Scripts, workflows, and tools designed to remove friction from knowledge work. This is where I share the specific automations that keep my digital life running on the rails.
A while ago I shared a post from David Sparks about automating greetings in emails to reduce typos and increase accuracy in written communication. That post got me thinking about the other things that I do in my day-to-day written communications that could benefit from the accuracy and precision that comes from automation. I realized that dates were what I should try to address.
Read more
Rosemary Orchard, writing for The Sweet Setup:
Drafts is much more than a quick way to take a quick note and has become the app I go to for all my writing because it’s easy, simple, but still powerful when I need more features.
Rosemary Orchard is rapidly becoming one of my technology/productivity idols. I first learned about her on her podcast The Automators, and I have since kept an eye on as much of her work as I can. I started using Drafts 5 (an iOS/macOS text editor) based on her rave reviews, and her post on The Sweet Setup is an excellent explanation of the app.
Read more
I plan on writing a post all about Hazel in the future, but I wanted to share a specific use case for Hazel that others might benefit from.
In short, Hazel is a very cool macOS tool for automating the moving and naming of files. I know that does not sound very fun, but it is incredible. Again I will talk more about that in the future but let me show you what I wanted to do:
Read more
When you drive your car, you use a seatbelt. It’s a no-brainer. Using a VPN on the internet is the same thing; you should be using one now.
Read more
Apple really ramped up its health efforts a few iOS versions ago and one of the sleeper hits (pun intended) is the bedtime feature.
Buried in the clock app on iOS is a tab called bedtime. In here you can set your wake up time (this also sets an alarm) and how long you want to sleep. Once you do this, you get a bedtime reminder every night and sleep data populated into your Health app. If you set the option your phone will also turn on Do Not Disturb mode during your sleep.
Read more