Productivity Was Never This Unproductive: A Review of Yojimbo

I have my Backpack account and my Hipster PDA. I read 43Folders with religious fervor. My desk is covered with post-it notes. I’ve read “Getting Things Done” and now I have Yojimbo.

Yojimbo, for those who aren’t as obsessed with personal productivity as I am, is the new brain extension tool from the good folks at Bare Bones Software (motto: “Our software doesn’t have to look or work like any other Apple software”), makers of the excellent BBEdit.

If you haven’t tried Yojimbo, you can download a free 30-day trial here on the Bare Bones (motto: “Quartz? We don’t need no stinking Quartz!”) web site. Give it a try, it takes a few moments to get into, but once you have it figured out you’ll really wonder how you ever did without it.

Yojimbo is almost too subtle to describe, the best way to explain it is to tell you how I use it. Yojimbo works in the background - it’s always ‘open’ there on the left side of your screen (or wherever you want to put it). You set up ‘collections’ on anything that strikes your fancy. Let’s say you want to collect thoughts, sites, emails, etc. that you want to blog about later. Then just create a ‘blog this’ collection and anytime you come across something you want to share with the world, just drag it over to the left side of your screen and dump it into the appropriate folder. It’s that simple. So I have collections set up for clients, for Apple Matters, for things I want to blog about, things I want to show my wife, blah blah blah. And anytime I come across something, there it goes.

So what’s the problem, you might ask?

I’m glad you asked. Really.

The problem with Yojimbo is it exists in a vacuum. Stuff goes into it, but nothing comes out. In other words, I want to be able to share across applications and on the Web. With Backpack, I can create reminders that can be shared with iCal and sent to my cell phone via SMS. iCal can share with the new Google Calendar.

Yojimbo lets you upload your stuff to .mac, but that’s about it for sharing. But man, it would be cool to be able to move my stuff right from Yojimbo on my hard drive, right up to my Backpack account. With all the apis and plug-ins around these days, you’ve got to think it would be easy for Bare Bones to create a hook or two. (motto: “Our spell checker is different from everyone else’s and that’s why it’s in a different place.”) But when I do a search in ‘iCal’ in the Yojimbo help section, there’s nothing.

Oh well. I guess it’s back to the post-its.