If It's Not a Hell Yes, It's a Hell No

If It’s Not a Hell Yes, It’s a Hell No

With Christmas now a passing memory, I’m hoping that my wallet can recover from the open heart surgery it experienced towards the end of last year. It’s certainly an expensive time when you have a young family - although the rewards trump the cost by a significant factor. 

I’ve found that when I spend money on others, a net result of this is a change in attitude regarding how I spend money on myself. There’s only a finite pool of cash that I can spend, so at times when my loved ones are the focus of my expenditure, I have to be ruthless when it comes to spending on myself. In fact, I’ve learned to adopt a strict strategy when it comes to buying something I like. I ask myself a simple question. 

“Do I 100% want/need this? Is it a Hell Yes?”

If it’s a Yes, then I’ll make the purchase. I trust my thought process enough to answer honestly. More often than not, however, the answer is No (In fact I’d say that 95% of the time, it’s a No!). 

I love this way of managing my purchases. It means I have to be ruthless with the money resources I have available and it allows me to make the best use of them that I can. 

So - why is a productivity guy talking about money management? Well, I quickly realised that this approach doesn’t have to be used solely for my finances. There is another resource that needs closely monitoring to make sure it’s utilized effectively and that’s my calendar. 

If I spend a little too much money in a month, then by hook or by crook, I can find ways of replenishing the pot - whether it’s by working extra hours, selling household items that are no longer needed - the bottom line is, there is a way of redressing the balance. Can I do this with my calendar? No chance! When the time is gone, it’s not coming back. This means that I need to be every bit as protective of my calendar as I would my bank account. 

This allows me to adopt the Productivity NInja characteristic of Ruthlessness when looking at Projects I have available and requests for my time. I ask myself a simple question. 

“Do I 100% want/need to do this? Is it a Hell Yes?”

If the answer is yes, it goes into Omnifocus as an Active Project and I schedule the necessary time in my calendar to work on the next actions for it. The same approach goes for meeting requests - If I’m 100% required to be at the meeting, then I attend happily. Otherwise, I make a point of requesting the meeting minutes as soon as it’s complete and picking up any relevant actions (which as I’m not at the meeting, is an infrequent occurrence - double win!). 

There are so many demands being placed on us within this Information Age that we live in. We’re all connected, our brains are being overwhelmed with the stuff of life and we need to adopt a ruthless approach if we are going to protect the resources that are dear to us. We don’t give people open access to our wallets - we shouldn’t do the same with our attention.

Protect your attention. Be Ruthless. 

When you create your magic and perform superbly at the office and home, everyone will thank you for it.

How To: Use your iOS Keyboard Like A Boss - 10 Tips

For iOS owners out there, the keyboard is possibly the function that is used the most. It’s central to the vast majority of applications that we use. Whilst dictation is improving rapidly, we’re not at the stage yet, either functionally or socially, where it’s use outweighs the humble keyboard - so it’s a good idea to make sure we’re using it as efficiently as possible. 

Below are some quick tips that you can use to level up your keyboard skills:

1 - Long Press Keys for More Characters - by default, the currency icon on display in the UK is the £ symbol. If you tap and hold on this, you’ll see a list of others you can quickly access. There are other keys that this works with too. Typing a word that needs an acute accent on an e? Tap and hold on the e and you’ll see the é you need.

2 - Reveal the Cursor - if you have a 3D Touch enabled phone, this is a doozy. Force touch on the keyboard and you’ll see a cursor appear - use your finger as a trackpad to move the cursor and perform the edits you need quickly and efficiently.

If you have an iPad, a similar effect can be had by swiping with two fingers when the keyboard is open to move the cursor. 

3 - Caps Lock - there is no Caps Lock button on iOS, however, a double tap of the Shift key will activate it. You do need to enable the function by toggling the Caps Lock setting in Settings -> General -> Keyboard

Another good tip here is that rather than tap Shift, press the key you want to capitalise and tap again, you can tap on the shift key and drag your finger across to the letter. When you release you can carry on typing and this saves some time. 

4 - Quick Numbers/Punctuation - in a similar vein to the above, you can save time when typing numbers and punctuation. If you just need a single number or punctuation symbol, tap on the 123 button and hold, dragging across to the desired key. When you release, the keyboard will be back to the default letters layout and you can continue unabated. I use this a lot. 

5 - Double Tap Space For Full Stop/Period - so simple it annoys me that this lay undiscovered for me for so long. A quick double tap of the space bar will show a full stop/period and save lots of time when carrying out longer form writing. 

6 - Fast Domain - when composing mail in the native Mail application (and Airmail I’ve recently found), if you are entering a recipient address and you long tap the full stop/period button, you will be presented with a list of common email suffixes.

7 - Text Replacement - whilst I am a keen user of TextExpander from Smile Software, you don’t HAVE to use it. There is a built-in Text Replacement service in iOS. Go to Settings -> General -> Text Replacement and enter some abbreviations for frequently typed expressions and you will improve our keyboard game.

8 - Shake To Undo - spent a while typing strings of text, only to accidentally delete it? A light shake of your phone will give you the option of undoing the last action you applied to your text entries. 

9 - Look Up Definitions - rather than use a third party dictionary application, you can long press on a word and choose the Look Up option.

10 - Enable Dictation - ok it's not perfect, however,  I find myself dictating far more often now with greater accuracy than ever before. It's especially good for quick-fire text messages. 

Public Groups with TextExpander

 

Back in the days before TextExpander went all cloud-based on us, there was a feature called Predefined Groups . These were groups of snippets built into the software with their content pre-loaded. We had groups for AutoCorrect, Symbols, Internet Productivity amongst others. 

Now that TextExpander has provided the ability to access our snippets from a web interface, the potential for these Predefined Groups has grown. Now, they have evolved into Public Groups, a far more scalable and accessible solution. 

Public Groups are, at their core, groups of snippets shared by TextExpander users. They have consciously made these groups publicly accessible and there are some great ones available. Here is the universal way to find them:

1) Log into your TextExpander account via a Web Browser

2) On the Snippet Groups page, select Add Public Group

3) Here, you can scroll through the page to find the groups that you wish to add. When you find the group that you wish to add, click Subscribe. A new page will appear with one further box - Subscribe To Group. Click this and you are off to the races. You can view the contents of this group from the web interface, or from your locally installed application. 

In this example, I’ve added the group Accented Words by Jean McDonald. While adding accents to characters is a relatively easy process on macOS (simply hold down the key for a second and a list of accents appears on screen), remembering which ones form the word correctly is not so easy. This is a great group to have!

It’s important to note that you cannot make changes to a Public Group, although you probably worked that one out already, being the astute reader that you are. You can, however, Duplicate the group so that a copy of the snippet group appears in your own personal snippet library. From here, you can use the Public Group as a base and add your own snippets as you wish. Any changes made to the Public Group by the owner won’t reflect in this duplicate you have created. 

Creating Your Own Public Group

You may have a set of snippets that you have lovingly curated and you wish to share with the wider public or members of your own team. This is an easy process, as you would expect. We’ll run this example from the web interface once more. 

1) Log into your TextExpander account via a Web Browser

2) Click on the Group that you wish to share

3) Click on the Sharing tab and towards the bottom of the screen you will see a section called Public Sharing. Check the radio button called URL Sharing and then click Publish In Public Groups.

4) The resulting window allows you to change the Title, Author, Category (General, AutoCorrect, Symbols, Internet or Medical) and specify whether you have the legal rights to publish the groups content. 

Once this is complete, the request is sent to the team at Smile Software for review. If rejected, contact them and ask what actions need to be completed to remedy this. They are a great team and will help all they can.

There we have it, a brief overview of Public Groups but certainly enough to get you started.

Creating Custom Searches with Alfred

 

I use Alfred for a lot of different things. It’s an app launcher, a currency converter, dictionary, calculator - in short, I try to use it as my shortcut for anything and everything that I do on my Mac. 

One great feature is the ability to search for content on different websites directly from the Alfred input bar. All I have to do is type in google or imdb followed by the search criteria and Alfred is able to invoke those searches, all from a compact and hassle-free interface. 

There are lots of default sites and services searchable by default, easily accessible by opening Alfred Preferences -> Features -> Web Search (see the below screenshot for the list). As you can see, the most common sites are certainly taken care of. There are occasions, however, when I want to search for content within a different site. My own is a great example! Am I able to configure an Alfred search workflow to trawl for content on a custom site? 

You bet you can! 

Here’s how:

1 - Identify the Search URL

Before I can configure a custom search, I need to know how my site handles search queries. The easiest way to do this is to navigate to my site and carry out a search. I have a search text entry field on my home page, so entering omnifocus as my search criteria took me to the following URL:

http://www.myproductivemac.com/search?q=omnifocus

Dropping the Omnifocus from the end gives me the custom search URL in use on my site. I need to take that and enter this in Alfred. 

2 - Add Custom Search

Go to Alfred Preferences -> Features -> Web Search and in the bottom right-hand corner, click the option to Add Custom Search

In the resulting pop-up box, enter the Custom Search URL retrieved earlier into the first field. Fill in the remaining fields, paying careful attention to the Keyword field. This is the abbreviation you will type in to invoke the search. This needs to be unique and memorable. MPM is easy for me, so I go with this. 

You can validate the search by clicking the Test button. If successful, it will navigate to the custom site.

It’s that simple! If you find yourself performing lots of searches in sites that are not listed in Alfred by default - such as forums, discussion sites, game reviews etc, this is a great shortcut.

Timezones with Alfred

I’ve been getting into some of the workflows that are available in Alfred on macOS. There are lots of small tasks that I carry out every day, involving several steps, or web-sites to visit. Everytime this happens, I perform a quick online search to see if there is a genius somewhere who has created an Alfred workflow already. 

I wrote about how I use Alfred as a currency converter a few months back. This time, I want to quickly show you how I use Alfred as a World Clock.

The more I find myself communicating with people overseas, I realise I need a quick and easy method for identifying the time in their part of the world. CarlosNZ is well-known in the Alfred community and has created a package called TimeZones and here is a quick-fire guide on how it works. 

1 - Browse to http://www.packal.org/workflow/timezones. 

2 - Click the Download link

3 - The package will download to your default download location. Double click on this .alfredworkflow file

4 - You will see a screen that offers a description of the workflow. You can assign a category if you wish (I use Tools for this particular one). Click Import to import the workflow into Alfred. 

5 - The last real stage is to assign a hotkey. This hotkey is the key combination you can type, irrespective of whether Alfred is open, in order to display the various timezones. Assign this hotkey by double clicking on the hotkey element on the far left of the workflow. The uppermost entry box is where you will define your preferred key combination. You can see I have chosen ctrl+z for this.

5 - The last real stage is to assign a hotkey. This hotkey is the key combination you can type, irrespective of whether Alfred is open, in order to display the various time zones. Assign this hotkey by double clicking on the hotkey element on the far left of the workflow. The uppermost entry box is where you will define your preferred key combination. You can see I have chosen ctrl+z for this.

6 - You can configure extra time zones by invoking Alfred and typing timez (short for timezones). You will see there three options available to you for further configuration.

     - You can add a new city to the list. Type the name of the city and Alfred will go away, find the city and add it to your configuration file.

     - Update All Timezone info online - I haven’t had to do this at any point yet. There are a couple of times where I’ve felt I should do (namely because I hadn’t before!) yet when I run it, it merely reports that all OK and there were zero changes made.

     - Move Timezone list - you can change the default location of your timezone list if you wish - not something I’ve ever done.

Using Timezones in easy. Either enter your hotkey or invoke Alfred and type tz and you will see a list of cities.

Entering the first character in the name of a city will filter the available names. Furthermore, you can find the name of almost any town/city in the world by simply typing in (name of city) (country).

Useful? I think so.