How I replaced everything with Notion

17/11/2020 Clicky Stevedatabase, Notion, Notion app, productivity hacks, productivity tips, productivity tools1 Comment

Knowing my penchant for a productivity tool, my good friend Pazy suggested I investigate one that I hadn’t heard of before: Notion. From what I could gather, it was a central place to store a whole manner of different kinds of notes.

I was initially a bit wary of diving head-first into Notion, as I have both used and built up a significant amount of content in Evernote over the years. However, the temptation was too much to resist, and I gave it a whirl. After just a short time, I was convinced. Notion is the promised land.

Coming from Evernote

While Evernote has been touted as the single place that you can quickly grab and throw all of your various ideas, links, clippings, and files that you come across on a daily basis – Notion takes that idea a step further. Rather than just acting as a huge repository with search capabilities, Notion encourages you to store information in a far more organised way, making heavy use of its own databases. At first, I found this a bit confusing, as my Evernote ‘save it all’ approach didn’t quite fit neatly… but once I realised that Notion involved a fundamentally different approach to data organisation, it made much more sense.

Databases versus Notes

I can already hear people turning off at the sound of databases. I was the same. Pazy is a database guru as part of his day job, so I just assumed he was naturally inclined to gravitate towards databases in his personal life too. However, Notion utilises and presents databases in a way that you wouldn’t even realise they were there unless you stopped to think about it. Essentially, rather than storing information in a text-note, you are gently prodded to put it into tables, with tags – all of which is presented in a logical hierarchical structure. Before you know what’s happened, you suddenly have the ability to organise, filter, and display your notes in a much more powerful and diverse way than would have been possible with the alternative.

To give a concrete example, as a musician I keep a note of tracks I have started working on, but which might not be finished. In Evernote, that looked something like this:

and here is an excerpt of how it looks in Notion…

Of course, Evernote can also present data in tables… but with Notion the key point is that the information is treated as a searchable database, rather than just text presented in a different way. With Notion, I can now quickly and easily see which projects are at which stage, and filter them depending on the different variables that I want to display.

For another example, I used to collect recipes to give me ideas for what I could eat on days where I lacked inspiration. In Evernote I would collect these by meal type, but in practice I found that the limited ways to filter these outside of just a plain search meant that I almost never referred to them. Now, they are stored in a dedicated database in Notion:

Looking for a vegetarian dinner? What about an egg-based breakfast? Maybe just a gluten-free snack… It’s as simple as combining the tags and filtering for desired results.

So much easier than sifting through a huge pile of text-note clippings.

Personal Workspace and Linked Databases

One of the other most useful features of the database storage model over using text notes, files, or simple tables is that you can create ‘linked database views’ in different places. In other words, you can have one central database for a particular purpose, and then filter that database to display the relevant data for the appropriate section you are working in. That sounds a bit convoluted, but here’s a practical example. If I want to compile a Reading List of different blog posts, books, journal articles etc that I want to read… rather than having different databases for each area of my life (work, personal, music, language learning, etc), I can have the main database like so:

and then under a specific page, I can have a dedicated ‘view’ of that same database, presenting only the relevant entries. For example, here is how I have the Reading List set up to display on my dedicated Japanese learning page:

Note that it isn’t just displaying a particular sub-set of the data (filtered by those articles tagged ‘Japanese’), but I can also choose how it appears on the page. There’s a bunch of different options including simplified lists, full tables, galleries, etc.

As you can see, rather than creating a typical file structure where you collect pages and files or notes within a hierarchy of folders, Notion encourages you to put together what are essentially ‘dashboards’ of data. This means that on the top level you can display the data from the various collections underneath it – not just act as a blank ‘storage box’. This is an incredibly useful feature, which means you can set up different workspaces for different projects, or for different areas of your life… even if just to separate out work and personal items.

Web Clipper

Evernote’s Web Clipper tool is known for its ability to grab almost anything from the web and squirrel it away for reference – whether it’s screenshots, selections of text, full web-pages, or whatever else – so Notion has a tough act to follow in that regard. In practice, it isn’t as configurable on the surface, which is a bit of a shame. However, it is deceivingly powerful. Here is how it looks when saving an article from a site:

As you can see, there aren’t all that many options. On the bottom right you can click and search for the page you wish to import the clipping to – but not much else. What isn’t obvious though, is that Notion will grab various fields, and import them into the appropriate tables of a pre-existing database. That means, that it will save the URL into the ‘URL’ column of your Reading List table. This is really handy, as it means you have to do less leg-work when it comes to getting different kinds of info into your custom databases. Unfortunately, the extent to which you can modify this is fairly limited… (as in, to tell the clipper to save the URL to a different table field, etc) but hopefully that will come in a future update.

UI and Page Formatting

The UI of the Notion block-style editor is particularly nice. Emojis are littered everywhere, acting as icons or nice little visual indicators, and you can customise pages with images pulled from around the web. There’s even an Unsplash integration, which is a pretty great way to directly get access to high quality images for free.

There is also a wealth of different ways to format the information on your pages and organise them as you see fit, including collapsible sections, different headings, etc.

Anyway, you’ve all seen rich text editors before… but it’s worth saying that the options here are far more fully-featured than I would have expected.

File Handling and Embeds

It should go without saying, but embedding content from other parts of the web like YouTube is really easy. However, at first I thought that file handling in terms of uploads might not be so great, based on various reviews talking about how great Evernote was at handling all kinds of different file types. In practice though, this wasn’t really the case. While you have to purposefully create an ’embed’ block first and then upload your file to Notion for it to display inline (if you just drag and drop, it will create a download link instead) – it is still perfectly functional, handling PDFs, MP3s, etc.

The one caveat here is that while Notion is free for personal use, uploading files larger than 5mb requires a paid account – which starts at 4USD per month for an annual subscription (or 5USD on a monthly basis).

How I use Notion

Years ago I helped create a Wiki style ‘portal’ for a company that I worked for. The idea being to serve as a central Intranet dashboard full of links, news, and other resources that folks might need. The software we used wasn’t exactly up to scratch, but it got the job done. If Notion had been available back then, it would have fitted the bill perfectly – and that’s one of its major strengths.

Instead of having all different kinds of data stored in different services that I inevitably forget about (Pocket, Evernote, Google Spreadsheets, etc), I now have a single personal ‘portal’ which displays a whole bunch of stuff that I need and use on a daily basis – or simply want to be reminded of. Links to commonly used sites, goals for the year, habits I want to track, articles I want to read, etc. There’s so much information collected and organised in the one place that it’s hard to show just what I mean, but here’s something of an insight…

Having everything I need organised and presented in this way, where I can see the status of a bunch of different ongoing projects at a glance, and dig in deeper into the sub-pages for more information as required has been really liberating. Instead of just chucking every little thing I find on the web which might be useful one day into vaguely defined categories in Evernote (which never really worked very well), I now have things much more neatly defined, and feel so much more organised. It has lifted some kind of low-level mental pressure around accumulating so much data that I would never be able to find again because of its haphazard nature.

Conclusion

I really didn’t expect to take to Notion in the way that I have. While it did initially take some adjustment to understand its core kind of usage philosophy, and a bit of time to set up and input my data in a way that made sense for me, it has replaced and improved on so many different areas of my daily workflows that I can’t imagine going back to Evernote.

Ultimately, the data that I save is now far more organised, far easier to access, and much more useful than it ever has been before as a result. I would definitely recommend it to anybody interested in keeping track of their digital knowledge base.

There is so much more to the app than I can squeeze into a single post, including the ability to manipulate or query the databases via scripts, etc… and so I’ll post a few follow-ups with specific use cases for more details.

Remaining Productive with Things: The Pandemic Edition

26/10/202026/10/2020 Clicky Steveproductivity, things, tipsLeave a comment

Back in March I wrote about how I managed my time using the task manager app, ‘Things’. The gist of that post was that rather than struggling to remember or stay on top of all of the various activities you want to complete (no matter how small) – you chuck them all into Things, and free up the mental energy that would otherwise be expended in tracking them.

For a while, this approach worked really well, but over time I found that I was confronted every day with a huge list of tasks that needed completed, and there wasn’t any kind of tangible satisfaction in completing them, as I knew at midnight the next day’s tasks would appear on cue. Rather than helping to alleviate stress, Things began to contribute to the overwhelming pressure of everyday life, which had come sharply into focus thanks to national COVID lockdowns and varying restrictions. Things I was ment to enjoy (like making music) were reduced to yet another tickbox to be churned through.

What made the above worse was that there were recurring tasks that I wanted to complete, but often failed to find time for. I didn’t want to take them off my daily list, but I didn’t want them to have the same mental load as other tasks.

Taking inspiration from this blog post, I followed Andrea’s lead, and changed the way I approach task management with Things. Rather than having one large daily list of jobs to get through, I now have them separated into their respective categories. The tasks that I definitely want to complete that day come in at the top, under ‘Daily Tasks’, and I try to keep this to a manageable load, so that I can always clear them out. Other things that I want to get done, but don’t necessarily have to get done that specific day are then available for me to work through, based on how I feel/what energy I have that day.

How my Things to do list is organised now.

This new approach has made a huge difference to my relationship with the daily to do list. Rather than feeling like I am endlessly fighting a losing battle to keep ticking off checkboxes, I can now see at a glance exactly what tasks need to be done that day. By keeping those separate, deliberately chosen, and manageable, I no longer feel like the other bits and pieces that I want to do are a chore. If something isn’t in the Daily Tasks list – it can be done another day… and ironically, since adopting this method, I’ve gotten even more done than usual, because I don’t feel the same pressure to complete everything.

Pomodoro

One other thing that I have adopted which is worth mentioning is the Pomodoro technique. The general idea here is that you split up your time into chunks of about 20 minutes, and deliberately focus on a particular task for that period of time, before taking a break and either moving on to something else, or committing to another 20 minute period of focus.

This notion isn’t anything new. I am sure I’m not the only one who sat in maths and thought ‘Okay just get through the next five minutes and then it’ll be another five minutes after that’. Plenty of people have written about this extensively elsewhere… but it’s not an approach that I’ve ever really come to use in any disciplined way. Breaking up my tasks at work was always too difficult, and concentrating for 20 minutes to then have a break and return to the same tasks felt too artificially scheduled for my liking.

However… since I switched up my approach in Things, I’ve had success using the Pomodoro model for my own personal projects – particularly those that I want to get done but struggle to get the motivation to start. For example, I am currently learning Japanese, but sometimes (often) the prospect of firing up the flashcard app for an indeterminate amount of time seems like too much of a chore, and I put it off. Before I know it, I haven’t done it in days.

Now, I sit down and say – okay, I’ll just do it for 20 minutes just now, and then go off and do something else. Knowing that it’s such a short amount of time means I can focus much more than I normally would, and I have been rattling through tasks like never before. This also helps me work out just how much time I actually spend or need to spend on certain activities to complete them, and it can be much less than I expected.

We’ll see how this mutates and modifies as time goes on, but for now… this is the approach.

Becoming a Coffee Snob

24/07/2020 Clicky Stevecaffeine, coffee6 Comments

Breaking ranks with the rest of the tech industry, I must admit that I have never been a huge coffee fan. I know. Sacrilege. The truth is that hot drinks in general have never really been my cup of tea (pun very much intended). Sure, I was partial to an iced latte, and the elaborate glass Chemex contraptions of the faithful were intriguing, but I just never really got it. I could easily have dismissed such geekery, but in actuality I was always a bit jealous. As someone partial to a wee dram, I know how amazing it is when you get past the initial stages of “this all tastes the same”, and can discover the variety and depth involved in something new.

Recently, I had come across a local hipster coffee shop which clearly took themselves very seriously, but for the first time I got a glimpse of the promised land. Much like the first time I actually tasted cherries in a red wine (no, not the Tonic), the coffee that these folks were serving tasted incredible. Rather than just being another cup of burned dirt water, it somehow tasted of caramel and raspberries – without any addition of sugar or syrups.

This damascus moment led to an insatiable craving, desperate to relive that delirious caffeinated experience time and again. It wasn’t long until I bankrupted myself and was in the process of selling all of my worldly possessions to return to that cafe every day and get my fix… until I realised that if they could serve something that good, perhaps I should do a bit of investigation into recreating it at home.

What I learned

In a very short space of time, I not only discovered the price of a semi-decent espresso machine, but I also realised that almost everything I thought I knew about coffee was wrong. I still know basically nothing, but here is what I’ve gleaned over the past wee while:

1. Buying ‘better’ coffee isn’t the answer

In my previous attempts to have better tasting coffee, I just assumed I could pick up a more expensive bag from the supermarket (you know, the ‘taste the difference’ stuff that comes in that tempting black bag), and that would be half the battle. However, that isn’t the case. Of course the way you brew it matters, but there’s far more to it than that. Wayyyy more than I expected.

2. Coffee goes stale. Quickly.

Coffee basically never goes out of date, right? Of course not. They’re just beans. Well… yes… but apparently to really get the most out of it, you have to drink it within about 30 days of when it was roasted. If you pick up a fancy bag of beans from a local roaster but don’t get round to drinking them for a month or two, you’re far less likely to taste all of the exciting flavours that the coffee has to offer. Note that supermarket coffee almost never has a roasting date, and you can begin to piece together why it all might just taste the same – even if you do buy the fancy black bags.

3. Different ages of coffee are better for different types

Not only does the date that the coffee was roasted matter, but the type of drink you make with it at what stage of its life-cycle within the 30 day golden period also makes a difference. I won’t claim to know the reasons behind why, but an espresso will supposedly taste better made with beans that were roasted between 12 and 30 days prior – whereas beans which were roasted between 6 and 12 days will be more suited for filter coffee.

4. Storage is important

What do you mean I can’t just fold the bag over and stick a peg on it?! Oxygen, light, and moisture all contribute to coffee losing their freshness quicker. If you want to get the best out of that expensive bag you picked up from the floppy haired barista who told you the beans were foraged in the foothills of Botswana by a rare breed of hogs… you need to put a bit of effort into storing them properly. That means using some kind of contraption that will keep oxygen out, but also allow the CO2 that the beans give off to escape. The protips I’ve found involve using specially designed vacum sealed coffee boxes, along with oxygen absorber pads.

5. Freezing is fine

This is a controversial one, but if you buy a whole pile of coffee at once without realising that you would need to drink it within 30 days (ahem), then freezing the beans will help keep them fresher for longer. The caveat here is that you need to ensure that they are stored in an airtight container before freezing. Using some kind of vacuum sealed bag with an oxygen absorption pad should do the trick. If you are taking beans out from the freezer to use immediately, give the bag 10-15 minutes to acclimatise to room temperature before opening it and re-sealing once done to help prevent moisture building up.

6. Not all grinders were created equal

I had a coffee grinder. A good one, so I thought. It cost me £20 damnit! But, apparently it’s pish. Totally worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t allow you to properly control the size of the grind, or manage the consistency. That matters as you will want a different consistency of coffee depending on what kind you are brewing. For espresso, a fine grind is desirable, whereas French press requires a coarser grind.

7. You’ll need a new kettle

Okay, maybe this isn’t strictly the case, but if you want to get into the world of fancy pour-over coffee (and at this stage I’m fully committed to this madness), you will probably need to use one of those gooseneck kettles that looks like something out of a Wes Anderson film. To be honest, they look so cool that I would want one even if I never drank coffee again.

The road ahead

Even from a brief foray into this highly caffeinated world, I can see why so many people are so religious about it. For me, I’m not sure what the future holds. It’s been a while since I had an entirely new area to get excited learning about though, and I’ll hopefully be able to at least enjoy the journey. At least until I get addicted to caffeine and curse this entire experience.

On inspiration

12/04/202023/04/2020 Clicky Stevecreative, creative people, creativity, inspirationLeave a comment

Something I have been reflecting on a lot lately is inspiration; where it comes from, what feeds it, and how to make the most of it.

Over the years I’ve found that I go through periods where I become very intensely inspired about specific things – to the point that almost all I can think about is the project or projects that I’m working on. This can be extremely rewarding, but also incredibly frustrating, with no obvious way to manage effectively. It seemed like there was never any discernible rhyme or reason for when these times would strike or how long they would last; it could often be incredibly difficult to satisfy the creative impulses that came along, and most maddening of all – I wasn’t sure how to trigger them consciously.

In addition, it also felt like this kind of all-or-nothing drive was often easily misunderstood – including by myself – as a sort of careless impatience, or worse, an erratic string of obsessions which would fade away just as quickly as they had appeared – rather than a genuine, lasting interest. There’s nothing worse than feeling like something you have been working on intently for months and are passionate about might just be some latest flight of fancy.

Managing Inspiration

Rather than just jumping endlessly from one new thing to the next, I realised that I was actually cycling through a few of the same creative outlets – focussing solely on one to the detriment of all the others. These cycles could run from days to weeks to months to years, and I had no real way to predict when they might end.

The nature of this meant that I felt guilty about neglecting my other passions, and inevitably made collaborative ventures especially tricky. For example, if I was currently deeply inspired about photographic expression, I found it almost impossible to garner enthusiasm for writing songs as part of a band.

The all-consuming nature of this kind of heady inspiration also means that you lose some objectivity in relation to whether what you are doing is actually any good – the constant desire to create pushing everything else aside. Even just considering this possibility was enough to drive me to despair. TL;DR I needed to find a better way to manage these driving forces.

It has only been very recently that have I begun to get something of a handle on all of this. Now, rather than simply waiting for inspiration to strike and abandoning all other projects when it does until the juice runs out, I can strike something of a balance. Here are some of my observations and tips.

1. Avoid the gaps

Rather than see multiple outlets as being in competition with one another, I’ve come to realise (with insight from wiser people than I) that they can actually support and feed each other. For me (and I think many other creatively wired folk), having lots going on at once is far more preferable to hitting a period where I’m unable to do anything. Having various different passions means that I can shift from one to another and keep up the momentum across mediums – rather than hitting a total expressive block. It is much harder to find inspiration after that than it is if you are constantly inspired in separate areas.

2. Take a break

There are piles of books out there that will tell you the key to getting things done is to commit to doing a little bit each day. This path-of-least-resistance approach can be a great tactic to help get you over any initial procrastination, and build longer term habits. If you commit to playing guitar for five minutes a day, you are bound to find yourself playing far longer. However, when it comes to expressive outlets, the danger here is that you turn something you love doing into a chore, with the idea that you must constantly be progressing at least a little for it to be worthwhile. That kind of feeling kills creativity, and sometimes in order to find inspiration you need to give yourself space to take a break from something and then come back to it – without feeling guilty. This will pay dividends.

3. Grab inspiration when it comes

Of course, sometimes inspiration gloriously swells up from nowhere, and you need to make the most of it while you can. I came across a quote the other day from Margaret Qiao (from this awesome book) which puts it better than I ever could.

When you feel inspired, or have an idea, stop whatever you are doing and follow the inspiration. It’s very difficult to rekindle the spark once it goes out and impossible to conjure up on command.

This inspired me to write this post!

4. Seek out inspiration

Sometimes, you have no choice but to work on something – whether that’s because of deadlines, personal expectations, or because you are part of a collaboration. In these times, if you find yourself completely uninspired, it can be an incredibly taxing and difficult process.

As I mentioned, I previously just rode the waves of inspiration, jostling on the creative seas with no way to control what happened. I presumed that was all just part of the tortured artist process and revelled in the misery of it. However, what I’ve come to realise is that there are actually ways to help trigger periods of inspiration – you just have to actively seek them out.

For me, this has meant that before I have to work on anything specific but don’t really feel like it, I’ll spend some time on related things that I think is really interesting. For example, actively listening to bands who have really great vocalists before I have to sit down and write lyrics; watching a Japanese TV show I like before I study some of the language; or looking through pictures from photographers I love before developing some film.

This might seem painfully obvious, but in practice it’s something that I never really bought into before as nothing ever clicked. However, that’s because most of the things other folks find inspiring or share online won’t work for you. To give another example I never used to care much for photo books, but have fairly recently discovered that having a collection of these I can browse through almost never fails to inspire me to get out and take pictures.

5. ‘Write drunk, edit sober’

It isn’t clear who actually said this originally, but it isn’t all that important. Rather than taking this literally, when you find yourself struck by an idea, squeeze as much out of that feeling as you can while it lasts – but don’t worry about finishing everything then and there. Get the bulk down on paper, canvas, on film, or on a blog while you are drunk on inspiration – and then revisit to apply the finishing touches later. The urge to publish quickly can be unbearable at times – and sometimes you should – but the important thing is to make a start will you have the drive to do so. You can always come back to it later.

Staying Productive with Things

26/03/2020 Clicky Steveproductivity, productivity app, productivity hacks, things, Things 3, To Do list, working from home2 Comments

More than productivity

I am a person that needs to have a bunch of different projects going on at any one time. Whether it’s making music, writing blogs, building weird keyboards, or restoring old iPods, if I don’t keep my mind busy, it quickly begins to turn in on itself. At the same time, my work involves managing a variety of disparate projects that can vary from day to day.

All of this has become increasingly difficult to keep track of over the years, and none of the various calendars, diaries or bits of software I tried really helped. However, about six months ago my colleague and friend Bryan convinced me to give an app called ‘Things’ a go, and it has pretty much transformed how I manage my time. As well as becoming far more productive, I have found that I am far less stressed out, and feel more in control. I had never appreciated just how significant the cognitive load of having to juggle so many tasks was, or how much anxiety I had internalised as a result. Now, I no longer worry about forgetting to do something, or lie awake at night unable to sleep while my brain organises the things I have to do the next day.

At the end of the day, Things is just a To Do list app, but it’s an especially pleasant one to use, with a really smart workflow. Rather than wasting what Bryan would call ‘brain cycles’ worrying about er, things, you let Things take care of them. In particular, it wasn’t until I found myself increasingly filled with despair about the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic that I realised just how invaluable Things had become for keeping my mind clear. Rather than allow myself to become consumed with the developing news cycle, I instead chose to rely on Things more, and focus on what I wanted to get done in the following days. While it seems trivial, this helped tremendously. So in this blog I wanted to share a bit about how I make use of Things, and what I’ve learned.

The Basics

Things is a beautifully designed to-do list app from Cultured Code which runs on both Mac and iOS. It doesn’t run on Windows, and (annoyingly) there is no web or Android version (though see this post for my workaround). The current version at the time of writing is Things 3. It is apparently based on the ‘Getting Things Done‘ methodology.

Boiled down, Things essentially just provides a very pleasant way to quickly create and manage tasks – the beauty of it though is the myriad of different ways that you can view and organise these. At its most simple, you have an Inbox where you can dump all sorts of to do items to be organised, and then categorise them into different subject matter areas or projects.

Tasks can be set to only appear on a specific ‘due date’ – presented in the ‘Today’ window. They can also be set to recur upon completion, or at set intervals.

For tasks that absolutely must be completed by a certain date, you can flag them up with a deadline.

Selecting an Area or Project on the left will display only the tasks that are associated with it, if you want to focus on something specifically.

If you have tasks that you want to get to, but they aren’t time specific, you can throw them in the ‘Anytime’ bucket… and for ideas that you want to explore at some point, they can be filed away under ‘Someday’ for when you get time. You can also tag any task to further organise them to whatever level of detail you want.

There are a bunch of other features as well which I won’t go into in any depth just now – such as the Logbook which keeps track of all of your completed tasks, the calendar integration so you see what appointments you have on any particular day, and the ‘Upcoming’ view which provides a longer term perspective of what’s on the horizon.

How I use Things: Workflow, Tips & Tricks

Everybody will use Things slightly differently, and I borrowed a lot of my approach from my sensei Bryan. However, here’s some of what I’ve found works:

Add everything – no matter how small – I literally add everything I need to remember to do as a task into Things. Whether that’s remembering to wash the dishes, or to chop carrots for dinner, I offload everything onto there so that I don’t need to think about it. At first this can seem pretty ridiculous, or like you are outsourcing your faculties to an app, but it frees up your mind to focus on other things that are more important. This also means that you have a mixture of things you enjoy as well as specific obligations – which helps to avoid dreading opening the app in the first place.

Make use of shortcuts – There are a bunch of useful shortcuts, the most important of which lets you very quickly add in To Do list items to your inbox while you are browsing the web, to be categorised later. Learn these, as the less friction you have in adding tasks or managing them, the easier and more natural it becomes – and the more you can focus on what you are doing at the time.

Only add things to your daily pile that you can actually achieve – It took me a while to realise that I would add all sorts of tasks to my daily list that I wanted to do, but which realistically I would never be able to get done. That ended up pretty demoralising, as I saw the same To Do items rolling over day after day, unchecked. Now, I only add things that I either have to get done, or which I have a reasonable shot at completing, and it has been far more effective.

Organise your tasks for the following day – Every night I look over the tasks I have for the next day, and organise them roughly by when I want to complete them, and ask myself what seems reasonable to do in one day. If it seems like there’s too much, I punt it to the following day. This ritual helps me organise my thoughts and get to sleep faster.

Set smaller goals, and be judicious with repeating tasks – It can be tempting to set a goal like ‘I will do one hour of Japanese study every day!’ and to add it in as a repeating task that appears on your list on the stroke of midnight. However, I found that this was actually counter-productive, as I began to just ignore these broad repeating tasks. Instead, I would manually set much more specific, one off tasks, like ‘Do 2 lessons on DuoLingo’ – which made them far easier to complete.

Use tags creatively – There are all sorts of cool ways you can make use of tags. For a practical example… I save lots of news articles to Pocket, but never actually get around to reading them. The same applies to YouTube videos. Now what I do is chuck them into Things, and tag them with the time they will take to complete – ’10m’ for example. Then, whenever I have a spare ten minutes and I’m not sure what to do – I can dip in and quickly find something to fill that time.

Separate out evening tasks – There’s no point having stuff you have to do after dinner wrapped up in the same list as everything else, and Things lets you specifically ring-fence tasks for the evening within a specific day. Make use of this!

Projects are useful! – I didn’t really utilise the Projects feature for ages, relying instead on individual tasks within Areas, but then I realised you could put Projects under Areas. Game changer. Now I use Projects a lot to manage groups of different tasks that add up to a larger goal, which is really useful.

Summary

…and that’s it. At first I didn’t really get what the big deal with Things was, and thought some of the practices were a bit bizarre and redundant, but I genuinely think that organising things in this way has made a huge difference to both my productivity, sense of achievement, and overall zen. It ain’t cheap, and they need to hurry up and just make an Android app already damnit, but I’m not sure what I would do without it at this point.

Build Log: Restoring a 3rd Gen iPod

24/03/2020 Clicky Stevebuild project, classic ipod, hackaday, ipod, ipod 3rd gen, restore, upgrade, vintage ipod9 Comments

A few years ago, I realised that I no longer had a good portable music player. Sure, there was my mobile – but I was still using an iPhone at the time, which could store about 10 songs before its pitiful internal, non-expandable memory got filled up. I longed for the golden days of iPods… back when they were cutting edge and had nice glowy buttons and scroll wheels and that nostalgic clicky sound. After a bit of Googling it seemed like it would be easy enough to pick up an old iPod and stick a new hard-drive and battery in – so that’s what I decided to do. However, things didn’t go especially smoothly. Below is my overly long account of my journey to repair the damn thing which nobody needs or wants, but since we are all currently locked inside thanks to the Coronavirus, it seems like as good a time as any.

The Restoration Journey

I didn’t want just any old iPod. I wanted the 3rd Generation iPod specifically. Why? Because that was arguably the best design – with a nice, smooth scrollwheel, and separate touch sensitive buttons. Looking around eBay, there were a few that were listed as ‘just needing a new hard drive’ for under twenty quid, but I decided to play it safe and get one that was fully working in the first place, to avoid other unseen problems cropping up. In the end, I went for a 20GB model for about £40 which seemed in decent enough nick. I picked up a battery with much larger capacity than the original (£9), and an 80GB hard drive (£28) – supposedly the maximum size that would work with this model. Along with the special tools to open the iPod without breaking it, the total cost so far is at: £90.

When the iPod arrived, everything worked as expected, but it was a lot more beaten up than I had expected. I always took really good care of my old one, so was a bit miffed that this one was rough. I hummed and hawwed for a while, before deciding to buy a whole new front plate, as I knew I wouldn’t be happy having upgraded all the other bits and then having a scratched up screen. I managed to track one down at a spare parts site, which cost about £20. It turned out I also needed a very particular size of Torx screw to get the logic board off and transferred over, so that brings the total cost at this point to £115.

The front plate and screwdriver finally arrived, and I was pretty pleased. It was brand new and shiny. The battery and hard drive were a breeze to install, and things seemed to be going well… though not for long. It turns out the front plate also has a whole set of electronics attached, which did not come included. That meant I had to transfer them from the old case into the new one, and there were no instructions online for how to do this. Luckily, I managed to slowly pry them off with a spudger (what a great word) without destroying anything. I left the iPod case open, so if anything went wrong restoring things, I could easily get back into the innards.

The next big issue that became apparent pretty quickly was that this particular model of iPod was originally designed only to work with Macs, and so requires a FireWire connection to restore. I had vague memories of this changing with later revisions, so didn’t think much of it – and assumed there must be some workaround – but after some further research online, that turned out not to be the case. If I wanted to restore the iPod, I was going to have to get a special Y cable that had both a FireWire and USB connection. What’s more, it would apparently not even charge over USB – which meant that not only were the cables I had bought already useless, but I needed to get a hold of an old FireWire mains adaptor as well. Since they are so hard to find, I decided to pick up a couple so I had a spare for the future. Total cost so far including the cables (£21) and chargers (£18): £154.

The dual headed cable arrived, and I thought I was in the final stretch. Apparently you should be able to plug in the USB cable into the laptop on one end, and the FireWire cable into an AC adaptor on the other, and then the iPod will restore just fine. That turned out not to be the case, with iTunes point blank refusing to restore the iPod without it being connected over FireWire. Pish. I thought it must be the third party cable that I had bought, so I hunted down an official Apple cable, in the hope that it might make a difference. Total cost: £164. At this point I was getting pretty despondent about the whole thing. Why did I have to drag up this antiquated piece of junk that was crippled by ties to obsolete technology when I could have gotten an iPod classic for less money? Either way, I was determined to get the damn thing to work.

Luckily, I realised that my Apple Cinema Display screen had a FireWire port – since Apple ditched the connection from its laptops years ago. Of course, the connection I needed was a FireWire 400 port, and this was FireWire 800. I ordered a convertor, which brings the running total spent on this miserable project to £168.

The FireWire adaptor arrived, and I was convinced that this would do the trick. Wrong. When I hooked the iPod up to the Mac with USB, the hard drive purred nicely and was recognised fine – it just wouldn’t restore. When I tried FireWire, the drive just clicked and clicked – refusing to spin up properly. I let it charge up for a bit, but no dice. I tried a different Y cable – but that didn’t work either. I tried a dedicated FireWire cable – but nope. I thought maybe it was some USB-C weirdness with my laptop, so I used my wife’s connected up to the Display Screen to see if that made a difference. After about ten minutes the hard drive seemed to mount, and it got halfway through the restore process before returning an obscure error that just said the iPod could not be restored. Great.

I spun up a Windows 7 Virtual Machine in the hopes that I might have better luck that way – but no dice. The iPod wasn’t recognised at all. I did all sorts of troubleshooting to correct the drivers, but nothing helped. Getting desperate, I spent hours researching online to see if there was some way to restore the iPod without using iTunes, but most of them involved flashing the firmware on Windows – which already wasn’t working. I was beginning to think that I might be stuck with a very expensive paper weight, since nobody was going to want to buy the damn thing when it was in bits. Why did I insist on pursuing these insane projects that cost so much money for so little reward?!

Finally, in one last hail mary, I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine – battling with the weird config to get it working. When I finally had iTunes installed, I connected the iPod up using USB only, and lo and behold – it actually restored. I let it complete the setup, switched back to OSX, and there it was in all of its vintage glory. I loaded it up with 40GB odd of music to test it out, and everything seemed to be coming up roses.

Well, almost. I went to close up the iPod for good, and realised that it didn’t seem to want to. I compared the sizes of the hard-drives, and realised that the 80GB drive was considerably thicker than the 20GB one that I had pulled from the original one. I was sure this model should work though, and that I had confirmed it online – but after angrily Googling, I realised that the 30GB and 40GB models had a slightly thicker backplate in order to allow for the bigger sized disks, and that was the kind I should have gotten in the first place. I begrudgingly found a broken 40GB model on eBay from Sweden for £17.50, which brings us to the grand total of £185.5 – just under double what an iPod Classic 160GB is going for second hand.

Despite installing everything on the old hard drive fine, I then had to go through the whole process to try and get it to work again. For some reason, the process kept failing. At this stage, I gave up documenting everything that had gone wrong, and my mind has clouded over on exactly what I had to do to get it to work – probably out of some kind of self protection mechanism. However, finally… I got everything to fall into place.

Behold, my beautiful, revamped 3rd Gen iPod:

I was so pleased with the outcome and the throwback to my youth that I bought a nice leather case, and a charging dock (unfortunately I couldn’t find a silicone green case like I had as a teenager).

However, the iPod had one last trick up its sleeve… for when I had finally gotten it all together and working successfully, I realised that the nice clean new front plate I had bought actually had a plastic screen protector sheet on the inside, which had a mark on it.

To remove this, I would have to take the whole thing apart again, which I can’t really face doing – especially since knowing me I would end up breaking the damn thing somehow. Of course, when the backlight is on you can’t really see it, but I know it’s there. Watching. Taunting me.

Maybe one day I’ll fix it.

Build Notes

This ended up being a far fiddlier and more expensive project than I expected it to be initially. In hindsight, I could have saved money by not buying as many cables; buying a 40GB model in the first place; and getting a model that was more bashed up from the get-go since I ended up replacing the front plate anyway. If I had known the FireWire connection was never going to work, that would have saved me another tenner. In total, I could probably have done this for about £70 cheaper.
It is ludicrous that I had to rely on Windows XP to restore an iPod. I had read that the reason these couldn’t be restored over USB on OSX was down to some architectural limitations – but if that was the case, why did it work on Windows?

Practicalities

Having owned the restored iPod for a few years now, here’s some of my thoughts and observations:

I hadn’t quite appreciated just how much of a pain it would be to charge the iPod. You can’t just plug it in to a regular USB port, as it needs the dedicated Firewire charger. This means it’s not especially practical for travelling, but at some point the chargers are going to fail and become impossible to replace – which is a bit of a concern.
Similarly, putting new music on to the device is a bit of a pain. For that to work (at least on the Mac), you need to use the Firewire/USB/power Y Cable plugged into both the wall outlet and the computer at once. There’s also no real guarantee that iTunes will continue to recognise the iPod, and at some point I suspect I’ll end up having to use a Virtual Machine to get software old enough to be compatible.
There is no reliable way to scrobble the tunes you listen to on the iPod to Last.fm. This seems like a fairly minor and inconsequential detail, but I use Last.fm fairly religiously – and I can even track what vinyl I listen to – so it’s a bit of a bummer that the iPod support no longer functions.

ipod charger — Not the most practical of travel charging arrangements.

When all is said and done, was it worth it, and would I do it all over again?

Hell no.

I’m pleased that I managed to get the iPod up and working, and recapture a bit of my youth through nostalgia – but in practical terms it was a fairly expensive experiment, for a device that has a bunch of real impracticalities. Since restoring it, I have switched to Android, and can store as much music on my phone as I want… and I’ve finally moved into the modern world of bluetooth noise cancelling headphones – both of which means the iPod’s usefulness has ended up reduced.

It does get use though. I have the iPod loaded up with my favourite bands, and it is connected up to my hifi for whenever I just want to whack on a bunch of great music and not think much about it.

New Keeb – Planck Rev 6

07/01/202016/06/2020 Clicky Stevemechanical keyboard, mk, otemu sky5 Comments

Behold my newest keyboard, the Planck Rev 6:

I have had this project in the works for a while now, but only just got around to finishing it when I realised that all of my other mechanical keyboards had the loud-as-hell clicky style key switches. This was always fine when I worked from home in a tiny cupboard and could disturb nobody, but lately I’ve been sharing an office with my wife who is on video calls pretty constantly, and my delightfully clickety clackety Ergodox keyboard with Cherry MX Blues suddenly weren’t as charming as they once were (Well, they were for me, but probably nobody else.

Rather than bore you with all the geeky build details, here are the salient points:

1. What are the colours all about?

I had originally wanted to do one of these cool blue to pink gradients for the keycaps… but realised that the set I ordered didn’t have enough single squares to cover the full grid required – and I didn’t fancy having to get a full new set just for a few extra keys. The other problem is that while gradients look cool, they also make it a bit of a nightmare to find specific keys that you need at a glance. In the end, I decided to go with something a bit more practical. The yellow keys are modifiers like Escape, Enter, space, etc. The pink and blue rows are the letters, and the green keys are reminders of where specific keys I need for work shortcuts are.

2. Wait, why are all the keys square?

Aesthetic, innit.

This kind of grid layout is known as an ‘ortho-linear’ keyboard. There are a bunch of reasons people like this system… with the theory being that it keeps your fingers in a more natural typing position than the standard setup. To be honest though, I just think they look cool, and wanted to try out something a bit different (though this isn’t my first grid rodeo…)

3. But there’s only four rows! How does that work?

Err, yes. There is. In the mechanical keyboard world there is often a bit of an obsession to see how many keys you can strip out and still type just as fast as you would on a full size board. The Planck is the smallest board I have tried so far, with just 48 keys in total. The sharp eyed amongst you will probably have worked out that this means there isn’t enough room for a number row… and there isn’t. So how do you get access to all those keys that are missing?

The idea is pretty straightforward: Rather than have just one ‘shift’ layer which gives you capital letters and exclamation marks and all that good stuff, you have multiple ones. The blue keys to either side of the yellow space bar(s) on the bottom row let you ‘shift’ into completely different layers which have all the other keys – which you can program however you want.

For reference, here is my top layer, and then a couple of my additional ‘shifted’ layers.

So if I want to get to the number row, I press and hold down the blue key to the right of the space bar. Simple.

I am still figuring out what the perfect layout for me is (ignore that rogue right arrow on the top layer… I’m not sure what is going to end up in that space just yet) – but I already really like this board. It’s neat, and I have space for all of my weird custom modifier shortcut keys I have set up for work. The keys I use most are on the top layer, and anything I use less is just an extra press away. Of course it takes a bit of getting used to, but then all keyboard changes do – and I’ve adapted to the Planck far quicker than I have others in the past.

4. What kind of switches are in that bad boy?

Those would be the Outemu Sky 68g switches. They are ultra-tactile without being too loud to use around other folks.

5. What’s with this obsession with weird keyboards?

When you spend most of your life using one specific device, it’s good to explore different ways of interacting with it. Plus, the MacBook Pro keyboards are now so shockingly bad, that I will do almost anything to avoid having to use one. If you know, you know.

6. Nice USB cable.

Why thanks for asking. It’s a custom made one from CoolCable.co.uk.

Books 2019

03/01/2020 Clicky Steve2019, books list, reading3 Comments

One of the things I wanted to do in 2019 was to carve out time to read more books again – especially since I had a three month sabbatical over the Spring. To that end, I kept track of what I read. It’s a mishmash of music bios, fiction, and non. I’ve only included books that I actually finished, and left out anything that was purely for academic purposes.

Crucial Conversations – Kerry Paterson.
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying – Marie Kondo.
Happyslapped by a Jellyfish: The Words of Karl Pilkington.
Karl Pilkington – An Idiot Abroad.
Subtle art of not giving a fuck – Mark Manson.
Come as you are – Michael Azerrad – A biography of Nirvana.
The Last – Hanna Jameson.
Green Day – Nobody Likes You – Marc Spitz.
Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet – Andrew Blum.
Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography – Limmy (Brian Limmond).
Daft Wee Stories – Limmy.
That’s your lot – Limmy.
Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata.
Broadcast – Liam Brown.
In the miso soup – Ryu Murakami.
The Passengers – John Marrs.
HWFG – Chris McQueer.
Lucky You – Carl Hiaasen.
Hings – Chris McQueer.
Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang.
Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet – David Kaye.
The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet – Jeff Kosseff.
Hatching Twitter – Nick Bilton.
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language – Gretchen McCulloch.
Smashing Pumpkins – Tales of a Scorched Earth – Amy Hanson.
Tokyo Vice – J. Adelstein.
10% Happier – Dan Harris.
Kevin Sampson – Powder.
Gotta get Theroux this – Louis Theroux.
Unfollow – Megan Phelps-Roper.
Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson.
the Hunting Party – Lucy Foley.

Submitting to Things 3 App from Telegram with Integromat

16/09/2019 Clicky SteveAndroid, ifttt, Integromat, productivity, productivity apps, Telegram, Telegram Bot, Things 3, To Do list4 Comments

My colleague Bryan is a productivity whizz. So much so that we often question whether he is actually human, and whether or not he would pass a Turing Test. I too am partial to finding ways to improve things that I have to do every day, and so when he gave a passionate recommendation for the To Do list app ‘Things’ from Cultured Code, I wanted to dive in headfirst, and I loved it straightaway.

No Android App

The problem with Things 3 however, is that it runs entirely within the Apple ecosystem. That means there’s no web interface, and crucially… no Android application. Having ditched the iPhone a while ago, I was left with no easy way to quickly add items to my To Do list while out and about. There is a way to send tasks via e-mail, but having to open up my mailbox, find the contact etc felt like too much friction for what should be much simpler.

Telegram and ifttt

What I do use all the time is the secure messaging app Telegram, and my dream was that I could just fire off a quick message and somehow have that shoot off an e-mail which would add the task to the Things inbox. It seemed like ifttt.com would make this simple, but it was actually much harder than expected. GMail’s ‘send’ integration no longer seems to work, and the built in ‘e-mail’ service only allows you to have one address associated with your ifttt account at any one time – restricting my workflow options as a result. This really should not be that complicated!

Integromat

I came across Integromat, which is essentially a much more powerful version of ifttt. The premise is the same though: You connect up a bunch of services, and tell them to do various tasks based on different circumstances. Unlike ifttt though, you can delve pretty deeply into the automations. It’s a bit trickier to pick up at first – especially if you aren’t familiar with programming, but gives a far greater degree of customisation.

To get my messages from Telegram into Things, I created the following ‘scenario’:

The way it works is by having a dedicated Telegram bot watch out for messages and send them via my GMail account to the special e-mail address for the Things inbox.

I decided that I might want to use this virtual helper for other things though, and didn’t want every single command I sent it to end up in Things as a To Do list item. To avoid that, I set up a filter on the scenario so that it would only send e-mails if the message began with ‘todo’ or ‘/todo’. Additionally, I used a text parser to take out those trigger words, and to add in a prefix of ‘via Telegram:’, so that when I look back on my outstanding tasks later, I have a bit of context about where they came from. In other words, if I add some bizarre things to my To Do list when intoxicated, at least I’ll know that it was down to Telegram.

For the final bit of the puzzle, I added in a step for the bot to reply when the workflow was processed successfully – including a copy of what was sent to Things:

In Telegram, that looks like this:

Finally, here it is, magically appearing in my Things inbox for parsing later:

p.s. You might be wondering what that reference to ‘operations’ at the end is all about. With Integromat, you get a certain number of resources allocated per month, depending on what kind of account you have. A free user gets about 1,000 operations per month, and each time I add a To Do list item, it takes up about 5 operations. With my awful maths that works out at about 200 To Do list items per month… which should be way more than I ever need, but I wanted to have some kind of visual indicator, just incase things started re-routing to a digital black hole somewhere.

The End?

So there you have it: How I got around the problem of adding tasks to my Things 3 To Do list when I’m not near my computer. Integromat looks very cool, and I’m going to have to think up some other commands for my bot to respond to… but really, this would be much simpler if Cultured Code would release an Android app.

Book Recommendation – “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet”

16/07/201923/04/2020 Clicky SteveCDA, Communications Decency Act, Intermediary Liability, internet law book, Jeff Kosseff, s.230Leave a comment

The latest book I have to recommend comes from law professor Jeff Kosseff, in which he examines one of the laws that have been most crucial to the development of the Internet: s.230 of the Communications Decency Act. For those not familiar with the CDA, it is a piece of American jurisprudence that has essentially enabled businesses such as Twitter and YouTube to develop platforms built on user generated content, without themselves becoming liable for everything that those users may say or do.

Understanding the CDA is increasingly important – not just for lawyers or academics focussed on intermediary liability – but for anybody with an interest in the future of the Internet. This book provides a comprehensive explanation of the law’s history and original aims, as well as its development through case law. Whilst it isn’t necessarily an ‘easy’ read due to the subject matter, Kosseff’s narrative style means that it remains engaging throughout, never letting things run dry, or too theoretically abstract.

‘The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet‘ was published in April of 2019. Given the impact of the CDA, it is almost hard to believe that such a complete study hasn’t come around before now. Either way, if you want to learn (a lot) about one of the most important laws underpinning the Internet as we know it, read this.

Disclaimer: I am not being paid to review or recommend this book, but if you click on the Amazon links above and buy a copy, Jeff Bezos might send me a few pennies to say thanks.