The great unfollowing 😱

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Inspired by @cedevroe’s semi-regular purges, I’ve gone through my many services and unfollowed, unsubscribed, and deleted everything. And, I mean everything! That’s all of my RSS feeds, newsletters, podcasts, and Micro.blog, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. This seemed kind of crazy at first, until I realized that being so attached to these things is rather silly.

Before simply resubscribing to everything, I’m trying to take a more thoughtful approach to why I’m using each of these services.

All of my news feeds are in NetNewsWire with Feedbin as the back end. I’d accumulated a few dozen feeds here, the vast majority of which I was consistently just marking all as read. Many were feeds that I thought I should read, rather than actually wanted to read. I’m going to resubscribe to just the ones that seemed to consistently yield interesting (to me) articles, like Quanta Magazine and Aeon.

As newsletters arrive, I’ll unsubscribe from them. If I still see value, I’ll transition them over to Feebin and they’ll show up among the news feeds. Conceptually this makes sense to me, since they really are just another source of news, rather than actual correspondence to me.

Although I cleaned up my podcasts a couple of years ago, I’d added a few more since then. I think my original list is still the right one. Nevertheless, I’ve unsubscribed from them all and will reintroduce them slowly.

The YouTube algorithms are far too powerful and tempting. So, I’m shifting to adding specific channels to Feedbin. I like a few science and math oriented channels (such as Steve Mould, 3Blue1Brown, and Stand-up Maths), the rest were just mindless ways of passing the time.

Instagram used to be where I went to see pictures from friends about their adventures, kids, and pets. Over time my feed had become dominated by brands, especially fitness, beer, and whiskey. Nothing wrong with any of these, obviously, just not what I need to be seeing, So, back to just accounts for people I actually know. As an aside, I was surprised by how easy Instagram makes it to unfollow, including a helpful list of which accounts you interact with the most and the least.

I really like the idea of Twitter as a place to follow my interests. We all know that in practice it can be a pretty nasty place. As an experiment, I’m going to try only following topics there, rather than people. To be honest, though, I lost my Twitter scrolling habit about halfway through the Trump presidency and I’m not that tempted to return.

Micro.blog was tricky. As the opposite of Twitter, I’ve found lots of nice people having interesting conversations there on a wide array of topics. But, the point of this exercise is to clean out everything, so even here I’ve stopped following everyone. I suspect that I’ll end up mostly back where I started on this one.

I have to admit feeling a bit disoriented this morning. My usual routine is to scan through all of these sources while waking up with some coffee. There are lots of other things I can be doing in the morning though, starting with actually reading some of the articles I’ve accumulated in my ever lengthening read-it-later queue.

Although a purge like this can seem dramatic, I think it can also be therapeutic. Thanks to @cedevroe for prompting this.

2021 iPhone Home Screens

Saturday, November 20, 2021

My iPhone Home Screen continues to evolve and, now that we have Focus Modes, I’ve made some further adjustments.

From left to right, I’m using three different Focus Modes: Personal, Work, and Fitness. The first two are entirely widget focused, while Fitness has a few app icons as well.

The dock has Drafts which, as the tagline says, is where text starts. This hasn’t changed from my earlier setups. The second icon launches a front-end Shortcut for Apple Notes. As I described in my Apple Note overview, this is an idea that I’ve borrowed from Matthew Cassinelli and provides a flexible interface to the app.

Personal

From top left, my Personal Home Screen starts with a stack of Reminders filtered to my Personal list, Fantastical, and Streaks. This is essentially my “what should I be doing” stack.

Next is a stack with Photos and Siri Suggestions. The Photos widget consistently surfaces delightful photos, so I’ve given it a prominent spot. While the usefulness of Siri Suggestions are variable, I like the idea of my phone learning my habits and showing me relevant actions.

Through the middle, I have Weather on the left and the right is a stack of Apple Music and Overcast, which are my options for listening to something.

On the bottom left is a stack of Timery and Screen Time. These are there to keep me mindful of what I’m actually doing, especially on weekends. The Timery widget shows me a summary view of my projects. So, in this screenshot I’ve put in an hour on exercise, another hour on reading, and 20 minutes with some household chores. The Screen Time widget helps keep me honest about how much I’m using my devices, especially on weekends when I really should be looking at something besides a screen.

And on the bottom right is a stack of Day One and Notes, filtered to my Personal folder. Day One is there for capturing family events and reflections. While the Notes folder often has some useful reference material for our weekend activities.

Work

Curiously, my Work Home Screen is less complicated than my Personal one.

The top is a stack with Fantastical and Mail’s VIP widget. I’m not entirely convinced that the Mail widget is useful here. I almost always just want Fantastical reminding me of my next meeting or task.

Given the more variable number of tasks I tend to be doing while in work mode, I’ve got the Siri Suggestions widget in the middle. I took this screenshot on the weekend, so it isn’t indicative of what it usually shows, which tends to be one of the Shortcuts that I’m often launching to manage my workday.

Intentionally mirroring my Personal HomeScreen, the bottom row is a stack with two Timery widgets and a stack of two Notes widgets, one filtered to my Work folder and the other to my Meetings folder.

Fitness

The Fitness Home Screen is mostly an experiment. I spend the vast majority of my time in one of the other two Focus Modes, so I’m not yet convinced that I need any other Home Screens.

Regardless, this one has the Fitness widget at the top for seemingly obvious reasons.

The middle row has the Training Today widget to help keep me honest about rest. And then a cluster of icons on the right. The only one that is non-standard is “Workout mix”, which is just a Shortcut to launch a good playlist in Apple Music.

The bottom row has Carrot Weather to make sure I’m not about to get rained on when heading out for a run. I’ve also added the Batteries widget there to make sure my Apple Watch and AirPods are ready for action.

I’ve set up Personal Automations to automatically switch between my Personal and Work Home Screens at 8:45 and 17:30. I’ve found these good reminders to keep my work activities within reasonable office hours. Starting a Workout automatically switches to the Fitness Home Screen.

There’s almost endless scope for fiddling with these. So, by writing them here, I’m adding some accountability to just stop that and use them for a while before making further changes.

Integrating Micro.blog Highlights with Apple Notes 📒

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Now that I’m committed to using Apple Notes, I wanted a way to download my Micro.blog Highlights into Notes.

I like using Bookmarks as a read-it-later service and the highlighting feature is great for quickly blogging excerpts from articles. For longer-term storage, though, and integration with the rest of my notes, it is much better to have the content of the highlights stored within Notes.

So, here’s a Shortcut Micro.blog Highlights to Notes that does exactly this. The Shortcut checks first to see if the highlight is already captured in a note to prevent duplication. It also checks to see if there’s already a note for the webpage, just with a different highlight, and appends the highlight to that note, instead of creating a new one.

At least, that’s the idea. I’ve found these checks very unreliable. Sometimes the Shortcut finds the match and appends, and sometimes it doesn’t and creates a new one. Part of the problem seems to be that if there’s any punctuation in the content, the Notes filter fails. For example, searching for “We begin with an obstinate fact:” fails, then remove the “:” and the search work fine. I can use regular expressions to remove all punctuation, but then my notes are all mangled.

After fiddling around with this for a while, I’m just going to move along and assume it is a bug in the Notes actions for Shortcuts. Perhaps not a fair conclusion. The worst case is that I get one note per highlight, rather than just one note per article, and sporadically a note is duplicated. This isn’t so bad, and debugging Shortcuts can be a nuisance. Given this, the Shortcut is likely better used in an empty Notes folder, that is, delete all the previously downloaded Highlights first.

Lessons from using Apple Notes for three months

Saturday, November 6, 2021

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.

Meeting notes

Thanks to Timery, I know that 60% of my working time is spent in meeting. So many meetings!

For each one, I create a note to capture ideas, useful information, and tasks. I’ve automated this with a couple of Shortcuts. The one I use the most is “Start My Next Meeting”. This presents me with a list of upcoming meetings. I choose from the list and it creates a meeting note, starts a Timery timer, and opens the link to start the video call (typically Teams). The meeting note has the name of the meeting as the title, adds tags for #meeting and the Timery project, adds the date and time of the meeting, a list of attendees, and any notes from the calendar event. From this structure, I can then add notes throughout the meeting and extract any tasks into Reminders later.

I used Agenda for these sorts of notes before, which was powerful.

Daily summaries

Occasionally, I find myself at the end of a week with no clear sense of what I actually accomplished. To help with this, for the past year I’ve been recording the top three things I’ve done in a day into Day One (the 5 Minute PM template has been great for this).

To augment this, I’ve been using another Shortcut to create a Daily Work Report. This makes a note of the meetings I attended, tasks I completed, and tasks I created. These all get saved to a Daily Notes folder. I then use the day’s work report to pull out the highlights for Day One. There’s some redundancy here, though I find the process of choosing just three things for Day One is helpful.

Overall, I think that Day One is a better app for this use case.

Project notes

For each of my projects, I create a project note that states the purpose or objective of the project, key stakeholders, and timelines. Then I accumulate relevant notes and documents while making progress on the project. Creating these are also done via a simple Shortcut. I’ve experimented with using checklists for tasks in these notes, but find it isn’t as effective as my approach with MindNode and Reminders.

Once I finish a project, the associated note gets cleaned up and moved to an Archive folder to keep it out of the way.

Research

This is a rather broad category and, unlike the previous use cases, is for both work and personal notes. Much of this is capturing facts, quotes, and sources. If it is project specific, they go to the project note. Some are more generic and are kept as a standalone note. All of them get tags to help provide some structure. This is where Apple Notes ability to accept almost anything from the share sheet is powerful.

The new Quick Notes feature has been interesting for research. The ability to quickly highlight and then resurrect content on websites is great. I find actually working with the quick notes is pretty clumsy though. They have to stay in the Quick Notes folder and choosing which one to send content to can be tricky. I think there’s some great potential here and will keep experimenting.

For any webpages that I want to archive, I use another Shortcut that creates a plain-text note of the webpage along with some metadata and then adds the link to Pinboard. This has been surprisingly useful for recipes, when all I really want are the ingredients and steps, rather than the long history of the recipe’s development.

Other nice features

In addition to these use cases, there are a few nice features of Apple Notes that are worth mentioning.

• As should be apparent from above, creating useful Shortcuts for Apple Notes is straightforward. In some sense, it is the Shortcuts that I’m finding really useful. Apple Notes is just the final destination for the content.
• I’ve set up widgets by focus mode so that the most recent notes are shown on my Home Screen in the right context. These are restricted to a particular folder and sorted by date modified.
• The formatting options are comprehensive, including table support.
• I think I like the feature where checking off tasks moves them to the bottom of the list. Most of the time, this is what I want.
• The iCloud web app is convenient for using notes on my Windows work PC. Unfortunately, I’ve found the syncing to be rather unreliable here, where notes just don’t show up in the web app sometimes.
• I don’t share notes as often as I expected. When I do, it works really well.
• Not really specific to Apple Notes, but I stole an idea from Matthew Cassinelli to aggregate all of these Notes Shortcuts into one super Shortcut that creates a list of Shortcuts to choose from.

Challenges

There are a few things that don’t work as well as they should:

• Searching is too limited. In particular, you can’t narrow searches to particular folders. Most of the time I either only want to search my meeting notes or not include them. I had to set up a Shortcut that takes a search term as an input and then asks me to specify which folder to search. This should be built into the app’s search field.
• Linking among notes isn’t really supported. You can sort of do this with url searches for note titles. Pretty clunky though.
• Given how much I use Shortcuts for Apple Notes, it is frustrating how little you can do when creating a note. In particular, you can’t style text or add tags. Every time I use Shortcuts to create a note, the first thing I have to do is apply title and heading styles and convert any words prefixed with a # into an actual tag.

Other use cases

I’ve found a few use cases that don’t yet fit in with Apple Notes. I’m using Drafts for all of these:

• Blog posts
• Drafting long emails
• Capturing and processing transitory texts, which Drafts is really optimized for

Restricting myself to Apple Notes was a helpful trick for crystallizing my use cases. Now that I’m three months in, I think I’ll stick with Apple Notes for a while longer. I’ve built up a good ecosystem of Shortcuts for working with the app and, of course, now have lots of content in the app.