Computer scientist and author Cal Newport joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about the impact of technology and culture on productivity and shares what we can do to protect our ability to focus.
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A few days ago, I broke a long streak in Readwise. Frankly, it was a relief. A popular feature in applications these days is streaks. Apps keep track of how many days in a row you use it, and, like a monkey, you get invested in that integer. Before you know it, you’ve got this long streak and feel you must keep it going. But generally, streaks are beside the point. They become an artificial source of stress for no reason.
Many apps these days feature some streaks system to try and make sure you touch the app every day. This isn’t just true for creepy social media apps. Plenty of productivity apps are in on the action, too.
This “don’t break the streak” mentality is table stakes for most habit apps. These streaks can quickly become a weight around your neck. You get more invested in continuing the streak than the actual benefit of the visit. In the case of Readwise, I found myself tempted on busy days to click through the daily quotes without really meditating on them because I didn’t have much time, but I didn’t want to break my streak. Why not in that case take the day off and not worry about an artificial streak? Generally, when I’m working on a habit or trying to maintain a daily practice, I am much more concerned about missing two days in a row than I am about keeping up a streak.
It is for this reason that I turn off streaks whenever possible. Instead, I have a repeating task in OmniFocus with gentle suggestions like “consider reviewing Readwise”. Don’t become a slave to your streaks. Don’t be a monkey.
Between news apps, delivery services, task managers, emails and communication tools, our devices receive an untold number of notifications daily. On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I talk about how to push back against the wave of interruptions that threaten our focus and work.
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Fixing images and screenshots is boring and tedious. Why not hand that off to automation? Check out this episode of Automators to learn more.
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I have often said that one of the easiest on-ramps to automation is text expansion. That’s one of the reasons why I’m such a fan of TextExpander. They’ve gone the extra mile with giving you automation tools in addition to text expansion. But it is easy to get overwhelmed when you’re attempting to develop a text automation system.
For example, for years, I use the semicolon as my trigger. “;workadd”, for example, would expand to my work address. But then I started doing a lot of work on the iPad, and I was using the software keyboard where the semicolon wasn’t so easy to access. So I switched over to using the letter ‘x’ for the same purpose. We all have these collections of tricks we develop as we do more text expansion.
Recently, Josh Centers created a list of best practices and published them over at the TextExpander website. I think they’re all good ideas and if you want to up your game with text expansion, this is worth reading.
I’ve talked and written extensively over the years about the utility of time tracking. Yet, many of us don’t track our time. And the reason is usually simple: it’s cumbersome and way too easy to forget.
This week’s sponsor, Timing, gives you the benefit of time tracking without the inconvenience. Timing is an app for your Mac that automatically tracks your time. You don’t need to push buttons. Timing just does its job. It’s smart, it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to use.
Just download and install Timing, and it’ll start recording how much time you spend on each app, document, and website you use.
And with the latest update, Timing will now import your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time as well! This means you’ll get the complete picture of how you spend your time across all your devices.
One of my favorite features is how Timing learns to associate certain activities on your Mac with specific projects. For instance, I track MacSparky Labs Admin time when I’m on the Memberful admin panel in Safari. So I set up a rule to assign time spent in the Memberful admin panel to that project and now Timing automatically makes makes the connection for me. But on the flip side, if Timing isn’t sure what I’m working on, I can manually set and adjust project assignments with a few clicks. This gives me solid, actionable data about how I’m spending my time.
If you’ve tried time-tracking before and gave up on it, try Timing. It does the work for you. I’ve even made some videos showing how the app works.
I read this post by John Gruber, and I couldn’t agree more about the shenanigans that will come from AI-generated deepfakes. The computers are so good at duplicating your voice at this point that a determined jackass could “produce” a tape of you saying anything. Conversely, an insolent jackass will deny an actual recording of him and claim it is a deepfake. Down is up. Up is down.
I don’t know that we’ll ever have “smoking gun” audio again. It’s just a question of time before that is true for video, too. The bad guys are certainly going to use this to further polarize us. Be warned.
Last week Microsoft gave an impressive presentation demonstrating the incorporation of artificial intelligence into their productivity apps. You can have it summarize and analyze data in Excel, write better documents in Word, and even summarize email in Outlook.
Moreover, it had less of that wild west feel we are seeing in most of the artificial intelligence features added to existing apps. This was clearly thought out. It’s worth watching the presentation even if you don’t use Microsoft software.
I really think this is a step in the right direction. What I would ultimately like from artificial intelligence is for it to help me get my work done better and faster. So much of modern technology seems to get in the way of serious work, rather than assist it. If you’ve ever watched any of the Iron Man movies, Tony Stark always had Jarvis working in the background for him, handling little things so Tony could work on the big things. I want Jarvis.
Just think how much easier your life could be, if you had a digital assistant that could do things for you like:
Seeing these initial steps from Microsoft gives me hope that Jarvis may show up sooner than I thought.
Malicious email is not comically dumb any more. One malicious strain, called Emotet, appears to come from a known contact and looks as if it is replying to an existing thread. If you click on the links or attachments, you are done for. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica breaks it down.
For me, if it has an embedded link or an attachment, I assume it is malicious until proven otherwise. This is particularly true from financial institution-related or account-related email. I’ve managed to avoid trouble because of constant vigilance. I wonder how many people out there have been compromised and don’t even realize it.
It’s that time again on Mac Power Users: Stephen and I round up some Mac apps for our “20 Under $20” saloon!
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