Fiendish Master Plan, which I found on 43Folders, is a simple Ruby script that looks at a text file and spits out a set of smaller text files according to category. So, for example, a line in your main text file reading ^monkeyfacts Monkeys enjoy dressing as humans to advertise tea would generate a file called monkeyfacts.txt with your monkey fact safely inside.

Set up a Quicksilver trigger ¹ to add text to your main text file, have cron² run the script for you every so often, use Textpander³ to automate the typing of category headings, dates and commonly used phrases… and you’ve got a seriously efficient note-taking and list-making application at your fingertips.

Being lovely text files, all those notes and lists can easily be repurposed, too.

If you use Markdown, the easy to read format that allows for simple text-to-HTML conversion, you could drop your files onto one of Fletcher Penny’s MarkdownDragAndDrop mini-applications and generate HTML files for the web or PDFs to email. And, with creative use of categories, you could even dump them into a directory on a server running Blosxom to generate a quickfire ideas weblog.

Add an Automator script or two, maybe some Folder Actions, and the only thing left to automate is, you know, thinking.

1. If you’re unfamiliar with Quicksilver, you might like to read this review I wrote a couple of years ago, or some more gobbledegeek on the topic of triggers.↩

2. cron, a Unix thingy for scheduling tasks, is easy to use, but if you don’t like tinkering on the command line, Cronnix offers a nice friendly graphical interface to it.↩

3. Textpander expands abbreviations into snippets of text as you type. I use it to generate annoying footnotes like this one, among other things.↩

Quicksilver’s greatest strength—the fact it can do absolutely bloody everything under the sun, dead fast—is also a weakness, since it’s often too easy to plod along doing something with the Finder and sundry applications, with all the attendant clicking and opening and general time-wasting that involves, because it doesn’t occur to you to tinker with QS to see if there’s a better way.

Thankfully, the Getting Things Done user community spend every hour of their strange meta-existences tinkering with elaborate efficiency systems rather than doing things, thereby turning up Quicksilver gems like the following, which I just spotted in a recent-ish entry at 43 Folders:

Let’s say you have a filed called “TODO.txt” that you add to throughout the day. In QS’s preferences, go to “Preferences > Triggers” and click “+” to make a new trigger. In the interface, type until you find your TODO.txt doc (important: it must end with “.txt”), then TAB to the second pane and type “Append To”. DO NOT TAB to the third pane; just hit Save. Now assign the new trigger a key command over on the right, and you’ve got “one-click” access to add items to your TODO list.

I’m aware that’ll be somewhere between gobbledegook and poppycock to anyone reading who doesn’t use Quicksilver: it means that instead of navigating to your text file in the Finder, then opening it in a text editor, then scrolling to the bottom of the file, then adding what you want to type, then saving the file, then closing it, Quicksilver lets you do the same job by banging on three keys simultaneously, typing your snippet of text and hitting return.

Have you any idea how many sweet, sweet milliseconds that could save over the course of a lifetime? Me neither, but it’s probably between ‘several’ and ‘quite a few’. Brilliant.