Tag Archive for: Friction

My Dictation Workflow

Person at desk with laptop, leaning back comfortably while speaking, hands gesturing naturally away from keyboard in a bright home office workspace

I’m so bad at spelling that I’m actually better at grammar; using a semicolon is easier than remembering whether I comes before E. As a result of my terrible spelling and tendency to avoid frustration, I’ve been trying to dictate my writing since middle school. If you’ve ever wondered how many children gleefully received Dragon Naturally Speaking as a Christmas gift, the answer is at least one. But regardless of how much I read to my computer, it wasn’t until this year that I finally found the dictation experience I’ve been searching for.

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AppleScript for Creating Follow-up Tasks in Things

A macOS script editor window displays an AppleScript titled "Mark an Action Item as 'Waiting For'." The script automates task management in the Things 3 app by retrieving the current date, selecting to-dos, checking for selected tasks, and handling follow-ups. The code is color-coded, with keywords in blue, variables in green, and strings in purple. The interface includes standard toolbar icons and a description field at the bottom.

A major component of my job is asynchronously collaborating with other people, usually subject matter experts from whom I need to get additional information or content approval on something I have created.

All of my project templates have this approval process built in at the appropriate points. This creates a common challenge: the people I’m working with are often overworked or get appropriately distracted by dealing with some type of emergency at work, and reviewing a script for the trainer gets put on the back burner. So, tactful follow-up is a critical skill and often something I’m managing across multiple people and projects at the same time.

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AppleScript for Pulling Today’s Completed Tasks From Things

A screenshot of an AppleScript editor window titled "Pull Today's Completed Action Items from Things and Create a Day One Entry." The script is designed to retrieve completed tasks from the Things3 app and create a Day One journal entry. The script contains code to set the current date, format it in ISO 8601 format, initialize a list of completed tasks, and fetch tasks from the "Logbook" list. Syntax highlighting shows text in different colors: green for comments, blue for commands, and purple for logic conditions.

Balancing life’s necessary chores with meaningful progress toward our goals can be challenging, especially when greeted by an overflowing task list each morning.

To tackle this, I’ve been exploring ways to not just manage my tasks in Things but also to ensure I’m making real headway on projects that matter. In this post, I’ll show you how an AppleScript is helping me do just that.

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Sending Staff Emails

Email was invented in 1971, email is six years older than Post-It notes! 

Even though email predates almost all technology that we use today, and even though practically every profession uses email as the official method of communication, we (collectively) suck at it!

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Sanity Saving Email Rules

I think email is one of those things I and my fellow millennials were supposed to kill, or maybe hate; I’m not sure what my generation’s official stance is supposed to be, but I kind of like email.

I came to this conclusion over time, after spending a considerable effort in making my email experience pleasant and functional. In this post, I want to show you some of the ways that I have done that and why.

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