This week I’m publishing an early episode of The Weekly Briefly because it’s Thanksgiving week. On today’s show I talk about the glories and the perils of running your own business. Why showing up every day is important for building an audience. Why trust and transparency are important for keeping an audience. And why doing our best creative work has very little to do with the tools we use, and quite a bit to do with knowing where our best creative work is born.

Sponsored By:

• TOM BIHN bags: designed and made in USA since 1972.

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

TOM BIHN has been designing and making backpacks and travel bags since 1972 — it’s what we know. We use the best materials, innovative design and superior construction techniques to build a better bag.

* * *

My thanks to TOM BIHN for sponsoring the site this week. They’ve got an incredible array of laptop bags, travel bags, backpacks, and more. Need something simple and low-profile to carry your iPad and a notebook? Check out the Cafe Bag. Need something handsome and rugged that you cantravel with? They’ve got you covered there, too.

Owen Williams (via The Tech Block):

When trimming down your notifications, ask yourself these questions: Am I willing to let this interrupt me at any given moment during my day? Is this information critical to my life?

Glancing in my iPhone’s system settings at the apps which I’ve granted permission to send me push notifications, I see a lot listed in there. However, most of them don’t actually send any push notifications. The notifications I do get on a regular basis are:

• ESPN: Injury / projection updates for my Fantasy Foobtall league
• Email: Emails from my VIP list (which is just my CPA and my wife)
• Twitter DMs
• Slack mentions and direct messages
• Flickr comments
• Dark Sky weather updates
• Calendar alerts
• Reminders: (time / location)
• Deliveries: when a delivery status changes
• Overcast: new podcast episodes are available
• Circa: breaking news alerts
• The Magazine: new issues available

I’ve decided to turn off notifications for Overcast, Deliveries, The Magazine, and Flickr.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d wager that most of you have a pretty conservative approach to push notifications as well. But what I just realized after reading Owen’s article and then thinking about what push notifications I have on, is that there’s a difference between needing to be informed of something and wanting to be informed.

With notifications from Overcast, Deliveries, and Flickr — yeah, it’s great to know when a new podcast episode is available or to know that my recent order is on the truck for delivery, but those are also bits of information that I seek out on my own anyway. And so the push notification is superfluous.

This week’s setup interview is with Faith Korpi, writer, ballet teacher, and co-host of the IRL Talk Podcast. I loved this bit at the end of Faith’s interview:

Well, my ideal setup would be a tree house high up in a tree guarded by panda bears. There’d be a desk with an old tangerine iMac that I’d use exclusively for writing and another desk with a new iMac that I’d use for recording and video editing. It’d be the only tree house in the world with Google Fiber and my internet speed would make you weep tears of joy.

Absolutely amazing. And, turns out, Beckham practices making one-handed catches.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about hiring help and how it should be seen as an investment.

I share about the people I’ve hired to help me with Tools & Toys and The Sweet Setup, how I found them, and why I brought them on. I also discuss knowing when it’s the right time to hire help, and how you can get out of the way so that the people you’ve brought on are empowered to do their best work.

Sponsored by:

• TextExpander touch 3: Now with custom keyboard.

• Yosemite: The Apple conference with a view.

Over on the Sweet Setup we compared Delivery Tracking Apps. Just in time for the holidays!

Many of us have been using Deliveries for years and it’s still the best one out there (though there are some other great options as well).

I’m an Amazon Prime member, and so I get a lot of stuff shipped from Amazon. (What’s that? We’re out of organic coconut oil? Just get it off Amazon. It’s cheaper than driving to the store, and it’ll be here in 2 days and we aren’t going shopping again until next week.) Anyway, one of the best things about Deliveries is how it can connect with Amazon to auto-import your shipments. Also, you can forward emails to the Junecloud server and it can grab the tracking number out of the email. Really cool.

Just a reminder to those of you in the Kansas City area: tomorrow (Friday) morning I’ll be speaking at this month’s Coffee & Design meet-up. It’s free, and it’ll be fun. You should come.

Update: A huge thanks to all of you who came out. It went great.

An excellent review:

[T]he most impressive thing about the iPad Air 2 is not its screen or its thinness or its camera, though those are all quite lovely. It’s the speed, and the extra RAM. Using the iPad Air 2 while flipping around from app to app feels like an entirely upgraded experience from performing the same tasks on my iPad mini 2. You learn to blot out the time you spend waiting for apps to open and Safari tabs to reload, but once you spend time on a device that doesn’t need to take those pauses, they become obvious. Painfully obvious.

I wish the iPad mini 3 featured all these same improvements, but it doesn’t.

And:

[W]hen I look at the power that Apple’s dropped into the iPad Air 2, I’m convinced that the use of iPads as everyday tools will just keep on growing. These devices are in their infancy; the iPad has existed for less than five years, and is now on its sixth generation. They’ve come a long way, and in some ways the software hasn’t really kept up with the hardware.

Josh Ginter wrote an excellent review of a seemingly mundane product: a laptop stand.

The Rain Design mStand hoists your laptop up to a height that promotes better posture and viewing angles. Combine excellent utility with a solid aluminum design that matches the aesthetic of your MacBook Pro, and you’ve got yourself one of the best laptop stands you can buy.

Over the years of doing the Sweet Mac Setup interviews (both the original series here, and the new ones over on The Sweet Setup), I’ve seen this stand being used by a lot of folks. In fact, it was in the very first Sweet Mac Setup interview ever with Mark Jardine.

Great for ergonomics and also great if you use your laptop with an external display but don’t want to do clamshell mode.

Speaking of Spotlight add-ons, Nate Parrott has a workaround/hack/plugin system that extends the functionality of Spotlight in Yosemite to include Wolfram Alpha searches, weather reports, and more.

Via Federico Viticci, who stumbled across a few bugs when using it:

I got similar results with weather and Wolfram Alpha integration, although also I stumbled across bugs as Parrott cautioned in the release notes. Weather correctly fetched my location, but Wolfram Alpha didn’t accept the (theoretically supported) “wa” command and some queries just didn’t work. And, obviously, being this a rough hack that’s not officially supported by Apple, memory consumption of the Flashlight plugin occasionally went through the roof with hundreds of MBs reported in Activity Monitor.

Here’s a clever way to increase the functionality of Spotlight in Yosemite. Sam Soffes and Louie Mantia wrote 7 simple applications: Screen Saver, Empty Trash, Lock, Log Out, Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down. You drop the apps into your Applications folder and then you can “launch” them via Spotlight.

Most of you (all of you?) probably know that these sorts of actions work out right of the box with LaunchBar and Alfred. But Yosemite brought many cool new features to Spotlight that make it a more compelling quick launcher than it was in previous versions of OS X.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

Mr. Underscore:

Apple took a clever approach to handling the extremely constrained power environment of the Watch (at least initially). To start with 3rd Party apps will run in a split mode. The Watch itself handling the UI parts of the app with an iPhone based app extension doing all the heavy lifting and computation. This is architected in such a way as to enhance interactivity (it isn’t just a streamed movie) while still keeping the Watch components very lightweight.

Good news for battery life, yes. And also, this may answer the question about how often Apple expects you to upgrade your watch. If the heavy lifting and computation of Watch apps is all done by our iPhones, it means the Watch itself serves more or less as a (very smart) second screen — a wirelessly-connected external monitor, so to speak. And so, perhaps the reasonably-useful shelf life of an Apple Watch could be several years.