Update on my New Year’s Resolution

Software
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In December I made a New Year’s Resolution, “Not Changing Apps—Want to Join Me?” I wrote: “This one may be difficult but after Dec. 31, I am resolved to stick with all of my existing apps for 12 months. As others have noted, “constantly changing apps can ultimately be counter-productive, a time sink, and expensive.”

This is my six month checkup and accountability. How am I doing? I am reporting as follows: Declared Default app as of Dec. 2018 / Current app. / Comment

  • Apple Mail / Apple Mail / Brief dalliance with Spark, back to default
  • Apple Notes / Apple Notes / Brief dalliance with Notability, back to default
  • Apple Calendar / Apple Calendar / Brief dalliance with Fantastical, back to default
  • Pages / No Change
  • Numbers / No Change
  • Keynote / No Change
  • Safari / / No Change / Brief dalliance with Chrome and Brave, back to default
  • OmniFocus / Dropped OF / Asana for teams; Reminders for personal projects
  • OmniOutliner / No Change
  • Mindnode / No Change
  • Drafts / No Change
  • Anylist / No Change
  • Ulysses / No Change
  • 1 Password / No Change
  • DevonThink / No Change
  • Google Enterprise and Drive / No Change
  • TextExpander / No Change
  • Copied / No Change
  • Overcast / No Change
  • Feedly / Dropped
  • Logos Platinum Bible Software / No Change
  • PDF Expert / No Change
  • Scanbot / No Change
  • VPN Express / No Change
  • Word and Excel only and if absolutely necessary / No Change

I short, I have kept my resolution except for dropping OmniFocus. I like OF, a lot. The problem is that it does not handle large-team oriented projects—which are the majority of what I have. And, I don’t need its features for personal projects—reminders—especially the upcoming upgrade—is sufficient.

I tried again to use Spark, Fantastical, Notability, Chrome and Brave. These apps are full featured and well designed but the integration is not as tight and seamless as Apple’s default apps. For my purposes, I have found that the tighter integration increases my productivity more than the extra features of the alternatives. Obviously, everyone’s use case will be different. I’ll report back in December!

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I was a little “hmmm…but…” when you first started doing this @Bmosbacker, but warming up to the idea of freezing the app portfolio for a year.

For a while I’ve been doing a similar thing – cancelling every subscription and keeping track of the end dates for the stub year. Then, at that time, assessing if I should renew. If I do renew, then I cancel it immediately after I renew it, so that at the end of that year if I’m not using the service, it just stops.

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I certainly don’t like to change apps ever, but I’ve been forced into some changes the past six months:

  • Change in Dropbox policies forced me to drop Dropbox, which also meant I had to change from an otherwise perfectly operating 1Password to a subscription of 1Password.

  • In preparation for Catalina I’ve got to change out from apps that won’t run and won’t be updated to run. The most serious of these is Aperture, so I’ve signed up for Lightroom and am learning to get along with it. A few video processing programs I use are also going off into the sunset – MPEG Screenclip being the primary one.