Justin’s Favorite Productivity Apps — November 2018 Edition
In the last few months, my workflows and application choices have changed quite a bit as my needs as a business owner became more clear.
Without any further adieu, here are my favorite apps in my workflow as of November 2018.
Task Manager: OmniFocus
Oh the softwares you waffle on but ultimately need to come to grips with that this is the right one for you…
OmniFocus is exactly that in my workflow. Now that I’m 100% on a Mac for work, it’s much easier to justify going all in.
The killer feature for me? Recurring projects that complete and defer to another day based upon its completion. I utilize this feature so much with checklists and recurring projects that OmniFocus has ruined me for other task managers.
Note Taking: Apple Notes
If you read my topic on the Community about my note-taking app setup a while back, I had some convoluted ideas. Took no time at all actually using that system for me to realize it was a bad idea.
Now, all my notes are in Apple Notes. I don’t take all that many notes, to be honest, so Notes is a straightforward solution at this point. The benefit is my wife and I share some notes, so it makes things easy when we need to make changes to those as well.
Long-Form Writing: Ulysses
The two major contenders for long-form writing are Ulysses and Scrivener. I don’t do novel or long research writing, so Scrivener doesn’t make sense to me.
I love how Ulysses offers such flexibility in organizational capabilities. Groups, filters, and keywords make it dead simple to form whatever organization complexity I need.
Email: Apple Mail
I was trying out Mailmate earlier this year, and while I really enjoyed the software, I was finding I don’t really use many of the power features. I’ve used Airmail and Spark as well, but some of the quirks and bugs make it challenging for me to fully implement.
Thus, Apple Mail wins.
Planning: Paper
When I actually need to flesh out what I’m doing for the day or week, nothing beats paper. I remember things better when I write them on paper, so a benefit is I stay mentally focused better throughout the day.
My current favorite notebook? A Leuchtturm1917.
Idea Development: iThoughts
I recently jumped into the world of mind mapping. While it’s a bit overkill for smaller projects, using a mindmap to lay out the key areas of a project really helps me get my mind 😉 around it. I’ve found paper is good for dumping ideas out, but mind mapping helps me make sense of all of it.
Mindnode is an excellent contender in this space, even featuring OmniFocus integration. However, iThoughts is included in the SetApp subscription (which I’m a happy subscriber of), and while there are definite design differences between the two, iThoughts fits the bill nicely.
Web Development: Visual Studio Code
A nerdy entry on here, but an obligatory one considering my main form of work — web development. Code editors are plentiful these days, from Sublime Text to TextMate to Atom.
Surprisingly, my choice is Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. The software is fast, clean, and offers quite a few tricks up its sleeve to make development work faster and easier.
Automation (Mac): Keyboard Maestro
If there’s an app that’s ever fallen into the “Where have you been all my life?” category, it’s Keyboard Maestro. In just a few short months of use, I’ve already developed a significant number of keyboard shortcuts to do even the tiniest of tasks I find frustrating, including showing/hiding specific windows (which is a pain when doing web development and you have 20 of them open…) or closing notifications without touching the mouse.
If you want to get as deep as you can into macOS automation, Keyboard Maestro is for you.
Automation (iOS): Siri Shortcuts
Let’s be honest, Siri Shortcuts is the star of the year for Apple. Forget new iPad Pros, an updated Mac mini, and all the other new gear. Siri Shortcuts is probably the biggest game-changing piece of software Apple has released in recent memory.
The system integration alone makes toying around with Siri Shortcuts infinitely more valuable, let alone the developer APIs.
While I’m not as heavy of an iOS user like others out there, Siri Shortcuts found its place on my iPhone XS as a quick way to trigger actions from my home screen.
Up In the Air
No system is perfect, and at this time, I have a few areas I’m trying to work out.
Reference/Research
I’m currently using iCloud for most of my file storage and organization needs. It works, but Finder tags are not the most usable things in the world at any sense of scale (sorry Brett Terpstra).
This leaves me with two major viable options for reference and research: Evernote and DevonTHINK.
I’ve used Evernote in the past for this purpose, and it’s worked quite well; however, the lack of features the community asks for (for years) makes me hesitant to pay them a recurring subscription.
DevonTHINK is the option I haven’t tried all that well. I’m currently giving it a go as a productivity experiment and will report on the results of it in our monthly Pro newsletter. It may just be the option I’m looking for.
Oh email. I survey the landscape and it appears to be the land of 10,000 tradeoffs. My favorite iOS app, Dispatch, hasn’t had a meaningful update in years, and iOS Mail doesn’t cut the mustard with getting email into other systems easily.
Spark and Airmail are promising alternatives, but I haven’t connected with Spark’s design philosophy, and Airmail’s buggy nature makes me nervous. These are both great apps, but I haven’t been able to land on either long term.
Thus, I will probably stick with iOS Mail until an alternative comes out (can you say mashup of Dispatch and Airmail?).
Notes
I’m fairly satisfied with Apple Notes at this time with my low-volume note-taking. I do know, however, I’m going to hate the folder-only structure if I need to scale at all. This is why I’m holding onto Bear in my back pocket. It’s a solid app, supports Markdown (yay!), and is under constant development. I do lose the sharing support from Apple Notes, but in the long term, that may be a minor tradeoff. Changes may be coming, but not until they are necessary.