Shifting Winds

This week has been a challenging one for me. Monday morning, I received a text message that there was a new wildfire near my home, The Silverado Fire, and to be on alert. So throughout the morning, I kept working with one eye on the reports and maps showing the fire’s progress. The wind was roaring Monday in gusts up to 60MPH. It’s a local condition we call the Santa Ana Winds, but the good news was the Santa Ana’s were blowing the fire away from my house.

Unfortunately, shifting winds are not always just a metaphor. Sometimes shifting winds just mean shifting winds. And at about 3 pm Monday, the winds shifted, and fire came roaring toward my sleepy little community of Foothill Ranch. The emergency text message arrived shortly later that we were under a mandatory evacuation order. The fire hadn’t arrived yet, but it was on the way. So all of my podcasts and blog posts about backups paid off. We packed up a few valuables, pictures, and hard drives and took off. I can tell you that the experience of evacuating your neighborhood while everyone else is also evacuating your neighborhood is pretty surreal. Everyone is packing their cars, smiling and acting like they aren’t worried while they are, in truth, all a little terrified. The smoke and ash were already blowing in, and police cars were driving up and down the street, blasting warnings to evacuate. Everybody was a bit on edge.

We stayed with family Monday night and watched some scary news coverage. I live in a tract of homes in the foothills. They were built with fires in mind. Our roofs are fire-resistant. We keep the brush cleared around our little community’s perimeter like some sort of ancient fire moat. The California firefighters are pros and understand wildfires. There isn’t a lot they can do when it is burning through open land. However, when it gets near homes, they have a tremendous arsenal of fire fighting tools. So the fire burned around the perimeter of our community Monday night. The park where I take my dog caught on fire, and to the extent a park can burn down, it burned down. However, no homes were lost. All was good.

We returned home yesterday only to find more shifting winds and more evacuation orders. We had another long night last night, but again, no homes were lost while the Silverado fire continues to linger in the neighborhood. We are once again with family, hoping we can get back home today. My family and home are safe, and the fire is very unlikely to pick my little tract home as the one it takes out.

We are very fortunate, and California firefighters are very good. Everyone in my community is safe. None of the houses in my community were lost. I can’t help but feel that if this fire’s siege of my community hasn’t broken through in two days, it’s not going to break through. The mandatory evacuation order is still in place, but we’re hoping it gets lifted later today. I just want to get back home, take a nap, and resume something close to normal life. Thanks for all the kind tweets and emails. I haven’t responded to many of them, but I appreciate them all.

Focused 111: Environmental Focus, with Erik Fisher

Erik Fisher joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about internal and external distractions, setting up your environment for focused work, dealing with unexpected changes, and building self-awareness.

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Mac Power Users 559: Research Apps

A few new research applications have popped up the last year, joining some true Mac legends. To see what is what, I went on a quest and have returned to share with Stephen the wisdom I gained while exploring. Listen in on the latest episode of Mac Power Users.

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Automators 61: Widget Home Screen Nerdery

In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I look at the widgets in iOS 14 and how you can automate to make sure you have the data you need under your thumb.

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iFixit Murders a New iPhone 12

It certainly didn’t take iFixit long to tear a new iPhone 12 apart. They’re doing it right now with a live stream that I can not stop watching. It’s kind of hypnotic. One bit of insight that stands out is how many of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro parts are the same.

Hyper-Scheduling Technology

Yesterday I wrote about the task management and your calendar. Today, I’d like to share some of the technology behind how I go about blocking these schedules. Creating calendar items can be tedious. Using a tool like Fantastical makes a big difference, but when blocking a whole week out, you want some automation at your back. For me, it’s been an evolution.

Block and Copy

You can copy and paste calendar events in most calendar apps on the Mac, including Apple’s own Calendar app. Command + C and Command + V are your friends. If you have similar blocks you use throughout the week, you can set them up once, then copy, then paste as many times as needed. You may need to make adjustments to start and end times (or even descriptions), but that is way easier than starting from scratch. Blocking and copying calendar events on the iPhone and iPad are not as easy and more time-intensive. Block and copy is a perfectly acceptable way to set your blocks, particularly if they vary a lot from week to week. As my schedule started getting more consistent, I looked at other options for automating calendar blocks.

Repeating Events

All calendar apps can create repeating calendar events with a high degree of customization. If you want a block every Tuesday at 1 PM or on the last Sunday of every month at 3 PM, you can do that. I tried this for a while but eventually gave up on it for two reasons.

First, I was not too fond of the confirmation box that shows up every time I adjusted a repeating calendar event. It was like hitting a speed bump multiple times every day. It started as an annoyance but quickly became unbearable.

Second, recurring events go into the future, potentially, forever. If you block most of your days going months (or years) into the future, Scheduling anything in the future become more difficult because, according to your repeating events, you are already very busy every day, forever.

Automatic Event Creation

As I explained in yesterday’s post, I don’t want to plan blocks much more than a week into the future. As Yoda said, “Always in motion the in the future.” Blocks planned out more than a week in advance rarely go down as planned. Yet there is enough consistency in my schedule that I’d like to automate the process of generating the 25-ish calendar events I want every week.

The easiest way I found to do this was with a Shortcut that runs through a “Create Event” task for each day in the following week with my standard blocks. You can download a simplified version on your iPhone or iPad with this link. I run this script every Saturday afternoon. It takes just seconds and fills my week with blocks. Since they are not repeating events, I can move and change them at will without seeing that blasted confirmation box. Moreover, since they only go one week into the future, if I’m planning an event for a month from now, my calendar isn’t overly cluttered.

In addition to generating the calendar events, my Shortcut script also inserts alarms for most events to trigger when the block starts. This reminds me to change gears and helps me from getting lost in any particular block.

Daily Evolution

Often, but not always, I need to make adjustments to these blocks as I go through the day. Stuff happens. It’s okay. I do, however, adjust the calendar to reality when that happens. Sometimes it means moving a few blocks around in the coming days. That’s okay too. Regardless, I take a screenshot of my weekly calendar on Sunday night, and I always go back to look the following weekend to see how the week went down compared to my plans. Sometimes I learn a thing or two comparing reality to the theoretical.

The Paper Option

I’ve also tried blocking entirely with paper. For that, I’d recommend a nice pen and a notebook that makes you want to use it. The trouble with doing this on paper for me was that I didn’t have the notebook with me at all times. Digital events are in my pocket, on my wrist, and send me notifications.

The Relationship Between Task Lists and Calendars

I’ve written about hyper-scheduling and using my calendar to keep myself in check when planning tasks. Those posts often get questions from readers about the exact relationship between my calendar and my task list. If you keep both a calendar and a task list, it can get confusing to figure out what goes where. Of course, you know the dentist appointment goes on the calendar, but if you are going to get the most out of that calendar, it should be used for much more.

Your task list should be the keeper of all tasks. It is the full inventory of things you plan to do. If, however, you’re like me, that inventory is pretty full. There is no way I’m going to wake up one day and complete every task on my list. Honestly, there are years worth of work in my OmniFocus database.

The purpose of the task list is to bring order to that chaos and give you a framework to hang current and future tasks and keep them in perspective. The goal is that when you plan your days and weeks, you can easily pull the wheat from chafe in that task list and know that out of all of those things, which are the ones that move the needle for you right now. Figuring out what is essential right now is the entire reason I’ve invested my time in mastering OmniFocus (and made the OmniFocus Field Guide). I want to get to the tasks that need my time with the smallest time investment on a daily basis.

It’s at that point that my calendar joins in the dance. Once I have picked my tasks for the day or week, I need to plan when I will accomplish them. To do this, I need to answer a few hard questions:

How long will this take?
Do I have that kind of time available?
Exactly when will I give it that time?

Let’s break that down further.

How long with this take?

As humans, we are generally terrible at estimating how long it takes to get something done. We usually vastly underestimate the amount of time required. If this is new to you, I recommend taking your initial time estimate and doubling it. Let’s say one of your on-deck tasks is a client proposal, and you immediately think “one hour”. Make it two. You can always scale back later, but if you are using calendar blocks and they are too short, you will fail at it. If it ends up taking one and a half hour to make that client proposal and you have a one hour block, you’ve already crashed. If instead, you had a two-hour block reserved, you can take a break for thirty minutes and play with the dog or work on something else. Bad time estimates are where most people have trouble when calendaring tasks.

You may find that you also have a set of essential but small tasks that also need to get done. I don’t block time for small tasks, but I will block time to handle a pile of small tasks. In my case, I often have a one-hour calendar block called “Legal Flags”. Those are small flagged client items in my OmniFocus database that I can lump together and get through quickly.

Do I have that kind of time available?

This process starts with a small list of tasks and you setting time estimates for them. Even with a short list of tasks, you may find you run out of time. There are only so many hours in a day. If you have realistic time estimates, you may find that you don’t have enough time for all of your selected tasks. That’s okay. It happens to me nearly every week. You then have to decide what gets done now and what has to wait for later. This process is the payoff of combining your tasks with your calendar. It allows you to be realistic about what can (and can not) get done in the time you have. It’s the difference between a realistic list of tasks for the week that you can feel good about finishing and an unrealistic list that may sap all of your energy by Wednesday as you realize you have no hope of getting it all done. I guaranty you will get more done with a realistic list than an unrealistic one.

Exactly when will I do it?

The final step is to put those task blocks on your calendar. They are just as crucial as dentist appointments and will help you keep on track throughout the week in getting those most important tasks done.

So in answer to the question of what goes on my task list and what goes on my calendar, I’d say while all of my tasks are in my task list, only a select few graduate to the calendar. I’d also avoid going through this process for tasks any further than a week out. Everything is continuously in motion, and it isn’t easy to know what will be the priority more than a few days from now.

Want to see what technology I use to pull this off? There’s a post for that.

The iPhone 12 Reviews

The iPhone 12 reviews are coming in today. It seems there are a few points most reviews have in common:

They dig the new industrial design. (Me too!) Matt Panzarino calls it, “the most premium feeling piece of consumer electronics I’ve ever touched.”
The jump from iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 is a more significant step than iPhone 11 Pro to iPhone 12 Pro. I suspect the iPhone 12 is going to be very popular.
It sounds like the iPhone 12 Pro Camera is better than the 11 Pro camera but not the quantum leap we got last year. Maybe that will change once people can start using the bigger sensor in the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
5G isn’t a thing yet, and the tests are confirming that. I’m glad Apple put 5G phones in these new iPhones. iPhones stick around a long time, and 5G will be a much bigger deal in a year or two, but I doubt it will make a difference in the immediate future.

If you want to read just one review, I’d recommend Matt Panzarino’s TechCrunch review. If you are smarter than me and want to avoid the deep dive on iPhone reviews, Chance Miller at 9to5Mac did a great job summarizing them.

Mac Power Users 558: Apple Hardware Season, with Zac Hall

Zac Hall from 9to5Mac and Space Explored joins Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users to talk about the state of the Apple Watch’s software and hardware, as well as Apple’s new iPhones.

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