DEVONthink Field Guide Early Bird Pricing Ends Tomorrow

Folks are digging my new DEVONthink Field Guide. Here’s just one of the nice testimonials I’ve received:

>
“I wish I’d had this MacSparky Field Guide when I first started using DT 8 months ago; it would have saved me hours of reading manuals, watching videos, and reading blog posts to try to figure out how to use DevonThink. In his typical thorough and logical manner, David takes you by the hand and leads you step-by-step through everything you need to know to get the most out of DevonThink. Excellent, and a steal for the value!”
— Jim E.

Tomorrow the early bird price of $44 is going up so if you want that discounted price, now’s the time.

Mac Power Users 608: DEVONthink & New Apple Hardware



Mac Power Users Artwork.png


My newest Field Guide covers DEVONthink, and on this week’s Mac Power Users, Stephen and I discuss the application, some example uses, and the basics anyone looking at it should know. After that, we review the new iPhone and iPad mini.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.

  • SaneBox: Stop drowning in email!

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

Daylite Pushes Your Productivity and Your Profits to the Macs (Sponsor)



DayliteCapterra-AppleFans-2021-2.png


Make no mistake, Daylite isn’t just a CRM tool, it’s a Mac CRM tool. It isn’t for everyone, it’s for us. It’s for Mac people. People who ‘get’ that thinking exclusively and holistically about small business is actually thinking big. 

Just like a Mac, Daylite is an intuitive way of instantly integrating your Apple calendar and Apple mail, reminders, notes, tasks and more. Online, offline, wherever, it’s completely shareable with any Mac user and accessible from any macOS or iOS device. Daylite allows you to minimize the juggling of accounts, tasks and projects while maximizing leads, customer relationships and profits.

At once, your small business has everything you and your team expect from a leading CRM tool while having the stress-relieving perks you’d only expect from a made-for-Mac app. Name one other CRM app with the productivity-boosting power to seamlessly work well with Apple integration. 

It’s Daylite. Learn more. 

Focused 135: Don’t Eat the Frog, with Jesse J. Anderson



Focused Artwork.jpeg


Jesse Anderson joins MIke and me on the latest episode of Focused to talk about self-awareness and the struggles with being productive while battling ADHD.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • ExpressVPN: High-speed, secure and anonymous VPN service. Get an extra three months free.

  • Novo: Powerfully simple business banking. Sign up for free.

  • Privacy: Smarter payments. Get $5 to spend on your first purchase.

Testing the iPhone 13 Pro Cameras at Disneyland

Yesterday morning I spent a few hours testing the new iPhone 13 Pro camera system at Disneyland, particularly in Galaxy’s Edge (of course). A few takeaways were:

  1. The new wide lens is a big improvement and I’m going to be using that lens a lot more.

  2. 3X reach is a lot more useful than 2X reach for zoom

  3. Cinematic Mode version 1 is a lot better than Portrait Mode version 1.

Here’s a video with all the details.

Mac Power Users 607: iOS & iPadOS 15



Mac Power Users Artwork.png


iOS and iPadOS 15 have arrived, bringing new features to Apple’s mobile devices, including Focus modes, Live Text, new Home Screen widgets, Safari extensions and a lot more. Stephen and I discuss our experiences with the beta and outline what’s best in this year’s upgrade on the latest episode fo Mac Power Users.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.

  • Electric: Stop stressing over scattered devices. Get a free pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones when you schedule a meeting.

  • Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code MPU to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2022, and can be used only once.

  • Zocdoc: Find the right doctor, right now with Zocdoc. Sign up for free.

Your Calendar as Both Planning and Archive Tool

In this week’s episode of Focused, Sean McCabe talked about how he uses his calendar not only to plan future events but record older ones. I do the same thing, but I’ve never written about the practice.

To me, the current moment is where my calendar transitions from a planning to an archive tool. I mean that I have time planned for the next week with projects I plan to work on and places I plan to be. However, that is only hypothetical in the future. I may plan to work on a client contract tomorrow afternoon at 14:00, but then again, maybe one of my kids will need me, or another client will call in with an emergency. Some days follow the plan. Others do not. 

However, as part of my overall effort to track my time and attention, I’ll adjust my calendar to match what happened as the day goes by (or at least at the end of the day). So in the moment of “now”, my calendar moves from a planning tool to an archive tool.

So why the extra step? I find that recording in my calendar has several benefits:

  • Better Understanding
    By recording how much time things take, I get a better understanding of … wait for it … how long things take. In the future, that will pay off with better estimates.

  • Reflection of My Actual Time and Attention
    Maybe I planned to spend the entire morning working on the next Field Guide. But then, later, having to go back and change that block to reflect that, in reality, I spent the morning watching YouTube videos about USB-C cables, which forces me to reflect on whether I am spending my time wisely.

  • Catching Falling Plates
    Going back to that earlier example, I may have a block of time set aside for that client contract. Seeing that I didn’t get to that on a busy day gives me the opportunity to move that block into the future, back into planning, and making sure I don’t drop the ball.

  • Easy Reference
    Sometimes I do find myself trying to figure out what I was doing on a particular day. Having this data in my calendar makes that trivial.

Turning your planning calendar into an archive tool takes some extra work throughout the day (or perhaps just at the end of the day), but in practice, the amount of time it takes is just minutes, and I find that a trivial investment of time for the payoff to be worth it.

Readwise Reading App

Readwise has been building its own fully integrated reading app. It’s a more powerful, more flexible version of the classic read-it-later app. From newsletters, RSS reading, Twitter threads, web highlighting, read-it-later, and PDFs, Readwise is looking for their Reader app to be the one-stop place for power readers to get all of their reading done. They’re working on features from instant syncing, to highlighting images, to powerful search, also:

  • It’s made to handle modern and established content alike, from Twitter threads to PDFs, and everything in-between.

  • It serves both casual and power users, with the flexibility to accommodate a variety of consumer, professional, and academic use cases.

  • It’s designed with a local-first, cross-platform architecture enabling blazingly fast interactions and full-text search across all of your devices (even offline).

  • It connects seamlessly with all your other tools for thought such as Roam Research, Notion, Evernote, and Obsidian.

  • It embeds powerful workflows to help you conquer content overload — one of the most acute pain points of read-it-later power users.

  • It’s being actively developed with responsive customer support and rapid feedback loops informed by beta testers who are already reading in the app for hours a day.

Readwise reading app is still in private beta because it’s not ready yet for self-serve onboarding, but they’re letting in friendly beta testers. If you’re an existing Readwise subscriber, you can be among the first users to gain access to the public beta once it’s launched. If you wish to gain earlier access (or you’re not already a Readwise user), sign up to join the waitlist for the private beta.

I am really looking forward to this app. I’m already sold on Readwise and being able to put the entire read-it-later workflow into one app (with all these features) sounds great.