Stephen Hackett talking about notebooks.
I’m a bit Field Notes junkie too and I use them as a capture tool. I like to read and watch stuff about other people workflows, so it’s always refreshing to see how somebody else uses something that I use as well.
When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.
It’s weird, but I’ve just subscribed for Headspace to have a way to practice the routine of sitting in silence.
I'm still thinking about which apartment should I stay in or stop wasting my time and move away completely. I started making my own cabin in the woods which I use at the weekends. Too bad that I like some of my current neighbors.
I agree with this so much. You should read the whole thing, if you have a website or you’re building websites, especially if you're using that bullshit Google AMP.
Most email systems do not signal to others that you are online, and such signaling is not part of the email protocols themselves.
We usually say a lot of bad things about email but it's a rare case of a technology which is independent, interoperable and if you use it right, can be non-distracting.
I really miss the old days of communication, it was such a simple system: when I was online (on whatever chat service) you could ping me, otherwise, you were able to send me an email. Nowadays we just install multiple messaging apps, each of them is constantly online. We receive multiple notifications and we try to fight the distraction with hacks like Do Not Disturb and AI that tunes our notifications.
Sometimes it works, but we should also train some basic expectations on response time to our peers: send me an email, or if it's urgent, message me, but never expect an instant response.
I've never really stopped using RSS. My blog still has an RSS button in the header, I still read blogs using RSS, and if you've subscribed to any podcast then you're using RSS too. It's still a fundamentally important technology albeit some "social" companies want to see it going away.
Maybe Apple should bring RSS back in Safari like Tiger had.
I assume BBC had this amazing footage laying around after editing Planet Earth 2 (which I’ll rewatch in 4K soon), so instead of putting it away on a hard drive somewhere, they’ve released it as 10-hour long looped videos. These are way better than any noise-making app for focusing when I code or relax. I even tried connecting a second display to my iMac just to see the video part too in fullscreen while I work, but that was too distracting.
My blog got included in the sources of hashtagopenweb which is a cool site from Michael Rockwell collecting all kind of one-man blogs related to Apple and technology. I also found a couple of new blogs which I subscribed with RSS.
Om describing Skype perfectly:
a turd of the highest quality
I'm using Skype for podcasting but I'm in the hurry finding a good alternative for it. Since they dumped a fairly good Mac app with a stupid Electron crap, I just want to avoid it.
And don't get me started on the iOS version…
Flitter is a really nice upcoming Twitter client for iPhone with some cool UI ideas.
A couple of years ago, iOS Twitter clients were UI playgrounds, but then Twitter started messing with developers and nobody wants to create new apps anymore. It is awesome to see there are still new clients are being made.
You can preorder it on the App Store.
There is a hidden directory inside of macOS that contains the app icons for built-in services like iCloud Drive. You probably wouldn’t know they are there because you’ll have to enter a specific file path in order to access them. Here’s how to put the iCloud Drive Icon on your dock for easy access to Apple’s cloud storage.
This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into parts of our lives that aren’t serving us well.
Although I don't agree with everything, this the sanest article that gives you tips about phone addiction, without going into extremes. I'm already doing a lot of these tips, I just need to revise my notification settings.
Cal Newport writes about owning your content on the social web:
Buy a domain. Setup a web hosting account […]. Install WordPress or hand-code a website for this account. Let people follow you directly by checking your site, or subscribing to an RSS feed or email newsletter.
It was like that couple of years ago, then social media made really really easy for everyone to tell their story. The problem is that your story is now tied to some company that controls basically everything outside a textarea which you use to tell your story. That's way more limiting than having your own website or blog which you control as a whole. Sure, it takes a bit more work to set up a website and you may have to hire a professional to help you, but it's way more satisfying at the end than creating a Twitter account or a Facebook page.
One more thought for Twitter users: if you want to tell something which needs a thread of multiple tweets then write a blog post instead. That's how we used to do it.
Wired has a nice collection of repeated apologies from Mark Zuckerberg over the last decade.
Last month, Facebook once again garnered widespread attention with a privacy related backlash when it became widely known that, between 2008 and 2015, it had allowed hundreds, maybe thousands, of apps to scrape voluminous data from Facebook users—not just from the users who had downloaded the apps, but detailed information from all their friends as well.
I’m getting tired of all Facebook’s crap so I have to get rid of it completely. I’m sure there is a shadow profile of me on Facebook servers even I deleted my account about a year ago.
I have Messenger on my phone with no access to photos, my location nor my contacts. My next goal is to get rid of that junk and move my communication of Android people over to Telegram. Luckily a lot of my friends and family use iOS devices.
Maybe I’m a bit masochist but I’ve always found SQL a really useful skill to have for filtering and aggregating a lot of data. I found this site which can help me master this a bit more with PostgreSQL, although the logic can be reused in any SQL based database backend.
And that’s how I discovered that meditation is an incredible design and problem solving tool. Instead of wasting hours browsing the internet looking for a solution or an idea, I sit in my room, close my eyes and simply think about the problem. It’s an incredibly useful exercise and more often than not, I come up with solutions faster that I’d do by browsing randomly the internet.
It sounds like the "walking meditation" practice that Cal Newport mentions in Deep Work. When you want solve a problem, get away from your computer and go for walk focusing on the problem. You'll get a solution almost every time.
Sometimes it can be boring to read about other people productivity systems, but this one really interesting. If you can’t find a GTD app that satisfies your needs, maybe you should try a plain old spreadsheet.
David Sparks writing about scheduling his workdays:
I treat the blocks of time more like versatile soup ingredients than a rigid jigsaw puzzle, so I am happy to move them around as I'm planning the next day.
I like this analogy of the calendar working like a puzzle where I can put and arrange pieces of my time as blocks. The problem is making a daily plan then scheduling my whole day simply doesn't work for me. This system feels too restrictive, and believe me, I tried it. It was creating unwanted stress and admin work because I got into the flow, ignored notifications then rescheduled stuff constantly.
I like the idea though. Also, currently I have a longstanding problem reviewing my right task lists at the right moment. Using my calendar, I'll try to schedule blocks of work categories, like @Home or @Admin which are representing context lists in my GTD system. I hope it will start to form at least a list review habit for me, so I can start to trust more in my system.
The secret for this—as with many things—is trying to not overdo it.
Simple tool from the MindNode guys to automate App Store screenshot creation.
Things 3.4 just has released with an awesome update to its URL scheme. I've already wrote about how can it be used, also there are more examples on MacStories and The Sweet Setup.
Twitter is killing its own Mac client. It was a big piece of crap anyway, but this attitude pisses me off.
Great new video course on Things from Shawn Blanc over the Sweet Setup.
The outboard memory is like an external hard drive, a place to curate any useful information, quotes, facts or figures you might come across. You might be familiar with the term "commonplace book" which is, usually, a handwritten book where all these references and snippets would be placed.
I'm very into the idea of using my blog as a commonplace book. Maybe some of that stuff should be public though.
On a similar note, many believe that blogging is making a return. Folks now seem to recognize the value of having your own little plot of land on the web and, although it’s still pretty complex to make your own website and control all that content, it’s worth it in the long run. No one can run ads against your thing. No one can mess with the styles. No one can censor or sunset your writing.
Not only that but when you finish making your website you will have gained superpowers: you now have an independent voice, a URL, and a home on the open web.
I'm optimistic about the state of blogs in 2018. I discovered a handful of new blogs thanks to Micro.blog and I don't want to leave them unread.
Crontab.guru is a great webapp to create (and learn) crontab schedules a bit easier.
Colin Walker writing about issues subscribing to RSS:
While RSS readers are making a bit of a comeback in certain quarters there's no doubt that, as Sameer puts it, "subscribing to feeds definitely has fallen out of parlance."
RSS is more than a decade old now, but explaining it to mere mortals still hasn’t really been solved. Podcasts apps are also using RSS technology in the background, but they usually have a directory of podcasts which gives you an easy way of subscribing in the app. This solves a lot of problems for average users.
Out in the open web, you have a feed URL and you need to know where to paste it. It's a big UX problem, but I'm not sure it is even solvable. We can build walled gardens or create a directory of blogs with a built-in RSS reader, but in theory, they still lock you into a service.
As a blog author, I still have to figure out the technical aspects of the IndieWeb and as a blog reader, you also have an obligation to find out how to follow blog over RSS. In this process, you can find a balance to lock yourself into a walled garden or choose something else which you can control, but give up some convince along the way.
Brent Simmons on why Micro.blog is different than App.net:
But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together. Those were great years — but then a few tragedies happened: Google Reader came out, and then, almost worse, it went away. Worse still was the rise of Twitter and Facebook, when we decided it would be okay to give up ownership and let just a couple companies own our communication.
Yes, it's pretty much sums up the last decade of the web. I want to get back the ownership of my content, that's why I'm posting from my blog nowadays and syndicate elsewhere. On the top of that, Micro.blog is a pretty great network with a lot of interesting people. As Jack Baty wrote:
I need to say it again… I love Micro.blog. It feels like something new and it’s pretty great. Sign up. Post stuff. Interact. Own your shit.
Robert Peake wrote about "daily to-do lists" on Next Action Associates:
To put a finer point on it: you are not a “good boy” or “good girl” for completing all the items on your short list any more than you are an unproductive person for not ticking off every item by the end of the day. It may well be that you focused on exactly the right things each moment of the day without striking through a single item on the sub-list. Simply having those short list options to hand can help you to validate that those choices you make which are not on the list are, indeed, correct – because you have consciously weighed them against that shortlist before acting.
This is a great mindset to have about the Today list functionality in Things. I like that Robert calls it a daily sublist which sounds way better than the "I have to do these today no matter what happens" list as people like to think about it usually.
I'm also in the habit of curating a weekend chores list from my main Home list into Things' Today view. I do this because my biggest problem with GTD at the moment is sometimes I forget to review my appropriate context lists on a daily basis or at the right moment.
