The omnipresent notebook
In The Spark File, Steven Johnson describes how he uses a document on Google Drive as a scratchpad. In his spark file he writes down anything and everything. Quotes, vague article ideas, business possibilities etc.
For the benefits of the spark file itself, read Johnson. Also, read Elizabeth Spiers'On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age.
Here I'll cover how I've implemented the idea. As a freelancer, collecting ideas is crucial.
Why digital is great
While one can use a paper notebook, going digital has two big benefits:
- The spark file can be backed up.
- The spark file can always be with you, as long as you have an internet connection and the file is stored in the cloud.
Before I read The Spark File, I used Evernote. Evernote has many advantages, like tagging, the ability to handle jpegs and other file formats, OCR and searching. But by reading Steven Johnson, I realized that going with a simpler solution has it's benefits too.
To really use the spark file, it's important that adding stuff to the document is blazingly fast. Sitting at a café reading a magazine, any idea that pops up in my head I should be able to write down in the shortest amount of time. Evernote didn't let me do that, and too often I used pen and paper instead.
And before I had noticed, that piece of paper was lost.
Going with multiple plaintext documents
I liked the idea with a digital spark file, but as a Dropbox user I couldn't see Johnsson's Google-based solution fit into my workflow.
I also realized that I wanted more than one file. In OmniFocus, which I use for my task, I had long lists with apps and services to test, movies to watch, books to read, albums and podcasts to listen to. But none of these really are task per se. They are more things I want to do, sometime someday.
Being a father I also want a way to easily write down things my kids do or say.
I wanted five files in addition to the spark file: to test, to watch, to listen, kid one and kid two.
The software setup
With six files, nvALT turned out to be the perfect choice for my notebook. The editor has a familiar two-pane interface, where files in my sparks-folder are listed on the left with the content in the selected file on the right. This means it's really easy to open the file I want to add stuff to.
But when I need to add something to any of my six files, I'm most often not at my computer. Instead, it's my iPhone or iPad that's within reach. And on them, Drafts has been in my dock for a long time.
Drafts is an app for text entry. You start it, type what you want and then select an action. Thanks to Drafts' tight Dropbox integration, I've set up one action for each of my six files. With just a click I can append a book title at the end of the to read-list or a quote to the spark file. I can't think of a solution that would let me append text to an existing file.
But while Drafts great for text entry, it doesn't let me view or edit the content in my files. For that, I use Notesy on my iOS devices. It is like a portable version of nvALT which, among other things, let's me do full text search of the content in my files.
What technology can't do for you
Together, Dropbox, nvALT, Drafts and Notesy makes it easy for me to work with my spark file(s). This is certainly true for adding to them.
But to really benefit from Johnson's idea with a spark file, also make sure that you on a regular basis read what you have written. As Johnson puts it:
Sure, I end up reading over many hunches that never went anywhere, but there are almost always little sparks that I'd forgotten that suddenly seem more promising.
And this is where ditching Evernote and going with a single plaintext document really did the biggest difference for me – that I have one place to look at (my five special files not counted) and that I really do that at least twice a month.
