Revisiting my 2020 Year of Health

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Four years ago, I decided to make 2020 my year of health. I didn’t set out to complete specific goals like losing a certain amount of weight or work out a certain number of times a week. I just wanted to be a healthier person overall.

I had no idea that a pandemic would upend daily life as we knew it a few months into 2020, but the changes the pandemic brought, namely working from home, actually ended up helping me in my journey once I changed my expectations of what being a healthier person looked like.

Pre-pandemic, my “exercise” consisted of small things throughout the day like taking the stairs, parking further away, and taking a walk during my lunch break if the weather was nice. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Of course, those things all went away once I started working from home. Three months into my year of health, I found myself averaging a dismal 1 minute of exercise per day according to my Apple Watch. Needless to say, my year of health wasn’t off to the greatest start, and I knew something had to change.

I started by taking a page from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and set a small goal of adding one minute to my daily exercise average. It was around this time that I also signed up for a free trial with Apple Fitness + which gave me access to workouts I could do from home. This was still in the early days of Apple Fitness + where the back catalog wasn’t all that large, so I quickly worked through the cycling classes and found myself exploring the other types of workouts so that I wasn’t repeating workouts. I added strength, core, yoga and later Pilates to my weekly routine. Variety improved my fitness in general, but also kept things interesting and gave me options for when I wasn’t feeling a particular workout. Within a few weeks, I actually started to see myself as someone who not only worked out regularly but wanted to.

I’m happy to say that despite a number of curveballs in the years since, including a sprained ankle, an unexpected trip to the ER, and not one but two heart surgeries in 2022 along with several other hurdles in my personal life, I’ve stayed committed to my health. In 2023, I even managed a workout streak of 230 straight days, and I owe a big part of that to adding variety into my workouts (a tip I picked up from Stephen Guise’s Elastic Habits.)

For 2024, as part of my theme of investment, I’m returning to my original focus of just being a healthier person in general. While I spent 2023 focusing on maintaining a streak, I don’t really care about the numbers this year. I don’t want to beat myself up for missing a workout or adjusting my plans when I’m just not feeling it or life gets in the way. I just want to take care of my body.

As I write this, I’m currently averaging about 40 minutes of exercise a day – way up from the 1 minute I started with back in 2020.

Thanks to Apple Fitness’s new custom plan feature, I also no longer need to plan out my workouts in Things each Friday as part of my weekly review. Apple does that for me, and I only need to reconfigure my plan every few weeks once the existing one expires or I decide to change my routine. (Apple, if you’re listening, please let us reuse with the same routine but using new workouts and let us edit them.) 

Because I’m less focused on a daily workout streak, I tend to take Saturdays and Sundays off these days. Not wanting to decrease my overall time working out, during the week, I try to do some sort of workout in the afternoon, and then usually do another shorter workout in the afternoon. If I’m ever not feeling it though, I swap workouts or skip the evening workout. Right now, my current routine looks a bit something like this:

  • Mondays: 10 minutes of Core + 20 minutes of Upper Body Strength + 10-20 minutes of Yoga in the evening
  • Tuesdays: 30-45 minutes of Cycling + 10-20 minutes of Yoga in the evening
  • Wednesdays: 10 minutes of Core + 20 minutes of Lower Body Strength + 10-20 minutes of Yoga in the evening
  • Thursdays: 30-45 minutes of Cycling + 10-20 minutes of Yoga in the evening
  • Fridays: 30 minutes of Pilates or Total Body Strength and 20 minutes of Cycling
  • Saturdays: 30 minutes of HIIT (optional)
  • Sundays: 45 minutes of Yoga (optional)

In addition to Apple Fitness +, I am also using the app Gentler Streak to avoid pushing too hard. When I started using the app, I wasn’t fully convinced or listening when it told me to ease up, but after 4 months of using it, I have to admit, it’s been pretty spot on in warning me when I might need to ease up. If and when I’ve ignored the app’s suggestions to go “gentler”, I’ve realized the tell tale signs of burnout creeping up about a week later and find myself wanting or needing to take an even longer break. When I do listen to it, I notice my fitness improving.

Health and fitness these days is less about me wanting to look a certain way or meeting a certain goal. I try not to fret about missing a workout or needing to adjust my plan when life gets in the way. Instead, I focus on how regular activity or rather the lack of regular activity makes me feel. I start to feel disheveled and lazy in other areas of my life. I’m less productive. I drop the ball on chores. I snack more, and I find myself drawn towards sitting on the couch watching TV or scrolling Instagram. Much like I’ve discovered with productivity, fitness is not about trying to do the most all the time. It’s doing some form of activity, no matter how small, consistently that leads to sustainable progress.

2024 Yearly Theme & 2023 Recap

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Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Each year I like to post my theme for the year and give a bit of a recap of the previous year.

My theme for last year was slowing down, and if I’m being honest, I may have slowed down a little too much in the beginning. 2023 started off fairly rocky. Without getting too personal, I made some incredibly hard decisions to say goodbye to some fairly significant relationships in my life that were no longer serving me. As a result, I ended up also losing a fairly significant part of my social circle. Not having much to do with my free time, I decided to really focus on myself, and committed myself even more to working out regularly (even reaching a streak of 230 days of working out in a row), extending my 1 month sober challenge to 70 days, and meditating and journalling regularly. I also really took the time to figure out how I liked and wanted to spend my time, paying attention to my daily routines and saying learning to say no to things I just didn’t want to do.

After slowing down to a certain point, I started feeling like I had the capacity to rebuild my social life and actually found myself reaching out to people I’d lost touch with over the years. Rebuilding those connections ended up leading me to having one of the best birthday weekends I can remember, discovering what it means to have a truly supportive partner, and realizing my assumed fate of ending up as a lonely, crazy cat lady probably wasn’t all that accurate. 

2023 may have started off quite rocky, but I ended up checking off plenty of unexpected things on my 2023 bingo card and would even go as far as saying it turned out to be one of my favorite years.

Now onto 2024…

When I started thinking of a theme for 2024 back in October of last year, my initial thought was for it to be a year of gentleness. 

I often have a tendency to beat myself up for not giving my all to everything I do. If I can’t give something a 100%, I beat myself up for failing. A great example of this was the day I broke my 230 day workout streak. I focused on the fact that I broke my streak, when I should have been proud of myself, a person who just a year earlier described themselves as someone who didn’t work out, for going 230 days without missing a single workout. 

It wasn’t until I had a conversation with my therapist that I realized it’s okay and normal to not be performing at 100% all the time. I mean even on days that I’m at 75%, I’m probably doing more than most people. So what if I missed 1 workout, on my birthday weekend I might add. The important part wasn’t that I worked out for 230 straight days, but that I had developed a habit of working out consistently. I may have missed that 231st day, but I worked out for 99% of the last 231 days, and even more importantly, I got back to working out the next day because I missed the feeling of working out.

That being said, as much as I do want to be more gentle with my own expectations, something about the “year of gentleness” didn’t quite feel right.

Then, randomly one day, months later, I thought to myself, “What if this is the year of investment?”

As someone interested in the F.I.R.E. movement, I know that investing financially is a long game. It’s full of ups and downs, wins and losses. Life’s also kind of like that. Some days I have the energy and determination to go all out and other days I just want to sit on the couch and watch football. Some days I’m going to stay up late hanging out with friends and others I may be in bed with my Kindle by 9:30. Life has its ebbs and flows and being in one or the other doesn’t mean I’ve succeeded or failed. The important part is that the trajectory is going up over time.

So 2024 will be my year of investment and with that comes:

  • Continuing to invest in my health and wellbeing,
  • Continuing to invest in my knowledge and personal development,
  • Continuing to invest in my friendships and relationship,
  • Continuing to invest in my home and lifestyle, and obviously,
  • Continuing to invest in my journey to financial independence.

Here’s to another year! Happy 2024 everyone!

What’s on my Home Screen? (2023 Edition)

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Over the past year, I’ve received a handful of emails asking for an update on my home screen, and seeing as I haven’t posted on here in a while, I figured it would be a quite post to round out 2023, so here we go.

First things first, conceptually, I tend to think of my phone screens in three contexts:

  • The Today View (swiping left from the home screen or Lock Screen) is for actions and things I want to have quick access to.
  • The Home Screen is my status board for the day.
  • The second page of my Home Screen is for things I do regularly but don’t need or want on my main Home Screen.
  • In my dock, you’ll find Things, Safari, Messages, and of course, YNAB.
  • Everything else lives in the App Library which I honestly think needs work because half of my apps are miscategorized or shoved into Other. I usually ignore it entirely, and use search to find apps if they’re not accessible through a widget. Apple, if you’re listening, please let us override the pre-determined categories.

So let’s get started on what’s in each, starting with the Today View.

There’s really not much on this screen. I keep a widget for Waterminder so that I can quickly log anything I’m drinking throughout the day (or at least try to). I also keep a Battery widget and Screen Time widget.

Next up, the Home Screen.

Here I have two stacks. The first is based around the landscape of my day and contains Weather, my Fantastical, and my Today list in Things. The second is focused on my health and contains a handful of widgets that rotate throughout the day: Fitness, Hidrate, Waterminder, Lose It, Gentler Streak, Streaks, and another Fantastical widget limited to just my meal plan calendar.

Last but not least, my second page.

On my second screen, you’ll find an audio stack with a widget showing my podcast queue in Castro and a recent playlist widget for Spotify. Below that is widget stack I honestly just use to fill the space with useful and/or mindful insights. like daily and weekly insight widgets from Exist, the daily quote from Insight Timer, and the daily journal prompt from Day One. Rounding out the final slot is a Siri Suggestions widget, which I find does a fantastic job at showing my commonly used apps when I’m likely to be using them.

So there you have it, my 2023 Home Screen.

I’ll likely be taking off for a bit for the holidays, but I do plan on returning to this blog with some new content in the new year.

Happy Holidays and thank you for reading!

Replacing Drafts with the Apple Quick Note Feature

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I’ve written in the past about my keyboard shortcuts for quick entry on my Mac. At this point using ⌘+space to launch Alfred, ⌥+space for quick entry for Things, and ^+space to jot down notes have become muscle memory.

While the app has changed a few times over the years, Drafts was my app of choice for jotting notes the longest. I mean its tag line is literally, “Where text starts,” and it’s honestly great at it. But in the back of my mind, I always felt like I just wasn’t using Drafts to its full potential, and with that nagging at me, I found myself tinkering and trying to optimize the app over and over again. I set up actions and action groups, organized my workspaces, played with themes, and hid as much as I could to make the app as minimal as possible. No matter what I did, I’d find myself myself back to jotting down notes in one jumbled workspace, and when I needed to get text out of Drafts, I wasn’t using any of the actions I created. I was using MacOS’s built in Share extension, and most of the time, the app I was sharing things to was Apple Notes. Drafts was overkill for my needs and really just serving as another junk drawer for notes, and so I kept asking myself, “Why create notes in Drafts when I could just create them in Apple Notes to begin with?”

When Apple released the Quick Note feature for MacOS with Monterey, I saw this as my chance to see if I could get away with using Apple Notes and the Quick Note feature to replace Drafts entirely.

Two years later, I think it’s safe to say I can.

By default, Apple sets up Quick Note to be triggered via a hot corner, but I already use my hot corners for other things. What I really wanted was to be able to trigger it via ^+space like I was used to with Drafts. Apple doesn’t make it easy to set up a keyboard shortcut for the Quick Note feature. It’s definitely not in Apple Notes settings where it should be, but it is possible.

To set up a keyboard shortcut for it, go into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control. There you should find an option for Quick Note to add the shortcut of your choosing.

Apple’s Quick Note window turns out to be the minimal, quick note taking solution I was looking for (no pun intended). On top of that, anything I jot down gets saved into Apple Notes automatically, so I don’t need to worry about sharing it to Apple Notes. I can also share it out to other apps if I need to using the share extension, and because I already review Apple Notes every week as part of my weekly review, that’s also one less inbox I need to review every week.

Screenshot of Quick Note window

If you’ve wanted to use something like Drafts for quick text entry, but felt it was overwhelming, I highly recommend seeing if Apple Notes can fit your needs. It certainly fit the bill for me.

Time Tracking w/ Toggl

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Long-time readers may recall that about a year ago I actually said I wasn’t a fan of time blocking because I hated planning out my days in excruciating detail. Yet, here I am today about to tell you how I’m tracking my time.

I’ve read countless books that recommend tracking your time. I’ve never doubted that it’s a valuable exercise. That being said, I’m also lazy, so I’ve avoided doing it because, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

In the world of customer support, my days are pretty reactionary. My core work is providing support for the projects others have rolled out. Most of my time doesn’t fit neatly into deliverables, milestones, and deadlines, but is instead reserved for being available and ready to help someone in the event things happen to go wrong.

The project I’m currently working on, however, does fit neatly into deliverables and deadlines, and the people I’m working with on it are used to tracking their time to make sure they hit their milestones. We’ve also been given a particularly ambitious go live date for this particular project. Not only was I not about to oppose how my colleagues usually do things, but I also saw the value in being able to document how much time I’m spending on this project, and equally as important, why I’m not spending more time on it as a way to manage expectations around a realistic scope and timeline.

I’m also not one to do something half way, so if I was going to be tracking time for this project, I might as well track the rest of my time too.

I settled on using Toggl. It’s free, highly recommended, and also syncs with Exist.io which I’ve been using for years (albeit with a brief hiatus) to discover trends in health, activity, and other aspects of my life. The Mac and iOS apps for Toggle do what you’d expect, and I also appreciate that they include a Pomodoro function. More on that in a bit.

Because Exist considers time tracked in Toggl productive time, I settled on tracking the time I spend on things on my Today list in Things, with the exception of workouts. While I definitely consider working out as productive time, Exist already tracks working out via Apple Health. Tracking it with both Toggl and Apple Health effectively double counts it in the weekly summary report it sends out which I don’t want.

I also track a few things that aren’t on my list, like the amount of time I spend providing customer support. Because I don’t know when a customer is going to reach out with a question those tasks generally aren’t part of my daily task list.

After tracking my time for a little over a month, I have noticed a few benefits:

  • I’m more productive than I thought. It may be shocking to readers to know that I don’t feel a productive person. Like I said earlier, I’m admittedly quite lazy. The systems I use in my daily life are there so that I can work through my to do list as quickly as possible because I want to be able to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Tracking my time showed me I’m more productive than I was giving my credit for. It’s hard to argue with actual data.
  • I batch my tasks more. Again with the laziness, constantly starting and stopping timers in Toggl got old quickly. Not only was I forgetting to start and stop timers, I didn’t like seeing my day broken up into tons of little time blocks. As a result, I started batching my tasks so that I could set one timer and work through multiple related tasks at once.
  • I’m less distracted. By now we know multitasking doesn’t work. Batching my tasks already helps with that, but I also find that I’m less likely to switch out of a task to go do something like check my email because I don’t want to stop a timer.
  • I procrastinate less. For tasks that I feel inclined to defer to another day repeatedly, I’ve been using the Pomodoro function. I tell myself I’ll just work on the task for 20 minutes set the timer and work until it’s done. I’m doing it right now for this blog post. I hadn’t had much success with the Pomodoro method in the past, but combining it with checking something off in my task manager and not wanting to pause or start timers seems to be the the magic combination to making the Pomodoro method work for me.
  • I get things done faster. Laziness here again, I want to get things done as quickly as possible so I can do nothing, so I try to check of as many tasks as I can within a timer, particularly if I’m using the Pomodoro function. This morning I had a few extra minutes before I had to leave and I had a Chores timer running, so I looked back through my to do list to see if there were any additional chores I could tackle before stopping my timer.

The jury is honestly still out as to whether I will continue tracking my time beyond this project. That being said, after reading all those books that recommend tracking your time, I can now say I’ve actually done it. I can also say it was a worthwhile exercise even if I choose not to continue.

Three Years with YNAB

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This month marks my three-year anniversary of using You Need a Budget (or YNAB). What started as a way to kill time during the early days of the pandemic has honestly turned out to be one of the best changes I’ve ever made in my life.

I was skeptical about YNAB, a service I’d need to pay, for would help me with my finances. I tracked my finances with Mint for years without much improvement, so clearly the problem wasn’t me or my budget. It had to be my income, and paying for something was the exact opposite of increasing my income.

My finances admittedly could have been worse. I only had a few thousand dollars worth of credit card debt and a car loan, but I was usually one paycheck away from potentially not being able to pay my bills. The thought of losing my home was a constant stress in the back of my mind, and I avoided my finances because of it

I checked my bank accounts as if they were Schrödinger’s boxes. Was there money in them or wasn’t there?

I seemed to always be in a constant cycle of getting hit with “unexpected” expenses (that were actually quite predictable). I’d pay for them with a credit card because I wasn’t sure that I’d have enough money to pay for whatever I was buying and still have money left over for my other bills. When it came time to pay my credit card bill, I’d only pay a portion of my statement balance because, like with my other expenses, I wasn’t sure if I’d have enough money to pay for it and the next round of bills that was coming. I ended up in a revolving cycle of debt I couldn’t seem to get out of.

Mint would tell me the obvious: I was in debt and I’d overspent my budget categories. Like any rational person, I’d vow to do better next month and revise my plan to pay off my debt. Then I’d head over to Amazon to treat myself to that thing on my wishlist that was suddenly 20% off. 

My mindset was that if I buried my head in the sand, my financial problems didn’t exist. This cycle of defeat, denial, and impulse spending had been going on for nearly 10 years. To Mint’s credit, it tried to offer me suggestions, but those suggestions were about as effective as telling someone to break up with the person they know is bad for them. They didn’t work for me.

Within days of setting up my budget in YNAB, the problem was obvious. 

If Taylor Swift had released Anti-Hero in 2020, I’d have undoubtedly been saying, “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.”

My problem wasn’t my income. My problem was that I was mentally trying to keep track of my spending in my head:

  • This puzzle is only $20. $20 isn’t a big deal. I have more than enough in the bank right now to cover $20 and groceries.
  • I know my car registration is due this month, but I’ll worry about that when I get paid again on Friday.
  • I can’t decide which craft beer I want, so I’ll just get both six packs today and won’t buy any next weekend.
  • I know I should get my HVAC system looked at, but I’m not sure if I have enough to pay for it, so I will just hold off.

I was making mental calculations like these constantly, and I was really bad at it:

  • Sure, that puzzle only cost $20, and I did have enough for groceries, but what about money for anything else?
  • Yes, I get paid again on Friday, and could use money from that paycheck for my registration, but what if something else comes up?
  • Let’s be real. I’m probably going to be just as indecisive and want to buy 2 different six packs next weekend. So then what?
  • I’m going to have to get the HVAC looked at eventually because the problem isn’t going away. I should look up how much it costs and start saving money for it now rather than putting it off indefinitely.

YNAB helped me get the mental spreadsheet out of my head and put it somewhere that I could actually see and use (and if you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you know how much a GTD-person like myself loves to get things out of their head).

I spent the first few weeks with my budget open constantly just looking at it. (Side note: If you have any desire to convince others in your house to use YNAB, don’t do this! My friends and family still assume YNAB is super complicated because I spent so much time in my budget.) Seeing my budget meant I no longer had to run the mental calculations in my head. My budget was showing me, “It’s okay. You’ve got this.”

My finances were no longer this mysterious box. Whenever I got money, I planned out exactly how I wanted to use it rather than spending as things happened and hoping for the best at the end of the month.

Thanks to the clarity I got with YNAB, I paid off my credit cards and my car loan in the first 8 months. To this day, I’m debt free other than my mortgage. (Mint suggested I could be debt free by 2024 by the way.) In the past three years, I’ve opened a Roth IRA and max it out each year. I’ve saved 6 months worth of expenses in the event that I lost my job. I also refinanced my mortgage to a 15-year mortgage, keeping my payment the same but cutting the amount of payments in half. Those are just some of the big things.

When I mention how I’ve improved my financial situation, people assume I must have went Dave Ramsey style, living on rice and beans and selling things like my life depended on it, but I didn’t. I spent money on things that mattered and saved on things that didn’t. I actually spent more freely and without guilt about buying things. Every purchase I made was part of my plan, and that plan was no longer focused on just that month or the days until my next paycheck but my future. 

  • I knew I could buy the puzzle because I had $20 in my Fun Money category.
  • I’d been setting aside a few dollars each month knowing my car registration was due this month. The money was there and waiting for me to pay for it.
  • I could choose to buy 2 six packs this weekend knowing I’d have less money available for next weekend unless I decided to pull money from elsewhere in my budget.
  • I researched HVAC companies in my area and have a contract with one, which is in my budget. They call me every spring and fall to arrange a time to come out and look over my system and perform any maintenance needed.

Three years ago, my only financial goal was to get out of debt some day. Quite honestly, it didn’t even seem achievable. YNAB helped me achieve it, but it also fundamentally changed how I think about my finances. My financial goal, now, is to become financially independent and possibly even retire early. I’m excited to see where my finances take me in the future, and once again, a big thank you to YNAB for changing my life.

Disclaimer: This post isn’t sponsored. I just really like YNAB, but if you’re interested in signing up and use my referral link, we’ll both get an extra month free if you choose to subscribe.

And if you’re interested in reading more about my YNAB journey, you can read through my earlier posts.

2 Years with Apple Fitness Plus

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Yoga mat, yoga blocks and hand weights sitting on floor

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

Obligatory disclaimer here: I am not a doctor. Anything in this post is what has worked for me. Consult your doctor, not the internet, for actual health advice, folks.

It’s been a little over two years since I did my first Apple Fitness+ workout, and since then I’ve completed over 500 more, which is surprising for me because I’ve never been an “exercise person”. I played softball as a child, but only because I was forced to, and I took physical education classes in high school and college, but only because they were graduation requirements. Even then, I usually found the lazy way out. I convinced my PE teachers to help me lead the class so that I didn’t have to do the actual exercises, and one of the classes I took in college was Tai Chi Chih, a series of moving meditations that can be done entirely seated.

Working out was something I knew I should do but found any way to get out of if I could. I tried all the tips and tricks to get myself to work out. Gym memberships didn’t work. I was too self conscious to go to the gym, too cheap to pay for a gym membership, and quite honestly too much of a homebody to want to leave the house. Pre-paying for group classes wasn’t an incentive either because I’d happily trade my sunk cost of a prepaid class for an extra hour of sleep and I could never find a friend to go with me and serve as an accountability buddy. The only thing that sort of worked was fitting movement in throughout my days in various ways like parking further away, taking the stairs, or getting in a walk during my lunch break at work, but that was really the extent of my exercise. And of course, queue the pandemic, the thing that upended all of our lives in a myriad of ways, and those little bits of movement went away too. My Apple Watch showed I was averaging a dismal 1 minute of exercise per day, and so I made myself a goal to do one minute more than my average each day.

In December of 2020, Apple released Apple Fitness+, offering a free trial to get people hooked. I figured I’d try it, and hopped on my stationary bike for a quick workout. I was pretty much instantly hooked. I loved that the workouts pushed me more than I had been doing on my own. I loved that a month’s worth of classes (at the annual rate) only cost a little more than a coffee at Starbucks, and I loved that I could pop on a 10-minute workout at any time throughout the day.

Eventually I got bored with just doing cycling workouts every day, (I also wore out the resistance knob on my spin bike which put my bike out of commission while I waited for replacement parts.) and so I decided to try some of the other Apple Fitness+ workouts. I tried yoga, pilates, HIIT, and strength training workouts, and I actually found myself getting excited to try new workouts. More importantly, I found myself looking forward to working out.

These days, I close my exercise ring most days. I try hard to not miss a workout (I’m currently on a 33-day streak), and I make sure to vary my workouts as well. My weekly routine looks something like this:

  • Mondays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Upper Body Strength
  • Tuesdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Wednesdays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Lower Body Strength
  • Thursdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Fridays: 30 Minutes of Pilates or Total Body Strength
  • Saturdays: 45-60 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Sundays: 30-45 Minutes of Yoga

I keep track of my workouts in Things 3, of course, in a project called Weekly Workouts. On Friday afternoons, during my weekly review, I scroll through the Apple Fitness app, picking out workouts for the upcoming week. I copy the link to each workout and include it in the corresponding task in Things, that way throughout the week, I can just check them off as I complete them.

When I started working out, I was doing it out of obligation because that’s what “healthy” people do, as well as, a desire to lose weight. Three years later, my goals have shifted. I did eventually hit my goal weight but have since adjusted my goals to account for the muscle mass I’ve gained along the way. I work out now, not because I should or have to, but because working out makes me feel better and, I daresay, I enjoy working out. I finally work out because I want to.

2023 Yearly Theme & 2022 Recap

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Normally I post something every January to recap the past year and share my theme for the new year. Not only does it look like I never posted last year, let’s just say last year wasn’t my greatest so I’m inclined to skip the recap as well.

My theme for the 2022 was boundaries. As a people pleaser, I’m one to say yes to every request even if it means running myself into the ground and run myself into the ground is exactly what I did.

If the events of the first part of last year taught me anything, it’s that I’d been doing far too much, mostly for other people, without really taking time to take care of myself. 

Most of the days were spent doing things out of obligation, not intention, and although I found myself with a lot of unexpected free time towards the end of the year, most of it was spent searching for the next hit of dopamine – endlessly refreshing Reddit for new posts, checking my email and my phone in hopes there might be a text message, and on more than one occasion, Youtube actually ran out of new things to suggest to me and began suggesting things I’d already seen. Even worse, I actually rewatched many of them them because I had been too distracted scrolling on my phone the first time I watched them anyway.

I also did a lot of things that seemed like great ideas in the moment – like continuing to hang out with people I didn’t really enjoy hanging out with anymore, staying out way too late, or having that extra drink after dinner despite knowing it’d make me feel worse the next morning.

Without going into detail, 2022 was a bad year, but… I can’t say it was all bad. 

I decided to focus on myself. I found routines that work. I discovered I actually am one of those people who doesn’t like missing a workout and lost 15 pounds in the process. I got healthier. I ate better. I meditated almost every day. I journaled. I met my reading goal and hit my financial goals as well. So despite everything the year threw at me, I still managed to hit most of my goals. 

And I got these two adorable monsters to keep the old man, Abu, company.

two kittens and a cat on the bed

So what’s in store for 2023?

My focus for the year is to actually slow down. I want to be more intentional about the life I’m creating and savor what each thing in my life brings to the table. It could be because I just read Chris Bailey’s new book on calming your mind, but I really do want to spend my time doing things I enjoy – not just because they give me a quick hit of dopamine.

I want to enjoy that I wake up in a home that I’ve spent the last eight years decorating and setting up to fit my lifestyle.

I want to enjoy that I can move my body and get stronger with every workout.

I want to enjoy the crappy reality tv show I’ve been faithfully watching for more than half my life without scrolling Reddit.

I want to enjoy the pause in my day each time I meditate.

I want to enjoy all the adventures, friends, and unexpected things life brings, and

I want to enjoy that I climb into bed with three very cuddly cats every night.

Most importantly, I want to enjoy the fact that I get to decide how I want create the life I’m living every day.

Here’s to 2023! Happy New Year everyone!

Linking to Apple Notes

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For those of you that have followed my blog for a while, you know I’ve really wanted to use Apple Notes for my personal knowledge management for a while now. There’s really only one thing holding me back – linking. For reasons unknown to me, Apple seems to have no intention of adding linking any time soon despite it being a feature that’s present in almost every other note taking app.

Even Apple’s other apps like Mail have a way to uncover a link using AppleScript at least. If you want a link to a note in Apple Notes, on the other hand, you have to act as though you’re sharing it with someone via phone or email even if the person you’re sharing it with is just yourself. Oh, and then it adds a wonderful Shared section to Notes to remind you of all the notes you’ve shared with yourself.

My frustration eventually lead me down a rabbit hole that lead to this post – a [very convoluted] way to generate a link to a note without sharing it.

Allow me to introduce how I link to notes in Apple Notes using Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts.

The Starting Point – Opening an Apple Note with a Shortcut

Theoretically, if you only link to a few notes, you could just create dedicated shortcuts for each note you want to link to and then link to the shortcut using the format shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Shortcut%20Name. If that sounds good enough for you, you can swap out Clipboard for the actual note title in the following shortcut and call it a day. I, however, like to link to a lot of notes, and I really didn’t want to have to create a new shortcut anytime I wanted to link to a new note.

(By the way, links to everything are included. You’re welcome.)

I started by creating a generic “Open Note” shortcut that opens a note based on your clipboard. This is a simple two-step shortcut:

  • Find All Notes where Name contains Clipboard
  • Show Notes

Adding On – Generating a URL Base to Launch the Open Note Shortcut

Like Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro can launch automations via URL, but it has one super power over Shortcuts’ URLs – the ability to pass a value through a URL. This means we can use it as a common URL base to run the shortcut above for any note just by changing the URL.

The macro is as follows:

  • Set System Clipboard to Text “TriggerValue”
  • Execute Shortcut “Open Note”

Almost There – Generating the actual Note Link

Now, honestly, at this point we have the base URL, and you could just manually create the links at this point. For example, “kmtrigger://macro=Open%20Apple%20Note&value=Work%20Ideas” would open my Work Ideas note.

But I don’t do clunky, and typing things out particularly when they involve percent encoding multiple words is one of my least favorite things to do. Thankfully we don’t have to, and for this I give you two options:

Option 1: Keyboard Maestro

I set this up using Keyboard Maestro initially because I’m more familiar with it, and because I already did the legwork, I’m including it here. For those of you who want a universal option, feel free to skip ahead to option 2 which uses Shortcuts instead meaning it will work on Mac OS, iPad OS and iOS.

Using Keyboard Maestro I set up a second macro that works only when I’m in Apple Notes, so that when I press ⌘K it copies the note title I’ve selected and generates the URL for me.

  • Triggered by any of the following (when Notes is at the front)
    • This hot key: ⌘K is pressed
  • Will execute:
    • Copy Selected Text
    • Filter System Clipboard with Percent Encode for URL to variable Note Title
    • Set System Clipboard text to “kmtrigger://macro=Open%20Apple%20Note&value=%Variable%Note Title%”

Now I can generate a link to any Apple Note that can be pasted anywhere on my Mac. If you only ever use a Mac, cool, you’re done, but I suspect most of you are like me and use iPhones and iPads.

Keep reading.

Option 2: Shortcuts

We can do the same thing in Shortcuts using a shortcut that receives text input from the share sheet that percent encodes the selected title, appends it to the base URL, and adds it all back to the clipboard, just like the Keyboard Maestro version, but Shortcuts means unlike the other option, this one will work on Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Side note: If you want to use it on MacOS, you need to check a box to have this enabled in the services menu and optionally via a keyboard shortcut by going to the Details pane.

One More Thing – Parsing a Keyboard Maestro Link

Now we have our links, but we still need to use them. Again, if we’re just using a Mac with Keyboard Maestro, we’re fine using the links as they are. We’re out of luck if we want to use them on our iPhones or iPads though, which brings us to our last and final piece of the puzzle.

This is simply a shortcut that works in reverse of what we did earlier. Select the URL and select share from the pop up menu. It grabs the selected URL, removes the base Keyboard Maestro URL, percent decodes the URL, and then opens the note with that title.

So in summary here’s everything.

  1. Open a Note using Shortcuts
  2. Generate the base URL using Keyboard Maestro
  3. Generate the unique note URL using Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro (Mac only)
  4. Open the Link on an iOS/iPad OS Device

I’ve only been testing this for a bit, and admittedly my brain is fairly exhausted after putting all this together. I also will never claim to be an expert in Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro, so there is probably a way more elegant way to do this. I’m open to suggestions. In testing, I’ve only run into a few issues in terms of notes having similar titles or content. In that case, Shortcuts graciously gives you the option to pick the note you want from the results.

Hopefully that helps some of you. I’m off to give my brain a sorely needed break. Happy note taking.

How I Structure My Day & Why I Don’t Timeblock

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It’s been quite a few months since I’ve posted here. Life just gets in the way sometimes, but have no fear, I’m back, at least for today. In the time since my last post, I’ve gotten rather used to my hybrid work schedule despite initially struggling with it.

To recap, since August, I’ve been alternating working two days (Mondays and Fridays) or three days (Tuesdays-Thursdays) in the office every other week. While the schedule definitely has its benefits, it also has its downsides. The biggest downside is my days spent in the office are far less focused due to various interruptions and distractions throughout the day. To account for this, I looked for ways to add more structure to my weeks and accepted that depending on where I was spending my time, some weeks would just be better suited for certain tasks than others depending on the level of focus they required.

I’ve since begun adding more structure to my days as well, probably because time-blocking (and time-tracking) seems to be a rather popular topic in the circles I find myself in online at the moment.

But… time blocking doesn’t work for me.

As much as my Type A mind really appreciates the detail that comes with planning days out like Cal Newport. I usually end up abandoning my perfectly time-blocked calendar at the first sign of the day deviating from my plan. A part of me even rebels against having a plan for every hour of my day. (Don’t tell that to my other half who’d probably jump for joy at the idea of me not having things planned out in excruciating detail.)

Instead of scheduling out my days, I think of my days as conceptual time blocks starting with morning, afternoon, and evening. This actually harkens back to my Erin Condren Life Planner days which used the exact same blocks of which, surprisingly, I wasn’t a huge fan at the time. From there, I batch my tasks according to how I know I best work, while also adding some variety to make sure I’m not doing one thing for too long.

A typical day might look something like this:

  • Morning
    • Administrative Tasks – This block includes things like ordering my tasks in Things 3 making sure things are tagged into their appropriate morning, afternoon, or evening blocks; checking my email; checking my budget in YNAB; and lastly, checking into our ticketing system to triage any support requests that came in overnight.
    • Personal Administrative Tasks – (Note: If I’m working in the office, I do this first because I need to do these before I get into the office.) This block includes things like getting ready for the day, making the bed, feeding our ancient 18-year-old cat, meditating, and also grabbing a bite to eat.
    • 1st Project/Meeting Block – This is when I work on my 3 tasks for the day. Most of my meetings also tend to be scheduled around this time as well. I get through as much as I can.
    • Break – Around this time, I start getting restless from sitting. If I’m working from home, I’ll do a quick workout on Apple Fitness Plus. If I’m in the office, I go for a short walk, preferably outside.
  • Afternoon
    • Admin Check – I usually circle back to my email and any other communications during this time. Not mentioned above, but I continue monitoring our ticketing system and phone lines constantly throughout the day.
    • Lunch Break – Self-explanatory, but I also try and fit in some sort of activity in here as well – usually another walk.
    • 2nd Project/Meeting Block – If I haven’t finished my 3 tasks from the morning, I keep working on them here until I finish them. I also get the occasional meeting scheduled around this time.
  • Evening
    • Exercise – If I haven’t finished my exercise by this point in the day, this is where I do my scheduled workout (using Apple Fitness Plus).
    • Evening Chores – I use this time to wrap up any chores I still need to complete for the day. I also use this time to shower, get ready for the next day, meditate, feed the cat, and start dinner.
    • Evening Shutdown – This is where I look over my to-do list in Things, rescheduling anything I might not have gotten to and scheduling my three tasks for the next day.
    • Dinner & Free Time – With everything done for the day, I’m free to finally sit down on the couch with something to eat and relax however I please.

The beauty of this structure is it’s easy to start each morning with a general idea of how I’m going to approach my to-do list without scheduling tasks or my calendar being so rigid that any slight deviation throws my day out of wack. It also takes into account how I best work – giving me time during the mornings to work on things that require the most focus, allowing for movement and mental breaks throughout the day, and also allowing for buffer time if things take longer or come up throughout the day.

I’m not sure if this is helpful to anyone, but if it has been or you have any questions, feel free to reach out.