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Simplifying my personal iPhone
Now that I’ve separated my work and personal iPhones, I’m taking some time to simplify my personal device.
The biggest change is that for work, I’m now fully into the Office 365 product. So, email in Outlook, tasks in To Do, and notes in OneNote. Although I really liked using MindNode as my project and task manager and Apple Notes for my notes, I have to admit that this just works so much better for work tasks and with my office Windows PC.
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☎️ 😱 Living dangerously for seven years with a corporate phone
For seven years now, I’ve been living dangerously by only using my corporate phone for everything. I knew this was wrong, yet couldn’t resist, until this week.
There were only two, day-to-day negative impacts of relying on a corporate phone.
The first, admittedly minor, though surprisingly annoying, one is that any explicit songs in Apple Music were blocked. It isn’t that I feel compelled to listen to explicit lyrics. Rather, there are lots of good songs with a few swear words thrown in, especially for the more high-energy rock I prefer for workouts.
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I’m letting my Pinboard subscription expire. I’ve added 3,500 bookmarks since 2010 and the service was valuable when actively engaged in research. I haven’t looked up a bookmark in the past few years though. Now I’ll rely on Apple Notes and Micro.blog Bookmarks
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Time to stop tracking my personal life ⏰
Through 2020, I built up an ornate system for tracking my time for both work and personal projects (like this one for reading). For most of 2021, I found this tracking really helpful.
I need to track my hours at work anyway, so using Timery and Shortcuts to automate much of this has been great. Having a strong sense of how long things take and ensuring good balance across projects are all benefits of time tracking.
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As an update to my earlier post about using MindNode for task management, I’ve refreshed my areas of focus and projects for work. I still find MindNode really helpful for this, especially for seeing the balance of projects across the areas of focus. In this case, I can see that I have many Process Improvement projects, which makes sense, given my company has a big push on Lean at the moment.
Now I can fill in next actions for each project and then sync with Reminders.
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Lessons from using Apple Notes for three months
Back in September, I committed to using Apple Notes for three months. The goal was to focus on my use cases for writing, rather than fiddling with new apps continuously.
Here’s what I’ve identified so far. Many of the approaches and features that I’m using in these use cases are readily available in other apps and often Notes is not the most efficient choice. Now that I’ve documented these use cases, I’d like to use them to assess alternative apps.
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Switching to iCloud+ Custom Email Domain 📧
I’ve switched my personal email over to Apple’s custom email domain with iCloud Mail. A roughly ranked list of reasons for the switch is:
One less account to worry about. Not that it was a big deal, but now I don’t need to know the various setup details for my personal email. Once I’ve logged into my iCloud account, my email is ready. I appreciate Apple’s commitment to privacy and trust that they’ll apply this commitment to my email account.
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Switching from Agenda to Craft, for now 📅🗒
In my corner of the internet, there’s a well trodden, twisted path of searching for the one true notes app. I’ve reached a fork in the path between Agenda and Craft. As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using Agenda for a while now and its date-based approach really suits my meeting-dominated work. Now, though, Craft has added calendar integration and I’m testing it out.
There are several things I really like about Craft, relative to Agenda:
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Scheduling random meetings with a Shortcut ⚙️🗓
Staying in touch with my team is important. So, I schedule a skip-level meeting with someone on the team each week. These informal conversations are great for getting to know everyone, finding out about new ideas, and learning about recent achievements.
Getting these organized across a couple of dozen people is logistically challenging and I’ve developed a Shortcut to automate most of the process.
Borrowing from Scotty Jackson, I have a base in AirTable with a record for each team member.
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MindNode is the best mind mapping app for iOS
Continuing my plan to update App Store reviews for my favourite apps, up next is MindNode.
MindNode is indispensable to my workflow. My main use for it is in tracking all of my projects and tasks, supported by MindNode’s Reminders integration. I can see all of my projects, grouped by areas of focus, simultaneously which is great for weekly reviews and for prioritizing my work.
I’ve also found it really helpful for sketching out project plans.
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Trying out a new iPhone Home Screen 📱
With the release of iOS 7, I’m reconsidering my earlier approach to the Home Screen. So far I’m trying out a fully automated first screen that uses the Smart Stack, Siri Suggestions, and Shortcut widgets. These are all automatically populated, based on anticipated use and have been quite prescient.
My second screen is all widgets with views from apps that I want to have always available. Although the dynamic content on the first screen has been really good, I do want some certainty about accessing specific content.
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Reading Shortcut for the iPad 👓⚙️
I haven’t yet adopted the minimalist style of my iPhone for my iPad. Rather, I’ve found that setting up “task oriented” Shortcuts on my home screen is a good alternative to arranging lots of app icons.
The one I use the most is a “Reading” Shortcut, since this is my dominant use of the iPad. Nothing particularly fancy. Just a list of potential reading sources and each one starts up a Timery timer, since I like to track how much time I’m reading.
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Reflection journal in Day One with an Agenda assist
I’ve been keeping a “director’s commentary” of my experiences in Day One since August 2, 2012 (5,882 entries and counting). I’ve found this incredibly helpful and really enjoy the “On This Day” feature that shows all of my past entries on a particular day.
For the past few months, I’ve added in a routine based on the “5 minute PM” template which prompts me to add three things that happened that day and one thing I could have done to make the day better.
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Different watch faces for work and home
watchOS 7 has some interesting new features for enhancing and sharing watch faces. After an initial explosion of developing many special purpose watch faces, I’ve settled on two: one for work and another for home.
Both watch faces use the Modular design with the date on the top left, time on the top right, and Messages on the bottom right. I like keeping the faces mostly the same for consistency and muscle memory.
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I'm not analyzing COVID data, though I'm impressed with Ontario's open data
I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a medical doctor. So, no one wants to see my amateur disease modelling.
That said, I’ve complained in the past about Ontario’s open data practices. So, I was very impressed with the usefulness of the data the Province is providing for COVID: a straightforward csv file that is regularly updated from a stable URL.
Using the data is easy. Here’s an example of creating a table of daily counts and cumulative totals:
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Simple brew tea shortcut
Since I’m mostly stuck inside these days, I find I’m drinking more tea than usual. So, as a modification of my brew coffee shortcut, I’ve created a brew tea shortcut.
This one is slightly more complicated, since I want to do different things depending on if the tea is caffeinated or not.
We start by making this choice:
Then, if we choose caffeine, we log this to the Health app:
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A simple Shortcut for tracking workout time
I’ve been tracking my time at work for a while now, with the help of Toggl and Timery. Now that I’m working from home, work and home life are blending together, making it even more useful to track what I’m doing.
Physical exercise is essential to my sanity. So, I wanted to integrate my Apple Watch workouts into my time tracking. I thought I’d be able to leverage integration with the Health app through Shortcuts to add in workout times.
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Brew coffee shortcut
Shorcuts in iOS is a great tool. Automating tasks significantly boosts productivity and some really impressive shortcuts have been created.
That said, it is often the smaller automations that add up over time to make a big difference. My most used one is also the simplest in my Shortcuts Library. I use it every morning when I make my coffee. All the shortcut does is set a timer for 60 seconds (my chosen brew time for the Aeropress) and logs 90mg of caffeine into the Health app.
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Things cost more than they used to
I’m delivering a seminar on estimating capital costs for large transit projects soon. One of the main concepts that seems to confuse people is inflation (including the non-intuitive terms nominal and real costs). To guide this discussion, I’ve pulled data from Statistics Canada on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to make a few points.
The first point is that, yes, things do cost more than they used to, since prices have consistently increased year over year (this is the whole point of monetary policy).
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Task management with MindNode and Agenda
For several years now, I’ve been a very happy Things user for all of my task management. However, recent reflections on the nature of my work have led to some changes. My role now mostly entails tracking a portfolio of projects and making sure that my team has the right resources and clarity of purpose required to deliver them. This means that I’m much less involved in daily project management and have a much shorter task list than in the past.
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RStats on iPad
Among the many good new features in iPadOS, “Desktop Safari” has proven to be surprisingly helpful for my analytical workflows.
RStudio Cloud is a great service that provides a feature-complete version of RStudio in a web browser. In previous versions of Safari on iPad, RStudio Cloud was close to unusable, since the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work and they’re essential for using RStudio. In iPadOS, all of the shortcuts work as expected and RStudio Cloud is completely functional.
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My iPhone Home Screen
My goal for the home screen is to stay focused on action by making it easy to quickly capture my intentions and to minimize distractions. With previous setups I often found that I’d unlock the phone, be confronted by a screen full of apps with notification badges, and promptly forget what I had intended to do. So, I’ve reduced my home screen to just two apps.
Drafts is on the right and is likely my most frequently used app.
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Fixing a hack finds a better solution
In my Elections Ontario official results post, I had to use an ugly hack to match Electoral District names and numbers by extracting data from a drop down list on the Find My Electoral District website. Although it was mildly clever, like any hack, I shouldn’t have relied on this one for long, as proven by Elections Ontario shutting down the website.
So, a more robust solution was required, which led to using one of Election Ontario’s shapefiles.
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Elections Ontario official results
In preparing for some PsephoAnalytics work on the upcoming provincial election, I’ve been wrangling the Elections Ontario data. As provided, the data is really difficult to work with and we’ll walk through some steps to tidy these data for later analysis.
Here’s what the source data looks like:
Screenshot of raw Elections Ontario data
A few problems with this:
The data is scattered across a hundred different Excel files Candidates are in columns with their last name as the header Last names are not unique across all Electoral Districts, so can’t be used as a unique identifier Electoral District names are in a row, followed by a separate row for each poll within the district The party affiliation for each candidate isn’t included in the data So, we have a fair bit of work to do to get to something more useful.
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Charity donations by province
This tweet about the charitable donations by Albertans showed up in my timeline and caused a ruckus.
Albertans give the most to charity in Canada, 50% more than the national average, even in tough economic times. #CdnPoli pic.twitter.com/keKPzY8brO
— Oil Sands Action (@OilsandsAction) August 31, 2017 Many people took issue with the fact that these values weren’t adjusted for income. Seems to me that whether this is a good idea or not depends on what kind of question you’re trying to answer.