Copy

Welcome to the 11th issue of my newsletter, Type.

This week has slightly more writing and slightly fewer links, but there’s still at least 10 different ways to use Siri Shortcuts 🙃

Episode 1 of Smart Tech Today 👍

This week, Mikah and I recorded episode 1 of Smart Tech Today! Here’s the show link if you want to listen.

I drove up to Petaluma and recorded in the TWiT studios, meeting Leo Laporte & the crew and trying not to be awkward on camera. Checking out the studio and all their gear was cool, plus I had fun recording with Mikah and responding to people tuned into the livestream.

TWiT will be adding production for the video production of the show once we hit 30,000 subscribers, so please share the show with anyone you think might enjoy the show if you want to catch the video feed after it airs live!

After we recorded, I also put together 6 shortcuts for people to use for the show:

The next day, I also had the pleasure of joining Mikah and Leo on iOS Today, walking them through a shortcut that I built for Leo to use. Every time he’s running late to the office, Leo can run the short and it’ll text Mikah, showing where he currently is and when he’ll be at the office.

We walked through building the shortcut step-by-step, so check out the video and you can follow along.

This week, I’m back at home and we’ll be recording episode 2 at 4pm PST Monday. If you want a reminder to watch, add the “Watch Smart Tech Today live” shortcut and set it as an Automation for 4pm every Monday :)
 



Fire scare in the Bay Area 👎

After I signed off iOS Today and ate lunch on Tuesday, I became totally distracted by the warnings going around.

Reports had come in that areas around where I live would be losing power in order to prevent possible fires during a windy weather front. I had heard the news that some areas would lose power for up to 6 days the week before, but it didn’t sink in until Tuesday, which is also when local news stations went full blitz – and a lot of misinformation went around.

Basically, news orgs started publishing bulleted lists of counties where people would be affected by the outages. But, while only very small areas within those counties would be affected, those paragraphs were screenshotted and shared across social media, making it look like entire counties would be shut down for almost a week.

The frenzy built and articles started popping up that “Silicon Valley, the epicenter of technology, would be losing power” – but it mostly wasn’t true.

Much of the real story came from counties not even in the immediate land around the Bay, but in the hills and cities north of San Francisco. The TWiT studios where I recorded earlier in the week up in Petaluma lost power for days, and in some places the situation is still ongoing.

However, in the midst of the stir, I was complete triggered by it all and sort of shut down.

See, my girlfriend’s parents lost their home in Paradise last year. They lost everything. We spent weeks in Berkeley with darkened skies and zero fresh air. It hit hard and, while I didn’t realize it at the time, it sunk into me and it took time to recover.

Even though we weren’t actually at risk, my girlfriend and I reviewed our emergency checklists, reorganized important documents, and even stocked up on water to keep with us should we need it.

However, by Wednesday afternoon, I came out of the state of fear we had slid into.

We realized things would be fine, but still... it was too much to feel that same fear another time.
 



Organizing what’s important 👍

I didn’t end up write some of the things I wanted to this week, but almost all of it is close to being finished. I oddly find it easy enough to write when things are stressful, but won’t even open the document again until I feel like I can edit it.

So while I’m giving my brain a break, I did something mindless enough – sorted out a mess of tasks, notes, and checklists in Reminders and Notes.

And let me tell you, that was excellent to get done. I had hundreds on hundreds of ideas that have been moved from Things to Trello to OmniFocus to Bear to Notes to Reminders to Notes again, and it’s been this floaty mess – until now.

I tried to dig into Reminders earlier during the betas this summer, but some bad syncing issues burned me and I couldn’t trust it until this week again. I had already nicely set up lists and gave them icons, ordered them by the six colors in Apple’s old school logo, and had gotten used to the feature set; so, when I was ready to move in, the place was good to go.

At some point I had dumped so many ideas into single notes in the Notes app (terrible idea), so I ported those into Reminders lists, gave them priorities, and sorted boatloads of them into sub-tasks. I ended up filtering down my entire Notes collection by 50%, leaving mostly Personal notes and one big folder for “Rebrand” that I’m undertaking over time.

I’m currently running totally lightweight, with all my ideas finally just saved as what they are: reminders of what I might want to do in the future.

I don’t need 500 undone “tasks” in Things sitting there, judging me for not having somehow finished them all. Instead, I had zero projects, a bunch of reminders, and checklists for my projects ready to go when the time comes. I can pull in the idea from Reminders, generate an entire project in Things for the related tasks that I already know need to be done, and I’m off to the races.

This works perfectly for me, because I don’t actually have any content commitments—aside from Smart Tech Today now—besides the things I choose to pursue myself, so I’ve constantly felt overwhelmed by having decided yesterday to work on something and now today I don’t want to.

My system already kicked around a few other tasks that’d been waiting needlessly and I feel like I can start each day properly knowing what to work on, so let’s hope this keeps going well... we’ll see next week I suppose.
 



Links from this week

That’s all for this week – I have to save all my “smart things” links for Smart Tech Today now

Hope to catch you in the livestream chat ✌️

Get the shortcut for tuning in live 📲

Thank you for reading the 9th issue of my newsletter! It was great to have you.

If you're interested in the rest here are the links:

Copyright © 2019 Matthew Cassinelli, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp