After years — decades — of experimentation, I’ve learned this about myself: when I follow a certain workflow, I’m happy and productive. When I don’t follow it, I’m stressed, anxious, and unproductive. There’s no in-between state. If I want to feel good about all the cool things I’m doing, I have to trust the process and follow it rigorously.

These are the things I use to stay sane and productive.

An inbox

My workflow is inspired by Getting Things Done (aka GTD), but I’m not dogmatic about most of it. The critical part is that I have an “inbox” where I record all of the things I need to do. This isn’t like an email inbox where people send me things they think are important, but the opposite: I decide what’s important enough for me to remember, and those things go into it. I can’t overstate the importance of having this.

Rationale

The GTD book goes into detail about the psychology of it, but the gist is:

• If I’ve recorded all the commitments I’ve made in a place where I trust myself to remember them later, my mind can let go of worrying about remembering to do them.
• If there are things I haven’t recorded, my mind will get hung up dwelling on them: “don’t forget to buy the widget! Don’t forget to email your boss! Don’t forget to respond to the customer!”

It’s the intrusive thought that I’m about to forget something vitally important that creates stress and diverts my attention from what I’d prefer to be thinking about.

Specific recommendations

I’m a huge OmniFocus fan, and I recommend it for everyone serious about organizing their whole life this way.¹ Anything is better than not having a system, though. If you have Apple devices, the built-in Reminders app is a great way to get started. It lacks OmniFocus’s powerful features, but has everything needed to get up and running for free. There’s even nothing wrong with a notebook and pen, although that’s a lot less flexible in important ways and those are more things I have to remember to always take with me.

Don’t underestimate the convenience of a voice assistant here. If I’m out running with my wife and suddenly remember something I need to do, I can say “Hey Siri, remind me to …” and trust that it’ll be waiting for me later. Then I can go back to paying attention to how much I hate running.

A daily plan

Every workday, I sit down and sort the things I’ve recorded in my inbox into project areas like “Personal”, “Family”, “Work”, or a few others. Then I decide what I’m going to try go get done that day. I review each of those project areas for urgent things such as paying a bill or preparing for a meeting, and flag those for my “today” list (which is an OmniFocus “perspective” that shows all the things I want to work on right now). Then I choose a few more things I’d like to get done until I feel like I’ve planned a day’s worth of work.

Rationale

Sorry, GTD purists! This is where my process diverges from The GTD Way, which looks closer to:

• Find the most important thing to be working on right now.
• Do it.
• Repeat.

I’ve tried to follow that flow many times but it doesn’t work for me. I’d rather dedicate time each morning to planning my day than continually revisit my list of possible tasks as I go.

A timer

Deciding what do to is good. Doing it is better. I use the pomodoro technique to make that happen. The short version is:

• Pick the first thing on my daily plan.
• Work on that thing for 25 minutes uninterrupted. This time is sacred: I don’t do anything else, with the minor exception that if I discover something else I need to do, I’ll pause for a moment to add that thing to my inbox so that I can stop thinking about it and go back to the current task.
• Take a 5 minute break, doing anything but working on the task at hand. Return texts. Check Slack. Browse Hacker News.
• If I’ve finished the task, mark it off and move on to the next one.
• Repeat.

Rationale

I can’t work on 1 thing for 8 hours straight (unless it’s something that’s letting me procrastinate, in which case I’ll see you tomorrow). I can’t do it. But I can work on anything for 25 minutes, even if it’s not something I enjoy doing. That’s long enough to get an appreciable amount of work done, but short enough that my focus doesn’t drift. It allows me to concentrate intensely on 1 thing at a time without worrying that I’m neglecting important messages from family or coworkers — or worse, getting bored. Because I know that I’ll be able to check my texts a few minutes from now, I’m free to think about my current work.

Specific recommendations

I like Focus by Masterbuilders. It works on all the platforms I use, has nice reports, integrates with OmniFocus, and syncs perfectly. I’ve tried every similar app I can find, but keep returning to Focus.

But any timer can work, from an app on your phone to a physical wind-up time stolen from your kitchen.

Conclusion

Put together, these 3 ingredients give me superpowers:

• I never forget the things I’ve promised do to.
• I always know what the most important things are.
• I have a way of getting them done that matches the way my brain works.

Without them, I’m a ball of unproductive anxiety. With them, I can do anything. When I find myself feeling swamped by new things to do flying at me faster than I can finish the old ones, my mantra is “rely on the tools”. They always see me through.

Amazon Sidewalk is a new project which allows Amazon devices (like Alexa, Ring doorbells, etc.) with different owners to share their Internet connections. In short, your Alexa talks to your neighbor’s Alexa. If your Internet connection goes down, your neighbor’s device will relay messages for your device so that it can keep working. Similarly, if your Ring doorbell is closer to your neighbor’s Alexa than to your own WiFi router, it can send alerts to you through their Alexa.

This is a terrible idea.

This means that a device on your home network — a device you bought and paid for yourself — is letting other devices you don’t control borrow your Internet connection. Amazon claims to have designed this as a secure system, but people in infosec know that a new security protocol written and implemented by a single company is going to be a mess. When (not if, but when) an attacker finds a flaw in the Sidewalk protocol or the devices it runs on, 2 terrible scenarios seem likely to happen:

• However good and strong your WiFi password is, if an attacker can access your neighbor’s network, they can hack your neighbor’s Alexa and then use it to gain access to your own wireless network.
• A braver attacker could sit outside your house with a hacked Alexa, or an app on their laptop that acts like one, and use it to connect to your Ring doorbell and then attack the other computers on your network.

If you have any Amazon devices, I strongly recommend you follow their instructions to turn off Sidewalk immediately. Because Amazon plans to turn this on for everyone who hasn’t explicitly asked them not to, if you don’t follow those instructions, you’ll be allowing people near your home to use your WiFi. Some owners have claimed that they turned off Sidewalk but that it turned itself back on after a software update. If this happens in my home, I will literally throw our Alexas out in the trash.

Amazon Sidewalk is a solution without a problem. Turn it off. This is a potential disaster in the making.

Many recent news stories feature companies having a hard time hiring workers. In capitalism, this means one thing: they’re not paying enough. Period. It’s that simple.

The law of supply and demand says that if demand for a resource outstrips its supply, then price for that resource increases. If a buyer wants to purchase that resource, they have to pay more to compete with the other people who want to buy it. That’s one of the defining features of a free market, and it’s unreasonable to complain that no one is selling at the price they’d like to pay.

There are things that increase the supply of people willing to work for a company, thus lowering the price it can expect to pay, such as offering excellent benefits or earning a reputation as a wonderful employer. Those are forms of compensation that potential employees can and will consider. Conversely, having a reputation as a bad employer decreases the supply. I could name companies that would have to pay me more than I’d be worth to them before I’d even think of working for for them.

Either way, the market — in this case, the other employers competing to hire workers — sets the price of the resource. If a company can’t hire, they need to pay more. The labor market has determined that their current combination of pay and benefits isn’t good enough to attract new employees.

In other words, stop complaining and crack open that wallet.

The iOS App Store recommended that I check out a meditation app named “Calm”, featuring “Wisdom from Shawn and Camila”. Shawn is 22 years old; Camila is 24.

With due respect, Apple, I’m not expecting a lot of wisdom from a couple younger than the sweater I’m wearing.

There are many wonderful things youth can bring. Experience of a life long-lived is not one of them. I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but they’re 22 and 24, and I expect they’ll have little to offer on mid-career thoughts, or watching one’s parents grow older, or coming to grips with mortality. Like, the guy’s been quarantined for the majority of the time it’s been legal for him to drink.

Scene: Nick’s intermediate league baseball game.

Bottom of the last inning. Other team at bat. 2 outs. 2 on base. Winning hitter at bat. Fly to right field. Nick makes a beautiful diving catch and comes up with the ball, ending the game for his team to win…

…then runs off the field holding his arm.

One rushed trip to the office for x-rays later, and it’s confirmed: he broke the same wrist that he broke last year when he fell off his skateboard.

I’ll hand it to the kid: he plays hard. If you’re going to get hurt, you may as well do it heroically.

In her article “I Have a Lot to Say About Signal’s Cellebrite Hack”, the extremely qualified Riana Pfefferkorn argues that Signal’s blog post, “Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective”, could have been a bit more serious and professional:

On the other hand, although this was serious work with a serious point to it, the unseriousness of Signal’s tone in the blog post and video hampered public understanding of the point they were making. You aren’t helping your cause when a reporter can’t tell which parts of your blog post are jokes and which parts are serious, or what you mean by your weird coy phrasing. This blog post was plainly written in order to impress and entertain other hackers and computer people. But other hackers aren’t the real target audience; it’s lawyers and judges and the law enforcement agencies that are Cellebrite’s customers. They tend to prefer clear communication, not jokes and references to 25-year-old cult films.

To be clear, Pfefferkorn is way more qualified to have an opinion on this than I am. Still, as I said in a Hacker News comment:

Eh, I can’t be bothered to care. Cellebrite hoards 0-days so they can use them to hack phones. They know about exploitable vulnerabilities but aren’t saying anything about them because they profit from insecurity. Thing is, just because Cellebrite knows about a thing doesn’t mean, say, China’s CCP or the Russian mafia or anyone else doesn’t also know about that thing. You and I are less safe just because Cellebrite wants to profit off of those vulnerabilities.

I just can’t work up the ability to sympathize with Cellebrite. The law may have something to say about Moxie’s writing, but in my opinion he has the clear ethical upper ground in this argument.

Pfefferkorn goes on to say:

But if Cellebrite machines stop working reliably, or the evidence obtained from them is hella sus and can’t be relied upon in court, then that safety valve — the ability for the cops to get courtroom-worthy evidence off phones notwithstanding strong encryption — gets plugged up. And closing the safety valve adds more pressure. It’ll become easier for law enforcement to make the case for why smartphone encryption needs to be backdoored.

That may be true, but I contend:

I also disagree with the notion that it’s good that Cellebrite exists because without them we’d have stronger anti-encryption laws. That’s hypothetical and all we know is what we have today. I’m not thrilled that someone is peeing on my basement carpet instead of peeing in my living room; I’d rather not have someone peeing on any of my rugs.

It’s not that I disagree with Pfefferkorn on an intellectual or legal level. She’s the expert. If our factual positions disagree, listen to her, not me. It’s just that I don’t care if Signal was crude in their anti-Cellebrite post. It brought a lot of attention to Cellebrite’s awful ethical stance, and for that I’m grateful to Signal’s CEO, Moxie Marlinspike.

Jellycuts for iOS and iPadOS is 2 things:

1. A text-based language for writing Shortcuts,
2. A compiler that turns the text language into “real” Shortcuts, and
3. An IDE for writing the language.

As a programmer, this is super exciting to me because it feels like I spend too much time fighting against the limitations of the visual language. Now I can use the programming tools I work with every day to write my little applets, and store them in version control so that I can track changes and roll back mistakes.

It’s not a perfect system as the design of the Shortcuts app means that getting the compiled code into it is a little convoluted (but automated and as smooth as possible). That’s on Apple, though, and not Jellycuts. The author has done an amazing job with the tools available to them.

Jellycuts is a game changer. I haven’t gotten far with it yet, but if it works as promised on larger projects, I see it becoming the way I write Shortcuts. Get it at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellycuts/id1522625245.

I’ve been using Apple’s Fitness+ service since it came available. It’s still a young product and has lots of room to improve, but its fundamentals are solid. This is what I like and dislike about it.

What I like: doing the exercises

First, the workouts themselves are excellent. They offer exercises I’m not used to, and I’ve found that working with a trainer, even a pre-recorded one that isn’t talking to me personally, motivates me to push harder than I do when I’m working out alone. At the end of a workout I’m exhausted, and the next day my body reminds me that I did something difficult.

This is the litmus test, after all. A trainer that doesn’t challenge and doesn’t push me harder than I would push myself isn’t much of a trainer. Fitness+ meets this requirement in spades.

Second, Fitness+ has a lot of workouts. When it’s time to use one, I want help picking one that’s appropriate to me. The app’s “discoverability” is… decent:

• I pick a type of workout (like strength, core, or yoga) I’d like to try, and use the filter to choose a length of time I’d like to work out. I want to do strength training for 20 minutes? Here’s a list.
• From that list I choose a trainer. This is convenient if there’s one I like and I want to see more of their workouts, but not as helpful for choosing between them. The app makes the trainers’ biographies available but I was overwhelmed with choices the first time.

If I know what workout I want to do, and which trainer I want to work with, Fitness+ is fine.

What I don’t like: finding the exercises

But that discoverability is barely sufficient, and leads to my sole criticism. Fitness+ could and should help me find new workouts that are appropriate for me personally, and today it doesn’t.

Within selections, the main differentiator in a screenful of similar-seeming workouts is the genre of background music. I know people may have strong preferences here but I don’t. As of writing there are 15 “Strength with Gregg” workouts. At a glance, I can’t tell the difference between them. Every screenshot shows exercises for both upper and lower body, even though most workouts target certain muscles. Navigating through each available workout exposes that information but it’s a lot of work when I’m ready to start lifting weights and would rather lift than investigate. Better titles like “Leg Strength with Gregg” would help a lot here.

There’s not an option to like or dislike workouts. I want a recommendation system like Apple Music’s: tell me what I might like based on what I’ve enjoyed, not just what’s similar to what I did last time.

Descriptions of workouts are more vague than they should be. For example, one reads “the focus of this workout is upper body, with a new element added to each move as you go.” But what part of my upper body? I want to know:

• Which exercises a workout includes. If my shoulder hurts, I might want to skip lateral raises.
• Which muscles groups it exercises. Sometimes I’d like to target specific areas like glutes or biceps or shoulders or quads.

If Fitness+ had filters that let me specify that I’d like to work my triceps and lats for 20 minutes, or find one that includes hammer curls because that sounds good today, I’d use it a lot.

Workouts need more audio cues. I spend a lot of effort trying to look at the TV so I can pace myself with the trainer, and would like a consistent signal to complete a rep. I wish the producer would add a chime or beep after each movement so that I could follow along without contorting to see the screen.

Finally, many other Apple apps use Siri to power smart recommendations. Putting all the above together, I’d like to see a Fitness+ notification like “you skipped leg day. Here’s a good leg workout you’ll going to like.” It’s easy to rationalize skipping a workout, but harder when someone’s reminding you that you’ve been a couch potato and giving you personalized suggestions for changing that.

Summary

It’s tricky to find an exercise I want in Fitness+, but that’s because there are so very many excellent ones to choose from. And that’s the important part: once I find workouts I like, they motivate me to work harder than I would on my own. I’ve found the accountability, even if it’s to someone who can’t see me and who I’ll never meet, to keep me moving. I am stronger and healthier for using the app than I would be without it.

Apple Fitness+ may have some rough edges, but for a new service that’s still improving, I’m into it.

I’ve been playing with Hook, an app I’ve started hearing about. It’s an interesting bird, and its own docs didn’t explain why I should want to use it. That’s too bad, because after downloading it and playing around for a few days, I understand why people are excited about Hook.

Let me try my own explanation:

It makes deep links into apps

Hook knows how to talk to a lot of other apps (about 150 as of now) and ask or direct them to do a few things:

• Get the ID of the active item in the app, like the omnifocus:///task/... link of the selected item in OmniFocus.
• Open the item in the app with a given ID.
• Get the name of the active item in the app, like the title of the front tab in Safari.
• Create a new item in the app.

Those first 2 options are interesting because many of its supported apps don’t offer their own URL scheme. You can refer to a web page by its address or an OmniFocus object by its URL as seen above, but Apple’s own Notes app doesn’t offer a way to make a link to a specific note. Hook solves this by offering its own URL scheme. For instance, if I try to open the URL hook://notes/dt/1498065293 on my Mac, it opens the Hook app, which sees that it’s supposed to open the Notes app, and uses AppleScript or JavaScript wizardry to go straight to the desired note. Or consider emails, each with their own unique Message-ID. Hook accepts URLs like hook://email/[Message-ID] and opens them in your favorite mail app, even if you’ve moved the mail to a different folder or switch mail apps since you copied the link.

That’s slick, and if Hook only allowed me to deep link straight into Mail and Notes and Finder and iTerm (!!!) and VS Code (now you’re showing off), it would be invaluable.

It keeps a database of bidirectional links

The “a-ha!” moment was understanding that Hook itself stores links between objects, even if they’re not editable. For example, suppose you’re viewing a PDF and it reminds you of a web page. You can ask Hook to copy the PDF’s location in Finder. When you open the web page in Safari, you can use Hook’s “Hook to Copied Link” action to make a two-way link (the eponymous “hook”) between the PDF and the web page. That is, if you come back to that web page a week later and wonder what PDF it reminds you of, you can press the Hook shortcut and it will pop up a list of all documents “hooked” to that web page. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to the PDF and press enter, then voila!, it opens the PDF for you.

This is the magic in Hook: you can make linkages between resources that aren’t under your own control. You don’t download a webpage and then edit its metadata to link to the PDF. Hook says “oh, when you’re looking at this page, I’ll remember that it made you interested in this PDF”. And even if that PDF can’t be edited to add a link to the webpage, Hook manages that association for you.

In this sense, Hook is like a personal wiki, except that you don’t have to edit a page to associate bits of data and that doesn’t have to be in the same app. You open the first item and press a few keys, then open the second item and press a few more, and now your system knows that you think these 2 items are related and can remind you of that later. That’s powerful. It’s easy enough to make a link from a Things action to its information resources in DEVONthink. Linking from DEVONthink information back to Things so that you can bounce right back to your project planning without lifting your hands from the keyboard? That’s harder, and it’s the true value of Hook.

A note on terminology: giving things a good name is hard, but I might’ve called “Hook to Copied Link” almost anything else. My mind kept reading “Hook” as a noun, as though I were converting it to a “Copied Link” similar to calling “JPEG to PNG” in a graphics program. Instead it’s a verb: “create a link back to the item whose link is in the clipboard” is clearer to me, although too verbose.

It lets you share links with friends and coworkers

Hook is available in a free version that’s focused on opening links, not making them. The idea is that you can send your coworker a link to a file stored in Git or Dropbox, or an email they were Cc’ed on, and they can go straight to it. That’s nifty, but in practice I can’t imagine my friends tolerating this: “hey Tom, I’m going to send you a link, and you’ll need to download this free app from…” “Stop right there.” Hook is cool and I’ve told several friends about it, but I’m not kidding myself about the likelihood of them all installing it.

Maybe I’ll look back on this in a few years and laugh at my own skepticism because it became the universal standard app that everyone uses, but I’m not counting on it.

Licensing

CogSci, Hook’s authors, have an interesting licensing model: if you buy the “essentials” or “pro” version, you can use any new versions that come out within 12 months of your purchase date for free, forever. If newer versions come out with features you can’t live without, you can buy a discounted renewal license that’s good for another 12 months of updates.

I love this idea. I hate renting software, and this is a nice compromise between an unsustainable “buy it once and get free support for the rest of your life” and “keeps working as long as you keep paying”. I wish this licensing model were the norm.

Drawbacks

The few things I dislike about Hook are minor:

1. It’s not available for iPhone and iPad. I’m not sure how an iOS version of Hook would work (perhaps through the Share action? Through drag and drop?), but I wish it were on my favorite mobile platforms. I’m using my iPad for a lot of work I’d would have used my Mac for before and cross-platform tools are splendid. An mobile “Hook Lite” version that supported opening hook:// links would help a lot.
2. I haven’t met another person using it. Although I’ve read articles about Hook, I’m the only person among my friends, family, and coworkers who has it installed. The link sharing idea could be brilliant if it becomes ubiquitous but I don’t want to be its lone evangelist among the people I know, many of whom are still annoyed by my Emacs and Amiga days.
3. CogSci: please ask someone who doesn’t work with you to review your home page. All the information there is technically accurate, but much of it only becomes clear to users who’ve downloaded Hook and experimented with it. If I hadn’t been evaluating the app on the recommendation of a friend, I might not have downloaded it. Your app is cool. Give it some marketing love!

Summary: try it.

I like Hook. I haven’t registered it yet but I’m leaning that way. Again, if Hook only allowed me to create deep links into apps that don’t natively support them, that’s enough reason to buy it. I’m not sold on the life-changingness of the bidirectional links between documents — not because I don’t think it’s an wonderful idea, but because I’m a sucker for things that promise to be the cure for what ails ya and then become disillusioned when they’re not as amazing as I’d hoped. For example, I’d heard that Zettlekasten note keeping is the magic key to life-long productivity, but realized that it’s a nice solution to problems I don’t have. I’m being cautious about Hook for the same reason. But skepticism aside, I think its core conceit that making links between all your related resources is valuable has merit, and Hook makes this easy. I’m still in the trial period my wish is it’s as helpful as CogSci thinks it will be.

Try Hook. I think we’re going to like it.

Updated: November 11, 2022

There are several excellent Mastodon apps for iOS and iPadOS. These are the ones I’ve tried.

Criteria:

• A good app is stable and (at least nearly) crash-free. This rules out a few apps I’ve tried that I’m not including here.
• Mastodon evolves with new features like polls. The best apps are updated with support for these new features.
• I use an iPhone and an iPad. Apps that don’t support both platforms are non-starters for me. It’s possible I could find a brilliant, flawless iOS-only app and a different iPadOS-only app and be happy with the combination, but that’s unlikely to happen. Bonus points for apps that have Mac versions.

Here are my recommendations that mostly meet those requirements.

Metatext

I stumbled across Metatext and I’m glad I did. It feels native in ways that other apps don’t and looks beautiful on my phone and iPad. I’ve used it as my main app since its release and recommend it to all my friends. Development has slowed down recently, but it feels “finished” without any obvious bugs or missing features. If you’re bored with your current app and want to try something new, get Metatext.

Toot!

Toot! is a favorite. It’s rock solid, updated frequently, and good looking on both iPhone and iPad. I suggest this for anyone getting started with Mastodon. The sole thing I don’t love is that it doesn’t always “feel” like a native iOS app, as opposed to say an alternative web interface. I’m picking nits, though: if you stop reading and install Toot!, you’ll be fine. It’s great.

Mast: for Mastodon

Mast looks and feels different from the other popular apps with its multi-column layout, and I appreciate its fresh take on how a Mastodon client can work. It’s a beautiful experiment. I can’t recommend it right now because it has significant bugs, like crashes and timelines which don’t refresh even when you try to manually refresh them. Its author released a popular Twitter app, Aviary, which I suspect has been taking their attention. This means it hasn’t been updated recently and I worry that it might be abandoned. Still, Mast supports iPhone and iPad and Mac and Apple Watch, which is amazing, and I’m watching it to see if the author resumes regular development. I hope they do.

Mercury for Mastodon

Mercury is a gorgeous, new, native-feeling app. I think it’s going to be a good option. It’s iPhone-only today with iPad support on their published roadmap, and I’d like to see that happen because it’s already a solid alternative for people who just use an iPhone. I’m monitoring Mercury’s development, too.

Honorable mention: Linky for Twitter and Mastodon

Linky is for posting to Mastodon, not reading it. I use this brilliant little app for sharing links to interesting websites, photos, or songs I’m listening to. It’s scriptable with x-shortcut-url, so if you’re technically savvy you can use Shortcuts, Drafts, or other apps to post things you’ve written. If you share a lot of content to Mastodon from other apps, Linky is your friend.

See also

Mastodon for iPhone and iPad is the official app brought to you by the people who made Mastodon. In spite of that, it lacks (or at least hides) vital Mastodon features, such as the local timeline. It’s ok if you’re joining one of the large, generic instances like mastodon.social that don’t have meaningful local communities, but offers a substandard experience on cozier instances.