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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Meetings are a massive part of knowledge work. So much so that being good at meetings can change the trajectory of your career. Worst case, it saves you time and reduces the number of meetings you need to attend. Best case, your preparedness and follow-through brings you higher quality opportunities and career growth. The only cost is the time you need to spend to prepare.
I made a video about a shortcut I use to automate my meeting preparation, reducing my time investment to seconds while also improving the quality of my work. Let me show you what I did.
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Morning routines are all the rage; I am constantly trying to improve mine in an attempt to positively impact my day. I have certainly seen positive changes from this work, but I also love how my morning routine experimentation allows me to create new automations!
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