Ryder Carroll’s clever looking system and structure for keeping notes, tasks, ideas, and events in a physical notebook journal. (Reminds me a little bit of Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus System.)

One thing I miss about keeping my tasks, notes, and ideas in a physical journal is that perspective I’d get when looking over past pages. When pages and pages are filled with tasks that were once written down and are now crossed out, you get the sense that life has been lived. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the little things we do every day help slowly inch us towards our bigger goals and dreams. A digital task manager doesn’t quite give that same satisfying and somewhat nostalgic perspective.

(By the way, the site is best viewed in a desktop browser. Though there’s a mobile-friendly version, you miss out on some of the cool animated examples.)

New-to-me tip from David Chartier:

If you use an external Bluetooth keyboard with your iPad (or iPhone) as well as a passcode to lock your device, you don’t need to slide to unlock to start the process. Just start typing your passcode on your external keyboard, and iOS will figure it out.

Nice. You don’t even have to turn on the display by hitting the Home or Lock button first.

Sign and return documents without printing or faxing, directly from your iPad. Fix typos and correct price lists immediately while an issue is foremost in your mind. Take PDF documents with you, and add notes, highlighting, and other markup during your mobile downtime. Sync with your Mac via iCloud or Dropbox. Retrieve and save documents via Evernote, Box, and Google Drive.

Edit your PDFs anywhere you are with the complete, feature rich, mobile editing power of PDFpen for iPad.

Get $5 off PDFpen for iPad, only $9.99 on the iTunes App Store, this week only.

* * *

My thanks to Smile for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Another great review with screencasts:

From the start, I knew that Editorial was something special. Ole [Zorn, the developer,] has an incredible design sense. He’s a master craftsman and the attention to detail in Editorial, even at that early stage, was jaw-dropping. There are ideas in Editorial I have never seen in another iOS app.

To say that Editorial is an awesome new iPad text-editor would be a bit of an understatement. To say that Viticci wrote a 25,000-word review would be accurate.

Though my desk and my clicky keyboard will always be my primary writing station, I still do a fair amount of writing on my iPad (especially when I’m away from my desk).

Needless to say, I downloaded Editorial yesterday, and I’m already blown away just in my first impression. So far it looks absolutely fantastic — the design, the features, the extra functionality all look brilliantly put together.

Just $5 on the app store. If you ever use your iPad to write more than emails, you’re going to like Editorial.

Michael Barrett wrote some great follow-up commentary to the aforelinked Back to Work episode on feeling like a fraud:

…after a while you adjust to the new normal and it becomes real and true.

When you step into a new role or arena it sometimes takes a while to realize that everyone else in there is just like you and that you fit in just fine.

Relatedly, this Steve Jobs quote:

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Farmer’s Market is a tech podcast for sellers, fixers, and makers. My friend, Rick Stawarz hosts the show and he asked me to be a guest to talk about the planning, building, and publishing of my new book, Delight is in the Details.

The newest version of Yojimbo now uses Wasabi Sync to do Mac-to-Mac syncing. Lex Friedman has the whole rundown.

Yojimbo is an app I used just about every single day from early 2009 until late 2012. Here’s my review of the app — which is still relevant today — from shortly after version 2.0 shipped.

However, last fall my collection of website bookmarks and notes reached a point where I could no longer quickly find something by search. It was with sadness in my heart that I decided to export most of my data out of Yojimbo and into type-specific apps and services. Bookmarks went to Pinboard; notes went to Simplenote/nvALT; and passwords, serial numbers, and encrypted documents went to 1Password. You can read about how and why I moved away from Yojimbo here.

What excites me about Yojimbo 4.0 and this massive time investment to get sync working, is that it shows Bare Bones has not abandoned the app. And if they’ve taken the time to implement syncing now (with hints and also getting OTA Mac-to-iPad syncing working), then perhaps there is more down the road for Yojimbo (such as an iPhone client, better searching, and who knows what else).

On this week’s episode of Back to Work (starting at the 33-minute mark), Dan and Merlin have a great conversation regarding what it is that sometimes causes creative and entrepreneurial people to feel like frauds.

It’s a great conversation about the fear of going into the unknown to create something and then exposing yourself by putting your work out there, and how, at the end of the day, it’s just part of the process for people who make things, and to do anything worthwhile requires stepping out on a ledge.

As an example, they talk about my launch-day fears which I shared in my post last week about how I self-published my book. In that post I wrote that I woke up on launch day feeling like a fraud before I had even made Delight is in the Details available for sale.

I’ve been making and selling my own work for years. I’ve done freelance work for print and web projects, I’ve sold t-shirts here, and I ask readers to become members and support the writing I do on this site.

Have I ever felt like a fraud before? No. Last week was a new experience for me.

All I can boil it down to is that charging for this book was different than anything else I’ve sold before. With the book I assigned a value to a topic that is familiar to me, but those who were buying it didn’t yet know what was inside. I feared they would find the content to be familiar as well and thus not consider the price to be a fair value.

For all the other things I’ve sold (design work, t-shirts, site memberships, etc.), the person buying knew exactly what they were getting before they paid. In the case of the book, people have had to trust that what I’ve said about the book is true.

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s the best way I know how to explain it.

If this “lizard brain” stuff sounds familiar to you, give this week’s Back to Work a listen. Merlin does a great job at debunking some of the reasons why people may feel that way and why it’s usually not an accurate assessment of who they actually are.

Speaking of VSCO, they just released a new film pack: Slide Film, and it looks great.

The VSCO Film packs are what I use to edit all the shots I take with my E-PL5. After ordering my mirrorless, the first thing I did was buy Lightroom and then VSCO’s Film packs. Only 1 and 2 were out at the time, and I’ve been extremely happy with them. I just bought film pack 4 and am looking forward to checking it out on my next photo editing session.

The Slide 4 pack is 25-percent off for a few more days (I think until next Tuesday, the 20th, but I’m not positive).

Lydia Dishman wrote a brief profile of the Visual Supply Co. (VSCO) and their iPhone app.

Using the VSCO cam to edit on the iPhone takes a bit more time than the one-click filters in Instagram, but I much prefer the finished product of the iPhone photos I edit in VSCO. And man, for proof that fancy gear and expensive software does not a photographer make, look no further than Kyle Steed’s VSCO Grid. Dude’s got skills.

Scott Belsky is one of the good guys. He’s an artist and a creative, but also a leader and an entrepreneur.

This sentence from the interview really stuck out to me, especially since the launch of my book is still so fresh:

To create something extraordinary, you have to learn to gain confidence from doubt.