Month: August 2015

Last month I came across a clever post about using just two GTD contexts by Matt Henderson (by way of SimplicityBliss). Like many of us, he’s experimented with lots of different ways of managing contexts. There’s the traditionalist approach where your contexts mimic the tools or location available to you: home, work, Mac, phone, etc. Then there’s Sven’s more modern approach based on energy level, which I’ve also advocated: brain dead, quick hits, full focus, etc. But Matt’s unique take is to simplify things even further into Will Do and Might Do. It’s a fascinating idea because by getting rid …

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One experiment I’ve been trying for the last two months is taking twenty-four hours each week to be entirely phone free. My goal is to give myself time back to focus on things that matter – rather than living in a half-distracted state all the time. I’ve chosen Thursdays. Anecdotally, it seems to be the day I receive the least messages, phone calls, and distractions, so there’s potentially less to miss. The first Thursday I turned off my phone I’m sorry to say I really did have withdrawal symptoms. There was a constant buzzing in my head as if I …

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I’ve written before about cutting back on notifications. Today I want to talk a bit about how I’m using a paid service called SaneBox to reduce unwanted email notifications even further. I initially found out about SaneBox six months ago from David Sparks. His enthusiastic recommendation was enough to get me to give the service a close look, but I was still hesitant to sign up. I take the security of my email very seriously, and I wasn’t to keen on handing over access to my email to a third party. But, as the months went by, I kept hearing …

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Last week Amazon Alexa and IFTTT hooked up in a big way. They now have triggers that allow you to do things whenever you add an item to your Alexa to-do or shopping lists. This is awesome because now those items don’t have to live within Amazon’s ecosystem. With a little IFTTT tinkering you can quite easily have them shuttled over the net and into OmniFocus. This means I can be cooking dinner and literally say out-loud “Alexa, add red pepper flakes to my shopping list.” Or “Alexa, remind me to schedule a cookout with Matthew.” And the next time …

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