I have become obsessed with checklists since reading The Checklist Manifesto. Automating checklists is even better!
Here is a video explaining how I use Drafts to write, store, and revise my checklists (e.g., project templates) to use in Things.
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As I have explained before, I try to deal with stressful situations by planning ahead, most often through checklists or automations.
Deciding to keep my sick kid home from school and communicating with his teacher(s) and the staff quickly is just such a situation. I have created two Drafts accounts to help me in those times.
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Instead of using different apps for tracking habits or chores, I keep everything in my task manager. This made my task manager cluttered and require too much maintenance until I started automating the marking as complete of various action items via AppleScript.
I made a video explaining and demoing the process; this post also has various downloads and links to help you recreate my work.
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In my life, air travel has been a pretty rare occurrence, one or two flights a decade, maybe. That is until my son was old enough to travel; since then, we have visited Disney World twice and multiple US national parks. However, the stress and magnitude of air travel felt by an infrequent traveler have stuck with me.
You might be able to guess what tools I reached for to mitigate travel stress and repeatedly ensure successful trips.
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I trick my son (and myself) into putting away laundry by asking him to just put away his socks. Then we will come back in a minute and do his shirts. We repeat this cycle until all of his laundry is put away.
I find the same trick works on me. I want to make a new YouTube video, but that amorphous daunting task is challenging to start. I made this automation to help break up making a video into smaller tasks. This reduces the friction and makes producing videos much easier!
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