Lots of power-user features are now part of Apple’s mail app. The one I’m honestly most happy about is the improvements to search. (One of the big components of our Calm Inbox system is the importance of using searching instead of sorting to find past emails.)
And, speaking of email, here are my own, personal top-3 tips for making your iPhone Email app more focused.
I’ve had 3 different conversations with 3 different folks in the past 24 hours about how much they are loving Ulysses. It’s such a great app — I still do nearly all my writing in it. If you’ve got a writing / idea project in the works and you’re feeling scattered, you should definitely check out Ulysses and let me show you exactly how to use it.
Between 6am and noon is arguably my most precious / important / valuable time of the day for getting things done.
That’s why I keep all of my devices in Do Not Disturb until noon.
This way I am free from any and all notifications, pings, buzzes, until the morning is over and it’s time for a lunch break.
If you need a fun game to play when you’ve already done the Wordle, this is a long-time fave of mine.
Remember that period shortly after 2010 all the way up until about 2018 where everyone thought the iPad was a product Apple didn’t really care much about, didn’t take seriously, and was just a “bigger iPhone”? Yeah. Well, that’s definitely over. Thank goodness.
Mike Schmitz put together a fantastic summary for The Sweet Setup, covering all the highlights from Apple’s keynote yesterday.
I thought this was one of the most polished and entertaining Apple keynote events of the past decade. Obviously there are some advantages to having a pre-recorded broadcast rather than doing a live event. But Apple’s production team did an excellent job with making it feel authentic, whimsical, and intentional. And that’s just the production…
The announcements around iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and more were all huge.
As a long-time Apple nerd, it is encouraging to see Apple’s software continue to mature and expand in both useful and whimsical ways. And, as someone who uses an iPad for the vast majority of just about everything I do, these next iterations of refinements and features to iPadOS just keep moving things forward for power users.
Over on The Sweet Setup, Josh Ginter just published a fantastic review (with photos!) of the new Magic Keyboard for iPad.
A lot of the early-access units and first reviews that came out were of the 12.9-inch model. Josh, like myself, has an 11-inch iPad and his review is of the smaller size.
There were two points that stood out to me most in Josh’s review.
First of all is just how great the hardware connection is between the iPad and the Magic Keyboard. You attach them and you are good to go. You detach them and you are good to go. There is no pairing or unpairing required.
This lack of friction is such a massive advantage that — even for me — I will often just use the attached keyboard even though I have a fussy, clickey bluetooth keyboard already on my desk and ready to pair with the iPad. (More on that another time.)
Secondly, I love how Josh highlights the “philosophical” positioning / signaling of what the iPad Magic Keyboard means for the iPad as a whole:
If ever there was a sign that Apple was working on the iPad’s perceived shortcomings, it’s this: The Magic Keyboard dramatically improves — I’d venture to say “flips on its head” — the notion that the iPad has poor keyboard and trackpad support.
As John Gruber commented regarding Jason Snell’s review of the Magic Keyboard:
Apple has made iPad better in new ways without making it worse in any existing way.
The 6am writing timeblock has been working well for me.
As I shared in my previous post, I have recently begun getting up around 6am to spend the first hour of my day writing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, my iPad, and Ulysses.
By 7:15 all the boys are up, and so we have breakfast with the family.
Then, I head down to my home office around 8:30 to do more work. Followed by a workout before lunch. And then a few more hours of work before wrapping up around 4pm or so.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, this is a new writing routine for me that came out of my need to re-evaluate how I’ve been spending my work days.
I will admit that I fell out of this early morning writing routine a little bit last week because it was our sabbatical week. Last week I let myself sleep in that extra hour instead of getting up early to write, and I let myself stay up a bit later to do some woodworking in the garage — building a beautiful Quarantine Coffee Table that I will never forget.
But this morning… I was back at my early morning writing. And this time I had a new typing tool at my fingertips!
My iPad Magic keyboard arrived late last week.
On Thursday evening, to be exact. While I was out with my boys to get curbside pickup of BBQ from our favorite spot: Joe’s KC.
(Let’s just say that when we got back with our BBQ dinner ready to eat and I discovered an iPad Magic Keyboard sitting on the front porch ready to be unboxed… it was a dilemma. But I was hungry and so I was somehow able to let the keyboard wait until after the boys had gone to bed.)
Anyway…
Long-time readers of this website may be all-too familiar with some of my previous in-depth, winded, opinionated, articles about keyboards.
I love a good keyboard. And I love my iPad.
So you’d think that if Apple came out with an amazing keyboard for the iPad, it’d be my New Favorite Thing.
Well. I’m not entirely sure if it is my New Favorite Thing or not.
I’ve read the Magic Keyboard reviews. Watched the videos. And I have loved reading everyone’s opinion about this thing, because it’s a HUGE step forward for Apple (and the iPad) on many, many levels.
In 2018 we got the epic reinvention of the iPad Pro, followed by iPadOS in 2019, followed by amazing trackpad support last month, followed by this Magic Keyboard…
Apple is saying over and over again that the iPad has a bright, professional, awesome future.
But as for me and this Magic Keyboard…
I’m still not sure if I like it. Or, at least, I’m not sure how much I like it for day to day use around my house an in my home office.
But don’t read into things too much. Really. I’m 50/50 on this… it’s too early to tell.
Because I also have to say that now that I’ve been using the Magic Keyboard for several days I’m not sure I could go back to that Smart Keyboard Folio.
Today I spent just about my entire workday working from just the iPad and the Magic Keyboard. (Usually I spend about half my day on the iMac and half my day with the iPad.)
And the typing experience on the Magic Keyboard is far superior to that of the Smart Keyboard. I mean, of course it is. This is a real keyboard. With backlights. And it’s not some plastic-wrapped thingamajig. But with my 11-inch iPad, the keyboard does feel more cramped. I have typos galore, and I am having a hard time adjusting to the way that the iPad itself sort-of blocks access to the top row of number keys.
And the trackpad. This. This thing is quikly becoming so nice and useful and something I may never be able to go back to even though it is still early adoption within iPadOS and many of the apps. (Things 3 in particular really shines with it’s keyboard and trackpad support.)
I know there are many more iPad apps that will be supporting trackpad and keyboard support. And I bet we’re going to see an increase in professional-grade apps as well. So that’s another way this keyboard will be improving the iPad experience.
Down the road when our lives begin to return to some sort of normal, and travel is something that we can do again, the iPad Magic Keyboard will be the ideal travel accessory for the iPad Pro.
But for now, it’s stuck with me here at home. And I have more thoughts and specifics that I may get into later about exactly how this Magic Keyboard works for me at home.
But! At the very least, this keyboard will be my new 6am writing companion.
And if it can help me write and create more on a daily basis then that is a huge win.
This past week I have been trying something new in the mornings.
We have 3 boys at home. And if I ever write a book on parenting it will have one chapter. And in that one chapter it will have one sentence. And the one sentence would be this:
“Buy an OK-To-Wake Clock.”
That’s it. That’d be the whole parenting book.
So this week, as I said, I have been trying something new.
I still wake up a little after 6am, which is when I normally wake up anyway. And that means I get an entire hour to myself before the boys wake up. (Thanks to their ok-to-wake clocks, they all stay in their rooms, quiet, until 7:15am. Every single day. (I know, right!?))
And I have been spending the first quiet hour of my day writing.
I wake up. Put on sweats. Make a cup of coffee. Sit down at the kitchen counter. And write for 30 or 45 minutes.
I’m here right now. The house is quiet. The sun is just beginning to rise. And there is the dim early morning light warming up the windows. And I am writing.
During the past month, I’d been noticing that I was struggling with my morning writing time. There are not one but two articles I am supposed to have already written for The Sweet Setup that are still in my drafts folder. And so I knew something needed to change.
During my work day, I have been more distracted — doing more busywork — than normal. I had to create a separate task list that is just all the “busywork ideas” I have. It’s a list of the little things I suddenly want to do around my house and around my office now that I am just here all day every day. And they’re all good things to do, but they also are distractions from what I need to be doing. (Writing it down on its own list helps me to stay focused.)
So, in order to combat my newfound work-from-home distractions, I’m trying a new writing routine to help me be more focused on this single most important task of the day.
Of course, all the “distraction talk” is not to say that my whole day has gone to the birds.
We Blancs are on day 35 of life and work and school from home. We certainly have our good days and our bad days. And in the midst of everything — the inside monotony and outside pressures of life — our routines have become all the more important.
A few things I have stayed vigilant with are:
Using routines and systems to make things easier on myself.
In another article I’ll have to write up the nitty gritty things of my routines and systems that have helped keep my day on track.
But first I want to share a “bigger idea”. Which is the simple idea of having big chunks of your day blocked out.
Here. Check this out.
It’s a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule.
This simple schedule of Benjamin Franklin’s has been an inspiration to me for years!
What I like is how open and simple it is. (And how he had “diversions” as part of his daily routine.)
If you look at it, you’ll see that he had only 6 blocks of time scheduled each day:
This, dear reader, is timeblocking. And it’s marvelously effective.
For my day, I have big “blocks” like what you see on Benjamin Franklin’s schedule. And I also will time block within those . . . mapping my day’s most important tasks to a time on my calendar.
Having a simple way to schedule your day can be especially important if you find yourself in the middle of a transition — such as trying to figure out how to work from home with additional distractions you wouldn’t have at the office.
Timeblocking can help you regain control of your day and make sure you are spending your time effectively on the things that are important.
I regularly come back to my own daily schedule to re-evaluate it and see if it is serving me as well as it should be.
Hence, this week’s early-morning writing experiment. I simply shifted around two blocks of time to see if it would improve my day. And it has!
Now, I don’t know if this is early wake and write will be my new normal. But it’s working right now and that is what matters.
One of the best new features in iPadOS has been the addition of the Today View on the iPad Home Screen.
There are a few reasons I like it. For one, it just looks better than the plain grid of icons. But, more importantly, the Today View improves the functionality of the first Home Screen by turning the Home Screen into a home base rather than just a spring board.
I have especially love having the iOS Shortcuts Widget right there on the Home Screen, allowing me to have one-tap actions and automations at my fingertips.
Now, by default, the order of the shortcuts that appear on your Shortcuts Widget are the same as those in your primary Shortcuts Library within the Shortcuts app. Showing all the Shortcuts that you’ve ever created and which were toggled to “Show in the Widget”.
If you find that you have too many shortcuts in your Home Screen Widget, it can be a bit overwhelming. You may realize you don’t need all those shortcuts to be right there all the time.
This is something that has bugged me for quite a while, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I just discovered the solution to it yesterday.
Fortunately, there is an easy — albeit somewhat hidden (at least, it was hidden to me) — way to edit and organize the shortcuts that are on your Home Screen Widget.
To edit and organize your Shortcuts Widget:
Then, at the bottom, you’ll see the option to “Customize in Shortcuts”.
Tap the “Customize in Shortcuts” button and you’ll be taken to the Shortcuts app with a special settings window that is specifically for the Shortcuts Widget.
From here you can now rearrange the order of the Shortcuts that are displayed in the Home Screen Widget and you can quickly select the check marks for which Shortcuts you do and do not want to show up in the widget.
I can’t remember the last time I used my iMac to edit a photo. All my photo editing happens on the iPad Pro.
The iPad is an ideal tool for perusing and editingyour photos. So, in a sense, picking the best photo editing app for the iPad is actually picking the best photo editing app, period.
Two other personal side-notes about Lightroom:
If you are using Lightroom, you should check out the presets that Rebecca Lily has to offer — they are fantastic. I have sets IV, V, and VI. As a long-time VSCO user, there are several bold and moody presets in Rebecca’s Pro Sets V and VI that I think are great.
Paying a few bucks a month for Lightroom cloud storage syncing and backup is worth the price alone to have a second layer of cloud backup for my entire Lightroom catalog.
This morning, over on The Sweet Setup, I published a pretty hefty guide to iOS Shortcuts.
Basically, there is so much you can do with the Shortcuts app on your iPhone and iPad — especially so with iOS 13 and iPadOS. And so I wanted to create a central spot for folks to grasp the the why behind why Shortcuts is so awesome, and then also have some clear next steps for how to start building shortcuts and automations of their own.
There are links to all sorts of incredible Shortcuts resources, including examples, Shortcuts libraries, and even stuff around home automation.
I’ve found that as people start to get familiar with how Shortcuts can help them, then they start having all sorts of light-bulb moments. (And no, that’s not a HomeKit joke, but it should have been.)
For example: The gym I go to makes its members keep and scan one of those small, plastic barcode keychain things whenever you check in at the front desk. And if you forget to bring yours then they charge you $1.
But… if you have a photo of the barcode card on your phone, then that works, too.
So I snapped a photo of the barcode card, dropped that photo into its own photo album on my iPhone, and then created a location-based automation Shortcut that gets the most recent photo from that album whenever I arrive at the gym.
Which means that now, when I am walking in the door of my gym, Shortcuts has automatically pulled up the photo I need for me. So simple, but also so handy.
Anyway, you should check out the iOS Shortcuts Guide here.
If you want to use your iPad more, GoodNotes is a tool you will want in your iPad tool belt.
As I’ve been sharing lately, I am using this app more and more — even as a full-on replacement for my physical notebook.
We just opened up doors for our brand-new GoodNotes course that also includes a slew of custom templates that I’ve designed. I think you might really enjoy using these, and even get a spark of inspiration for how you can use GoodNotes — and your iPad — more often.
A couple weeks ago I hosted my third annual Breckenridge mastermind retreat.
And I noticed something was different this year compared to the previous years: The most common note-taking tool was an iPad (with GoodNotes).
There were 11 of us there. And of the group:
Of the 6 on an iPad, only one had a 3rd-party keyboard (Brydge). The rest of us were using GoodNotes and an Apple Pencil.
