I found GoodTask today. Or re-found it, anyhow, because the App Store had the little cloud/down-arrow icon that told me I’ve downloaded it before at some point. It’s pretty much a skin for Reminders, but it’s a skin that gives me stuff I’d otherwise pay a lot for OmniFocus to do that instead costs $9.99 once, and it includes some affordances that make some of Reminders' more fussy UI gaps less fussy.
It promises “From Simple Checklists to Complex Project Management,” but I don’t really want a complex project management tool and need just a bit more than “simple checklists” and just a few more smart list options than Reminders provides.
Doing an inventory today, I realized how much I’ve allowed the language of projects to slip into my mental model. I don’t have “projects,” I have areas that occasionally involve things that have a couple of other things nested in them. When something gets so complex that it’s a project, there’s a staff program manager sitting right there who can help with wrangling the work streams.
GoodTask includes a Smart List feature that works close enough to OmniFocus’s Perspectives for my purposes: It took about two minutes to make a Big Dumb List of date-sorted tasks in my Work group. If all hell broke loose and GoodTask stopped working tomorrow, it’d sort of suck but it separates its organizational metadata from Reminders' enough that the real fallout would be “well, I need to drag some of these groups I made into new Groups in Reminders.”
It also lets you tell it to leave some lists in Reminders out of its reckoning. I have a few shoebox lists that just gather recommendations, items of passing curiosity, to-read, to-watch, etc. I don’t want them in a tool I’m using to manage things I have to actually do, so GoodTask hides them for me.
This is all coming after a reorg I did with my group at work. I’ve got historical reasons to be a little averse to reorgs, but this was one of those times where I was watching managers tripping over each other to get capacity for their projects, unpleasant “everybody in the org is at the same meeting” experiences, and a realization two-and-a-half years into this place how few professional development opportunities we’d made for people. So we spent a month as a management team, talking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and how we could think beyond “this team is full of people who do this kind of work, and that team is full of people who do that kind of work.”
And for me, I felt mired in the day-to-day of the managers under me, trying to sort out what went where and playing a glue role all the time to hold us together at one level, with no room to figure out new levels.
Shifting from a very rigidly functional structure to a delivery-oriented structure is creating some definite short-term pain. We inventoried all the things we’re doing and decided that we could allow one particular kind of work to be much more distributed in order to concentrate management attention on other kinds. That distributed work needs some supporting rituals and routines to keep on track.
But for all the short-term tradeoff pain we’re dealing with, I came out of the planning cycle for next year with sign-off to build a new program and a new governance structure, and with a mandate to add a role that seemed out of the question a month ago. I have to refine my model of what I think work is.
Well, the Activation Lock thing resolved easily overnight and I’ve got this Mac mini M4 Pro in place now. Now I need to decide how bananas minimalist I want to get with my desk.
I changed my iCloud account address after I bought a Mac Studio. I was just now trying to deactivate and wipe the it for trade-in & the helper app won’t complete without the password for a non-existent account. Ticket in to remove the Activation Lock, but I had to jump through hoops to file it.
I just turned Center Stage on with a new machine. A coworker said it was giving her motion sickness, which was weird because I’ve been using it around her for a week. Turns out the new machine was still Sequoia. Upgraded to Tahoe and it calmed down. Less “rocking boat” effect.
If I had the patience to do this I probably would, but I “sacrificed” a Magic Keyboard using industrial strength hook-n-loop tape on the underside of my desk. I’d pay for a standalone device, though.
Snap. I got my way on a couple of things and suddenly have a backlog of stuff I deferred while I sat around waiting to see if I’d win + new things. Apple Reminders is not going to cut it. Took a look & the OmniFocus sub I canceled runs out tomorrow. Gotta dig out my Things/OF bake-off notes.
I wonder at what point all the costs of commodified housing – administrative overhead, NGO inefficiency, cost of mental health and addiction services, damage to the tax base, or cost of shelters – make our conviction that the market is the answer sorta fall apart.
Al & I took the Green line downtown for breakfast at Grits n' Gravy, then we walked up to Slabtown then down through the Alphabet District. I took the OM-3 with the 17mm/f1.8 II. Weird that after nine years of shooting with X100s/Fujifilm, the OM feels closer to natural after just a few months.
“The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground.”
— Chögyam Trungpa
I’m going to keep this first part short:
I got my first account on a Unix machine some time around 1991 or 1992. Up until that year I’d almost solely used 8-bit computers at home, but had some experience using a DEC PDP-11 in college to work on the school newspaper.
“Unix” became my home environment – the place I wanted to be regardless of what I had to use. I was a little late to Linux, finally getting it installed on a machine in ‘95 or ‘96. I lucked into a freelance gig where I could write about Linux. I co-authored a book about Linux. I got some gigs helping complete books about Linux during the heyday of tech books, when Borders or Barnes and Noble had large tech sections. There are a lot of people in the world who read my chapters on how to use the command line in Linux. If they didn’t read about it in the original edition of a doorstop-sized “Unleashed” book I contributed to, which I think was about Red Hat, then they read the mildly revised editions for other distros.
“UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance.
“Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.
“At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.”
Like a lot of people, I ended up migrating to Macs once OS X came out, but I did so because there was Unix in there somewhere.
But today I don’t live in a work world where it’s a meaningful skill set. I spend a lot of time making decks and working on documents. I use a lot of browser-based SaaS for work. There’s pretty much nothing to script at work, and when I do spot things where I could, the right play is invariably to drop a few suggestions about how to best write that script to the person I’m paying to do that.
I’ve worked on a few personal projects over the past few years that were meant to help me keep my hand in: TUI apps, a CLI interface to the SmugMug and flickr APIs, etc.
But I have also had to admit those projects haven’t been particularly sticky, even though I spent a lot of time making sure they mapped to my sense of How Things Should Be, because a command line/shell orientation makes less and less sense to me. There’s friction getting things in and out of a shell environment when so much of the work you have to do doesn’t live in there. And once you start cobbling together tools that might let you live in both worlds, you’re in a UI wild west, with myriad configuration conventions and differing ideas about ergonomics.
It has not been easy on the ego to slowly transition out of that Unix orientation. I have the career I have because of that first account on an Ultrix box and years spent in and out of the Unix and Linux orbit as a writer, sysadmin, web developer, consultant, and manager. It has been almost as much a cultural identity as a skill set, and possibly more.
But it also feels increasingly awkward and shoehorned into my day-to-day life, and clinging to it bothers me because I’m at a stage of life where I want to be less set in my ways, not more. I think about how to maintain my fundamental plasticity as a matter of aging gracefully, remaining a learner, and embracing the ways the culture around me is changing in ways I’m not always chill with, but need to accept.
As hard as it is to set aside or let go of something that was such a big part of my life, though, it’s also nice to lose that sense of obligation to a past self who’s indifferent to my present self.
