Agenda’s most notable feature is the ability to pin a note to a particular date, and most notably, an event on your calendar. (It also inserts a link to the note in the calendar event, so that you can refer to the note from two places: Agenda itself, or your calendar).

An Agenda Note Link in Fantastical

In a meeting, inevitably a task or action will occur to you (or be assigned to you); I think best practice in GTD would be to add it to your task manager (OmniFocus, in my case). If you’re referring to your task manager and reviewing weekly, you won’t miss this commitment or open loop.

The one thing I’ve struggled with is taking notes in meetings and then tossing them into the digital abyss of history. It’s easy to type notes during a meeting and never look at them again. They are there if you ever need them, but a once-over can help you process anything of importance or remind you of something you might not have realized deserved your attention.

To this end, using Agenda’s “Mark New Notes as On the Agenda” preference can create a kind of digital inbox of meeting notes that you can add to your weekly review. This feature, as it says, puts any new note that you create on Agenda’s, ahem, agenda, and you can simply click on the “On the Agenda” menu item in the Overview pane.

Mark New Notes on the Agenda

My practice is to leave all new notes on the Agenda until I’ve performed a weekly review. Simple yet powerful.

This week, still on the agenda

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have created Rt-Covid–19, a visually rich expression of “a key measure of how fast the virus is growing”:

The metric being tracked here (Rt) represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.

I’m not familiar with the validity of the measure, but the visualization is immediately understandable. New Jersey, my home, is on the cusp of “breaking the back of the virus,” as our governor likes to say.

Tim Nahumck echoes a great point made by Jason Snell and Myke Hurley regarding the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro:

Now that I’m working from home for the foreseeable future, I’m using the iPad Pro in a “docked” manner, where it sits off to the right in a stand connected to an external monitor; for input, I use the Logitech K780 keyboard and – new to my home office setup – a Magic Trackpad 2. In this scenario, the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro obviously wouldn’t be used, just like my Smart Keyboard Folio sits below my monitor.

As Jason and Myke said, the Magic Keyboard isn’t for turning your iPad into a desktop workstation. If you want to use your iPad at a desk, get a stand and a keyboard (and maybe a trackpad or mouse). This beast is for turning it into a laptop.

Talmon Joseph Smith, writing for the NY Times about how liberals who grew disillusioned with President Obama welcome his reemergence:

But now we are older, and living through a deadly pandemic with a leader who embodies the antithesis of Mr. Obama’s empathy and rationality. A man who attempts to ignore or erase all realities inconvenient to him and who seeks gain through bluffing when division, his first instinct, fails. Suddenly, an Obama-style civics and the competent, bipartisan-minded technocrats of his administration would be a godsend.

That’s as good a description of our current president as any.

The Return of Barack Obama

Jason Snell, writing for MacWorld about the convergence of tablets and trucks:

Now comes the race toward that elusive sweet spot, the creation of a device that’s the perfect balance—a light touch tablet when you want it to be, a stylus-driven notepad when you want to draw or take notes, a laptop when you want to write or work on a spreadsheet, even a desktop when you want to sit at a desk and use a large screen.

Prior to the release of iPadOS 13, I would have said that Microsoft was ahead of Apple. The Surface Go and Pro offered a more modular tablet experience than Apple’s iPad. But with desktop-class Safari, great display support, and a completely rethought pointing system, iPad is at once a wholly different experience from using a Mac, but almost as capable. Windows on Surface is still very much Windows.

iPad vs. Surface: Apple and Microsoft get closer to convergence | Macworld

I previously shared a pic of my home office, such as it is, since I was spending so much time there what with the social distancing and school closure and all. I was getting some RSI issues in my right elbow/tricep, so I ordered a keyboard tray:

I’ve had this desk for over 20 years and am happy to be able to keep it. I really like the whole rig.

Slate’s Laura Miller interviews Robert Kolker about his book, Hidden Valley Road, which documents the story of the Galvin Family, where six of 10 children developed schizophrenia:

The genetic part of it has been really disappointing. We really thought 20 years ago that as soon as the human genome was sequenced we were going to knock out any number of complicated diseases. We thought we’d just look at the genes of someone who has a disease, see where the problem genes are, fix those genes and be done in time for dinner. That didn’t happen for any number of diseases, including schizophrenia, where they found one gene and then another and then another and now they have over 100. Each of those irregularities they’ve found only add a small probability that you’ll get the illness.

Schizophrenia–often confused with multiple personality disorder–is a chronic condition that exhausts families, resources, and the lives of the afflicted. Things haven’t changed much, either.

Six Brothers With Schizophrenia Fascinated Researchers. A New Book Explores the Family’s Trauma.

Yes, I said Mac OS X, because this collection by Stephen Hackett stretches so far back into Mac OS history that I can’t help it.

Every major version of Mac OS X macOS has come with a new default wallpaper. As you can see, I have collected them all here.

While great in their day, the early wallpapers are now quite small in the world of 5K displays.

Every Default macOS Wallpaper – in Glorious 5K Resolution

Andy Slavitt, on what we should be doing to suppress COVID–19:

Right now the smartest people I talk to want us to push R0 (“R-naught is term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is) to zero, be able to contract trace, install thermal indicators, develop reliable anti-body testing, and put fever tents in the right place. Armchair experts and economic hacks feel different.

Medium

I was watching A live tour of how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run Basecamp and I thought it would be fun to write about how I have moved my work setup home.

Just in case you’re living under a rock, the United States (and in my specific case, New Jersey) has been under a kind of lockdown due to the novel coronavirus that causes COVID–19. My particular school district has been close for over and week, and inclusive of our spring break, will be closed for a month.

My district issue laptop is a 12“ MacBook Adorable. It’s a fine machine for running around, but I don’t really use it in the office that way (I have it connected to a 27” Dell with an iKBC Poker II mechanical keyboard.

At home:

• 2018 Mac mini, 3 GHz i5 6-core
• Samsung U32J59x Display 31.5-inch (3840 x 2160)
• Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (in Space Gray)
• Logitech G602 Wireless Mouse
• Tanberg PrecisionHD webcam
• Insignia NS-PAUBMD8 USB microphone
• Samsung T5 SSD for Time Machine Backups