We had a fun time with hypnotist Chris Jones tonight at St. Olaf’s family weekend. There were many people hypnotized and doing interesting things.
We got our Hoist 3-Tier Dumbbell Rack put together tonight. We ran out of room on the vertical rack, and the heavier dumbbells never fit right on that one. Nice to have easy access to everything. 💪
Had a fun evening at the 2023 Minneapolis Downtown Council Annual Fundraiser at Mosaic. #TeamSPS’s own Karin Lucas chairs the MDC board and addressed the crowed.
Scrambling to wrap up Tyler’s soccer game as a storm barrels in. Finished just in time. ⚽️⛈️
The conference rooms on #TeamSPS 5th floor in Minneapolis are named after Fictional Elements. To fill out the Fictional Element world even more, this Periodic Table of Fictional Elements was added recently and I absolutely adore it. 🤓
Squash Blossom Farm and Sod House Theater Dinner
We had a fun evening driving out to Squash Blossom Farm just outside of Oronoco, Minnesota for a Farm-to-Table dinner presented by the Sod House Theater group with funny skits and performances along with the meal. This was a truly unique experience!
The farm was pretty and very relaxed. The Sod House Theater had an accordian player to accompany the skits.
We tried two different meads and had one other drink.
The performances were fun and goofy and made us all chuckle. You were right in the action.
The meals were good and not too foody. Simple dishes served very well.
Switched things up with the 89 °F unusually hot day to get one last afternoon in the pool! 💦
Task Management for the Weekly Thing
I’m often asked about how I create the Weekly Thing and how I’ve been doing it for over six years. People are usually curious about how I find things to write about or how I build the Weekly Thing. However, there is a critical part that is invisible to others but key to the consistency of sending every week for 262 issues — project management!
With the recent rebuild of my automation I needed to update my project template which seemed like a good time to share how I do this. I’m a Getting Things Done practitioner, and my tool of choice for as long as I can remember has been OmniFocus. Everything here is in OmniFocus or supporting automation.
A detail to share on dates and times for the publishing schedule. My target for sending the Weekly Thing is Saturday at 7:00 am CT. If I miss that it’s fine, I can shift things. However, the content cutoff is actually Thursday at 11:59 pm CT and that never changes. This allows me a window from Thursday night to Saturday at 7:00 am CT to publish. One odd side effect of this is that a blog post I publish on Friday will not be in that issues Journal on Saturday, but will wait for the following week. Nobody seems to notice this and it is necessary for me to have the time to do the publishing.
Project
Here is what the project to send Weekly Thing 264 looks like in OmniFocus. The two dates on the right are the defer and due dates. Defer dates are critical for me since they keep things off my plate until they need to be. Note everything in gray is deferred. You can see that right now, there are only three tasks available. I’ve expanded select tasks so that you can see the helper links and text that make things a bit faster for me.
There are four major steps to publishing each issue:
- Creating Content: Most notable activities here include writing the introduction, adding any “Currently” topics, taking and setting the picture for the week. Some of these I can do immediately, others I defer until a few days into the week. The writing is done in Drafts.
- Curating Links: I try to curate links and various points through the week, but I have two “deadlines” for the publishing cycle. Links are curated in Pinboard.
- Building and Sending: Content and Links are done, time to build and send. I’ve automated this to be pretty simple. See how I build the Weekly Thing for more.
- Finalizing: After the issue is sent and in peoples mailboxes, I need to do some final activities and most importantly create the project for the next issue.
All of these steps are sequential. And the tasks in them are sequential, except for Creating Content which can be done in any order.
Repetition
This project is not a repeating project. That is the reason for the last step in the project, to create the next project. Why not repeating?
- Changes: Not having it repeating means I can change and alter any given instance however I like. I might add a special task to one issue, like adding a POAP for the anniversary issue. Or a special section I’m only doing that time.
- Schedule: I may move the due dates for one step or another and I love knowing that will not persist to the next iteration.
So how do I get the repeating project without doing all the work? Plus, there are tons of date references that need to be calculated, where does that come from? This is where TaskPaper and project templates come to the rescue.
TaskPaper allows me to have a template for sending the Weekly Thing that I can “run” via a Shortcut. You can see the Send Weekly Thing Taskpaper Template for all the details. Take note of two special “tokens” in the template: «Issue» and «Date». These are not part of TaskPaper, but instead two “variables” I handle.
Before I hand OmniFocus the TaskPaper to create the project, I’m going to process those two tokens using a Shortcut. My Send Weekly Thing shortcut will get the “Publish Date” and “Issue Number” from Data Jar. It will set those “variables” in the TaskPaper and the rest of the data offsets are magically handled by OmniFocus. Most critical thing here is making sure I format the «Date» as yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm aa so that OmniFocus understands it.
The Shortcut also puts a time block on my calendar for Thursday night to send the issue. This is a nice benefit of combining Taskpaper and Shortcuts together.
Summary
Creating the Weekly Thing isn’t a single “Send Weekly Thing” task on my list. Instead I’ve focused on “next action thinking” to try and make each component a simple task. Overall this works really well for me. It doesn’t solve writers block, but frees me up to focus on the creative aspects instead of the tasks.
You might be curious how this works when I take my summer or winter breaks? In those cases, I still create the next project for the issue when I come back from break, but then I set the defer date for the whole thing to the week before that issue publishes. I also usually add a housecleaning task to the beginning of that issue to clean out my Safari Reading list and Pinboard Unread links.
I received an email this morning from a service I have no recollection of informing me that their terms of service were updated. I have no idea what this service is. I looked in 1Password and have no entry record of it either, so it is very old. I don’t know the password on the account so I issue a password reset, just so I can then delete this account. It then requires me to provide a reason for cancellation. My reason is “This field should not be required.”
There should be a requirement similar to “1-click unsubscribe” but to delete your account.
We went to our last MN United game of 2023 tonight. They drew a 1-1 tie versus San Jose with plenty of scoring opportunities. It was a little sad realizing we wont be back to Allianz Field until 2024! ⚽️
Smooth Transition from Purchase to App
There is a very common gap in customer experience that is often ignored when you buy a physical product that has to be shipped to you and it has an app that you can use to interact or control it. This can go from a Smart home appliance all the way to a Tesla.
I still remember when I reserved my spot for my Tesla Model 3 and was excited to download the Tesla app only to realize that it wouldn’t let me do anything until I had my car. This is very common, and it is a let down because right at that time of purchase you are excited to get the thing, and are motivated to get things setup so you are ready for it to arrive.
I recently purchased an Eight Sleep system, and for the first time saw a company handle this hand off from purchase, to receipt and app well!
After I completed the order, Eight Sleep smartly directed me right away to download the application and get my account setup. Once creating my account, it knew that I had placed the order but didn’t have it yet, so it helpfully showed me the order status. Even better, in anticipation of the product arriving it also gave me a Checklist to get some things I will need to have on hand when the product arrives.
This is a great way to insure that:
- I get my account setup and have the app installed, ready for the arrival of the product.
- Make sure that I have everything I need so I’m not disappointed when it arrives.
- Smoothly handle the transition from new customer to app user.
Nicely done Eight Sleep!
I created a Shortcuts Collection page to connect various blog posts I’ve written about Shortcuts and how I use them. Few posts so far, but thinking this is a topic I will write about more since I do so much with it.
Launch Apps Shortcut
I’m a big fan of Shortcuts and find it useful for many small automation tasks, creating one off scripts really fast, and even building complex solutions like the Weekly Thing.
“Launch Apps” is a shortcut that I think every Mac user can benefit from. I have a set of applications that I always use. Mail, Calendar, Drafts, etc. Some apps I add contextually based on which computer I’m on, or what network. Launch Apps gives me one shortcut I can put in my Menubar and easily get everything that I want running quickly.
You can grab my Launch Apps Shortcut as a starting point to make your own. It is a very simple shortcut, and a great way to get started with automation.
This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.
Starting AI for Business conference at Carlson School of Management, Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC). Looking forward to a focused day of learning on one of the most critical topics of the moment.
Huge thank you to Dee Thibodeau, Nick Hernandez, Ahmed Jamil for hosting the Fall CIO Wine Tasting! And thanks to Tony Peleska for hosting on their amazing patio! Lastly, Chuck Kanski of Solo Vino was an amazing guide through delightful wines.
I’ve had the ScanSnap iX500 for years and the scanner is great but the software gets worse by the day. The “Scan to the Cloud” feature fails silently! You can be scanning away thinking it’s all going to my Box account to retrieve later, but in reality the scans are going nowhere, no error message, and no file to recover!
I just realized that one of our iMacs (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) isn’t able to upgrade to macOS Sonoma! I’ve been debating if it is time to update it as well as the other iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019). Seems like it is time to put these Intel iMacs to pasture.
Seems like $4 billion is the minimum cost to Amazon for missing the LLM wave.
Amazon will invest up to $4bn in Anthropic, an American AI startup founded by former employees of OpenAI, who have built a chatbotcalled Claude. Amazon will acquire a minority stake in the company, which was valued at $5bn earlier this year, to better compete in generative AI. Anthropic will work closely with Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud-computing arm. — Economist Espresso, Sep 25, 2023
POAP 6801491 at Weekly Thing Forum Launch.
