2 Years with Apple Fitness Plus

Leave a comment
Yoga mat, yoga blocks and hand weights sitting on floor

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

Obligatory disclaimer here: I am not a doctor. Anything in this post is what has worked for me. Consult your doctor, not the internet, for actual health advice, folks.

It’s been a little over two years since I did my first Apple Fitness+ workout, and since then I’ve completed over 500 more, which is surprising for me because I’ve never been an “exercise person”. I played softball as a child, but only because I was forced to, and I took physical education classes in high school and college, but only because they were graduation requirements. Even then, I usually found the lazy way out. I convinced my PE teachers to help me lead the class so that I didn’t have to do the actual exercises, and one of the classes I took in college was Tai Chi Chih, a series of moving meditations that can be done entirely seated.

Working out was something I knew I should do but found any way to get out of if I could. I tried all the tips and tricks to get myself to work out. Gym memberships didn’t work. I was too self conscious to go to the gym, too cheap to pay for a gym membership, and quite honestly too much of a homebody to want to leave the house. Pre-paying for group classes wasn’t an incentive either because I’d happily trade my sunk cost of a prepaid class for an extra hour of sleep and I could never find a friend to go with me and serve as an accountability buddy. The only thing that sort of worked was fitting movement in throughout my days in various ways like parking further away, taking the stairs, or getting in a walk during my lunch break at work, but that was really the extent of my exercise. And of course, queue the pandemic, the thing that upended all of our lives in a myriad of ways, and those little bits of movement went away too. My Apple Watch showed I was averaging a dismal 1 minute of exercise per day, and so I made myself a goal to do one minute more than my average each day.

In December of 2020, Apple released Apple Fitness+, offering a free trial to get people hooked. I figured I’d try it, and hopped on my stationary bike for a quick workout. I was pretty much instantly hooked. I loved that the workouts pushed me more than I had been doing on my own. I loved that a month’s worth of classes (at the annual rate) only cost a little more than a coffee at Starbucks, and I loved that I could pop on a 10-minute workout at any time throughout the day.

Eventually I got bored with just doing cycling workouts every day, (I also wore out the resistance knob on my spin bike which put my bike out of commission while I waited for replacement parts.) and so I decided to try some of the other Apple Fitness+ workouts. I tried yoga, pilates, HIIT, and strength training workouts, and I actually found myself getting excited to try new workouts. More importantly, I found myself looking forward to working out.

These days, I close my exercise ring most days. I try hard to not miss a workout (I’m currently on a 33-day streak), and I make sure to vary my workouts as well. My weekly routine looks something like this:

  • Mondays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Upper Body Strength
  • Tuesdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Wednesdays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Lower Body Strength
  • Thursdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Fridays: 30 Minutes of Pilates or Total Body Strength
  • Saturdays: 45-60 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Sundays: 30-45 Minutes of Yoga

I keep track of my workouts in Things 3, of course, in a project called Weekly Workouts. On Friday afternoons, during my weekly review, I scroll through the Apple Fitness app, picking out workouts for the upcoming week. I copy the link to each workout and include it in the corresponding task in Things, that way throughout the week, I can just check them off as I complete them.

When I started working out, I was doing it out of obligation because that’s what “healthy” people do, as well as, a desire to lose weight. Three years later, my goals have shifted. I did eventually hit my goal weight but have since adjusted my goals to account for the muscle mass I’ve gained along the way. I work out now, not because I should or have to, but because working out makes me feel better and, I daresay, I enjoy working out. I finally work out because I want to.

2023 Yearly Theme & 2022 Recap

Leave a comment

Normally I post something every January to recap the past year and share my theme for the new year. Not only does it look like I never posted last year, let’s just say last year wasn’t my greatest so I’m inclined to skip the recap as well.

My theme for the 2022 was boundaries. As a people pleaser, I’m one to say yes to every request even if it means running myself into the ground and run myself into the ground is exactly what I did.

If the events of the first part of last year taught me anything, it’s that I’d been doing far too much, mostly for other people, without really taking time to take care of myself. 

Most of the days were spent doing things out of obligation, not intention, and although I found myself with a lot of unexpected free time towards the end of the year, most of it was spent searching for the next hit of dopamine – endlessly refreshing Reddit for new posts, checking my email and my phone in hopes there might be a text message, and on more than one occasion, Youtube actually ran out of new things to suggest to me and began suggesting things I’d already seen. Even worse, I actually rewatched many of them them because I had been too distracted scrolling on my phone the first time I watched them anyway.

I also did a lot of things that seemed like great ideas in the moment – like continuing to hang out with people I didn’t really enjoy hanging out with anymore, staying out way too late, or having that extra drink after dinner despite knowing it’d make me feel worse the next morning.

Without going into detail, 2022 was a bad year, but… I can’t say it was all bad. 

I decided to focus on myself. I found routines that work. I discovered I actually am one of those people who doesn’t like missing a workout and lost 15 pounds in the process. I got healthier. I ate better. I meditated almost every day. I journaled. I met my reading goal and hit my financial goals as well. So despite everything the year threw at me, I still managed to hit most of my goals. 

And I got these two adorable monsters to keep the old man, Abu, company.

two kittens and a cat on the bed

So what’s in store for 2023?

My focus for the year is to actually slow down. I want to be more intentional about the life I’m creating and savor what each thing in my life brings to the table. It could be because I just read Chris Bailey’s new book on calming your mind, but I really do want to spend my time doing things I enjoy – not just because they give me a quick hit of dopamine.

I want to enjoy that I wake up in a home that I’ve spent the last eight years decorating and setting up to fit my lifestyle.

I want to enjoy that I can move my body and get stronger with every workout.

I want to enjoy the crappy reality tv show I’ve been faithfully watching for more than half my life without scrolling Reddit.

I want to enjoy the pause in my day each time I meditate.

I want to enjoy all the adventures, friends, and unexpected things life brings, and

I want to enjoy that I climb into bed with two very cuddly cats every night.

Most importantly, I want to enjoy the fact that I get to decide how I want create the life I’m living every day.

Here’s to 2023! Happy New Year everyone!

Linking to Apple Notes

2 Comments

For those of you that have followed my blog for a while, you know I’ve really wanted to use Apple Notes for my personal knowledge management for a while now. There’s really only one thing holding me back – linking. For reasons unknown to me, Apple seems to have no intention of adding linking any time soon despite it being a feature that’s present in almost every other note taking app.

Even Apple’s other apps like Mail have a way to uncover a link using AppleScript at least. If you want a link to a note in Apple Notes, on the other hand, you have to act as though you’re sharing it with someone via phone or email even if the person you’re sharing it with is just yourself. Oh, and then it adds a wonderful Shared section to Notes to remind you of all the notes you’ve shared with yourself.

My frustration eventually lead me down a rabbit hole that lead to this post – a [very convoluted] way to generate a link to a note without sharing it.

Allow me to introduce how I link to notes in Apple Notes using Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts.

The Starting Point – Opening an Apple Note with a Shortcut

Theoretically, if you only link to a few notes, you could just create dedicated shortcuts for each note you want to link to and then link to the shortcut using the format shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Shortcut%20Name. If that sounds good enough for you, you can swap out Clipboard for the actual note title in the following shortcut and call it a day. I, however, like to link to a lot of notes, and I really didn’t want to have to create a new shortcut anytime I wanted to link to a new note.

(By the way, links to everything are included. You’re welcome.)

I started by creating a generic “Open Note” shortcut that opens a note based on your clipboard. This is a simple two-step shortcut:

  • Find All Notes where Name contains Clipboard
  • Show Notes

Adding On – Generating a URL Base to Launch the Open Note Shortcut

Like Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro can launch automations via URL, but it has one super power over Shortcuts’ URLs – the ability to pass a value through a URL. This means we can use it as a common URL base to run the shortcut above for any note just by changing the URL.

The macro is as follows:

  • Set System Clipboard to Text “TriggerValue”
  • Execute Shortcut “Open Note”

Almost There – Generating the actual Note Link

Now, honestly, at this point we have the base URL, and you could just manually create the links at this point. For example, “kmtrigger://macro=Open%20Apple%20Note&value=Work%20Ideas” would open my Work Ideas note.

But I don’t do clunky, and typing things out particularly when they involve percent encoding multiple words is one of my least favorite things to do. Thankfully we don’t have to, and for this I give you two options:

Option 1: Keyboard Maestro

I set this up using Keyboard Maestro initially because I’m more familiar with it, and because I already did the legwork, I’m including it here. For those of you who want a universal option, feel free to skip ahead to option 2 which uses Shortcuts instead meaning it will work on Mac OS, iPad OS and iOS.

Using Keyboard Maestro I set up a second macro that works only when I’m in Apple Notes, so that when I press ⌘K it copies the note title I’ve selected and generates the URL for me.

  • Triggered by any of the following (when Notes is at the front)
    • This hot key: ⌘K is pressed
  • Will execute:
    • Copy Selected Text
    • Filter System Clipboard with Percent Encode for URL to variable Note Title
    • Set System Clipboard text to “kmtrigger://macro=Open%20Apple%20Note&value=%Variable%Note Title%”

Now I can generate a link to any Apple Note that can be pasted anywhere on my Mac. If you only ever use a Mac, cool, you’re done, but I suspect most of you are like me and use iPhones and iPads.

Keep reading.

Option 2: Shortcuts

We can do the same thing in Shortcuts using a shortcut that receives text input from the share sheet that percent encodes the selected title, appends it to the base URL, and adds it all back to the clipboard, just like the Keyboard Maestro version, but Shortcuts means unlike the other option, this one will work on Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Side note: If you want to use it on MacOS, you need to check a box to have this enabled in the services menu and optionally via a keyboard shortcut by going to the Details pane.

One More Thing – Parsing a Keyboard Maestro Link

Now we have our links, but we still need to use them. Again, if we’re just using a Mac with Keyboard Maestro, we’re fine using the links as they are. We’re out of luck if we want to use them on our iPhones or iPads though, which brings us to our last and final piece of the puzzle.

This is simply a shortcut that works in reverse of what we did earlier. Select the URL and select share from the pop up menu. It grabs the selected URL, removes the base Keyboard Maestro URL, percent decodes the URL, and then opens the note with that title.

So in summary here’s everything.

  1. Open a Note using Shortcuts
  2. Generate the base URL using Keyboard Maestro
  3. Generate the unique note URL using Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro (Mac only)
  4. Open the Link on an iOS/iPad OS Device

I’ve only been testing this for a bit, and admittedly my brain is fairly exhausted after putting all this together. I also will never claim to be an expert in Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro, so there is probably a way more elegant way to do this. I’m open to suggestions. In testing, I’ve only run into a few issues in terms of notes having similar titles or content. In that case, Shortcuts graciously gives you the option to pick the note you want from the results.

Hopefully that helps some of you. I’m off to give my brain a sorely needed break. Happy note taking.

How I Structure My Day & Why I Don’t Timeblock

Leave a comment

It’s been quite a few months since I’ve posted here. Life just gets in the way sometimes, but have no fear, I’m back, at least for today. In the time since my last post, I’ve gotten rather used to my hybrid work schedule despite initially struggling with it.

To recap, since August, I’ve been alternating working two days (Mondays and Fridays) or three days (Tuesdays-Thursdays) in the office every other week. While the schedule definitely has its benefits, it also has its downsides. The biggest downside is my days spent in the office are far less focused due to various interruptions and distractions throughout the day. To account for this, I looked for ways to add more structure to my weeks and accepted that depending on where I was spending my time, some weeks would just be better suited for certain tasks than others depending on the level of focus they required.

I’ve since begun adding more structure to my days as well, probably because time-blocking (and time-tracking) seems to be a rather popular topic in the circles I find myself in online at the moment.

But… time blocking doesn’t work for me.

As much as my Type A mind really appreciates the detail that comes with planning days out like Cal Newport. I usually end up abandoning my perfectly time-blocked calendar at the first sign of the day deviating from my plan. A part of me even rebels against having a plan for every hour of my day. (Don’t tell that to my other half who’d probably jump for joy at the idea of me not having things planned out in excruciating detail.)

Instead of scheduling out my days, I think of my days as conceptual time blocks starting with morning, afternoon, and evening. This actually harkens back to my Erin Condren Life Planner days which used the exact same blocks of which, surprisingly, I wasn’t a huge fan at the time. From there, I batch my tasks according to how I know I best work, while also adding some variety to make sure I’m not doing one thing for too long.

A typical day might look something like this:

  • Morning
    • Administrative Tasks – This block includes things like ordering my tasks in Things 3 making sure things are tagged into their appropriate morning, afternoon, or evening blocks; checking my email; checking my budget in YNAB; and lastly, checking into our ticketing system to triage any support requests that came in overnight.
    • Personal Administrative Tasks – (Note: If I’m working in the office, I do this first because I need to do these before I get into the office.) This block includes things like getting ready for the day, making the bed, feeding our ancient 18-year-old cat, meditating, and also grabbing a bite to eat.
    • 1st Project/Meeting Block – This is when I work on my 3 tasks for the day. Most of my meetings also tend to be scheduled around this time as well. I get through as much as I can.
    • Break – Around this time, I start getting restless from sitting. If I’m working from home, I’ll do a quick workout on Apple Fitness Plus. If I’m in the office, I go for a short walk, preferably outside.
  • Afternoon
    • Admin Check – I usually circle back to my email and any other communications during this time. Not mentioned above, but I continue monitoring our ticketing system and phone lines constantly throughout the day.
    • Lunch Break – Self-explanatory, but I also try and fit in some sort of activity in here as well – usually another walk.
    • 2nd Project/Meeting Block – If I haven’t finished my 3 tasks from the morning, I keep working on them here until I finish them. I also get the occasional meeting scheduled around this time.
  • Evening
    • Exercise – If I haven’t finished my exercise by this point in the day, this is where I do my scheduled workout (using Apple Fitness Plus).
    • Evening Chores – I use this time to wrap up any chores I still need to complete for the day. I also use this time to shower, get ready for the next day, meditate, feed the cat, and start dinner.
    • Evening Shutdown – This is where I look over my to-do list in Things, rescheduling anything I might not have gotten to and scheduling my three tasks for the next day.
    • Dinner & Free Time – With everything done for the day, I’m free to finally sit down on the couch with something to eat and relax however I please.

The beauty of this structure is it’s easy to start each morning with a general idea of how I’m going to approach my to-do list without scheduling tasks or my calendar being so rigid that any slight deviation throws my day out of wack. It also takes into account how I best work – giving me time during the mornings to work on things that require the most focus, allowing for movement and mental breaks throughout the day, and also allowing for buffer time if things take longer or come up throughout the day.

I’m not sure if this is helpful to anyone, but if it has been or you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Using Reminders as a Shared Grocery List

2 Comments

We’ve been using Apple’s Reminders app as our shared grocery list for years now. We use it for two main reasons:

  • It can be shared between myself and my significant other. This means we can both add things to it throughout the week, and we both have access to the list depending on who actually does the shopping.
  • It syncs with our recipe manager, Paprika.

As Reminders has evolved to include new features, so to has how we use it for our shopping list.

Adding a Link to the Store Ad

At the top of our list, I keep a standing reminder that just includes a link to the weekly store ad for the grocery store we normally shop at, Aldi. This makes it easy to check what’s on sale when I’m making the list.

Using Subtasks to Categorize by Aisle

I’d say the biggest change to how we use our shopping list came with iOS 13’s introduction of subtasks. Because we generally shop at the same store, we have headings for each section of the store (in all caps so they stand out), organized in the order of the store. Actual grocery items are then listed as subtasks. This means that as long as we’re paying attention, we can go through the store in one direction without having to double back for an ingredient.

Using Show Completed When Making the List

When putting together the grocery list, I toggle show completed. This gives me a running list of things we’ve added in the past, making it an easy trigger list to see staples I might have missed. If I see something we need, I’ll uncheck it.

Worth noting here, I tend to add things throughout the week as we run out, so occasionally I end up with two copies of those staples (the completed one, and the incomplete one I added through Siri). In these cases, I delete the duplicate to keep the “Show Completed” from becoming a cluttered mess.

Location-Based Reminders

I mentioned earlier that we primarily shop at Aldi. However, Aldi doesn’t always have everything we need, or we just prefer to buy certain things at other stores. In these cases, I have an “Other” section at the bottom of our list and list those special buys as subtasks. For each subtask I set a location-based reminder so that when we’re near that particular store, say Costco, I get a notification that we need something.

I’m curious, do you use Reminders or another app for your grocery list? Do you just throw things on it like I used to do? Do you have one big list or lists by store? Let me know in the comments.

Improving my Weekly Planning with Things 3

Leave a comment

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how I’ve been looking for ways to add more structure to my weeks after finding that switching back and forth between working from home and working in the office was throwing my productivity out of wack.

I’ve spent the last month or so soaking in all the advice I could find online in terms of weekly planning. Special thanks goes out to Peter Akkies and michelleb who I found particularly inspiring during my search.

I’d also like to give a shoutout to the Cultured Code team. I didn’t know it at the time, but what they had in the works for their iPadOS 15 update turned out to be a huge help as well.

So what’s changed with how I’m planning out my tasks?

First things first, let’s talk about what Cultured Code added to Things 3 in their iOS 15 update – namely the extra large “Up Next” widget. This widget shows your to-dos for Today, Tomorrow, and the two days after that. This was actually something I had tried to create on my own in just about every productivity tool (TeuxDeux, Trello, AirTable, Notion, etc) but abandoned because it felt like I was wasting time duplicating content that was already in Things 3. Now that it’s built into Things 3, problem solved.

I’d honestly prefer to see a full week (XXL widgets in iOS 16 maybe?), but three days has worked just fine. Seeing my tasks in listed out for the next few days horizontally makes it easy to see days when I’m overcommitted or, on the rare occasion, not committed enough so that I can go into Things 3 and reschedule some things.

Seeing what’s on my plate this way has led to some other changes in how I approach my planning as well.

I no longer try to schedule additional tasks more than one day ahead. I found that scheduling tasks out for the entire week rarely worked for me. I’m much more likely to accomplish what I set out to do if I plan the night before.

When I am planning out my day the night before, I try not to schedule more than 3 additional (not scheduled/routine) tasks from Anytime for the next day. Three feels like the right number in terms of feeling like I’m making progress without feeling like I’m waking up to a daunting to do list.

I also have a repeating project called “Priorities for the Week” that I use to set three priorities for the upcoming week during my weekly reviews. The priorities I list in this project are tasks that link to other projects or tasks in Things. For instance, one of my priorities for this week, is to finish this blog post, so I have that listed in my priorities project, and the task itself links to the corresponding “Post to Blog” project to make it easy to check off both I do post this blog post, and the priorities project itself is set to start every week on Monday where it then stays in my Today view until I check everything off.

I’ve nested this project within a new area, Goals, which lives at the very top of my areas list so that Priorities for the Week shows up at the top of Today. The goals area also has a project for this year’s goals so I can clearly keep track of them, and I’ve already started on planning 2022’s goals in their own project as well.

Having been using these methods for the past several weeks, I can confidently say they have helped me feel like I’m actually making progress on my goals rather than responding to whatever comes my way.

Wireless Charging is Finally Coming to the Kindle

1 Comment

I used to be the first in line excited to buy new technology, particularly Apple products – So much so, that friends and family dubbed me iAndrea. I won’t lie, I looked like a pop-up Apple Store at times having all my devices spread out in front of me, but those times have passed. I’m still happily using my iPhone XS and my Apple Watch 4, and my iPad, and computer are definitely showing their age at 5 years old. The products being released these days, from Apple and other companies, just haven’t been compelling enough for me to purchase.

That is until yesterday.

Yesterday Amazon announced an all new Kindle Paperwhite, and to say it checked all the boxes of what I was hoping for is an understatement.

I’ve been faithfully using my Kindle Paperwhite from 2013 all these years and it’s served me well enough that I never needed to upgrade.

It’s even served this blog well over the years as my post on adding wireless charging to it has been one of the top ranking posts of all time. For a while it was even the top search result when you searched for wireless charging Kindle.

I guess Amazon finally got the news, and the new Paperwhite Signature Edition finally has wireless charging.

I couldn’t be more excited to upgrade my Kindle to this device after all these years. I even moved money around in my budget to move up my “New Kindle” purchase sooner.

If you’re not interested in wireless charging, you can save yourself $50 and get the standard model which is still pretty fantastic, but I’ve gone full in on the wireless charging lifestyle so it’s worth the convenience.

In addition to wireless charging (on the Signature Edition), both new Paperwhite models also switch to USB-C for charging and include a larger screen with an adjustable warm light. The Signature Edition also features auto-adjusting light sensors.

Coming from an ancient model, I’ll also be able to take advantage of the flush screen, waterproof rating, and bluetooth audio.

I couldn’t be more pleased with the new Kindle, and although I’m sad I’ll likely be losing some of my blog revenue due to people no longer needing wireless charging adapters, I think this Kindle is going to be a great device for so many people.

Do you use a Kindle or other e-reader? What are your thoughts on them or the new Kindle Paperwhite?

*Amazon didn’t ask me to write this, although there are affiliate links in this post. I truly just adore my Kindle and haven’t been this excited for a new product in a while.

A New Normal?

Leave a comment

People have been talking about getting back to normal (or at least a new normal) post-pandemic for months now.

For the past few months I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like for me. While my particular office functioned well remotely, the university I worked at understandably wants folks back in the office for the students that are on campus.

The months leading up to this past week (the first week of classes) felt like I was in limbo. Somehow I was faced with planning a socially distant office space having never done so all while dealing with the reality that my time working from home was about to come to an abrupt end. Queue anxiety.

Thankfully for now, I’ve been able to continue teleworking 2-3 days a week, but it’s far from the telework environment I’ve gotten used to.

My team is now split pretty much 90% remote and 10% on site. For the staff working on campus, we’re faced with a new challenge of managing our usual workload plus, often times, singlehandedly managing the workload of customers who walk in with questions, most of which isn’t even related to our job but rather to the building we’re in. Pre-pandemic, that walk-in support would have been split among 3-5 people instead of 1-2.

Did I mention we’re also navigating this through our busiest time of the year where our work quadruples anyway?

While I’m thankful to be able to not be fully back in the office, it’s safe to say that I feel as though my routine is now thoroughly upended. Because my teleworking schedule changes every other week, I now understand my partner’s tendency to never know what day of the week it is. I also can’t seem to get into a normal rhythm of work. All in all, I just feel disheveled.

So what’s next?

I find myself wanting to make a weekly plan, but the day to day unpredictability of tech support has proved that to be challenging.

I’ve also found myself revisiting the maker/manager schedule. My current telework schedule is structured such that the weeks I am in the office 3 days a week also tend to be my meeting heavy weeks, so I’m toying with the idea of a accepting that those weeks will simply be distraction heavy and using my three telework days the following week to really focus on projects.

Anyway, this is a bit of a rambling post, but I wanted to throw my two cents out there in case anyone else is struggling or has struggled with something similar.

Using Tags to Plan my Day with Things 3

2 Comments

Working from home during the pandemic has unsurprisingly impacted how I do my work. Back in September I wrote about the first of those changes – namely turning on the preference to group my Today view in Things by project to feel a little less overwhelmed.

A side effect of this setting is that I could no longer manually order my tasks to reflect the order I planned to do them during the day. As I shared in that earlier post, when first made the switch, I thought I’d be fine with this tradeoff because my areas and their respective projects are ordered by priority. This meant my highest priority tasks were always at the top for me to do first thing in the morning.

In theory, this change was great for my workflow. In practice, it was less so.

Sometimes those highest priority tasks weren’t things I could do in the morning. Making a handful of phone calls while the other half is still sound asleep in the next room probably wouldn’t go over well. Similarly, if my morning was full of appointments, I probably wouldn’t have time to handle putting together a report. I also tend to work better on reports in the afternoon anyway.

At the time of making that change, I even noted that I was already finding myself jumping around in the list. Little did I know just how much jumping I would end up doing. Over time, I found myself spending a LOT of mental bandwidth simply scanning through my list multiple times a day to figure out what I could work on next.

Ordering my list manually allowed me to build out a plan for my day every morning, and I no longer had that plan.

My solution ended up being a fairly straightforward method that I adopted from my Erin Condren paper planner days. While there’s now a few different layouts, the original Erin Condren planners I used broke each day down into three blocks, Morning, Afternoon, and Evening.

Things 3 already has a This Evening section, but I’ve manually created tags for This Morning and This Afternoon. (Cultured Code, if you’re listening, an option to have a This Morning or This Afternoon section could be nice.)

On mornings where I’m feeling a little more overwhelmed, I can go through and find all the tasks in my Today view that I need and can do first thing in the morning and tag them with my morning tag and (optionally) do the same with the afternoon tag.

Once I’m done, I can filter my Today list by the This Morning tag which reduces my Today list to only tasks I can do that morning and nothing more.

I’ve been using this method for a few weeks and I’m actually really liking it.

It’s also a bit reminiscent of my days using Omnifocus’s start times which prevented things from showing up until I could truly do them. As an Omnifocus user, I loved start times. Why see a task before you can work on it?

I’ll tell you why.

I’d start my day with no clue of how many tasks were scheduled. I’d check everything off for the day and revel in the feeling that my tasks were done, not knowing another task (or tasks) had a start time later in the day.

In the worst case scenario, I wouldn’t see those tasks until the next day missing them entirely. The more common scenario was that my task list started to seem neverending – “Congratulations! You’ve done all your tasks for the day! Just kidding! Here’s another one at 9PM!”

The lack of start times in Things 3 was actually a good thing for my life, but I still did miss that ability to filter things.

Now by using tags in Things 3, I still see every task I have on my Today list at the start of the day so I know what I’m in for, but I also have the option of breaking it down further if necessary.

Mind Like Water

2 Comments

First of all, wow it’s been a long time. Sorry for not posting since May. I feel like I blinked and now we’re already more than halfway through 2021. Full disclosure though, I also haven’t had a lot of inspiration to write either. Posts that seem to do well on here are typically related to Things 3 or note taking, and quite frankly, my system doesn’t really change all that much to have new things to write about.

When I found Getting Things Done (GTD) in high school, it was life changing. The methodology just clicked and I never looked back. Whether I was using Things 2, a Filofax, Omnifocus, or now, Things 3, GTD has always been the backbone of how I manage life.

My concept of GTD has changed significantly over the years. GTD is one of the few books I reread every few years. Each time I read it the book seems to hit differently and I grasp the concepts a little more. Every so often I also find myself having small breakthroughs where a concept clicks just a little more. While the breakthroughs seem to be fewer and far between these days, I do have occasional moments where I still find my GTD practice changing.

In the past, examples have included fully understanding what capturing everything actually entails (It’s more than you think!), why something that takes more than one step really should be a project and not a single action, and why it actually can be sufficient to only have a single next action in a project rather than planning every detail out at the start.

My most recent breakthrough is understanding mind like water.

For much of the past year and a half, I’ve run myself ragged, stressing about all the projects I was responsible for, many of which I had never encountered like managing a remote team, setting up a socially distanced office, planning a return to the office when the conditions seem to be shifting daily (go get vaccinated folks!), or dealing with a sick pet.

In every one of these cases, most of the stress was due to simply not knowing what to do next, and as more and more of these piled up, the overwhelm set in hard.

In a recent chat with my therapist, we discussed how one of my coping mechanisms for stress is creating systems and solving problems. Sadly I usually do this out of desperation rather than regular practice. Rather than feeling helpless in a situation, her suggestion was to shift my thinking and problem solve at least one thing I could do to make me feel more at ease – to make a stressful situation a little less scary.

In writing this, I find myself realizing this probably sounds a lot like next actions, but I actually think about it a little differently.

For next actions, I ask myself the question, “What is the next thing that needs to get done to move this project forward?” This question is all about progress and completion.

For mind like water, I’m asking myself, “What is something I could do to feel more at ease?” Here I’m more concerned about what’s going to make me feel better.

In some cases, the answers to these questions might even be the same. In my sick pet example, the next action was to clearly call the vet to schedule an appointment. However, I found myself stalling because I hate making phone calls, how busy my vet is, how much my pet hates going to the vet, and how scary the diagnosis could be. All of these things were overwhelming, but what was more overwhelming? Knowing my pet was sick, not knowing why, constantly telling myself I should be calling to schedule an appointment, and beating myself up for not doing it because I’m a responsible pet owner. Without question, the thing to put me more at ease was to just make the call.

It’s a small mindset shift, but in cases where I’m truly feeling stressed, it’s that small shift that takes me from feeling like things are out of control and helpless to seeing a path through.