I just got a new Mac Mini with the M1 Apple silicon.
The experience so far is stunning performance compared to my previous 16ā MacBook Pro. I was using an i9 with 16GB RAM, and this Mini blows it out of the water on responsiveness (and every other category).
A little reading on user experiences with the M1 had me interested in upgrading to any machine with the latest SoC. One of my main drivers was the noise and heat generated by the MBP, which is just in constant turbo mode with whatever my usage behavior is. It never stops running full tilt basically, so I needed to get away from that. My office is in the corner of the house and doesnāt get great HVAC coverage with the door closed, so between that and the west-facing windows, the heat-radiating laptop canāt have helped.
With the M1 Mini and a nice USB-C dock with a built-in fan that it sits on top of, I havenāt heard a sound from the machine at all.
11/10 so far. Itās wild that such an affordable, portable desktop machine has owned everything pre-M1 in performance.
A great annotated Twitter thread from Steven Sinofsky, who was leading the launch of Windows 7 coincident with when the iPad was announced.
19/ The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoftās core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was āmissing.ā
20/ The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed by Linux and Open Source.
21/ The kicker for me, though, was that keyboard stand for the iPad. It was such a hack. Such an obvious āobjection handler.ā But it was critically important because it was a clear reminder that the underlying operating system was ārealāā¦it was not a āphone OSā.
A fun story from Jimmy Maher about the 1991 partnership with IBM that moved Apple from the Motorola 88000 chips to PowerPC. It was a savvy deal that kept the Macintosh (and Apple) alive and kicking long enough to bridge into their transition back to Steve Jobsās leadership, and the eventual transition of the Mac lineup to Intel in 2006.
While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly well; once one pushed past the surface stereotypes, they were all just engineers trying to do the best work possible. Appleās management wanted the first PowerPC-based Macintosh models to ship in January of 1994, to commemorate the platformās tenth anniversary by heralding a new technological era. The old Project Cognac team, now with the new code name of āPiltdown Manā after the famous (albeit fraudulent) āmissing linkā in the evolution of humanity, was responsible for making this happen. For almost a year, they worked on porting MacOS to the PowerPC, as theyād previously done to the 88000. This time, though, they had no real hardware with which to work, only specifications and software emulators. The first prototype chips finally arrived on September 3, 1992, and they redoubled their efforts, pulling many an all-nighter. Thus MacOS booted up to the desktop for the first time on a real PowerPC-based machine just in time to greet the rising sun on the morning of October 3, 1992. A new era had indeed dawned.
The downturn in revenue IBM plummeted into in the early 90s during the Wintel explosion was stunning. Just look at these numbers:
In 1991, when IBM first turned the corner into loss, they did so in disconcertingly convincing fashion: they lost $2.82 billion that year. And that was only the beginning. Losses totaled $4.96 billion in 1992, followed by $8.1 billion in 1993. IBM lost more money during those three years alone than any other company in the history of the world to that point; their losses exceeded the gross domestic product of Ecuador.
Weāve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a āDependency Driftā metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:
Create a numeric metric that incorporates the volume of dependencies and the recency of each of them.
Devise a simple high level A-F grading system from that number to communicate how current a project is with itās dependencies. Weāll call this a drift score.
Regularly recalculate and publish for open source projects.
Publish a command line tool to use in any continuous integration pipeline. In CI, policies can be set to fail CI if drift is too high. Your drift can be tracked and reported to help motivate the team and inform stakeholders.
Use badges in source control README files to show drift, right alongside the projectsās Continuous Integration status.
A technical write-up on a Google chatbot called āMeena,ā which they propose has a much more realistic back-and-forth response technique:
Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity.
John Gruber uses the iPadās recent 10th birthday to reflect missed opportunity and how much better a product it could be/could have been:
Ten years later, though, I donāt think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.
I would agree with most of his criticisms, especially on the multitasking UI and the general impenetrability of the gesturing interfaces. As a very āpro iPadā user, I would love to see a movement toward the device coming into its own as a distinctly different platform than macOS and desktop computers. It has amazing promise even outside of creativity (music, art) and consumption. With the right focus on business model support, business productivity applications could be so much better.
I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11ā model instead of the previous generation 12.9ā one that Iāve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a weekās worth of usage:
The iPad
So far the smaller form factor takes a little bit of getting used to, but the weight and size is a huge improvement in portability. When this iPad is the only thing in my bag, it almost feels empty itās so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like Iām about to drop it. One of the downsides of the 12.9ā size is that using it sans-keyboard as a reading device (especially in portrait mode) is unwieldy. The 11ā size can be comfortably used in one hand for reading. You also still get all of the iPadOS multitasking features for split screen productivity apps, which was one of the biggest drivers for originally going with the Pro model.
Keyboard Folio & Pencil
I got the Smart Keyboard Folio and the new Pencil to go with it, and both are pretty major improvements over those two products from a generation ago. The smaller size keyboard is taking a little adjustment, but itās not too bad. I love the feel of the keys on Appleās iPad keyboards, and this one is an incremental improvement in tactile feeling from the last generation. The new version of the Pencil seems to have less latency in sketching, which makes writing and drawing feel more natural than it did ā even though the Pencil even since version 1 has been leaps and bounds better than any other stylus hardware ever made. With the magnetic docking inductive charging, itās also nice to have a Pencil thatās always at 100% full charge, ready to go. Too often Iād get out the old one after a period of not using it only to find it dead. Itās a quick charge, but taking up the Lightning port to charge it was always annoying.
Since I made the switch, Iāve been doing a lot more work on the iPad versus the MacBook Pro. Even with multitasking, the āmodalā nature of app usage on an iPad seems to keep my mind more focused and less alt-tabbing between various windows. While not impossible to do, itās hard to end up in the trap of 50 open browser tabs on an iPad than a full laptop. Thereās also the fact that I donāt have a heating element on the lap while using it, like the superheated aluminum case on a MBP when Chrome, Slack, and other memory-heavy apps are churning hard.
So far, so good. This week with some travel abroad Iāll give it a shot as the primary device and see how it feels.
I recently learned that you can pair your AirPods with the Apple TV, which Iāve been using for the last couple of weeks. With two kids sleeping nearby plus noise from the nearby kitchen, itās impossible to get the volume loud enough to make out dialog in most shows. Because of this we always have the captions on for everything. But this new discovery solves this problem, plus it makes it easy to get up and walk away for a minute without having to pause anything.
This guide shows how to connect to them. Holding down the āÆ button on the Apple Remote pulls up an output source selector, like what you get with AirPlay dialog menus. My AirPods showed up in there the first time with no Bluetooth pairing required ā probably some iCloud account magic happening to bypass that handshake process. After theyāre paired, you can use the volume control on either the Siri Remote or even the volume controls on your iPhone inside of the Remote app. Very slick experience.
iOS 13 has support for pairing multiple sets of AirPods to a single device. If this comes to tvOS, itāll be fantastic for both of us to be able to watch without noise issues.
I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.
In this clip is his famous ābicycle for the mindā quote about the personal computer.
This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that itās going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.
Hard to believe Jobs was this prescient at age 26, when computers were still considered to be hobbyist toys.
I normally avoid early upgrades to iOS betas, having been burned too many times in the past. But this time, the release of iPadOS is too exciting for me to avoid. Now that the public beta is available, I set it up and am already enjoying the changes. So far, the home screen app density and Today view up front is already a huge improvement for using the iPad for productivity, as expected. The Share Sheet changes are also pretty slick. Once I spend more time with it Iāll probably post some more thoughts, but itās looking good for further enabling those of us interested in getting work done on iPad.
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called āLook Aroundā. Even though itās exciting to see them invest in mapping, it seems like a bridge too far to ever catch the quality of Google Maps. Om Malik compares the relative positions between the two to that of Bing to Google in search. Apple is approaching Maps as an application first, when really maps are about data:
Why do I think Google Maps will continue to trump Apple despite the latterās fancy new graphics and features? Because when it comes to maps, the key metrics are navigation, real-time redirection, and traffic information. Googleās Waze is a powerful weapon against all rivals. It has allowed Google to train its mapping algorithms to become highly effective and personal (not to mention how much intelligence that might have been shared with Waymo).
I would add point of interest data to this list as a key metric. That used to be purchased from commercial providers, scraped from the internet, and mapped manually, but now the fleet of vehicles (and Googleās users searching for places) provide a continuous stream of validation and updates to place data. With the combination of Google Maps, the Android OS, and soon a fleet of autonomous Waymo vehicles, it seems like Google will continue to be an unstoppable data juggernaut.
Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:
Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data to solve. And there is no doubt that they do not want to let Google continue to leverage Maps against them in Cloud sales. They need a āgood enoughā response to help keep AWS customers on the reservation.
Because of mappingās criticality to so many other technologies, any player that is likely to compete with Google needs to be a platform ā something that undergirds and powers technology as a business model. Apple is kinda like that, but nowhere near as similar to an electric utility as AWS is.
With the release of the amazing new Mac Pro and other things announced at WWDC, itās clear that Apple recognizes its failings in delivering for their historically-important professional customers. Marco Arment addresses this well here across the Mac Pro, updates to macOS, iPadOS, and the changes that could be around the corner for the MacBook Pro.
Iām excited to get iPadOS installed and back to my iPad workflow. This is a good comprehensive overview from Shawn Blanc, someone who has done most of his work on an iPad for a long time.
Iāve written here before about my enjoyment of working on the iPad Pro. Even with the excitement around Appleās launch of the new Mac Pro this week, my favorite announcement was their āspecializationā of iOS in the new iPadOS.
Running down the best features:
Denser screen real estate ā Anyone that uses an iPad for work lots of different apps is familiar with this gripe. The giant screen with a sparse scattering of tiny icons looks sort of ridiculous. That plus the addition of the anchorable Today Widget view on the left will both be massive improvements in speed.
Multitasking improvements ā I havenāt been a huge user of the Slide Over app capability, but the extension of that to support multiple app switching with a swipe looks awesome. And Split View with multiple documents in a single app is something Iāve always wanted.
Pencil ā Reducing latency and adding a slick Markup toolset as part of PencilKit for other apps. I use the Pencil every day, so this is just icing.
More keyboard shortcuts ā Iām a keyboarder; I hunt down and get to know the shortcuts for any apps I use. Already on iPad I use cmd-tab to switch apps, cmd-space (Spotlight) to launch apps, cmd-tab and cmd-W to open and close browser tabs, and probably more I donāt even realize. I hope what theyāve added to Safari leads to more conventions being adopted across other apps.
Mouse support? ā This looks like it might be weird, but Iām real curious to try it out.
The improvements to Safari and Files arenāt too exciting because I donāt use either right now, but itās still positive to see Apple put energy into iPad as a platform for real work. MacStories has a good roundup of details with everything included in the first version.
Calling it a completely different OS is inappropriate, at least at this stage. I hope that itās just the tip of the iceberg with desktop-class optimizations for the larger screen.
Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. Theyāve put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well all season:
The Rays emphasize power now, but in a different way: Through Monday, their hitters had the highest exit velocity in the majors, at 90.1 miles per hour, and their pitchers ā who specialize in curveballs and high fastballs ā allowed the lowest, at 86.3. Hard-contact rates enticed them to trade for Pham from St. Louis last July, and to land Yandy Diaz in an off-season deal with Cleveland. Pham was hitting .248 for the Cardinals, but the Rays assured him he had simply been unlucky; he hit .343 the rest of the season.
And I get to post this on the back of their 11th inning win over the Yankees this afternoon.
Great quick read from Horace Dediu on Appleās Services business. As he points out in the piece, Appleās business model is continually oversimplified and/or misunderstood by many:
This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.
Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. Itās easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable.
Conversely Apple offers solutions to problems that are viewed, classified, weighed and measured as objects or activities by external observers. Again, itās easy to be fooled that these are the same.
This post goes into how the author put together a visualization of tornado trend data for Axios. Observable notebooks are so great. The interactivity lets you not only see the code and data to create it all, but can be forked and edited right there.
The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. Theyāve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:
The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection and curation of perishable data in DesignSafe. Auburnās David Roueche, the teamās Data Standards Lead, was especially enthusiastic about the teamās customized Fulcrum mobile smartphone applications to support standardized assessments of continental U.S. and Caribbean construction typologies, as well as observations of hazard intensity and geotechnical impacts.
It worked so well that the team transitioned their efforts into a pro-bono Fulcrum Community site that supports crowdsourced damage assessments from the public at large with web-based geospatial visualization in real time. This feature enabled coordination with teams from NIST, FEMA, and ASCE/SEI. Dedicated data librarians at each regional node executed a rigorous QA/QC process on the backside of the Fulcrum database, led by Roueche.
Ever since my health issues in 2017, the value of the little things has become much more apparent. I came out of that with a renewed interest in investing in mental and physical health for the future. Reading about, thinking about, and practicing meditation have really helped to put the things that matter in perspective when I consider consciously how I spend my time. This piece is a simple reminder of the comparative value of the ālong gameā.
In this piece analyst Horace Dediu calls AirPods Appleās ānew iPodā, drawing similarities to the cultural adoption patterns.
The Apple Watch is now bigger than the iPod ever was. As the most popular watch of all time, itās clear that the watch is a new market success story. However it isnāt a cultural success. It has the ability to signal its presence and to give the wearer a degree of individuality through material and band choice but it is too discreet. It conforms to norms of watch wearing and it is too easy to miss under a sleeve or in a pocket.
Not so for AirPods. These things look extremely different. Always white, always in view, pointed and sharp. You canāt miss someone wearing AirPods. They practically scream their presence.
I still maintain this is their best product in years. I hope it becomes a new platform for voice interfaces, once theyāre reliable enough.
Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that thereāll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key player in recruiting and hiring infrastructure for startups):
āWeāre going to see an era of everyone employing remote tech workers, and itās not too far away. In fact, nowās the time to prepare for it. But I think in the meantime, the companies that are going to do the best job at it are the ones that are remote companies or that have divisions internally that are remote. Itās going to be done through lengthy trials. Itās going to be done through new forms of evaluating whether someone can work remotely effectively.ā
Jan Chipchase from Studio D posted these fun, creative, realistic, and sometimes scary speculations on what sorts of behavioral side effects could play out with the proliferation of autonomous vehicles. See also the follow on 15 more concepts.
The practice of what we currently call parking will obviously change when your vehicle is able to park and drive itself. Think of your vehicle autonomously cruising the neighbourhood to be washed, pick-up groceries and recharge its batteries whilst youāre off having lunch. What is the optimal elasticity of your autonomous vehicle to you? What are the kinds of neighbhourhoods it likes to drive around in when youāre not using it? This is an especially pertinent question, when a vehicle is considered a sensing platformāāāthe technology to autonomously negotiate the city can collect rich data for other uses.
While the batch of feature enhancements isnāt mind-blowing, Iām glad to see Apple continuing to evolve these. AirPods are the best product theyāve released since the iPhone. I use mine for hours every single day ā far more than I ever used any previous headphones. I recently got one of these Qi wireless chargers for my office, so Iāll be glad to have the inductive charging for the AirPods, too. Of course the extra battery life will be a huge plus.
I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device ā itās darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys for things like volume control and playback, and
Quillette always has good stuff. Iām on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: itās a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes āor else.ā This author and Steven Pinker (quoted in the piece) have the right idea. Take a long, optimistic view and look to history for similar circumstances, and take measured action over time.
I love analyses like this. Take the open GeoNames database, load it into Postgres, ask questions on patterns using SQL, visualize the distributions.
I wanted to find patterns in the names, so I explored if they started or ended in a certain way or just contained a certain word. With SQL this means that I was using the % wildcard to find prefixes or suffixes. So for instance the following query would return return every word containing the word bad anywhere in the name:
SELECT * FROM geonames WHERE name ILIKE ā%bad%ā
This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.
Interesting work by Fordās self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But Fordās investment in Argo and GM with Cruise demonstrates theyāre serious.
Jason Snellās thoughts on the new iPad Pro release last week:
I love the new design of the iPad Pro models. The flat back with the flat sides, which remind me of the original iPad design and the iPhone 4/5/SE, is a delight. But when you pick one up, the first thing you notice is that the bezels are even all the way aroundāand theyāre almost, but not quite, gone entirely
An improved keyboard case, new revision to the Pencil, reduced bezel width, and Face ID support are all the right updates to make to get me closer to the goal of iPad Pro over laptop. The Folio idea for the case sounds fantastic, and with the Pencil, itās amazing how innovative it can seem to add a small flat segment to keep it from rolling off the table.
Bufferās Joel Gascoigne with an in-depth overview of how they bought out their Series A investors to reset. Their Open blog series is worth a follow. They openly publish all sorts of insider details on running and growing a startup that are insightful for comparison.
The cascading effect of a world with no human drivers is my favorite āwhat ifā to consider with the boom of electric, autonomous car development. Benedict Evans has a great analysis postulating several tangential effects:
However, itās also useful, and perhaps more challenging, to think about the second and third order consequences of these two technology changes. Moving to electric means much more than replacing the gas tank with a battery, and moving to autonomy means much more than ending accidents. Quite what those consequences would be is much harder to predict: as the saying goes, it was easy to predict mass car ownership but hard to predict Walmart, and the broader consequences of the move to electric and autonomy will come in some very widely-spread industries, in complex interlocked ways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee looks at the potential for AI in medicine, specifically as a diagnostic tool. Combine processing and machine learning with sensors everywhere, and things get interesting:
Thrun blithely envisages a world in which weāre constantly under diagnostic surveillance. Our cell phones would analyze shifting speech patterns to diagnose Alzheimerās. A steering wheel would pick up incipient Parkinsonās through small hesitations and tremors. A bathtub would perform sequential scans as you bathe, via harmless ultrasound or magnetic resonance, to determine whether thereās a new mass in an ovary that requires investigation. Big Data would watch, record, and evaluate you: we would shuttle from the grasp of one algorithm to the next. To enter Thrunās world of bathtubs and steering wheels is to enter a hall of diagnostic mirrors, each urging more tests.
This piece is one of the best explanations of neural networks Iāve read.
If you follow the Apple universe, youāve surely heard the frustration of professional Mac users whoāve felt abandoned by Apple neglecting their pro hardware for 3 years. Theyāre resurrecting the lineup now with a redesigned Mac Pro. The craziest bit about this story is that Apple is coming out of the shell to talk about a new product months before launch, to a handful of select journalists.
Trying out a new thing here to document 3 links that caught my interest over the past week. Sometimes they might be related, sometimes not. Itāll be an experiment to journal the things I was reading at the time, for posterity.
Good piece from Ben Thompson comparing the current developmental stage of machine learning and AI with the formative years of Claude Shannon and Alan Turingās initial discoveries of information theory. They figured out how to take mathematical logic concepts (Boolean logic) and merge them with physical circuits ā the birth of the modern computer. With AI weāre on the brink of similar breakthroughs. Thompson does well here to make clear the distinctions between Artificial General Intelligence (what most people think of when they hear the term, things like Skynet) and Narrow Intelligence (which is all we have currently, AIs that can replicate human thinking in a narrow problem set).
Apple announced their new APFS file system at last yearās WWDC, and this week launched it as part of the iOS 10.3 update. Their HFS+ file system is now 20 years old, but file systems arenāt something that you change lightly. Theyāre the core data storage and retrieval engine for computers, and massively complex. APFS is engineered with encryption as a first-class feature and also includes enhancements for SSD-based storage. The most amazing thing to me about this story is the guts it takes to make a seismic change like this to millions of devices in one swoop. Itās the sort of change that is 100% invisible to the average iPhone owner if it works, and could brick millions of phones if it doesnāt. Working in a software company building mission-critical software, it takes serious planning, testing, and skills to deploy risky changes like this to move your platform forward. Kudos to Apple for pulling off such a monumental and thankless change.
Iāve read Fred Wilsonās AVC blog for some time, but only through post links that make the rounds. Recently I discovered his archive of āMBA Mondaysā articles covering tons of business topics. Heās got pieces on budgeting, cash flow, equity, M&A, unit economics ā tons of great stuff from someone learning and practicing all of this in reality. Much more digestible than textbook business school material. Iām gradually making my way through the archive from the beginning and really enjoying it.
Iāve talked before about the concept of āubiquitous captureā and how achieving a system where you never lose an item is an ideal for a seamless GTD setup. No matter what task management tool you use of the hundreds of options, both automatic or analog, there are still moments when a fleeting piece of info we want to remember ā either something new to do or an idea or breakthrough on an existing project task ā slips through the cracks. The best system for managing all of your collective āstuffā is any that you trust to be the go-to place for all the things that require your attention.
In any GTD-esque system, the two core concepts are capture and review:
Capture anything on your mind so it lives in a system, not in your head.
Review your āinboxā on some repeated schedule to process things into the right place, grouping things by project, adding deadlines, or filing into contexts.
When I got started building my personal workflow, I found the biggest initial hurdle was a reliable mechanism for getting things into my inbox as quickly and readily as possible. Iāve tried notebooks, cards, text files, and most digital task apps to try and find a single tool that works, but there was always friction and things would get forgotten. My short term memory is horrendous, and most things needing to find their way into my inbox would occur to me while getting ready in the morning or while driving or biking to work.
Enter Siri
True ubiquitous capture is achieved by using whatever tools are most reliably available to you, and for me thatās OmniFocus and my iPhone. OmniFocus 2 for iOS added a built-in Reminders capture feature to pull things added to a specific list over into the OF inbox. Then using the āSiri, add this to my listā¦ā command when dictating gives you hands-free, fast access to append items to the inbox. I say things like:
With Siri set up this way, I now have a wider funnel for capturing anything Iām thinking about anywhere Iāve got my phone. So even when Iām in the car or working in the garage and some random item pops into my head, I can make sure it doesnāt slip through. Itāll be there waiting in my inbox for the next review when Iām processing my workload.
