Getting Organized for a Book Project

Facing the biggest writing project of my journalism career, I recently found myself needing to get organized, really organized. That is a first - I'm a bit of a slob as far as information management is concerned.

At work, I use the Microsoft Outlook program as a dumping ground for e-mails, story notes, Web clippings and hastily constructed to-do items and calendar entries. This electronic file cabinet is, to put it mildly, a mess.

But with my new, book-length undertaking, I had to be more conscientious about how I gathered and organized all my information. My just-wing-it system works well for shorter forms, but this has required learning new habits and embracing new tools.

Here are some of them:

Electronic calendar. Faced with dozens of interviews for my project, I had to figure out how to keep them all straight. This meant creating a book-related electronic calendar and coordinating it with my day-job calendar.

I ruled out the calendar module in Outlook, a Windows desktop application, right away. Outlook is expensive, and restricts me to a single PC, which is all right for my day job but inadequate for an unrelated side project.

I went with Web-based Google Calendar.

I was already depending on Google's Gmail for my personal e-mail, so a Web calendar on the same Google account was only one click away. Because all my appointments would be stored on the Internet, I could access them anywhere, on any Web-connected computer, as well as on mobile devices such as a BlackBerry or an Apple iPhone. Best of all, Google Calendar is free.

I did need a few pieces of desktop software to complete my calendar system.

Since I am primarily using a Macintosh for my book-related work, I installed an application called Spanning Sync that synchronizes Google Calendar with the Apple iCal calendar software installed on Macs. Firing up iCal is faster than getting at Google Calendar in a Web browser, and it allows me to access and modify all the same scheduling information.

On my Windows PC at work, I installed a little program called Google Calendar Sync, which works much like Spanning Sync except it syncs Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook. This allowed me to get all my day-job appointments into my Google Calendar - also visible in iCal, thanks to Spanning Sync - and coordinate them with my book-related appointments to avoid conflicts.

All these interlocking pieces work well together, but I'm intrigued by a recently-announced alternative: Apple's MobileMe.

A replacement for Apple's .Mac suite of Web services, MobilMe is notable for a Web calendar that is said to work elegantly on any computer, Windows or Mac, as well as on mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. It also syncs with iCal on Macs and Outlook on PCs. MobileMe wasn't available when I wrote this column (it was due to debut on July 11). I plan to give it a serious look.

Task management. I have never been big on to-do lists. But for my book, task management is a must. With so many things to do, I need a system for keeping all my activities straight. Enter Remember the Milk.

This task manager is Web-based, yet it works much like a desktop application. Entries can be created or modified in a browser window even when a computer isn't on the Internet (this is very handy on a flight, for instance). To achieve this "offline" capability, you install a bit of software called Google Gears, which works with the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Remember the Milk integrates efficiently with Google Calendar via a "subscription" system that yanks tasks into the calendar for easy viewing (but, alas, not editing).

This task manager has a few other nifty features. It gives me an abundance of options for zapping reminders to myself, via e-mail or text messages. I can create tasks via e-mails sent to Remember The Milk; I just had to learn a few formatting tricks so my messages would be magically converted into to-dos. It's accessible on an iPhone or iPod Touch in an exceedingly elegant, readable form.

Internet research. My bad habit of dumping Web clippings or addresses into Outlook had to go. I needed a more powerful Web clipper, one that would store hundreds or thousands of Web pages and make these easier to find via super-fast keyword searching.

Enter Evernote. This isn't one program or service but a suite of Web-research tools that work flawlessly together to keep your Web clippings organized.

EverNote gives you online storage space to stash fragments of Web pages, for starters. Just copy what you want off any Web page, then clip it using a special bookmark called a"bookmarklet." Your info is stored online, where you can get at it from any machine.

For more power and flexibility, Evernote users can install desktop programs - for either Windows or Macintosh. These download everything you have stored online, and upload any new Web information you clip. If you use Evernote on multiple computers, everything is kept in sync on every computer, as well as on the Web.

Evernote had one deal-breaker - online storage is too limited - that sent me looking for alternatives. I found Yojimbo, a Mac-only application that is better at archiving Web pages in their entirety, and has an option to keep clippings synchronized across multiple Macs. Yojimbo is now an essential part of my book-project toolkit despite flaws (no PC version, no way to get at clippings online).

Just as I was completing this column, though, Evernote unveiled a premium-account option that boosts online storage for $5 a month or $45 a year. This makes it a no-brainer for those who need access anywhere, anytime to all their Web research. But Mac users have one other reason to stick with Yojimbo: It works with the last three versions of Mac OS X, while Evernote only works with the latest, known as Leopard.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata covers consumer technology for the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, a MediaNews Group newspaper. Find all his tech coverage at yourtechweblog.com and twincities.com/techtestdrive. His book about Twitter use in business will be published later this year by Happy About Books.