I just did nearly four months on a job that required me to use Windows.
For most of my career, I’ve mixed work and personal use on a single computer, but at my job-before-last that was a source of stress for me, so instead this time around I decided to keep work and personal use separate.
In practice, that meant using Microsoft OneDrive to store all my work documents, which I was then able to access from my Mac. But I seldom used that access. I worked 100% from a home office. I did work on Windows, and my Windows laptop was side-by-side on my home office desk with the MacBook.
I tried a couple of KVM switches but I was never able to get them to work reliably. Instead, I just switched the cable between computers when I wanted to switch which computers I used. I also have a Logitech multi-device trackball and keyboard. The Logitech hardware comes with software that supposedly allows you to slide the mouse pointer between machines, and the keyboard and mouse focus will follow. I found that software was unreliable. But the hardware has switches that are easy to toggle. So that was a good solution.
I also used my personal iPhone to access work email, Teams, and calendar. The job required me to install Microsoft device-management software on my iPhone. I hesitated about that for a bit but then said to myself, sure, why not? I’m already trusting the employer with a lot more than my iPhone. And indeed there as no problem; when I left the job I uninstalled the Microsoft MDM software from my iPhone and got on with things.
I used Outlook for email and calendar.
Regarding finding open times to meet: Outlook has a fantastic feature called “schedule assistant.” You can see which times are available on another person’s calendar, and just drop in an appointment. Works for group meetings too. At the company where I used windows, people just dropped appointments on other people’s calendars without even talking with them first. At first that sounds rude, but in fact it’s fantastic. Workplace etiquette was that the recipient of the invitation could feel free to ask for clarification or reschedule if the time was inconvenient. Completely eliminates the back-and-forth in email about finding mutually convenient times. So: No need for Fantastical.
For note taking, I tried OneNote but didn’t like it as much as Obsidian. So I went with Obsidian. That worked well. I use a lot of Microsoft Office documents in my career, and Obsidian plays well with those. You can’t edit the documents within Obsidian, but you can manage and open them.
I never found a task management solution I was happy with. Microsoft Tasks was too basic for me. I went with TickTick, but didn’t love it. Todoist is better, except for one feature that I find essential–in a filter view, I need to be able to manually reorder tasks. Ticktick lets you do that, and Todoist does not. When I left the job that requires Windows, I gratefully went back to Apple Reminders.
(I have lately become persuaded by Carl Pullein’s advice that you should stop using your task manager as a project manager, so nowadays if a project is too complicated to manage in Reminders, I put the task list in Obsidian, and simply have “Work on Project X” as a task in Reminders. I’m not rigorous about this–I’m embracing sloppiness in my task management system.
I started a topic on using Windows when I took the job in September.