This week, MacSparky is sponsored by The Archive, a plain text editor for interconnected notes that last a lifetime Text files are probably the best way to make sure your words will still be decipherable by a computer in 100 years. (Seriously, if I gave you a MacWrite file right now, would your Mac have any chance at reading it?) Plain text is universal, portable, and permanent. 

The Archive gives you the convenience of plain text files along with an app full of beautiful themes and Markdown syntax highlighting. As the name implies, The Archive is a note-taking app with easy storage so you can organize your notes how you want and write in an efficient editor environment that doesn’t get in the way. You can transform it into a distraction-free full-screen writing environment, including typewriter scrolling. And best of all, all of your data is, ultimately, plain text and absolutely portable. You can sync your notes across different Macs seamlessly via iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and the like.

In addition to storing notes, The Archive facilitates creative work with your notes through cross-connections, clickable links and hashtags. The term Zettelkasten is getting thrown around a lot these days among folks interested in getting focused. The Archive was designed around the concept with cross linking by making links between notes super easy. You can start feeding The Archive with ideas, and then build a second brain to help with your thinking in the long term. I’ve been playing with it and this stuff works.

The Archive is now two years and is being used for everything from taking college lecture notes to writing books and mapping complex fields of knowledge. The dedicated community produces a ton of custom Keyboard Maestro macros and Alfred workflows to add even more features to the workflow. All thanks to the open nature of The Archive and the plain text storage!

So my congratulations to The Archive for its first two years and my thanks for sponsoring MacSparky this week. Go check out The Archive.

There is a lot of talk lately about email disruption and tools to let you deal with email on your terms. I have to smile when I see this because I took control of email years ago when I signed up for SaneBox, this week’s sponsor. I use SaneBox every day to manage my email. SaneBox acts as your email assistant, sorting your inbox for you, so you only see the most important emails with less important emails relegated to other mailboxes for later.

I’m not the only one who relies on SaneBox. It is also used by companies like eBay, Coca-Cola, adidas, and LinkedIn to help their employees stay on top of the most important email.

SaneBox has many additional features, like the ability to track and notify you if people don’t respond to your email and defer incoming email until later. It serves as a set of power tools to make every aspect of using email easier, and it works with just about any email platform including iCloud, IMAP, Google, and Exchange. No matter what system, platform, or app you use for email, SaneBox can help. It is like a feature upgrade to every email application. If you would like to become the boss of your email, sign up for a free SaneBox trial today and use the links in this post to get a significant discount when you sign up.

I love it when tools I use every day want to sponsor MacSparky.com. A case in point is this week’s sponsor, TextExpander. I use that application every day. I am currently working on a complicated transaction where we have a pile of exhibits, all with absolutely crazy names. So I made quick TextExpander snippet to rename the files. It inserts the date, puts in a transaction code, and even moves the curser to exactly the right place for me to type in a brief description. It took me about a minute to make the snippet and it saved me at least an hour. Just another day with TextExpander.

TextExpander makes you more productive. With the ability to add tokens for dates, get fill-ins from the user, and even run AppleScript, it is way more powerful than you’d think. With TextExpander you’ll see your snippets everywhere. It syncs between your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows PC instantly.

They’ve got free snippet groups for all sorts of folks including job recruiters, freelancers, airport codes, brand names, and more at the TextExpander website (or you can download some of mine).

TextExpander even lets you run AppleScripts. For example, I use TextExpander to auto address emails with Apple Mail.

Best of all, with TextExpander you don’t have to work alone: TextExpander for Teams lets you manage and share snippets with your coworkers or the entire company. Use this link to get 20% off. 

The reason the Pomodoro Technique is so popular is because it takes almost no effort to implement and immediately delivers real productivity. If you’re going to use the Pomodoro Technique on your Mac, I recommend Tomato 2, this week’s sponsor. Just like the Pomodoro Technique itself, Tomato 2 is easy to use and delivers immediate results.

What I like about Tomato 2 is the way it remains simple but adds flexibility. Pomodoro Technique purists insist you need to work in 25-minute bursts, but I prefer 45-minute bursts. Tomato 2 can do that. Tomato 2 also gives you feedback about how many Pomodoro sessions you finished charted out over your week.

Need a little help resisting distractions? Tomato 2 can also block those websites that get in the way of your productivity. I’ve tried several Pomodoro apps over the years, and Tomato 2 is the best I’ve ever used. Check it out.

Your business card says a lot about you. To me, it tells me how much you care about the little things, and that, in turn, tells me how you care about the big things. I recently had a lawyer give me his card. It was a cut piece of laser printer paper, and I thought to myself . “huh?”. It wasn’t a good “huh”. Don’t be that guy. Why not carry a business card that genuinely makes you stand out? This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Hoban Cards, where they use a 1902 letterpress machine to make cards that your colleagues, clients, and customers will never forget. I sure love mine. Forget laser printers. Watch the Hoban letterpress process in action.

Evan and the gang at Hoban Cards are entirely dedicated to making the best possible calling cards. They have some beautiful templates to choose from, or you can roll your own.

There is no doubt I am a geek, but I have to admit that I love handing out letterpress cards. It is always a conversation starter. Put simply, Hoban Cards is where you go for the unique and classy alternative to conventional, mass-produced, soulless business cards. Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. I’ve been carrying Hoban cards for years and I intend to keep carrying them for the duration. You should too.

A lot of folks are waking up to the fact that accurate time tracking can make a huge difference in your ability to get your most important priorities done and not waste a bunch of your time. The trick, however, comes with that word *accuracy*. For time tracking to work, the data must be accurate, and systems that require you to manually throw a switch every time you context shift are just not going to give you the data you need.

Enter Timing.

Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents, and websites you use — without start/stop timers. See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing. It’s like Screen Time on steroids.

Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead. Timing also offers a web app to track time from anywhere, not to mention the ability to seamlessly sync data across all your Macs.

The Timing team even offers a set of Siri shortcuts to start and stop timers as quickly as possible. And if you spend a lot of time in meetings, you will be delighted by Timing’s ability to record time for calendar events with a single click. There’s even a third-party app, Zeit,  for iPhone that can update your Timing data from your phone.

Once you know precisely how you’re spending your time, first, you’ll be surprised, and then you’ll start making changes to be more productive. Timing helps you get started. 

Check out the videos I made on timing to help you get started and go download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year!

If you are one of those people who can’t get through the day without coffee, you might understand the importance of having great coffee.

Each cup of coffee should be supreme and you should enjoy each sip you take during the day. After all, believe it or not, this is part of what makes your day great. Every little detail sums up to produce an outstanding cup of coffee, but freshness is key here. So make sure that you get this part of your coffee ritual right.

To get a fully flavor-filled experience, the first thing you need is fresh ground coffee beans. And to get the richest infusion of flavor and aroma to your coffee, you should grind it just before you brew it. Of course, you need a coffee grinder to accomplish this because coffee beans are super hard!

Gear.Coffee makes it easy for you to choose because they’ve selected the top three high-quality manual coffee grinders by Kinu Grinders. The German-engineered Kinu M47 Phoenix and Simplicity hand grinders feature the best in consistency and reliability no matter how you prepare your coffee: Aeropress, Pour-over, Espresso,  Moka Pot, Drip, etc.

Choose the one that suits you better. There’s no wrong choice with these grinders!

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.

Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.

When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I thought it was silly and just another way of pushing today’s problems until tomorrow. However, I was wrong. Deferring email is actually a very powerful tool that takes almost no time and I’ve now been using it for years. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system (which takes time) but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.

With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.

AFTERNOON

This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. Morning is when I am most productive so I don’t deal with many emails directly in that morning sweep. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email. I’ve thought about getting rid of this deferred email box several times but I don’t. It is just too useful.

TOMORROW, 2 DAYS, 5 DAYS

I only give a certain amount of time to email every day. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.

Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Ulysses, The app where I do so much writing on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. In the last year, my usage of Ulysses has only increased more. It has become for me, “the place for words”. Not only do I keep a repository of text, I call it the “text bank” that I use in my law practice in Ulysses, it has also become the place I keep notes, work on drafts, outline screencasts, plan podcasts, and write just about all the other words I make in one context or another. I love the clean design and the way it syncs everything everywhere.

The Ulysses team just keeps making the app better. Just this week, they released a new update for iOS and iPad that adds a ton of power features, including mouse and trackpad support, external folder support, and several more new features. Writing is hard. Ulysses helps you out by removing distractions and letting you focus on moving that cursor from left to right. Moreover, with seamless integration between all of my Apple devices, I can add and edit my words on everything from my 27” iMac to my iPhone in my pocket. Best of all, if you sign up with the links in this blog post, you’ll get three months of Ulysses for free. 

This week’s sponsor, SaneBox is the solution to so many of my email problems. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. The email just never stops coming at you. If you’re goign to stand a chance against it, you’ll need some powerful technology and SaneBox is that. With SaneBox at your back, you can:

• Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 

• Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”

• Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.

• Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).

• Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.

• Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service.

The SaneBox team has been hard at work lately improving the SaneBox interface and releasing even more new tools. For instance, now you can have SaneBox send an auto-reply when you defer an email. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.