Category: Tools

Finding the Right Tool for the Job

~ Ryan

In keeping with the two project theme this week, I’ll cover both bases for what I’ll be attempting to accomplish while on the road.

The first project, the writing, is actually pretty simple for me while traveling. I do most of my creative writing within Ulysses. It has just enough organization to keep my various writing projects in some semblance of order. But it’s minimalistic enough to stay out of my way and just let me get to the writing.

For me, this is a huge plus. I’m a big settings guy. I’ll waste away days just tweaking settings instead of actually buckling down and doing the work. (Incidentally, this was one of the reasons why I decided to give Micro.blog a whirl. I had been using WordPress for years, but I would always get completely sidetracked by playing with settings every time I wanted to just sit down and write something. Micro.blog does not get in my way like that.)

Ulysses is great for me, also, because everything just syncs in the background, regardless of the device I’m using. So I can just work on my tablet, or even my phone, and know that the work will be synced to my laptop without issue. So I’ll be doing my drafting in Ulysses.

I will be trying to use iA Writer as well when it comes time to actually convert my story into a script. I’ve never used iA Writer’s screenwriting features, but I do believe it actually has them. That’s something I’ll be testing out this week. Worst case scenario, I’ll just follow the script guidelines and draft it by hand. But I’m hoping iA Writer fits the need here.

For the other project, though, the blogging on the road, this will involve some experimentation. As I’ve mentioned before, I use MarsEdit to do all my blog post writing. I don’t bother with drafting in Ulysses first, although I certainly could. (Really, I love Ulysses!) Since I’m posting every day, I wanted something that felt separate, something dedicated specifically to the task. And MarsEdit has been doing the job perfectly for me. I just open up a new post, type away until I like what I see, and hit the very satisfying “Send to Blog” button. Done and done.

But there is no MarsEdit for mobile. Le sigh. So what can I use? I post my daily entries on two separate websites, one using Micro.blog and one using WordPress. (I’m doing this for reasons. Maybe someday, someday soon even, I’ll stop and just pick one. But for now I’m testing to see what I like and what I don’t.) I very much don’t relish the idea of writing up my entries in the dedicated Micro.blog and WordPress apps, though. I’ve been burned in the past with WordPress specifically, having been putting the finishing touches on a long piece only to have the app crash and everything lost. I’m sure the app is better now, but trust is hard won and easily lost.

So what do I want, then? What is the goal? Really, I want MarsEdit on mobile. But since that doesn’t exist this week, I want as close as I can get to that. So I’ll be spending this week playing around with the various writing apps I already have on my phone and tablet, examining each to see what they may offer in the realm of publishing blog posts. My hope is that, by the end of the week, I’ll have found a nice solution that will allow me to write and post all from within a single app.

To give myself some guard rails, I’ll attempt for now to stick just to evaluating the apps I already have installed. Embarrassingly, that doesn’t narrow the field greatly. I’m looking at my phone right now and I have the following:
– Ulysses (because I love it)
– Drafts (another daily go-to for which I continue to find new uses)
– Scrivener
– Bear
– Ulysses (yes, somehow I have two versions of it installed, because I love it and I’ve never bothered to try and figure out why there are two of them)
– iA Writer
– Byword
– MacJournal (this has burned me before, too, though, and it’s not even in the iOS App Store anymore)
– WordPress (though I never actually write in this)
– Micro.blog (I do replies in this, but never posts)

Yeah, that list is too long. We’re not going to talk about the number of apps I have on my phone. But that’s the list. I’ll be playing around with each of them to see if I can get any of them to do the job the way I want it done.

The goal will be to find, ideally, one single app that will let me draft a post, do any necessary edits, add any applicable tags, set the title, and post to two different blogs. Bonus points if it can also handle images. And double bonus if it syncs and allows me to edit previously published posts (though that is not a must have, more a want than a need).

As always, I’m open to any suggestions. If you’ve already worked this problem and know how to make it work with any of the apps I’ve listed here, please reach out and let me know! And if you use a different app that does the job marvelously, I’m always looking for an excuse to try something new and shiny.

Streaks: my secret weapon in building habits

~ Ryan

As I mentioned last week, I’m working this year on building some new habits and maintaining others. We’re past the halfway mark of January, and so far I’m keeping up with it. This week, I wanted to share one tool that I rely on more than any other to make habits stick, my secret weapon to a better me: Streaks.

Streaks up front on my home screen. More on my screen layout another time.

At its core, Streaks is essentially a to do list for habits. It can track up to six habits on one screen, and allows up to two screens for a maximum of 12 habits to be tracked. Personally, I find this limitation to be a good thing. I’ve been using Streaks for a couple years now, and as habits become cemented in my daily routines, I remove them from Streaks to make room for something new. For me, I’ve found that I can’t really do all the things I want at once, so limiting myself to no more than six new habits at a time increases the likelihood that I’ll actually stick to them. That’s just me, but I’m guessing it applies to a lot of other people as well.

As for the habits themselves, Streaks can track whatever you want. And they provide a great selection of preloaded habits if you don’t know where to start. With Apple Health integration, tracking things like exercise or mindful minutes happen almost magically. If I go for a run using Runkeeper, Streaks catches it and adds the progress towards my exercise habit goal. If I do a 10 minute meditation in Headspace, Streaks applies that towards my mindful minutes goal. It’s a simple thing, but it’s one less friction point in building a new habit, and that’s a huge plus for me.

“Finally I’ll stop picking my nose. Kidding…mostly…stop judging me!”

Streaks isn’t limited to just building new habits, either. It’s also capable of helping you eliminate bad habits as well. Just select the thing you want to stop doing, and be honest every time you give in. It can even handle tasks that need to be repeated multiple times a day. Streaks is flexible enough to work in whatever way you need to help build and maintain any habit.

The best way to see what Streaks can do is to just dive in, so let me show you how I’m using it right now. I’m currently tracking six habits in Streaks. I have trackers for daily reading, idea generation writing on Monday through Friday, exercising five days a week, taking my one-a-day vitamin, daily flossing, and daily meditation. Here’s what that looks like:

With a quick glance, I can see what goals I’ve completed, what progress I’ve made in finishing others, and which are still left to get done. For example, here I see that I’m looking pretty good. I’m a bedtime reader, so I know that 30 minutes of reading will get knocked out when I go to bed. And the flossing will be done right before then. I still have four minutes of exercise left to meet my daily goal, but I’m not worried about that because I’ll be doing a seven minute workout with the Seven app as soon as this is posted. And the last task of mindful minutes will be done with a 10-minute meditation in Headspace before calling it a night. And that will be another successful day in the books.

The possibilities within Streaks are broad and varied. I’ve found this to be one of the first apps I open in the morning and one of the last I check at the end of the day. The habits I’ve built in the past and those I’m building or maintaining now would have been significantly more difficult to accomplish without something like Streaks. If you find yourself looking for a tool to assist you in building your own good habits, or breaking bad ones, then this may be the solution for you.

And that’s all for this week. The rain finally stopped here and it’s looking to be good beach weather for the weekend. Next week I’ll start diving into the new practices I’m tackling this year. In the meantime, my best to you all, and to all a good week!

  • Ryan