On psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s notion of “good enough” parenting:
But Winnicott recognized that adapting and readapting to a child’s ever-evolving needs for attention versus independence is no easy feat, and he reassured mothers that getting it perfect isn’t possible, nor is it the goal. In fact, as long as she’s usually reliable and her child is well-cared for, her “failures”—minor miscues and slip-ups—are par for the course. Being good enough (as opposed to perfect), he championed, ultimately fosters independence and autonomy in the growing child. He writes of the good-enough mother: “Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities. Her imperfections better prepare them for an imperfect world.”
How many important things in life call for us to accept “good enough,” not out of a pathological need to settle, but because “overall love and consistency” with “inevitable blunders” not only is good enough, but describes all of us rather well?
Temple Gradin, Writing for the New York Times:
I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding. I would have hated school if the hands-on classes had been removed, as so many have been today. These classes also expose students — especially neurodivergent students — to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up who have never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.
When I was a school psychologist, we used to lament the slow attrition of the trades programs at the high school at which I worked. Kids who didn’t care much for academics looked forward to cabinet making or metal shop every day. It seems like things have been turning around lately, though, with more vocational programs and county schools that offer programs that would be expensive and difficult for your local public to produce.
I’m not much of a gamer, but I finally got around to finishing Metro: Exodus on the Mac Studio, using the time afforded by The Week Between. Here are some screenshots:
Following with my updated tradition of naming the software I see myself using in the new year (instead of looking back)
I wrote about the newly released Spark Desktop, here back when it came out, and I’ve continued to use it daily over my beloved MailMate.
The beta crashes a fair bit, without warning and without any indication of why, but it is generally stable enough for daily use. It maddeningly lacks keyboard shortcut support right now, which is almost a deal-breaker, for system-level actions like copy and paste.
App-level keyboard support, however, makes for a productive email environment, and the Command Center is a familiar affordance borrowed from PKM software that puts almost every command at your finger tips… mouse not required. I am shocked sometimes by how quickly I am able to winnow down a few crowded inboxes, and the emerging AI features are making it even faster.
Spark Desktop Beta Spash Screen
Spark Desktop’s Actions Menu
I’ve been using Yoink for some time now; I purchased the Mac and iOS versions near the end of 2018. I saw it as a great way to share bits of data (URLs, text snippets) between iPhone and Mac. Oddly, though, Yoink doesn’t sync (a strong competitor, Gladys, does).
Yoink sits on the side of your screen, hidden, until you start dragging something towards it. A shelf then pops out, and you drop content into the shelf. The shelf remains exposed until you drag the content back out.
A common example for which I use Yoink is taking a screenshot on the Mac, grabbing it in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and then dragging it into the shelf. Switch to Messages or Spark, and drag the screenshot into the next app. I do this with links a lot, too. Yoink remains onscreen until you’ve done something with the content you dragged into it, which I initially saw as a limitation, but have come to appreciate, as it keeps Yoink from getting clogged up.
Raycast is an example of a utility that highlights how the Mac is, and will likely always be, a tool completely different from iPad and, to many users, more interesting and flexible. Raycast is, broadly speaking, a competitor to launcher apps like Launchbar and Alfred. But interested users might find enough about Raycast to use it alongside their preferred launcher.
Raycast can easily become a Spotlight replacement for finding files. Like Spotlight, it can look up words in a dictionary. It can do so much more, though: it can be Paletro, search Craft, create drafts in Drafts, and resize windows. Raycast will search DEVONthink, YouTube, and Google. It’s a calculator. You can use it to store and expand text snippets.
Raycast
Related: Raycast Does Window Management Too
Tabby acts like command-shift-a in Chrome, but for all of the browsers running on your Mac (save FireFox, if you happen to use it). You invoke Tabby via keyboard shortcut or menubar icon, and you are presented with a list of open browser tabs, organized by browser. You can search the list or mouse to the tab you want to activate.
If you hop between multiple browsers during the day, this is a must-have utility.
Tabby
TextSniper cops Apple’s default screenshot behavior but instead of taking a screenshot, it applies OCR to the text on-screen and performs OCR on it. If you have a JPEG or PNG scan of text, for example, that someone sent you, you can use TextSniper to convert sections of it into text you can paste into an email, text editor, or email. It’s amazing and always useful.
I’ve been writing about Craft here as I’ve been using it for a while; it’s a different kind of text editor and page layout application that has more in common with services like Google Docs than tried-and-true word processors like Nisus Writer. In addition to being available everywhere, Craft offers PKM features in a rich-text environment. Hard-core text editor fans are not likely to find Craft compelling, but the ability to drag anything into your Craft document is powerful and liberating.
Taking notes during a Zoom meeting? Grab a screenshot or download a file and drop it into the document. Want to create a nested outline? You can do that. Like to keep your hands on the keyboard? Type a “/” and you will see a menu with commands to change formatting, insert tables, and more. And the linking within Craft is a PKM enthusiast’s dream.
A Craft Document Collecting Links
I’m trying to journal more, and DayOne makes it easy to add data to your journals as you go, is present on all of your Apple devices, and is safe and secure. It’s easy to use Apple’s Share Sheet to put something you find into your journal for later retrieval.
Related: Why You Should Keep a Journal and Why Keeping a Diary Can Save You.
DayOne Entry Back During the OG Quarantine
Jesse Grosjean of HogBay software has made some of the most compelling productivity software for the Mac, most notably TaskPaper, and invented said file format along the way. Bike is an outliner that artfully blurs the line between plain and rich text formats. And the text animations, to my eye, look a bit like Word on Windows–which I like a lot.
As with TaskPaper, Bike isn’t an application that exists on iPhone or iPad.
Bike Outline
For about the last year, I have been editing and preparing my state professional organization’s online newsletter, and the article body font–set in 15-point Helvetica–is most easily set to large swaths of text using TextSoap. It’s been a long time since I’ve used it, but it works as well as ever.
I had gotten out of the habit of using HookMark (previously Hook) but their recent update and beta, plus a couple of stress-inducing projects, have me at it again. HookMark provides a Mac-level means of linking data. My particular workflow involves linking all manner of resources to OmniFocus projects and tasks so that OF is always the hub of what I’m working on.
HookMark Showing Files Related to OmniFocus Project
Related: Hook: A Quick Look
I still use these apps nearly everyday:
Heartbreaking. Ben Rhodes, reviewing Down and Out In Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, for the Atlantic:
In the end, that’s also what is most disturbing about his suicide. Leehrsen has an eye for the devastating detail. And to me, the most devastating of all is the fact that Bourdain had an “as-it-happens” Google alert for his own name, and that he spent the final hours of his life Googling Asia Argento hundreds of times, presumably staring at the same paparazzi photos over and over. How sad it is that Bourdain, who offered the promise of escape from the mundane social-media addictions of our time, spent his last days triggering himself while staring at screens. After a life of exploration, his last journey was down an online rabbit hole about his own failed romance.
As with anything worth watching or listening to, I was late to White Lotus. I found it bewitching, but unsure why. The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert lent a hand:
Across all six episodes, a convincing thesis emerges: The curse of the privileged is that they would rather be miserable than lose even a tiny fraction of the things they’ve been given.
…
Every interaction in the series is an exchange of power, and even when people try their hardest to use that power in benevolent ways, or to redistribute it, things go awry. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” Mark tells his wife and kids during a tense dinner debate. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.”
Alain de Botton’s School of Life takes a different approach to resolving the notions and paradoxes we hold that make us unhappy. Regarding work:
The modern meaning of life is that our deepest interests should find external expression in a form that others will find useful, and that will bring in sufficient funds for a bourgeois life. The ambition is enormous, beautiful and worthy of solemn respect for its trickiness. It is only in very recent history that we’ve even attempted not just to make money at work, but also – extraordinarily – to be happy there as well. How deeply peculiar the idea would have sounded to most of our ancestors: especially the aristocrats who never worked and the working classes who would mostly strongly have wanted not to. Happy work is the genius, malevolent invention of the bourgeoisie.
There is something to be said for work that has discrete fences and boundaries, one that does not intrude on your vacation, your evening, or your sleep.
More Ruth Chang on the issue of choice:
The key thing about parity is that it opens up a new way of understanding rational agency that is a substitute for the usual Enlightenment conception according to which we are essentially creatures who discover and respond to reasons. On that view, our agency is essentially passive – our reasons are ones given to us and not made by us. Our freedom as rational agents consists in the discovery of and appropriate response to reasons given to us and not created by us. Parity allows us to see that our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place. So we might be free in a deeper sense – we are free to create reasons for ourselves under certain conditions.
Dr. Chang’s TED talk and NY Times article are written for a more general viewer/readership. This interview is far more academic in its content, but interesting if you have a philosophical bone in your body.
Philosopher Ruth Chen, on making big decisions:
When we choose between options that are on a par, we make ourselves the authors of our own lives. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.
“On a par,” for Chen, means that options are not helpfully considered by consulting facts or input from the outside world, but rather, “you can look inward to what you can stand behind, commit to, resolve to throw yourself behind.”