The Doist team continues to put out good content about topics that interest me. Single-tasking is the focus of this one and while they do not make any surprising points, it’s a great summary of why this is an important habit to develop. They do give one tip that I personally don’t agree with: using multiple spaces on the desktop (a macOS feature). > I limit myself to four desktops only: one for communication windows (Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Sunrise Calendar) and the other three for the windows…
My most read piece on Medium is How I Journal [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/how-i-journal]. Since writing that, I’ve received a lot of questions about my journal, Day One, and how I put it all together. But there is one question that comes up more than all the others. How can I start journaling and make the habit stick? A lot of people see the value of keeping a journal, but struggle to fully adopt the habit. It’s very easy to try out an app like Day One, add several entries over a week, th…
In order to benefit from whatever system you use to be productive and sane, regular reviews are required.
I loved this piece from Rands in Repose. If you’re familiar with his writing, he often talks about flow and how to get into the zone in order to achieve it. > The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental place. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value. In this article, he describes…
True rest is available, but it doesn't come from our efforts.
There used to be a time when Apple keynotes got me almost as excited as Christmas morning. I’d immediately dig into all the updates coming to OS X (nee macOS) and write about it in the weeks following. Now, I barely know the new features that come out with each new release of Apple’s macOS or iOS. That’s partly due to my stage of life (aka I’m old). But it’s also because after Lion (maybe Mountain Lion) I realized I rarely used the new stuff that became available each year. And maybe that trend…
I mentioned last week that my Bible study set up using Ulysses [https://thesweetsetup.com/how-to-use-ulysses-for-long-term-research/] was published over at The Sweet Setup earlier this month. This resulted in a handful of people asking about my reference to using the ESV API to populate Ulysses with Scripture. I was (obviously) not quite clear in the article. It was my intention to start that a person could use the API. But I have not been doing that myself. Instead, I manually copy and paste 1…
On the topic of tech companies with money to spend, Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub was interesting! Paul Ford had some things to say about this. > GitHub rode the wave of git adoption to become the central repository for decentralized code archives. As a result, 27 million users maintain 80 million projects on it—some private and closed off, some open sourced, many abandoned after a weekend of inspiration. That’s a significant portion of the software in the world. The article is a bit of an exp…