I can’t remember your initial resolution. Did you “test drive” any apps this year?
I linked to the original resolution in my post above. Yes, I did for several reasons try a few other apps. One of them was Notability because of all of the syncing problems I was having with Apple notes after upgrading to iOS 13. However, fortunately, the syncing problem with Apple notes has been resolved. Otherwise, I made a firm point of staying with the apps that I had listed in my original resolution. It has proven to be beneficial to me and as I said above time saving and money saving.
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Thanks for sharing this and well done on you efforts (you get to go home early today! 
)
I’m interested in how this went mentally/emotionally. I can see some real benefits in not chopping and changing (as some people may do, I’m guessing… ) New shiny things have their initial dopamine hits but later cause anxiety because everything is spread across multiple apps.
Can you comment on mental clarity side of things?
Duh… Earth to neonate…
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried the same app over and over only to return to my original app. I admire that you stuck to this.
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“Duh… Earth to neonate” That made me laugh! 
I guess I’m getting tired of fiddling and just want to get my work done as quickly and easily as possible. 
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Thanks for the update, and I think you did better than me! I wasn’t too bad though:
I’ve gone back to Fantastical again, only because I like using it with Alfred to input items (it was finding I could write “cal todo…” to input reminders that clinched it).
A SetApp subscription led me into toying with PDFPen (and a few other apps), and although none of those stuck, I think the wavering should cost me a grade.
And, recently, I switched to Studio One from Logic. Now I’ve done it, the integration of Melodyne alone makes it a far better app for my needs… I’d known that before switching I would give myself a pass on this, but in honesty it was a rash decision!
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That is a good question. As I think about it there are several emotional/mental benefits for me (I obviously can’t speak for others).
- Fewer places to look and go to in order to find what I need and therefore fewer clicks—this reduces what I’ll call “background noise/stress”—the same reason I never watch cable “news”.
- I have fewer GUIs to deal with, fewer keyboard shortcuts to remember, fewer settings to set/reset, fewer app updates to deal with, fewer subscriptions., etc. All of this adds up to less mental energy, more time, and less expense. Thus, less background noise/stress.
- Overall, Apple’s default apps integrate better across platforms, have greater compatibility and results in fewer broken apps when the OS is updated. Again, less “stuff” to deal with not directly related to my productivity.
- It forces me to master the apps I use which in turn increases productivity.
I suppose this is an example of minimalism in the app ecosystem.
I hope that makes sense.
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I also dropped Feedly this year. Poor them! I like the company but couldn’t justify it.
Are you still doing RSS somehow? If so, what’s the setup?
No, I’ve decided that spending a lot of time on reading articles in readers of that sort is not the most productive use of my time. I’v decided to spend more time reading books related to my professional work as well as some of the great books of western literature. And of course I read the news and several periodicals. Obviously this is just my use case but apps like feedly was just one more thing to try to keep up with and probably not the best use of my time overall.
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I use borh Overcast and Apple Podcast with Carpplay, they both work fine.
Can you use Siri with Overcast in CarPlay?
Absolutely makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
We (I) can get caught up looking at how something new/different will improve our (my) lives or fill a specific gap. And I think the other factor is your last bullet point:
I need to spend some time of the holiday season sorting this stuff out too.
Thanks again
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It might depend on what you want to do but if you can set a Siri shortcut for an action in Overcast (Settings > Siri Shortcuts), you can call it by voice. There are a lot of available options:
As shown above, I have one set to resume playing whatever I was listening to in Overcast that I use in the vehicle a lot by shouting out “play Overcast.” Well, I used to use that a lot, but in iOS 13 I created an Automation in Shortcuts that fires when I plug into CarPlay since 99% of the time I want to listen to podcasts and with iOS’s whacky resume behavior you never know what will start playing when you plug-in:
Voice Boost and Smart Speed (also available in others, like Castro) are the reason I don’t simplify to the Podcasts app.
Thank you, that is very helpful and much appreciated! Have a blessed and Merry Christmas.
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If you try Siri tells you that Overcast hasn’t enabled support. However it’s easy enough to use via Carplay.
Thanks, I’lll give it try.
Do you work in iOS much (relative to using Alfred instead of TE)? Intriguing switch, but I’m in IOS a good deal and wondering how that change would work.
My use of iOS tends to vary but in general, I’m on my iPad Pro probably for 80% of my work in a given week. I have taken a two-fold approach to dealing with snippets on iOS. I have many text replacements in iOS that I can use for snippets 1- 3 sentences in length. For larger snippets, I copied them from TE and pasted into a series of Apple Notes. It only takes a few seconds to copy/paste these snippets into emails, etc. This works fine and is free.
Shortcuts arguably provides a nice alternative, too. You could build out complex expansions using text, menus, and Ask for Input and copy the result to the clipboard/paste into a target app.
Thanks for the tip, no doubt that can be done. But frankly that probably requires just as many clicks or more than merely copying the snippet from Apple notes and pasting it, which takes two clicks. And, most of my snippets are just several sentences to several paragraphs of text with blanks where I can insert the necessary information so I don’t need anything particularly complex.
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