I’ve been doing something like this as my project list / big list, that I then pull a few things from onto my time block plan for the day. Rather like I believe David does with his Plotter.
Are you just copying this week to done every week?
I ended up moving all my email archives into Thunderbird and just converted over to using Thunderbird as my email client too. I’ve got over 128,000 stored emails in it right now. Search is fast and easy. If you do convert do it on small mailbox or set of files at a time and import and verify before moving to the next one. I had a couple of false starts by not understanding the process well enough. I ended up with several thousand duplicates that I had to manually clean out. Plus, Apple Mail cannot properly export much more than about 5000 emails at a time and 4000 is better.
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I’ve actually just set this up. I’ve set up all my mailboxes, am playing around with getting a ‘mid’ email link to open in Thunderbird from Things 3. Next step is to set up a local archive with backup and then try to import my email from DEVONthink.
Yes, I complete the task/project and copy to DONE. This gives me a good recap of my work accomplishments for the year.
You might want to take a peek at BetterBird, it’s Thunderbird with a lot of fixes.
What specifically has changed?
I’ve got some pain points with Thunderbird but none so far that are bad enough to have me looking at alternatives but you never know…
I can’t pin anything particular down, probably because I only ever dabbled with Thunderbird and never took to it. I looked when Apple trashed Mail and stopped MailTags from working and I wanted an email client that understood tagging. In the end I just waited until MailMaven came out.
Now I’m back in the market for good cross platform apps to get out from under the Apple/ Google/ Microsoft hegemony and BetterBird came up in my explorations. It “feels” better than Thunderbird was, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why. There is, however, a massive list of fixes in its release notes.
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Thanks for promoting this one - I’ve subscribed for a while, but somehow microsoft or spark decided this newsletter belonged in my spam folder.
That’s basically what I do.
In addition, I normally do clean installs on new devices, and when installing major upgrades. Then I only install apps that I use at least once a month. I do the same when faced with a problem I can’t fix in a reasonable length of time.
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I set up a few changes over the Christmas period.
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Swapped Fantastical for BusyCal. BusyCal is included in SetApp and the iOS app is a cheap one off purchase. The only feature its missing is one of the calendar views on iOS I prefer, otherwise they’re identical, except I save £60 a year.
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Cancelled my Strava Pro sub in exchange for Stats for Strava, a self-hosted stat dashboard.
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Am trying out Zotero for my reference material. I have a bunch of documents I’ve collected relating to my line of work that are good to refer to when writing articles. Unfortunately while browsing through these over Christmas I found that many of them, which I converted into markdown, have not converted correctly and half the article is missing. So my plan is to not bother with the markdown conversion and simply keep everything as PDFs (much as I hate them). This opens the door to PDF only apps. Zotero is my first port of call.
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Move my personal emails out of Apple Mail, now I just use it for my work accounts. I check my protonmail & gmail in the browser. Mainly to stop myself seeing work stuff while checking my personal emails at evenings and weekends. But also means I can cancel my protonmail sub, which is expensive if you only use it for proton bridge.
Wasn’t really aiming at reducing subscriptions, though I notice now that its definitely a theme. That’s a fair bit of money saved…
At the back end of last year I’d also added a few new bits to my workflow I intend to stuck with too.
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Noteplan for meeting notes - Comes with Setapp. This is one of those things I wish I’d realised years ago. It just attaches markdown meeting notes to your calendar items. Working largely from home, I have many ad-hoc meetings in the diary, where there aren’t formal papers, but I still want to take quick notes about them. I had been using either Devonthink or Drafts for this, but both require you to then organise your notes after the fact. This eliminates all that sorting.
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Nu - brilliant little app. Works like the templates folder in Keep It or Devonthink, but it works everywhere that you can drag and drop. You give it all the template documents you want, then whenever you invoke it with a keyboard shortcut, you can drag one of your templates over to the app you’re using. Its particularly useful for Word and Excel templates, since the built in method of setting templates in those apps is so godawful.
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Markedit - Probably been using this for more like 6 months to be fair, but this is one of those apps where I can’t imagine I’d find something better. Has precisely everything I want from a markdown app and nothing I don’t want. Could have been designed just for me.
And I’m still looking for the following
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Task manager. Not sure what I’ll go with, but Omnifocus is too rigid, it makes basic things unnecessarily difficult, and its not cheap. It does some stuff really well, but not enough to say I’m particularly happy with it. Open to suggestions!
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Been wondering again about how to store my general reference material. Not research materials or formal work documents I need to store, just all those files and documents that I’ve probably finished with, but don’t want to delete on the off chance I’ll use them again. I might just put them in a folder and use HoudahSpot (what does that name even mean?) to find them again. At least that’s simple.
And a whole bunch of stuff that hasn’t changed, including ones that will be hard to ever beat like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hookmark, OpenIn, Hazel, Drafts, etc.
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I am almost ready to upgrade to Tahoe just to get this app. There’s been a Nu-shaped hole in my workflow since, oh, I don’t know, 1987. It’s been that many years and I still can’t bend Word to my will when it comes to templates. Thanks for the tip!
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I think I’m saying so long to MindNode. It’s aesthetically perfect. Curio’s mind map capability is stronger, particularly once I realized that every node in a Curio mind map gets a note attachment. I didn’t realize that at first.
It’s a very nice mindmap utility. I hesitate to cancel the subscription.
OmniOutliner is doing nice things for me, too. I’m not sure a mind map adds much more perspective than an outline. OO’s Javascript automation is pretty cool.
Since moving to a Filofax this December, it has become my primary “source of truth.” I use it for almost everything—including my calendar—only setting phone reminders for time-critical tasks.
My digital footprint is now lean, limited to Apple One, Pika Pods (for Actual Budget), and Google One for Gemini and Drive. While I initially tried Tinderbox, I’ve decided to drop the subscription. Between the steep learning curve of coding “agents” and the high cost of structured courses, the friction was too high. I felt some initial buyer’s remorse, but I’ve realized I’m simply not the target user for such a complex tool.
I am returning to The Archive for my commonplace notes. Treating each note as a physical index card fits my workflow perfectly.
However, I still need a dedicated tool for structuring complex work content. I am currently weighing two options:
- Curio: For a more visual, free-form “brain dump” approach.
- Bike Outliner: For a fluid, fast, and minimalist hierarchical structure.
My goal is to find a digital partner for my Filofax that helps me organize ideas without the overhead that made Tinderbox unsustainable.
As a side note, I also use Anki to help me learn important stuff. Although this one is free.
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Try Godspeed (it’s in SetApp, too). I’ve been on it for a year now and it’s the best task app I’ve ever had.
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How long have you been using Joplin. I had tried it about 2 years ago and it was a bit of a mess, but recently downloaded it and seem to like it. The iOS/iPad apps are much better, it seems to reliably sync with my home webdav server, and there is versioning.
I haven’t fully committed to switch out of apple notes, but may start using it for work notes (apple notes share feature is too convenient to use with family.)
Had a quick play and it seems excellent. One downside is that the Hookmark support is somewhat limited, so the Hook to New feature doesn’t work, which I use all the time. But I may be able to replicate it manually with Keyboard Maestro, so fingers crossed that’ll work.
Interesting; it’s my most prized app, helps automate a lot of things, large and small.
A few examples:
- When I open Preview, always automatically make the Markup tools available
- When I open app “X”, always make it full screen
- When I type “todayy”, insert date in ISO format
- When I press Ctrl-G, open Google Chrome
- When I press Ctrl-S, open Safari
- Convert a video to 1.25x speed
- Capture a Safari tab and add the URL to the file
Saves me a lot of time
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Interesting list. Of those the only thing that I do is insert the date in the format I want and I use Typinator for all those substitution things. I have a bunch of them but it seems overkill to use KM to do that.
The other stuff is stuff I wouldn’t want to do.
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Keyboard maestro is a slow burner. There’s lots of things you can do in other apps or other ways, but over time you find more and more things that nothing else can do, until eventually it ends up being easier to make it central to your automation.
Some examples of stuff I use it for
- Open an app and go straight to search
- Replace keyboard shortcuts in apps with different ones I prefer
- Add keyboard shortcuts to apps that don’t have them
- Take the currently selected file in Forklist, open it in Finder, then copy the OneDrive link to the file
- Paste on websites that don’t let you usually paste (like my business bank)
- Show a list of shortcuts to click in excel and word for obscure menu items buried in places I can never remember
- Add a list of items to the clipboard ready for sequential pasting
- Monitor the clipboard and convert certain plain links to Markdown links
- Check Out a file on the Sharepoint website by clicking the mouse for me in the right places
- Make a folder in the file system with a set of templates in it, all labelled with the current financial quarter
And so on and so forth. All specific little itches it can scratch.
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I can appreciate that for your list but nothing on that list is something I do or want to do. I think that’s why KM has never “stuck” for me. I don’t typically do the things that it’s good at automating.
The only 2 things on your list I have used is replace keyboard shortcuts and add keyboard shortcuts. But only in Obsidian and the option to replace them there is built in.