notebook or a pile of index cards (someone needs to give that idea a funny name), and apart from that it's just a wallet, my phone, and a Space Pen.
But, yeah, I'm all about the lightness. I don't even own an iPod anymore. People truck too much crap around these days. It's weird.