I’m on a journey and I’m struggling to keep up. I manage big, long-running projects professionally. As a project grows it naturally develops sub-projects, short term milestones, teams, and intertwined dependencies. To my dismay, most productivity systems keep me focused on the granular day to day work. Without the right level of focus I end up just staring at my feet, hoping that I’m headed toward my destination.1 How do we know when projects are stalled?

Every year Jason Snell asks a bunch of bloggers and podcasters what they think about Apple products. I always enjoy the conclusions and quote pulls and this year doesn’t disappoint. I also enjoyed Jason’s grades for the graders on the Upgrade podcast. There are few people that have followed Apple’s products as closely and as long as Jason and the questions he asks get to a fairly good concensus on the state of Apple.

I used a large shoulder bag for many years. You can find my first review of this bag way back in 2013. That bag is still in terrific condition1, but my daily activities changed. 18 months ago I bought a Tom Bihn Brain Bag and have thoroughly enjoyed it. This isn’t my first Tom Bihn bag. I also own the Aeronaut 45 which is a wonderful travel bag. I’ll write more about that, and travel in general, at a future point.

Here’s one of the small changes I’ve made to my days in the past two months: more intentional planning each morning and each week. For home I review weekly. I’ve incorporated reviews of my systems as much as my task list. I find that I have too many inboxes to manage and once they become messy I get much less value out of each additional thing I add. My work reviews are much more detailed and are broken into daily processing reviews and weekly clean-up work.

I haven’t made a New Year resolution in over 20 years. As a young idealist I rebelled against the arbitrary Roman calendar. As an old-ish man I understand the convenience of the New Year resolution. For many of us it concludes what might be a long period of down-time where we can contemplate all of the ways we are not happy. Humans are kind of broken that way.1 During vacation I often eat too much, watch a lot of bad television, and have copious amounts of time to trip over that damn Bowflex.

I’ve used the 2018 iPad Pro for 7 weeks and it’s time for a retrospective on my time with this new hardware. Here are 3600 words no one was waiting for. TL;DR It’s the best iPad yet. I’m using it more than I used my previous iPads and I’m using it in a lot of new ways. The software got old very quickly and I still find my Mac much more convenient for complex tasks.

One of the best features of Drafts for iOS is how it almost always opens to a blank document ready from me to type. This is a double edged sword though. Sometimes I come back from doing a web search and the document I was working on has been replaced with a blank screen. There’s a Drafts action to solve this. I bound this action to CMD-Opt-L in Drafts so now when I come back to a blank screen I can quickly re-open my last document and pick up my work where I left off.

I’m fully on the bandwagon of using home screen shortcuts on iOS. The Automators podcast had a nice discussion about the pros and cons. Coincidentally I’ve been using a folder on my dock for iPad to get to my most commonly used OmniFocus, DEVONthink, Day One, and Fantastical screens. At least these shortcuts still work as expected so I’m sticking with them. While I like working in all of these apps, all of my shortcuts are workarounds for navigation limitations in the app UIs.

DEVONthink sync continues to improve, with last week’s update rolling out push-sync between devices. In my experimentation this is a very nice improvement for anyone running DEVONthink across iOS and macOS devices. This is how it works for me. After a new DEVONthink sync is triggered on one device, a push message is sent to all other devices within a few seconds, initiating other synchronizations even if the app is not active.

Many of my Shortcuts rely on dictionaries as a sort of switch statement. For example, I choose from a dictionary list which then modifies a DEVONthink To Go URL scheme and routes new documents based on my selection. It works marvelously but since Shortcuts doesn’t make it very easy to reuse dictionaries, it can be tedious recreating them from scratch in each new shortcut. That is, until I realized that Shortcuts dictionaries can be created from raw JSON.