The Weekly Review: Vol VI Issue 13
Hello to you on this fine Saturday (or Sunday for you on the far side of the time zone spectrum)!
This issue is even more of a mixed bag than usual. But here’s hoping you find something that piques your interest.
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App of the week
I’m not sure if regular app recommendations are useful, but I always enjoy checking them out. This product caught my eye recently: Sunsuma. I’m a believer in adding blocks to your calendar to work on your most important tasks, and that seems to be the focus of this app.
At $10 a month, it’s not too expensive. But while it can be used on its own, it also integrates with your existing tools. You connect it directly to your Google calendars, but it also integrates nicely with options like Asana, Trello, Todoist, and even Jira.
The question is, why pay for something like this when you just add tasks to your calendar manually? It does let you add teammates, add notes to your meetings, and convert follow up items into tasks automatically. But I’m not sure that’s enough value to convert people.
I’m not sure I’d pay for something like this, but I do appreciate the approach.
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Items of note
Into the Personal-Website-Verse
Matthias Ott is another person making a fresh plea for people to ditch social media and publishing platforms like Medium for a much more promising and healthy technology:
There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website.
Hear, hear.
Not only does he share why running your own site is good, but he takes it a further step and suggests how to improve the overall ecosystem of the web. Quote and link the things other people write. Use RSS. Employ webmentions. Etc.
It’s more work. But perhaps that’s just what the internet — and we — need.
The Slackification of the American Home
This Atlantic article talks about families who are using products like Slack, Trello, Asana, and, yes, even Jira to run their homes. I can understand using shared chat, calendars, and task lists with the spouse and kids. But Jira? That is just wrong.
The Weekly Review: A Productivity Ritual to Get More Done
The Doist team shares why a weekly review is so important, as well as some good tips on how to start and maintain this habit. As the name of this newsletter suggests, I’m a believer.
A weekly review is an opportunity to direct your life with intention. It’s dedicated time to think about the past week, reflect on what went well and what didn’t, and plan for the week ahead. It’s a chance to get aligned with your goals and ensure that the work you’re doing on a daily basis is helping you reach them. It avoids you ever having to ask, “What was I doing all this time?”
It’s a really good feeling when you can well answer that question. Even better? Being able to know the answer when you stop at 10:45 am on Wednesday and ask yourself, “What should I work on next?”
If there’s anything that kills my productivity the most, it’s not being sure of how I should be spending my time. Crafting a plan for the week in my weekly review is the best way I know (combined with a solid shutdown ritual each day) to make sure I don’t find myself staring at the screen, paralyzed with uncertainty.
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Quote of the week
Saying no to something that’s not fun, or obviously a bad choice, that’s the easy part. Saying no to something that is an interesting and fulfilling use of time, to pursue other interests or more professional goals – that’s harder.
Simon Ouderkirk, Getting Better at Saying No
I have to remind myself of this from time to time.
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Currently
Watching:
Reading: I’m still working through the Lightbringer series from Brent Weeks (currently on the third book). It definitely has a tad too much sexual content, but apart from that, it’s the best series I’ve read since Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.
Listening: It’s taken quite a while, but Bon Iver is finally starting to grow on me so I’m looking forward to the release of i,i this year. In the meantime, this list of greatest hits from Spoon has been getting some spins.
Drinking: Parallel 49 is one of the funkier breweries I like to enjoy, so I was happy to find an 8 pack of tall cans that let you try 4 different options. I recently enjoyed their Hillbilly Ninja hazy pale ale and haven’t really had a bad beer from them.
We had an amazing 92mm of rain in July, so I’m hoping August brings some warm days to enjoy these on the deck.
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The organization of your thinking
I recently read the sample chapter for How to Take Smart Notes. Although the word Zettelkasten is not used much on the site, this book is all about how Niklas Luhmann organized his writing (and therefore his thinking) and the system he used. It was an immediate sell for me and I ordered the book.
I’ve written about my fascination with this concept, but I haven’t gotten a good handle on how I could incorporate this in my life. I’ve even installed this very well thought out plugin for Sublime Text, but using it has never stuck. I’m curious if this book will help.
But it makes me wonder about the topic in general. Sönke Ahrens, the author of How to Take Smart Notes, makes the assertion that long-form writing is easy when your ideas and thinking are well ordered in Luhmann’s system (Luhmann’s output was incredibly high over the course of his career). It reminds me a lot of Ryan Holiday’s commonplace book.
But while I appreciate the idea, writing is such a personal habit that varies vastly from one person to another. One writer swears by starting with an outline, another states outlines are terrible. Some writers need a tranquil environment, others need to be surrounded by hustle and bustle.
Can one method truly enable a high level of output for anyone who uses it? I’ll let you know what I find.
The older I get, the more I recognize my enjoyment for how information can be structured and how different cultures and personalities will approach this differently. Maybe I should have been a librarian.
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Bloat
It’s been sad to watch what started as a very focused and very well designed tool try to be something more. I lamented about this change this week:
Dropbox Paper started off as a focused tool: a collaborative writing tool with version control. Now it feels that features are added for the sake of adding features. Example: the persistent menu now takes up precious vertical space on my laptop screen: https://dsh.re/b2bcb4
Paper was an excellent tool in its early days, focused on one thing: helping teams write together.
Over the past year to two, the Paper team has added a lot of features that detract from the writing experience. Elaborate timelines, nagging requests to add documents to folders, integrations with dozens of services. And that annoyingly persistent toolbar that takes up precious vertical space.
Maybe there are a lot of teams out there that use these features. Me? I just want a nice environment where our team can work on written materials together. My appreciation for focused tools only increases as the web and all our tooling options seem to grow more complex.
However, a product does not become bloated simply because new (unwanted) features are added. It’s only when those features get in the way of the core value that it’s a problem.
Launchbar is a great example. It’s an incredibly powerful tool with hundreds of different features. I probably use 10% of what it can do. However, my use of it to open applications, manage my clipboard, resize images, and various other things are not hindered at all by all the other features it offers. They’re there if I want to try them out, but otherwise, it all just stays out of the way.
Sidenote: I recently started using Launchbar for text expansion with its snippets feature. Rocket Typist had a bug for a time that would erase some of my written words, then became super slow to expand my saved snippets. So I was happy to find that a small tweak to my habit (different keys) and I was able to add all my bits of text to Launchbar and move on. Finding solutions with tools I already use always makes me smile.
Launchbar isn’t trying to force me to use it more. But the Paper team? It feels like there’s a push to get people to make it the hub of all their work, rather than just write collaboratively. Helping people get more value from a product is fine and understandable.
But it should never be done at the expense of the very thing that got people using it in the first place.
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That’s it for this week. May you enjoy some good weather and a quiet corner to get some reading in. Blessings to be appreciated!