MAC POWER USERS 421: Business Workflows

In this episode, we share our favorite business workflows including managing email, calendaring, TextExpander tips, reducing paper, managing PDFs, billing, communicating and more.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Save up to 20% using this link.
The Omni Group: We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Fujitsu ScanSnap: ScanSnap helps you live a more productive, efficient, and paperless life.

On Focus

Last year I noticed my priorities were out of whack and I spent several months woodshedding the latest productivity books and websites as I sorted myself out. One prevalent theme throughout the productivity world as of late is how to keep yourself focused. Keeping yourself on target is an important skill. Cal Newport wrote a good book about it and Shawn Blanc developed an entire online course around it.

Luckily, this is one of the few things I’m good at. I’m not sure if I’m a focus savant or it’s just a side benefit of having a regular meditation practice for over 25 years but I’m good at locking in on one thing to the exclusion of the rest of the world. There are actually some pretty funny stories about me growing up and being completely oblivious to the world around me as I read a book or was dialed in on something else.

Regardless, people are having a lot of trouble keeping their attention on a single task with all of these digital devices surrounding us. There is a whole cottage industry of apps that can do things like dim sections of your screen, hide your social media apps, and even turn off your internet connection requiring heroic efforts to get it back up and running all in effort to avoid distractions. My daughter routinely deletes social media apps entirely from her phone when she is working on a deadline.

A lot of people are going to some extreme measures in the name of focus and I’m not sure that is necessary or, in the long term, sustainable. It’s like trying to lose weight by not eating. It may work for a day or two but after that, it’s all downhill. Getting better at focus is difficult and it takes time to master. Here’s my list of suggestions for some help along the way.

Set Your Non-Essential Technology Aside

If you’re working on your Mac or iPad, just put your phone down with the glass on the table. When you get tempted to pick it up, you’ll see it is face down and remind yourself how much more fun Alto’s Odyssey will be after you finish your sales report/spreadsheet/term paper/whatever. Alternatively, put you tech in another room.

Banish Notifications

Nearly everyone, myself included, has let notification bloat creep into their lives. The first time you launch just about any new app, it asks for permission to tap you on the shoulder at will and you, in a fit of optimism, will think to yourself that “This garbage truck simulator app is the one. This is the app that will change my life and of course it should get notification privileges”. You’ll tap the button and then put up with needless notifications from that app forever. I made a video about notifications that show you how to fix that.

I suggest a notification purge. Why not try turning off all notifications on your phone? It’s not that hard (although I wish Apple would make it easier). Just turn off all notifications and live like that for a day or two and then only add back notifications for the apps from which you absolutely must get notifications. This clean slate approach is exactly the way I reduced the number of daily notifications from about 40 to about 5.

Use Calendars and Timers

The whole hyper-scheduling thing I’ve been writing about is in part my own effort to keep focused on the important stuff. In my case, it is more about the areas of focus than the ability to focus but it’s a similar problem. Blocking time on your calendar or setting a timer is a great way to focus in bite-sized increments. It’s the entire idea behind the Pomodoro Technique. I do think giving yourself a timed focus period is a good way into tricking your brain into getting better at this. Telling yourself to just focus for X minutes makes the lure of all those shiny technology interruptions bearable. Start with as short of an interval you need to succeed and then start moving it up slowly.

The “Not Now” Folder

Make a folder on your iPhone called “Not Now”. Put apps in there that are your frequent temptations. For some people, it will be Facebook. For others, it may be Twitter or even Email. Make opening the “Not Now” a deliberate act that you do only when you are not focused in on getting some work done. If you really want to go nuts, put the “Not Now” folder on page three of your home screen to really keep it out of mind.

Consider Trying a Little Meditation

It’s really not hippie nonsense. A mindfulness meditation practice is not a religion. It’s just a way to help you tame that wild organ between your ears and anyone can do it. You can learn more with an app, like Headspace or through a good podcast. It’s a great way to work on your focus muscles. And speaking of focus muscles …

Think About Developing your Focus like Developing Muscles

It does take practice and time. Even if you take a pass on meditation, try to focus on what you are doing other times during the day. It’s easy to do that while you are mountain climbing or surfing but what about when you are driving, or eating an apple? Can you keep your brain on target then? You need to wear new grooves into your brain and that doesn’t happen overnight.

Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

There are so many articles on the Internet by people dealing with the focus problem that are beating themselves up about it. That just gets in the way. We have more distractions thrown at us these days than any time before in human history. We’ve all got to come to grips with it and it’s hard. Don’t be so hard on yourself. If you occasionally fall off the wagon, don’t get angry. Just get back on the wagon and keep trying.

Free Agents 42 — Learning Your Creative Rhythms, with Shawn Blanc

In this episode, we go through the Free Agents mailbag with observations about the legend of the man who outsourced his own job, taking a hobby to the next level, and the menace of imposter syndrome. Then we welcome our guest, Shawn Blanc, creator of The Sweet Setup and shawnblanc.net, to discuss building an independent business with collaborators, solid project planning, and sensible work hours.

This episode of Free Agents is sponsored by:

Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code FREEAGENTS at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
Casper: The Internet’s favourite mattress. Get $50 off select mattresses with the code ‘FREEAGENTS’.
Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.

Task Management Pain Points – Orphans

One area of trouble for anyone with a lot of projects is orphans. Those are those projects or tasks that somehow fall off the radar and fall apart not because you are actively ignoring them or prioritizing them as “on hold” but instead because you forget about them. An orphan may be unimportant but it may also be mission critical. Ignore them at your peril.

If you follow GTD, you should not have many orphans because the system requires you to review all your projects on a weekly basis. While I use elements of GTD in my planning, I don’t adopt the system entirely and I don’t review all my projects weekly. Instead, I use the OmniFocus review feature to set custom review times depending on a project’s priority. If I’m working with a client on a big contract, I’ll get a review reminder every week. If I’m just maintaining a corporate book for a client, I’ll only get a review reminder every six months. Although my longer delayed project reviews could cause me a problem, I’m pretty good about starting new projects for anything that requires a more frequent review frequency. Another thing I do while reviewing projects in OmniFocus is assessing the project’s current review frequency and consider whether it needs adjusting.

OmniFocus is the only task app I’m aware of that includes a review mechanism but you could put something similar together yourself in other apps. Just add a task inside projects called something like “Review Status” and set it to repeat at some reasonable frequency.

There also isn’t anything wrong with just taking a few hours every month or two and doing a top-to-bottom audit of your task system. This even works for the paper and pencil crowd. Every time I do one of those audits, I feel better afterward. Moreover, during audits I sometimes do find an orphan lurking in my system and, even better, a few projects I can kill.

iOS 12 Concepts

Last week, 9to5Mac Linked the iOS 12 concepts from Behance.net. While I’m not usually very interested in these alternate reality concepts, I do like a few of their ideas.

Nameless Apps

They mocked up a home screen with no app names, and it looked so much better than a home screen with app names. When is the last time you actually read the name of an app on your home screen? I honestly can’t remember ever doing so.

Information Dense Lock Screen

I also like their mock-up of a lock screen that lets you pull down for weather, although I’d let the user decide which today view information a pull-down gets you. (I’d probably use it for OmniFocus or Fantastical.) Of course, there would be security concerns, but it could be user choice like other lock screen information.

June and WWDC (the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) isn’t far away, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple doing either of these things.

Solve your Email Problems with SaneBox – Sponsor

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. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. 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. I was just speaking with the folks at SaneBox, and they report that 70% of the MacSparky readers that try SaneBox end up signing up for it. That’s crazy but not surprising to me because SaneBox works. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.

Mac Power Users 420: Presentation Workflows

Presentations are on our mind on this week’s episode as we prepare for talks at ABA (American Bar Association) TECHSHOW. We discuss workflows for planning a presentation, tips for making your slides, getting ready for the big day, dealing with nerves, and making sure your presentation goes off without a hitch.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

Casper: The internet’s favorite mattress. Get $50 off select mattresses with the code ‘MPU’.
Timing: The automatic time-tracking app for macOS. Use this link to save 10% on your purchase.
TextExpander from Smile: Type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
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Hyper-Scheduling Mechanics

Last week I wrote about my anal-retentive hyper-scheduling method and got a lot of surprisingly positive feedback. One of the most popular questions was how exactly do I implement it. It’s not that difficult. The night before, I take a look at my appointments and essential tasks are for the next day and start laying things out. Whether I am on my iPad or my Mac, I do this in Fantastical. A lot of times I’m using blocks that I recently used in the past few days, so I set it up in a week view, select the applicable block, such as “Email and Social” (which is the 45 minutes or so where I deal with all of my email and check in on social media), hit the keyboard shortcut command (Command + D) to duplicate, and then drag the block into the appropriate space. You can do the same thing on an iPad with a long press, but it feels like it takes longer and setting the duplicated block to the next day with your fingers is less precise than doing so with the mouse.

Here is yesterday’s calendar in Fantastical. I usualy include more detail, like client names, but those were removed for this screenshot. Click to enlarge.

Screen Shot 2018-02-28 at 4.35.48 PM.png

I treat the blocks of time more like versatile soup ingredients than a rigid jigsaw puzzle, so I am happy to move them around as I’m planning the next day. The only things that are locked in are the specific appointments I have made with other people. I know some folks who have done this by creating repeating events where they have the same block of time for the same event every day. My life isn’t that simple, and these blocks nearly always move around depending on what I have on deck for the next day. Setting these as repeating events won’t work for me, but maybe they can work for you.

I map days out the afternoon before and it is an organic process because the whole time I’m also looking at my pile of tasks in OmniFocus and trying to make big boy decisions about what exactly gets my attention the next day. At the end of this process, I have a pretty solid looking calendar for the next day. I set alarms for the block events that start at the time of the event, so I get a little kick as I go through the day and need to change into the next block. The Siri watch face on my Apple Watch helps with this.

The last part of my process, and this is new in 2018, is writing it down with a fancy pen in my Baron Fig Confidant dot grid plus-sized notebook. I have a page for every day, and at the top is a list of events and big rock tasks to finish for the next day. I keep it open on my desk as I work. Writing it down takes additional time but only a few minutes, and there is something about having it written down in ink in front of me as I work through the day that keeps me rolling. I received some very satisfying affirmation on this last bit when I saw that Shawn Blanc does the same thing.

Underneath this section of the page I draw a line and below that I take notes and summarize progress at the end of the day. Like I said in the last post. The whole shutdown thing is a post for another day. Here’s a picture of my list for yesterday. At the time I took the picture, I still had one event and one task left to complete. Sorry about my terrible printing. If I’d thought about it when I set up this day, I would have tried to make it neater. Click to enlarge.

A Case Study in Phishing

A few days ago I received this email. I thought it was an excellent example of a phishing attack. If you’ve never heard of it before, phishing is a process where a bad guy sends you an email that looks legitimate in hopes that you’ll click on the link and give information to him that he can use to somehow screw you over or steal your money.

Here’s the email. Click to enlarge.

Screen Shot 2018-02-28 at 9.27.12 AM.png

In this case, they’ve created an email that looks a lot like it came directly from Apple. It’s got the Apple Logo and the YouTube logo and, on first glance, looks official. It informs me that I’ve subscribed to YouTube Red for $149.99/month and it gives me a handy link to unsubscribe. There be the dragons. If I were to click on that link–I didn’t–it would ask me for my iTunes login or my credit card (or both), and then the bad guys would have my information. Game over.

The first tool you need in fighting Spam is common sense. YouTube Red does not cost $149.99/month, and a simple search will tell you that. If there is any question, also take a closer look at the details. The sender lists their name as “App Store” but disclosing the actual email address; it’s “noreply11@fillappealform.com”. Does that really sound like an address Apple would send you to confirm a subscription? Also, it lists “Payment Method” as “By Card”, not the usual xxxx-xxxx-1234 you usually see. It also creates this sense of urgency, explaining I’m on a free trial but I will be charged $150 in just two days if I don’t act. While I can see how this email may fool some people, on the barest scrutiny, it starts looking shady.

Screen Shot 2018-02-28 at 9.27.27 AM.png

If you ever find yourself tempted to click on any link in an email that involves a problem or access to any of your online accounts, stop and think for a moment. Then go to the source website itself and check. In this case, logging onto my iTunes account would show that I have not, nor have I ever, signed up for a YouTube Red subscription.

Finally, there’s nothing wrong with proving yourself wrong on this stuff. I recently got a “credit card expired” email from Squarespace. Rather than clicking on the link, I went and logged into my account and discovered that my credit card had, in fact, expired. Better safe than sorry.

Want to learn more? I wrote a book about email.

My Blogging Workflow

I have received a lot of questions asking precisely what my workflow is for getting blog posts up. The whole process is a bit more complicated than it probably should be but here goes:

Step 1 — Choose a Topic

The first thing I need to do for a significant post is choose a topic. For a long time, I kept a list of topics in OmniFocus, but at the end of the day, that’s not the best place for them. Then, for a while, I kept the list in Apple Notes, but ultimately I added a category in Ulysses under the “Blog” project called “Ideas”. There is a series of very short notes in that folder that could be a single word or a few sentences about an idea for a blog post that I may want to write someday. This one was called “Explain a Post” and had been sitting in the Ideas folder for about four months. Once a week, usually Saturdays, I look through the list and pick two or three notes with the same strategy used when buying cheese: pick something interesting and different but not too smelly or old.

Step 2 — Mind Map

If the idea is going to need some planning, which in my mind is any post of four paragraphs or more, I start a MindNode mind map on the post. It will start with just a few nodes, but I will let the idea cook over a week or so, occasionally stepping into MindNode and adding things that my subconscious comes up with. (I thought of that clever part in the previous paragraph concerning cheese while actually buying cheese.) After about a week, I’m usually ready to start writing.

Step 3 — Move the Cursor from Left to Right

Now comes the hard part of moving the cursor across the page. If I’m typing the article, I will go ahead and do that right in Ulysses, but I move the Ulysses note from “Ideas” to “Cooking”. I usually block a few hours every Saturday afternoon to do some writing for the blog, and in those cases, I will do most of the writing with dictation. For dictation, I use Dragon for Mac or Dragon Anywhere on iOS, which I’m doing right now. As an aside, when using Dragon for Mac to write stories, I do it in TextEdit, which works swimmingly with Dragon’s voice commands. When I dictate, I just dictate the first draft. I don’t do a lot of edits with my voice but instead move the text to the Ulysses “Cooking” folder where I review and edit it via the keyboard.

Either way, I continue banging away at it until I’m more or less happy.

Step 4 — Grammarly To the Rescue

Last year I bought a subscription to Grammarly. I was never a fan of computer-based grammar checkers until I signed up for a trial with Grammarly. The service works better than I expected. I was hesitant to pay the annual subscription fee, but when I considered the fact that I pay for my shoes with words, it made the cost easier to digest. All significant posts get run through Grammarly after I finish writing them. If you ever want to know which posts don’t go to Grammarly, they are the ones with typos.

Step 5 — Rest

After I finish this process, I put the corrected text out of Grammarly and back in Ulysses, and I give it a day. Waiting 24 hours to come back and do an additional reading of the post always makes it better.

Step 6 — Add Links

Towards the end of the process, I go ahead and add links to the post. I usually do this using this clever Keyboard Maestro script if I’m on the Mac. It isn’t much more difficult with Ulysses on iOS. If there are links to products, I use Affiliate on Mac or Blink on iOS to add affiliate links.

Step 7 — Send to Editor

I have a good friend who reviews my more significant posts for me, makes any corrections that I missed, and then sets up the post for publication in Squarespace. To pull this off, I export the document from Ulysses in rich text format and send the file through a card in Trello. I have a template project in Trello for just this purpose, so if there is anything unique with the tags or the images, I can add it to the Trello checklist. It’s only in the last year that I asked someone to make this last pass and handle the Squarespace setup. Now that I see how useful it is, I wish I had done it sooner.

Step 8 — Publication

Once my editor finishes the review and sets up the post, I go through and read it one last time in Squarespace and set the publication dates. If I’m really on my game, I will even get a link to Twitter once the post publishes. We have this big group for the Mac Power Users on Facebook, but I rarely have the guts to post a link there.

Obviously, not every post goes through all eight steps, but my best posts do.