This week, a lot more folks will be working from home than usual. I’ve talked to several friends and family lately about this. Some are looking forward to it, and others are dreading it. I drove into an office for 22 years, but I’ve spent the last five years mainly working from home. Here are a few things I learned along the way.

New Workspace, New Habits

If you are working from home for the first time, realize it is one of those golden opportunities to establish new habits. Maybe you need to take that time saved from not commuting to spend an hour each morning on your most significant project. Or perhaps you finally have an opportunity to sleep in just a bit, so you aren’t tired all day. Maybe it’s time to demote email to something you do at 11AM, leaving the rest of the morning to work on your deliverables. The point is, you are going to develop a whole set of new habits, so why not do it intentionally?

Time Gained. Time Lost.

You just got some time back. You don’t need to commute. You will attend far fewer meetings. You don’t need to make the morning rounds to talk to everyone at the office. How are you going to use that? Likewise, you are going to spend time you didn’t before. Maybe you are now taking care of the dog, or you have small kids at home. Working from home will both give and take away time. Sit down and figure out the math on your own time and determine how you are going to deal with both sides of that equation. This week would be an excellent opportunity to track time to keep yourself honest. Figuring out where your time goes and how you allocate it is essential for working from home. You don’t have someone looking over your shoulder, so you have to supervise yourself. It’s liberating once you figure it out.

Be Proactive

Remember that the job is to work at home. If you want to keep paying the rent, you’ve got to deliver. Don’t sit in front of the TV and wait for your boss and co-workers to dole out work. Nobody is there keeping track of who arrives first or leaves last. They are just looking for who can move the ball forward. Be proactive. Use your new freedom to find and solve work-related problems without meetings and office politics. Prove to everyone (including yourself) that you don’t need someone looking over your shoulder.

We are in the midst of a massive work-from-home experiment. Nobody expected this to happen, but it did. If you can build your own habits, use your time wisely, and be proactive. It could change the way you work forever, whether you work from home for just a few weeks or the next few decades.

In the last few days, Apple has announced it’s reaction to Covid-19. Yesterday there was an announcement that WWDC will be online-only this year. I’ll miss not seeing my Apple community friends, but I also think this is the right move. I had to smile a bit at the announcement. There was no mention of Covid-19 and instead all talk about how awesome it will be online. Part of me wonders if this isn’t a test to see if all future WWDC’s will be online-only.

Today the other penny dropped. Apple is closing all of its retail stores outside of China until March 27. They are paying their hourly employees while things are down, moving their offices workers to remote work if possible, and they’ve donated $15M to the fight against Covid-19.

Good on Apple.

This week, MacSparky has a new sponsor, The Archive. I’ve made no secret of my love for plain text files over the years. Plain text is universal, portable, and the most likely format for your words that computers will still recognize in 100 years. The problem with plain text apps, however, is that they are just so … plain.

The Archive is the plain text app that changes that. The Archive has beautiful themes while also providing 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 a beautiful editor environment that doesn’t get in the way. And best of all, all of your data is, ultimately, plain text and absolutely portable.

In addition to storing notes, The Archive facilitates creative work with your notes through cross-connections, clickable links and hashtags. You can start feeding your storage with ideas, and then build a second brain to help with your thinking in the long term.

The Archive turns two years old this week and is being used for everything from taking college lecture notes to writing books and mapping complex fields of knowledge. The dedicated community even produced a ton of custom Keyboard Maestro macros 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.

MacSparky isn’t going to be your destination site for Covid-19 information. However, as California starts buckling down and my family shutter ourselves in to help slow down this disease, there is one graph I wanted to share. 

You can learn more about how this works at Vox. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are young and healthy and for whom this disease doesn’t pose a mortal threat. However, there are others in our society for which it does. If we continue business as usual, the infection rate is going to spike and some people are going to die simply because there are not hospital beds and ventilators for them. If we can slow it down, they live. It is that simple

If everyone can avoid big social gatherings and stay home, we can save lives. As a good friend told me yesterday, “Hug with your eyes, not your hands.”

While I don’t cover a lot of rumors here, the latenst nugget from Ming-Chi Kuo is worth mention. Reportedly, we’ll be getting scissor switch updates to the smaller MacBookPro and and MacBook Air by June. I sure hope he’s right. While the butterfly keyboard was a mistake, the bigger mistake (by far) was extending it through the line and keeping there so long. We have a MacBook Air in our family that lasted 9 years. Another person in my family still works on an 11 year old MacBook. There is no way those butterfly keyboards in the currently shipping MacBook Air will last that long.

9to5 Mac has a nice scoop on watchOS 7 that looks to include some excellent features (including sleep tracking). 

What stood out to me, however, was a suspected new feature that lets you share Apple Watch faces. If true, you’d be able to share your watch face setup, which would presumably include your choices of colors and complications. I feel like this misses the boat. What I’d like is for Apple to open up the creation of watch faces to third-party developers, or, better yet, users.

Apple’s watch faces are attractive but also limited. Moreover, some of the original faces, like Utility, actually got worse over time as Apple changed the watch but didn’t update the face. We need more choices. Opening it up to developers and users would give users more options. Depending on how much they open it up, I suspect we could get some great watch faces mixed in with a lot of ugly ones.

I think it is the possibility of ugly watch faces that is the problem. Apple doesn’t want customers walking around with poorly designed watch faces on their Apple Watches, but that could be solved by instituting guidelines and requiring Apple’s approval, just like the App Store. While I would prefer there be no such mechanism, if that’s what it would take, I’d live with it. Once you introduce the ability to sell watch faces, I’m sure there will be plenty of good ones. 

The bottom line is that Apple, after numerous years, is not getting the job done of making enough diverse and useful watch faces, and I suspect watchOS 7 will be more of the same. Rather than sharing a face I’m not particularly excited about, I’d prefer to roll my own.

In case you are wondering, I bounce between several watch faces, but my current one is a simplified version of the Explorer face with the date, activity ring, and next appointment complication.