Tag Archive for: productivity

Purposeful Project Folder Structure

A wooden table filled with fresh ingredients, including leafy greens, asparagus, green beans, chives, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and herbs. Small bowls contain cheese, cream, and an egg. Jars of spices and seeds labeled "Sunflower," "Pumpkin," and "Paprika" are placed nearby. A yellow squeeze bottle, a green apple, and kitchen utensils are also present, suggesting a cooking or meal preparation setting.

Growing up, I spent countless hours recording Good Eats episodes for my mom to use in her high school cooking classes. Beyond the science and humor, one concept from the show profoundly influenced my approach to work: mise en place, which is the practice of getting everything in place before you begin.

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AppleScript for Creating Follow-up Tasks in Things

A macOS script editor window displays an AppleScript titled "Mark an Action Item as 'Waiting For'." The script automates task management in the Things 3 app by retrieving the current date, selecting to-dos, checking for selected tasks, and handling follow-ups. The code is color-coded, with keywords in blue, variables in green, and strings in purple. The interface includes standard toolbar icons and a description field at the bottom.

A major component of my job is asynchronously collaborating with other people, usually subject matter experts from whom I need to get additional information or content approval on something I have created.

All of my project templates have this approval process built in at the appropriate points. This creates a common challenge: the people I’m working with are often overworked or get appropriately distracted by dealing with some type of emergency at work, and reviewing a script for the trainer gets put on the back burner. So, tactful follow-up is a critical skill and often something I’m managing across multiple people and projects at the same time.

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Updated Evening AppleScript for Things

A task management app interface showing a to-do list titled "This Evening." One task is labeled "Feed Walle Dinner" with a reminder set for 18:00 (6:00 PM). The task has tags: "walle," "chore," and "evening." The task is part of the "Chores" group and repeats one day after completion. The background gradient transitions from orange to blue.

Improving existing solutions is a slippery slope for automators. You might improve things in a way that continues to save time and improve outcomes. But you might also be spending time rearranging apps in your Mac’s Dock to save milliseconds of mouse movement, only to realize you could have just used Alfred all along.

In this post, I share an improved automation for dealing with recurring tasks in Things that I think falls firmly on the side of worthwhile.

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rsync

A stylized illustration of a cheerful robot holding a stack of colorful folders in front of a large, open vault door. The robot has a blue and orange metallic body with glowing eyes. The scene is set in a futuristic archive with warm lighting and stacks of documents in the background, suggesting secure storage or organization.

When I first started learning photography, I used Aperture as my photo editor and management solution. But I was too dumb to use it right and accidentally deleted the only copy of many photos from the first years of my son’s life. Since then, I have been diligent, borderline fanatical, about having backup copies of family media and important files.

Determined to never repeat that mistake, I explored various tools for creating better backups. One of the most versatile tools I found is rsync, built right into macOS.

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AppleScript for Pulling Today’s Completed Tasks From Things

A screenshot of an AppleScript editor window titled "Pull Today's Completed Action Items from Things and Create a Day One Entry." The script is designed to retrieve completed tasks from the Things3 app and create a Day One journal entry. The script contains code to set the current date, format it in ISO 8601 format, initialize a list of completed tasks, and fetch tasks from the "Logbook" list. Syntax highlighting shows text in different colors: green for comments, blue for commands, and purple for logic conditions.

Balancing life’s necessary chores with meaningful progress toward our goals can be challenging, especially when greeted by an overflowing task list each morning.

To tackle this, I’ve been exploring ways to not just manage my tasks in Things but also to ensure I’m making real headway on projects that matter. In this post, I’ll show you how an AppleScript is helping me do just that.

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