Whew it’s kinda late. Here’s this week’s list of things to check out.

Forever Notes

Since diving back into Apple’s Notes app, I’ve wondered about how best to organize the notes. I don’t subscribe as fully to the magic of search as I used to; it’s necessary, for sure, but not sufficient.

I set up Notes using Tiago Forte’s PARA Method and, despite my continuing confusion of what, exactly, goes into the “Areas” folder, it’s working out pretty well. But me being me, I always wonder…

Forever Notes doesn’t suggest much in the way of organization, but focuses more on linking notes and using some characters to enhance your search powers. It reminded me of some of my early uses of TaskPaper as a kind of project anchor document. Hookmark largely obviated the need for this kind of document for me, though. It’s a good way to learn all the goodies in Notes you’re not using.

Half Growlers

This adorable upstart is, as its name suggests, half of a standard wine growler at our favorite local haunt. I neglected to bring our one liter growler to fill up on their Lynx wine, and was about to buy a new one when I spied the halflings on the shelf below. I drink exactly 100 grams of wine with dinner most nights of the week, so 500 ml will be just about right. Started this evening in fact with the sous vide chicken drums and Mac and cheese we had.

ChatGPT tells me that they got the name “growler” from the gurgling sound they made when people sloshed them around in buckets.

The Unschedule

That I’ve been trying to read Neil Fiori’s The Now Habit since I purchased it long enough ago that it’s not even ironic any more. It’s an interesting take on procrastination, but some of the core strategies Fiori recommends are purely behavioral, and in the case of the Unscheduled, cribbed from the practice of BF Skinner himself.
Without getting into it too much, the Unscheduled shows you have to track how you spend your time each day in discreet blocks of time, blocking out commitments and things you have to do (like commuting, making coffee, prepping dinner) and then build in time for things you like to do (reading, writing, socializing, gaming…whatever it is that you do intrinsically). It’s effectively time blocking, but a little less granular.

(For my part, I cannot understand how someone who’s properly using a to-do app to time-block with the surfeit of very short tasks that inevitably populate your system.)
For example, you might pick a project that you’re having a hard time getting started on and block out just one half-hour to work on it with uninterrupted focus. You then track the minutes that you spend doing the project, and reward yourself for completing the 30-minute dash by doing something preferable.
The larger point of all of this is to help you see that you don’t have to work interminably to make progress, and that planning for play will make you more, not less, productive.

OmniOutliner

It inevitably comes to the mind of any good tech nerd that unscheduling begs for the creative application of software. I looked at some PDF templates and set something up in Notes, but I also cobbled together a quick OmniOutliner document that totals up the time logged in a cell. I love using OmniOutliner but don’t often find a good use for it. It sits in a weird space between outliner, notes app, to-do list, planner, and spreadsheet. It’s impossible not to love, a kind of Emacs for Mac nerds . It’s dense and challenging, although this has improved to some degree in this regard over subsequent releases for me (mostly around formatting). I suspect OmniOutliner doesn’t sell in anything close to the volume of OmniFocus, and so might not be as actively developed. But it’s fantastic on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and sync is fast over iCloud.