This week’s sweet setup interview is with my long-time internet pal, Aaron Mahnke. Aaron is a Sweet Setup alumnus from the original series of interviews I did here. His office looks the same as it did back in October 2010, but his hardware has all been upgraded and his software in use is quite a bit different now, as well.

However, I bet one thing that hasn’t changed is his answer to the question about how his setup helps him to do his best creative work:

I’ve tried my best to surround myself with tools that help me get the job done faster. I take notes in Notational Velocity, which is connected with SimpleNote, so that I never have to save, rename, or move the files again. I keep inspiration logged in Yojimbo and Littlesnapper, both of which sync across my computers. And I try my best to master hot keys to save time and effort.

Creativity is all about reducing the distance from inspiration to retention. I might not be able to react to a moment of inspiration right away, but if I can capture it properly (via screenshot, dragging into Yojimbo, or typing the idea out) I can come back to it when I’m ready. This isn’t multitasking, though. This is all about knowing your tools and having a solid system.

Workflow Mastery is an ebook that will teach you how to work and play with a clear mind.

• Learn to avoid procrastination and form your work into paths of mastery.

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• Nurture calm confident elegance throughout your workflows.

Written by the author of Creating Flow with OmniFocus, Workflow Mastery: Building from the Basics helps you to build solid workflows so you can work and play with a clear mind.

Winner of a Quality in Excellence and Design Award and a Bronze eLit Award in Education (First edition — Workflow: Beyond Productivity).

Now available at MasteryInWorkflow.com and UsingOmniFocus.com.

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My thanks to Workflow Mastery for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I follow up with last week’s episode, Regret and Focus, to talk about the need for having a focused schedule, why it’s especially important for creative people, and a step-by-step walk through for how to get started.

Sponsored by:

• Scratch: Capture your ideas with the best quick-input notepad for iPhone.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Sylvia Poggioli (via Kyle Steed) tells the story for NPR about coffee shops all over Europe that offer caffè sospeso, or suspended coffee. Suspended coffee is when a customer comes in for a cup of coffee and they pay for two so that someone else can have a drink for free.

The barista would keep a log, and when someone popped his head in the doorway of the cafe and asked, “Is there anything suspended?” the barista would nod and serve him a cup of coffee … for free.

It’s an elegant way to show generosity: an act of charity in which donors and recipients never meet each other, the donor doesn’t show off and the recipient doesn’t have to show gratitude.

There is a Coffee Sharing website with a list of all the shops that do Suspended Coffee. And then there’s a coffee shop in Kentucky that offers a similar model, but with a twist. At A Cup of Common Wealth customers can buy a specific drink for a specific person or type of person. Such as “a medium coffee for a a middle school teacher” or “an iced latte for an Alaskan traveler”.

The Cramped is a brand new site from my internet pal, Patrick Rhone, that is all about “the unique pleasures of analog writing”. In other words: pen and paper nerdery with a focus on actually writing. Love it.

Dan Benjamin asked me to be a guest on his Podcast That Is Trying to Find a Name but Is Still Currently Called Quit. We talked about a whole slew of things related to starting your own business, delegating, investing, hiring, firing, and the like.

“3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.”

Ben Bajarin:

Specifically, the iPad is the most general purpose computing device I’ve ever studied. It can be so many things to so many people and do a wide variety of things well. It can be a DJ’s mixing board, an art easel, a portable DVD player, a music recording studio, an e-reader, a web browser, a gaming console, and so much more. I believe this range of supported use cases is what made the iPad Apple’s fastest growing product and one of the most quickly adopted devices in consumer electronics history. […]

The iPad’s curse may be it can do many things well but does it do anything better? That is a key question.

Frank Chimero:

Increasingly, I feel like a lot of my tools are dressing-up as tools, because they don’t offer any savings in time or effort, just slightly different methods to mindlessly shift information from one bucket to the next. And if one bucket has a hole in it, you get another, smaller bucket to catch anything coming out of the hole in the first bucket. This goes on and on with more holes and buckets, and before you know it, you have an intricate network of buckets whose reason for existance is to catch the information you can’t manage in the first place. You are stuck in bucket recursion, adding tools to patch the shortcomings of other tools. Those patches are how you know you have dress-up tools.

Matt Gemmell on the small screen of the 11-inch MacBook Air:

There’s no substitute for motivation, self-moderation and focus, but there’s also nothing inherently limiting about small screens. You absolutely can have the best of both worlds: your entire office in an envelope, without feeling that you’re being held back.

Great piece; hitting on both the philosophical and the practical.

Your best ideas come when you least expect them. That’s why Scratch launches lightning-fast, ready for input. Write it down and get back to life. Later, send your ideas where they need to go: Email that recipe to your sister, turn that note into a reminder or post that joke to Twitter. Get Scratch for iPhone today.

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My thanks to Scratch for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. This app is just fantastic. It lives in my iPhone Dock for the sole purpose of being the go-to app for initially capturing ideas, lists, and other miscellaneous tidbits of information. It’s fast and right there, waiting. Highly recommended.

Over the weekend, Anna and I watched this documentary and really enjoyed it. (It was also the first time I’ve ever used the YouTube app on Apple TV; I had to un-hide the darn thing.)

Someday I’ll Fly is just an hour long, and it tells the story of how John Mayer got into playing guitar, how his first record came about, and subsequently how the rest of his records came about.

What’s so great about this video is that the focus is entirely on creativity, making music, and working through disillusionment as an artists.

The video is narrated by Mayer himself, and even if you’re not a Mayer fan, there are many fantastic quotes and tidbits about the journey and struggles of the creative artist.

This week’s setup interview is with Preshit Deorukhkar. Preshit is man behind Beautiful Pixels, an excellent site that features apps that stand up as great examples of visual design.