What are your Revised Workflows and Apps for the New Year?

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Many of us use the holiday season to reassess our workflows, apps, and to perform general system cleanup.

I’m curious to learn what others are planning to do in this regard.

As for me, I’ve decided to make a few relatively minor changes and to stay the course for the next 12 months.

What Remains the Same in App Selection

  • Apple Notes
  • Apple Calendar
  • Reminders (see below)
  • Apple Mail
  • Safari
  • Drafts
  • Ulysses (see below)
  • Pages
  • DEVONthink

What Changes

  • I am going to use Reminders and OmniFocus simultaneously until I am certain as to the best app for my needs. OF 4 was a free upgrade for me. Given the massive overhaul, I believe it deserves a good trial on my part.
  • Though I dislike subscriptions, I’m returning to MindNode from iThoughts. iThoughts is powerful but clunky to use.
  • I’ve reinstalled Alfred
  • In addition to Ulysses, I’m using Scrivener. My writing apps will be used as follows:
    • Scrivener: book project only
    • Ulysses: all other writing
    • Pages: for formal reports and documents for submission to others, e.g., board of directors
  • CleanMyMacX for general computer maintenance

In short, I’m making a few minor changes, nothing significant.

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I’ve been on a continuous mission to simplify. Call it “More Power through Simplification”. If multiple apps do the same thing, just pick one.

So this year I got rid of Text Expander moving its substitution feature into my already heavily used (and non-subscription) Alfred. I also got rid of Parallels running Windows VMs for Virtual Box, which I was using already for Linux VMs.

I’m trying to make better use of Notes/Reminders/Calendar for which there is a surprising amount of functional overlap. I’d like to get rid of OmniFocus, which has become overkill, again since I retired. Frankly I think it can be replaced by Reminders and Calendar.

I’ve always believed that storage is cheap so rather than throwing out my “digital assets” I’ve kept them. Finding things when one is a digital hoarder can be tough, and it sure helped when I went to the Mac from Windows. But this year, actually this month, and with the forgetfulness of age, I decided to get DEVONthink Pro and Mac Sparky’s Field Guide for it. So far it is working out well, although I haven’t devoted much time to it yet.

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The tools I am using:

Note taking / task management

Mainly use Apple Notes for note taking, task management and drafts whenever possible while reviewing Evernote, Bear 2.0, UpNote, iA Writer and Heptabase. Even though the search performance gets worse since iOS 17 and locked database (official export only possible on Apple website and Mac), I still go back to AN.

As I just need causal writing to help me think and do things better. I don’t need advanced writing apps like iA Writer. Yes owning my assets for portability is important but I really need an app to integrate my note taking into life. Life is more important than documents. Apple Notes is doing the job.

I also use stock Reminders and Calendar more and more not limited to causal reminders or some events. Especially when I can add a note link to Reminders and there has been column view since iOS 17.

Journal since iOS 17.2 has been the new app but currently I just write due to its suggestions. I still write something causal on Apple Notes.

  • Apple Notes
  • Reminders
  • Calendar
  • Journal

Graphic

This year I decided to purchase Affinity suite for publishing zines or other graphic design stuff. At the same time I will keep using Pixelmator Pro for quick edit.

Procreate is my digital sketching app for complicated drawings, while Freeform is being used for photos reference.

Update: Freeform has just become my sketching app on the go (fingers with iPhone) since today because of vector and zoom.

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  • Affinity Designer
  • Affinity Publisher
  • Affinity Photo
  • Pixelmator Pro
  • Procreate
  • Freeform

Photo organization and management

Remains unchanged using Apple Photos.

  • Apple Photos

Internet, entertainment, workout and security

Safari remains my only browser because of iCloud+ Private Relay and Apple Pay. It is not a perfect and I even prefer Chrome’s UI, but Safari overall is not bad so I don’t urge for switching to the best.

Apple Music and MUBI GO are my entertainment apps. I prefer Apple because of cheaper yearly cost compared to Spotify and the singing mode so that Karaoke is possible! MUBI is something like Netflix but with MUBI GO plan I can have a free ticket to any specific cinemas for good movies curated every week.

Finally I use iCloud Keychain most of the time but there is a question still unanswered whether I should use 1Password and avoid iCloud for password management. Should I worry about the issue related to iPhone passcode? Will iOS 17.3 mean I can safely use iCloud without third party subscription? (at this moment I don’t consider other apps like Strongbox)

  • Safari
  • 1Password or iCloud Keychain?
  • Apple Music
  • MUBI GO
  • Strava
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I never thought to do an annual review of the apps I’m using, but sounds like a useful exercise.

  • Obsidian - I use this for all note taking and project planning
  • iA Writer - most of the time the note starts off here, then I organize and tweak it in Obsidian.
  • Apple Notes - for a few specific notes I want to share with others, plus for scanning paper documents
  • Things - my task manager for many years now, I’ve tried other apps, but always return to this one which has the perfect balance of features without the bloat of apps like Omnifocus
  • Day One - back to keeping a daily journal, streak up to 56 days
  • Reminders - for specific lists I want to share, such as Groceries
  • Calendar - I do time block planning using Apple’s calendar
  • Pages - for the few times I want to create a document to share with others
  • Numbers - my spreadsheet of choice now, used it to collaborate on a party with my brothers, it worked really well for that.
  • VS Code - for most of my development work, Python, C++, shell scripts, etc
  • iTerm2 - a better terminal app than the built-in Terminal
  • Apple Classical - most of my classical music listening has shifted to this
  • Spotify - everything that isn’t classical
  • Kindle - for most books I read these days
  • PDF Expert - for reading and annotating most PDFs
  • ESPN - for keeping up with Sports
  • Bloomberg - for keeping up with News and the markets

That is a list of the apps that I use every day to do most of my work. After reviewing all of these apps there isn’t anything I’d change at the moment.

Some apps I’ve tried recently, but rejected as a replacement:

  • The Athletic for sports, it has good coverage, but hard to beat ESPN which with ESPN+ has a lot of actual sporting events that the Athletic doesn’t have at all
  • Apple Journal - I like the suggestions, but compared to Day One it is just a toy. Having decades of content in Day One any app will have to blow me away to want to switch. Journal is far from that, but probably good for someone to get started before graduating to another app like Day One.
  • Apple News - too expensive (recent price increase) and missing key periodicals
  • Obsidian - mobile app is not great, but hardly anything else has the desktop features that make me stick with Obsidian. Having plain text markdown files is a must for me to keep all my notes and Obsidian handles this the best. iA Writer mobile is much better than Obsidian, but doesn’t have the organization features of Obsidian, so not really a replacement.
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I’m still using Things for task management. I switched from Omnifocus years ago, and had a brief detour into Todoist, but Things works the way my brain works, and keeps me focused on managing my tasks instead of managing my task management app (that was fun for me many years, but no longer).

I’m still using DEVONthink as my information repository, so no change there in years.

The big change for me is in my daily note taking app. For years, I used Drafts. I still use Drafts for transient quick capture, but for my daily notes, I switched a few months ago to Obsidian (my second kicking of the Obsidian tires), and in the last few weeks I’ve switched again, this time trying to bring that into DEVONthink. A recent MPU guest (I think with Kourosh Dini) discussed how he used DEVONthink for note taking, and that he tweaked the text settings to make it suitable for note taking. I’m finding it works well. I like that it is Mac and iOS/iPadOS native, and supports wiki links. It has Shortcuts support on iOS, and AppleScript support on the Mac.

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