MPU 367 – Getting Productive with Michael Hyatt

This week we’re joined by New York Times best-selling author Michael Hyatt to share ideas about technology and productivity.

Sponsors include:

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Home Screens – Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus


This week’s home screen features Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus. (Twitter) (Website) Bob is a prolific technology writer and one of my favorite members of the old Macworld Allstar Band. Bob has recently written his very first self published book, Working Smarter for Mac Users. I’m so pleased to see Bob doing his own thing. So Bob, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

Ulysses , Final Cut Pro , Logic Pro , Words with Friends

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Real Racing 3 (with nearly 200 hours of guilt).

What app makes you most productive?

A Pomodoro timer.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Photoshop.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

Too many to count.

What Today View widgets are you using and why?

Dark Sky (hyper local weather), Workflow (shortcuts and macros), Launcher (shortcuts)

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

Voice control and Siri (especially with Apple Music)

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Go back to selling Macs with user-upgradeable RAM and storage.


Do you have an Apple Watch? Show us your watch face tell us about it.

Yes, and I use the Simple face for its retro good looks and subtle elegance.

What’s your wallpaper and why?

“Welcome to Macintosh.” The “why” should be obvious: I like retro.

Anything else you’d like to share?

My mission is to show you how to use your Mac better, faster, and more elegantly; how to banish procrastination forever; and how to do more work in less time so you have more time for things you love.

My first self-published book—Working Smarter for Mac Users—ships on March 3 and I invite you to check it out or sign up for my weekly newsletter packed with productivity tips right here .

Thanks Bob.

Sponsor – Stay on Top with Daylite




This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite. 

For small companies, staying on top of clients, leads, and projects can feel chaotic. Daylite helps you streamline your workflow so you can win more business and get more done.

Daylite is a business productivity app for the Mac, iPhone & iPad. It’s like having a CRM, Project Management, and Lead Management app all rolled into one. It integrates with Apple Mail, and you can share it with your team to keep everyone in the loop.

Whether you’re in real estate, sales, design, or the legal industry, Daylite can help you track leads, stay on top of clients, and deliver projects on time. 

Daylite also integrates with the iPhone and iPad so you can leverage features like Multitasking, Caller ID, Siri, and more.

Visit marketcircle.com/Daylite to try Daylite free for 30 days!

∞

OmniOutliner Essentials

This week Ken Case of the Omni Group announced the upcoming OmniOutliner Essentials. It is a focused version of OmniOutliner that doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles you get from OmniOutliner Pro but still a wicked useful outlining application. The best part is that they are going to sell this for just $9.99. There is also a price reduction on OmniOutliner Pro. As they work towards the release of OmniOutliner 5, OmniOutliner Essentials is available for public test.

The first version of OmniOutliner I purchased was in a box at a computer store. Those stores are all gone but OmniOutliner continues to evolve.

The 10.5 inch iPad

Today the rumor sites are abuzz with the “delay” of the new iPads. I always find it funny how the press reports something is “delayed” which has never been publicly announced.

Nevertheless, Apple finds itself in that place once again with the rumored 10.5 inch iPad Pro. I’ve not written anything about this new iPad yet but there are many rumors at this point that it’s probably a real thing. This hypothetical iPad gets rid of the bezel and manages to get a 10.5 inch edge-to-edge screen on a 9.7 inch iPad-sized device. I think it’s a great idea.

An edge-to-edge screen makes the standard size iPad all that much more useful for making things in addition to consuming things. It may offer users the best of both worlds with a large screen and portability.

I’ve currently got both sizes of the iPad Pro and find myself using the larger screen for very particular projects–like reading sheet music, editing PDFs, or working on a detailed document in Microsoft Word–while I use the smaller iPad for most of the day-to-day tasks–like managing OmniFocus, answering email, and the like. I’d be curious to see if a 10.5 inch screen is good enough for everything. Either way, if the rumors are right, were not going to hear about this until May or June.

Looking at Tags … Again

Lately I’ve been thinking about making another run at file tagging. It’s kind of funny how these tech issues percolate up. It all started with some receipts that I wanted to save to both client folders and tax folders. I found myself creating duplicates to have them in two places at once, which rubs me, someone who used to save computer data onto a cassette tape, as fundamentally wrong.

Tags would solve that problem. I could barf tags all over the file and then find it easily enough later with any index. Spotlight is good for this. Houdahspot is even better.

Then I had another problem with a backlog of unfiled documents. I’ve got Hazle trained to auto-sort a lot of documents that come my way but between my various careers I also get a lot of oddball one-timer documents that don’t really lend themselves to Hazel rule creation. However, if tagged, Hazel could easily land those documents in the various big bucket folders in my system.

So I’m looking at a hybrid tagging system that will still work with folders at some level but also rely on tags to help sort, store, and find files. There still are a lot of downsides to tagging. It takes extra time and it has very shaky support on iOS. I’m making a list of problems as I go.

I’m only a few days into this new experiment so I’m not going to share results until I dive deeper but I will say early results are promissing. I’ll report back on this next month.