Speaking of uninterrupted work time, Paul Graham’s essay about how makers and managers use and schedule their time differently is always worth a read.

Michael Lopp:

Who understands the compounding productivity interest earned with each consecutive uninterrupted minute of work? It is there in those hard to capture collective minutes where your best work is happening.

It’s not just a challenge to get uninterrupted work time when in an office environment. It’s also a challenge in the most isolated of work spaces. Because our minutes are interrupted from without (co-workers, incoming phone calls, and other notifications) as well as from within (our tendency to check twitter real quick or to keep our email app open in the background).

It’s been 90 days since the re-design of Tools & Toys went live, and when comparing the most recent numbers to the same quarter last year we saw a 3x growth in pageviews, unique visitors, and site revenue.

And so, on today’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I wanted to share more about why we decided to redesign the site, what our goals were, and what we think has contributed to the site’s growth (beyond just the new look).

Sponsored By:

• Harvest Forecast: A whole new way to plan your team’s time.

• Artisanal Software Festival: No bundles, no gimmicks: just great prices on some of the most interesting and innovative software for working with ideas.

Wow. This is a brilliant and fantastic new feature to Gumroad.

I use Gumroad to sell Delight is in the Details, and I couldn’t be happier with the service. As a seller, Gumroad is extremely affordable and very easy to set up. And the user experience for the buyer is just as great — I wouldn’t be selling with them if I thought otherwise.

With their new email workflow stuff, you can set up scheduled emails and automated email campaigns that go out to your customers. It can be as simple as a thank-you email after someone has bought your product, or a whole series of communications.

I’ve been use Zapier to connect Gumroad with Mailchimp to do something similar, but I’m paying $785/year for those two services. Gumroad now includes it for free. Though with Mailchimp I do get quite a bit more control of my email designs and flexibility as my email list grows with folks who are interested in my book but who haven’t yet bought it.

Sounds great, but… rollover data only carries over to the next billing cycle, and it’s only for those on the Mobile Share Value plans. And the Mobile Share Value plans only get their discounted pricing if you pay full price for your smart phone or have AT&T Next (where you “lease” your smartphone).

But it does sound like an awesome step in the right direction. Remember when mobile phone plans were all about how many minutes and how many text messages you got and data was unlimited (because who uses data?) Now that’s basically flip flopped.

And speaking of AT&T data usage, last week I was logging in to my AT&T account to update my billing info. Before making it to my account settings page, I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my plan from 10GBs of shared data/month to 30GBs. Below, in smaller print, was a link to see my average monthly data usage. So I clicked that only to discover that my wife and I use about 1.5 GBs of data per month. So instead I downgraded from our 10GB/month plan to the 3GB/month plan and we’re now saving $40 (!) a month.

Something we didn’t put to our 2015 Tech Resolutions article was to check in on and evaluate our cell phone plans. Mobile carriers are changing and reconfiguring their plans all the time; how many of us are on older plans that are charging us more than we need, but don’t know any different?

We just posted our latest app review over on The Sweet Setup, and it’s for desktop RSS readers. We tried out literally a dozen different apps and Reeder was clearly the best. It’s fast, it’s well-designed, it’s awesome.

Managing teams is hard. Imagine it’s Monday morning and your team doesn’t know what they’re working on for the week. Plans change and schedules change with them. Spreadsheets weren’t built for this.

Harvest Forecast is a tool designed to plan your team’s time. Visualize schedules in Forecast and easily adjust them as needed. Forecast keeps your team’s expectations on the same page and helps you move projects forward.

As new projects come in, you’ll know who’s available, and when to hire. Leave behind bloated spreadsheets and begin scheduling in Harvest Forecast with a free 30-day trial.

* * *

My thanks to Harvest Forecast for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Great setup interview with Sebastian Green. And I love that The Sweet Setup now has its first Hackintosh featured:

When in my home office, I use what I call a Hackintosh Pro (Yes, you did read that correctly). Before I got bitten by the Apple bug about 10 years ago I used to build my own PCs, and for the past 3 or so years I have been itching to build one again. I had an old PowerMac G5 that finally died, so I decided to strip the case, convert it to fit an ATX motherboard, and build my own machine inside it. Building the machine was the easy part. Getting it to run OS X was the tricky part

Once you go “paperless” you can never go back. It’s great. For one, the lack of clutter is wonderful. Secondly, it’s ridiculously easy to set up some Hazel rules that will automagically sort your incoming document scans for you — making it a nearly-mindless task to file away all your paperwork, instead of sitting in front of your filing cabinet putting one piece of paper away at a time in different hanging file folders. Moreover, with all your documents scanned, it’s very very easy to find what you’re looking for.

All that to say, over on Tools & Toys we just put together a big update to our guide to going paperless. If you want to know which scanner to get, which shredder to get, and how to go about organizing your scans, check it out.

I want to thank curbi for sponsoring all three sites this week.

Curbi offers parental controls for iOS devices, and it’s pretty incredible — especially if you’ve got a family of devices you’d like to help safeguard. Curbi is a way to monitor and restrict the apps and websites your kids use on their iOS devices.

You can flat-out block certain content content (such as porn), and you can set time-based restrictions on other content (like no Facebook during study-time hours), etc.

And curbi can be more than just for kids — you can set it up on your own device as well. Use curbi as an internet content blocker that actually works so you don’t accidentally get slimed with stuff you don’t want to see, and so you’re not constantly entering in a PIN to visit regular sites that iOS doesn’t need to block.

Curbi is free to use for 14 days, and then a monthly subscription is just $6.99 no matter how many devices are in your home.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about the pursuit of “the best”.

Who doesn’t love finding the best tools, the best coffee, the best food, the best experiences? I know I do. But I realize that this can, at times, be an unhealthy pursuit. Too much focus on only ever doing and experiencing “the best” of something can lead to disappointment and complaining when we don’t have “the best”. Which is why being content — and making each unique experience “the best” — is a choice.

Sponsored by:

• Curbi: Amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Welp, it convinced me to finally drop in a dynamic timestamp in all my sites’ footers.

David Sparks:

Family Sharing is not ready for the Sparks family. I’ve spent way too much time trying to make this all work and this weekend I’m officially throwing in the towel on Family Sharing until it gets better.

There are just 3 iOS devices in the Blanc family: my iPhone, my wife’s iPhone, and my iPad. They’re signed in with the same Apple ID for the store, and with our own Apple ID for email and calendar. It works great… for now.

Over at The Sweet Setup, we laid out a few ideas for getting your setup up-to-date:

As Apple users, we generally take pride in our computing setup and technology. Technology is always moving forward, so you can’t go years without upgrading or maintaining your equipment. While resolutions generally deal with losing weight or finishing a project at home, our technology setups can also be part of our plan.

I think it’s wise to evaluate the tools we use. Sure, it can be easy to nerd-out a bit too much and be constantly over-evaluating our gear to the point where we never actually do any work. But that doesn’t mean we should never look things over. Are the services, software, and hardware tools we use day in and day out serving us well? Or have our workflow needs changed and would we be better served with a different set of tools? Or is there a newer / better / more-reliable way to do a job that would benefit us if we upgraded?

These are the sort of questions worth asking about once a year. Then, once we’ve solved them, put our heads down and get back to doing our best creative work every day.