2018 has been a bumpy road, and there are a few things I want to write as a recap on the year. After talking about reading the Bible in a year, I wanted to focus on three apps that I’d tried previously or owned but wasn’t making very good use of.

Day One

I’d picked up Day One for the Mac back at the end of 2016, but I didn’t really get into it (or ever pick it up for iOS). When they went to a subscription model I originally wrote it off entirely. It was a post over on The Sweet Setup that showed me the role Day One could play in my digital life. To summarize his article, momentos, cards, and letters are easily preserved in Day One as memories, in addition to traditional journaling. I’ve also enjoyed using it to keep track of my life through my first year teaching and things happening on the personal side.

It’s still a bit hard to justify the subscription price, but I look forward to one day being able to print these journals, likely for my kids.

Drafts

I’d heard the Mac Power Users go on about Drafts quite a bit, and tried it myself without it really sticking. It was generally just a substitute for my OmniFocus inbox that wouldn’t get processed. With the release of Drafts 5, things started clicking much better. It wasn’t any specific feature contained within Drafts 5 (though I’m getting great use of Workspaces for literal drafts of things I write), but it inspired me to make other tweaks in my workflow (including adding Bear). Until I upgraded some of my hardware, it also served as a better dumping ground for OmniFocus tasks where I otherwise might let things slip, as well as recording things that would eventually go to Day One or other destinations. It does take a bit of added time to process down my inbox in Drafts, but it allows me to make sure everything really does get captured.

My hardware upgrades in 2018 allowed for Drafts to become even more supercharged though. As a method of capture, speaking into it on my Apple Watch is generally the fastest and most accessible thing I have access to. And I don’t have to be concerned about finding its fit in OmniFocus right away (lots of things wind up getting added to an existing Bear note or just getting put straight into its destination, like an email, from Drafts). Drafts also launched its beta Mac version this year. This makes it that much more versatile of a writing environment. Actions aren’t a part of the Mac app yet, so processing Drafts on the Mac is a bit clumsier than it is on iOS, but it’s freeing having all of my text accessible on the Mac.

Drafts works for me much better than the sticky note systems I see my fellow teachers using. As I process things down, I feel like I’m truly clearing clutter from my life. And as I continue to stress my OmniFocus system, it’s a major bonus being able to separate capture from my OmniFocus inbox many days. Now that it is free to use the basic version, it’s worth a try for anyone who makes major use of iOS.

TextExpander

I’ve always been a fast typist, and the idea of paying for a service to save me time typing was really never attractive. I had a free year of TextExpander from a bundle I’d previously purchased, and I redeemed it this year to see if there was anything to it. For awhile, even with its snippet suggestions, I wasn’t getting very much value, but with the start of the school year I’ve finally found its niche. TextExpander is valuable for me not because of reducing characters typed, but in reducing the amount I’m thinking when writing.

First it was with snippets that format date for files (yyyy-mm-dd) and for the way I want it to appear on printed documents (mm/dd/yyyy). This saved me moving up to the number rows and the little bit of mental energy it took to think through my desired date format and the actual day in my menubar. But I was able to quickly branch out with fill-ins for sending cookie cutter emails (like emails regarding a new lesson book or a blurb at the end of an email explaining to the student that I’ve cc’d their parents). It’s not just having my words thought through ahead of time, but when I’m filling forms, the way multiple parts of a snippet can draw from a single field (e.g. if I properly set up a snippet, I can have a student’s name filled in everywhere I need it after I’ve typed it once). I sometimes feel a bit self-conscious about using these snippets when emailing parents, but I also know there’s no shame in trying to cut down on the number of hours I’m working right now. I spend a lot of time torturing myself over phrasing in emails home, and being able to reuse my own words where I can may allow me to have time in my life outside of work.

TextExpander and Drafts both allow for JavaScript to make actions more powerful, and if my life gets any less crazy in 2019, I’ll hopefully find the time to learn the skills necessary to make use of these features. On top of this, OmniJS is coming to OmniFocus (hopefully) in 2019, and there are a lot of things in OmniFocus I’d like to accomplish that I think this will enable. I’m not sure what the best way to learn JavaScript is solely for automation, but I picked up a great deal on m1m0, though practicing some of these early skills has been hard.