Today, Smile published my answers to some of your cognitive productivity questions.
About Smile
Smile develops productivity software for Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone and iPad. Including PDFPen & PDFPenPro and TextExpander.
If you’ve read my Cognitive Productivity books, you know that I describe how to use productivity software for deep work. On this blog I’ve discussed Editing Tables of Contents with PDF Pen Pro, and The Value of TextExpander Snippet Conventions: Web Addresses, Citations, Bibliographical References, Markdown and More.
I have discussed PDFPenPro and TextExpander several times on the Hook productivity website. We know that expert reading involves making connections between what you’re reading and other knowledge. One can bring up Hook’s contextual window in PDFPenPro to view and navigate hooks. With Hook, you can hook PDFs to just about anything.
Questions about cognitive productivity
Some of the questions I answered in the interview.
Can you explain what cognitive productivity is?
How does cognitive productivity differ from the type of productivity we read about in blogs?
How do we produce the mindware? How can we expand our knowledge?
We like to think of PDFpen/PDFpenPro as tools for engaging with information in PDFs. Can you tell us how PDFs come into your day-to-day and how you use PDFpenPro?
You created an app called Hook. What does it do and how do you use it?
Coming up! Writing about cognitive productivity on Smile’s blog
Leading the Hook productivity software project, which bridges a huge number of apps, puts me in touch with a many Mac software vendors. I’m a long time user of Smile’s software. PDFPenPro’s excellent API worked “out of the box” with Hook: no custom programming required on either side. Smile and I had a few meetings, which confirmed that there’s nice synergy between our companies and values. The topics of my research and writing are pertinent to Smile. So … we’ve agreed that I will blog for Smile — about cognitive productivity 😊 . Here at CogZest, I will post links to those articles.
We’ve planned a very nice series of articles for you. So, follow @PDFpen, and stay tuned.
Of course, I will continue to publish articles here and elsewhere on a range of topics. Compare: Why, Where, and What I Write.
