Seth Clifford shares an interesting approach to managing tasks with OmniFocus. Rather than the traditional contexts such as "phone", "Mac", "iPad", or "Errands", he uses time. > First, I created three new contexts: “9am-5pm”, “5pm-9am”, and “Weekend”. Not a bad idea. As one who uses only 3 main contexts (Errands, Home, and Mac), I concur with Seth's opinion here: > Location is a modifier on time. It's the time of the day that dictates what I will be working on, not my location. This is part of…
How's your learning going this week? Have all the articles you've read on your phone improved your life? It's vital that we remember empty knowledge is useless, whereas wisdom leads to improved life. For us, and others. That seems to be at the heart of Ryan Holiday's point in this post. > No matter how much learning or work or thinking we do, none of it matters unless it happens against the backstop of exhortative analysis. We live in an interesting time: we can drink from the firehose all day…
If you're familiar with the writing of Ben Brooks, you may have come to expect a certain … tone from him. Ben's never been one to mince words and shares his thoughts about products and services whether they're good or bad. In this post (yes, it's audio, but I'll still call these a post), Ben shares how this voice was not his natural way of talking or treating others. Rather, it was an online persona that grew over time. But he openly shares how he wants this to change. This is…
My experience in different work environments has been that accountability to investors results in a less than ideal work environment and questionable decision making.
Rian nicely sums up a growing sentiment. Namely, that there is an anti-Slack backlash growing. What made Slack so inviting is a reduction. But we're simply using it to replace everything (every.other.thing), which is just moving a mess, rather than cleaning it up. > Slack is a great communication tool, with integrations that make it possible to reduce the amount of time spent on other services. But once you have multiple accounts and multiple rooms to contend with every day, it has the potenti…
Shawn Blanc shares how he mixes pen & paper with his digital task management system. OmniFocus is where everything goes, but it's the paper where the most important things go, both as a reminder and as a focus. > There is something concrete to the act of using a pen to write down my most important tasks onto a piece of paper. And there’s something ever-so-slightly less distracting about coming downstairs and having a notebook open and waiting, listing out in my own handwriting what it is I need…
Hugh McGuire describes the problem that has resulted from our always on stream of updates. For him, reading 4 books in one year was a struggle and a sign that the issue is serious. His description of the nature of the problem may resonate with a lot of us: > I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without…
A description of how I made version control a part of my process for writing and working on my personal site.