Once a year I use a really helpful Siri Shortcut to schedule and plan for a year of meetings.
This shortcut makes calendar events and OmniFocus projects for each of my department meetings so I am never caught off guard.
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I made a video about how I use Drafts and Shortcuts to get my tasks into OmniFocus. I was inspired to make this video after writing yesterday’s post about how I have been using the Drafts Inbox recently.
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In the minds of most teachers and students summer has a special allure of freedom and wistfulness. As the summer break approaches we all get anxious to shed the skin of the past year and shift into summer mode.
I too look forward to summer with the same excitement as everyone else but I’m not looking forward to the beach and sunshine as much as I am looking forward to the time and freedom to learn something new, make something cool, or improve myself.
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I have been on Twitter for several years now, but I have never fully jumped in. I have purchased Tweetbot, and that has helped me enjoy consuming Twitter, but I still want to do a better job of contributing.
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I was listening to the most recent episode of Cortex (one of my favorite podcasts) and the hosts were talking about their calendars. Unexpectedly they had a little stand off about what day of the week their calendars started on. If you grew up in America this is an absurd statement that does not make sense. Upon some reflection and listening to the discussion of the hosts, I don’t have a good argument against their position that your calendar should start on Monday. Listen to the episode here:
A while ago I shared a post from David Sparks about automating greetings in emails to reduce typos and increase accuracy in written communication. That post got me thinking about the other things that I do in my day-to-day written communications that could benefit from the accuracy and precision that comes from automation. I realized that dates were what I should try to address.
I plan on writing a post all about Hazel in the future but I wanted to share a specific use case for Hazel that others might benefit from.
In short Hazel is a very cool macOS tool for automating the moving and naming of files. I know that does not sound very fun but it is awesome. Again I will talk more about that in the future but let me just show you what I wanted to do:
Your high school health teacher made this phrase mean one thing but that same precaution also applies to using the internet. You can find endless examples of privacy breaches, creepy online tracking, or straight up public wifi hacking that make accessing the internet seem like playing with fire. And it is!
Apple really ramped up its health efforts a few iOS versions ago and one of the sleeper hits (pun intended) is the bedtime feature.
Buried in the clock app on iOS is a tab called bedtime. In here you can set your wake up time (this also sets an alarm) and how long you want to sleep. Once you do this, you get a bedtime reminder every night and sleep data populated into your Health app. If you set the option your phone will also turn on Do Not Disturb mode during your sleep.
One of the features of Snapchat that I thought was cool when the app first launched was the Snapcode. It made connecting with people on the service pretty frictionless. You could just scan a branded QR code to automatically follow a specific person. No typing, asking clarifying questions or anything, just scan and go!
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Your iOS device has had a feature called “Do Not Disturb” for the past few years. You might have noticed a little moon icon on your phone at some point, but did you know you can set a schedule for it?
David Sparks, writing for MacSparky.com
If you have TextExpander and use Apple Mail, I recommend trying this out. I use these scripts with nearly every email I write on my Mac.