Dropzone, one of my favorite Mac utilities, just got a big update to version 5. If you’re not familiar with it, Dropzone lives in your menu bar and gives you a spot to temporarily park files, folders, and media while you work…
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I spend most of my days trying to get things done faster. Better systems, better tools, better workflows. That’s kind of my whole deal. So it’s a little funny that one of the things I look forward to most each week is tending to something that will take decades to finish.
I’ve been getting into bonsai. And the thing about bonsai is that the tree does not care about your timeline. You make a cut, and then you wait. Sometimes years. You wire a branch into position and check on it next year. There’s no keyboard shortcut for this.
I trimmed a juniper last fall that I won’t touch again until this summer. That’s the plan. Leave it alone and let it grow. If I get impatient and start fussing with it, I’ll set it back. The best thing I can do for that tree right now is nothing.
That’s a hard lesson for someone like me.
We live in a culture that treats speed as a virtue. Get more done. Ship faster. Optimize everything. And I’m not going to pretend I’m immune to that. I built a career on it. But bonsai has been teaching me that some of the most important work happens slowly. You can’t rush a root system. You can’t shortcut the way a trunk thickens over years of careful pruning.
I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity lately (I went through the Shortform summary first, which is a great way to get the core argument quickly). Newport makes a case I keep coming back to: real productivity isn’t about doing more things faster. It’s about doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and caring deeply about quality. His third principle, obsessing over quality, is basically the bonsai philosophy in business terms. You don’t rush the work that matters most.
Newport points out that many of the people we consider most productive across history, writers, scientists, artists, actually worked slowly by modern standards. They had long gaps between major works. They weren’t optimizing their daily throughput. They were protecting their ability to do the deep, patient work that produced something lasting.
That landed for me. Because when I’m standing at my bonsai bench with a pair of scissors and a tree that may outlive me, I’m not being productive in any measurable way. Nobody’s going to see a result for years. But I’m practicing something I think I need more of: the ability to stay with something without needing to see immediate progress.
It turns out the same patience that makes a good bonsai also makes better writing, better teaching, and better thinking. When I sit down to work on a field guide, the best sessions are the ones where I stop watching the clock and just stay with the material until it’s right. Not fast. Right.
I’m not saying throw out your task manager. But I’ve started asking myself a different question when I plan my week. Instead of “how much can I get done?”, I’m asking “what deserves slow work this week?” Usually, it’s one thing. And giving that one thing the bonsai treatment, patient attention without rushing to a result, has made the work better.
The tree doesn’t care about your schedule. And maybe that’s exactly the reminder I need sitting on my desk.
Apple turned 50 this week, and there’s a lot to talk about. Tim Cook rang the NASDAQ bell, shared rare prototypes with the Wall Street Journal, and Paul McCartney played Apple Park…
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Apple just dropped the price of the VESA-mount Studio Display XDR by $400. The standless version is now $2,899, down from $3,299. The stand version stays at $3,299.
That’s a big correction for a product that’s only been on the market for a few weeks. And it makes me curious about the internal conversations that led to it. Did the original pricing miss the mark? Were pre-order numbers lower than expected? Did someone at Apple realize that charging the same price for a monitor without a stand as one with a stand didn’t make a lot of sense?
Either way, if you are looking at the new monitor sans stand, it just got a bit more affordable.
Apple Maps has been quietly accumulating useful features over the last few years and most people are only using a fraction of what’s there…
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Fantastical now supports Apple’s AlarmKit, the persistent alarm feature that arrived with iOS 26. You can set urgent alarms on individual calendar events, and they’ll ring through even when your iPhone is silenced or in a Focus mode…
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Apple turned 50 today. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a fun animated history running on Apple’s homepage that sketches its way through five decades of products. It’s clever but not too clever. If you’ve been around through Apple’s triumphs and failures, it’s a good watch.
I’m glad Apple is marking the occasion. Fifty years is a real milestone, and the company has earned a moment to look back. The Apple II. The Mac. The near-death experience. The iPod, the iPhone, and everything that followed. That’s a story worth reflecting on.
But I hope they don’t overdo it.
The reason I became an Apple customer wasn’t nostalgia. It was the opposite. Apple’s thing has always been an unrelenting focus on what’s next. What’s the best product we can make right now? What problem can we solve tomorrow? That restlessness is what made them interesting and what kept me buying their stuff year after year.
A 50th birthday celebration is great. A 50th birthday year where every keynote opens with a sepia-toned montage? Less great. Apple is at its best when it’s building the future, not curating the past.
So happy birthday, Apple. Now get back to work.
MacSparky Labs members get to participate in member events and receive a number of exclusive videos and podcasts each month. Here’s a summary of offerings this past month:
Labs content and its membership level: P – Pathfinder; I – Insider; M – Member
If you’d like to be a part of the MacSparky Labs, you can get more information and join right here.
I was a guest on The Supportive, a podcast from Help Scout hosted by Mat Patterson. The episode is about customer support, small business, and figuring out what matters when you’re a one-person operation.
When Mat first reached out, I wasn’t sure an interview made sense. What I do is small. I make video tutorials and run a website. I’m not managing a support team or fielding thousands of tickets a day. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I actually care a lot about customer support. Maybe more than I’d admitted to myself.
We ended up going deep on some things I don’t usually talk about in public. My early days working at RadioShack. The values my dad taught me over lunch when I told him I wanted to be a lawyer. Why I chose a small law firm over the big ones. And how all of that shaped the way I run MacSparky today.
The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is about kindness as a business strategy. Not in a soft, abstract way. In a practical way. If you solve for kindness in your customer interactions, you end up attracting the kind of audience you want. The aggressive people filter themselves out. That’s been my experience for twenty years now.
We also talked about the tension between growth and staying hands-on. Mat did a great job of getting me to talk about things I don’t usually discuss.
On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I dig into the feedback bag. We cover everything from Stephen’s secret Cloudflare image-hosting shortcut to the great Raycast vs. Spotlight vs. Alfred debate, Stream Deck setups (and whether that new XL is too much Stream Deck), iCloud security with Advanced Data Protection, and how I’m using Keyboard Maestro conflict palettes for window management across two monitors. We also announce something new for More Power Users subscribers: monthly bonus episodes starting with a Star Wars movie ranking that may test our friendship.