Various Contrivances

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. Plus, the vast majority of my time in the office is spent in meetings to coordinate with other teams and identify new projects.

As a result, in order to optimize my systems, I’ve switched to using a combination of MindNode and Agenda for my task managment.

MindNode is an excellent app for mind mapping. I’ve created a mind map that contains all of my work-related projects across my areas of focus. I find this perspective on my projects really helpful when conducting a weekly review, especially since it gives me a quick sense of how well my projects are balanced across areas. As an example, the screenshot below of my mind map makes it very clear that I’m currently very active with Process Improvement, while not at all engaged in Assurance. I know that this is okay for now, but certainly want to keep an eye on this imbalance over time. I also find the visual presentation really helpful for seeing connections across projects.

MindNode has many great features that make creating and maintaining mind maps really easy. They look good too, which helps when you spend lots of time looking at them.

Agenda is a time-based note taking app. MacStories has done a thorough series of reviews, so I won’t describe the app in any detail here. There is a bit of a learning curve to get used to the idea of a time-based note, though it fits in really well to my meeting-dominated days and I’ve really enjoyed using it.

One point to make about both apps is that they are integrated with the new iOS Reminders system. The new Reminders is dramatically better than the old one and I’ve found it really powerful to have other apps leverage Reminders as a shared task database. I’ve also found it to be more than sufficient for the residual tasks that I need to track that aren’t in MindNode or Agenda.

I implemented this new approach a month ago and have stuck with it. This is at least three weeks longer than any previous attempt to move away from Things. So, the experiment has been a success. If my circumstances change, I’ll happily return to Things. For now, this new approach has worked out very well.

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.

Although most of my analytical work will still be on my desktop, having RStudio on my iPad adds a very convenient option. RStudio Cloud also allows you to setup a project with an environment that persists across any device. So, now I can do most of my work at home, then fix a few issues at work, and refine at a coffee shop. Three different devices all using the exact same RStudio project.

One complexity with an RStudio Cloud setup is GitHub access. The usual approach of putting your git credentials in an .REnviron file (or equivalent) is a bad idea on a web service like RStudio Cloud. So, you need to type your git credentials into the console. To avoid having to do this very frequently, follow this advice and type this into the console:

git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout 3600'