My workflow
I am always looking at new ways to produce and organise my work, which mainly consists of producing documents (reports, lectures, presentations, handouts) in which I insert diagrams, tables and images.
There are two processes to consider:
- Data and information
graph LR A[Collection]-->B[Organisation] B-->C[Retrieval] style A fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px style B fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px style C fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px - Documents
graph LR A[Drafting] --> B[Editing] B --> C[Distribution] style A fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px style B fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px style C fill:#3cf,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px
My approach follows a few key principles:
- Simplicity of
- To be able to collect and organise information and data from various devices (mobile phone, tablet, PC) to a single cloud based repository. This allows me to collect content from newspapers, journals, websites, ebooks, social media, independently from the device that I am using and to retrieve it from a single location
- To rely on open source software. I find that the most common SW packages (Adobe, MS, Apple, Google) steer the focus of the attention away from the content toward its form.
My key principle is that we tend to produce output (a report, an essay, an article) accepting the constraint that it has to fit into and A4 sheet to be printed and read in that shape, even if the great majority of documents are no longer being printed and are read of screen that do not meet the A4 standards.
In addition to that, I try to use software which is open source and which does not over complicate the process of producing written output. In summary, I avoid packages such as MS Office or Google Docs as they force the acceptance of pre-set standards and limit creativity and focus by forcing editing and tipographic choice while in the phase of creating content.
As such, my written documents are produced in Markdown, to be then converted, as necessary, in html or pdf.
Collection of information
Evernote and Zotero
Document drafting
Most of my written work starts as a markdown file and it is produced through a text editor (such as Vim or Atom) or a Markdown editor, such as MacDown (downlaodable on your Mac and run as a local application) or StackEdit (cloud based editor, whose basic account allows downloads as Markdown or HTML files).
Presentations
Either Html or Latex/Beamer