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Day One 2, Sync Options & Security

Day One 2 will be released this week on Thursday, February 4th. It is a major upgrade to an app I use nearly every day. Consequently I am equally excited and curious. Reading the introducing blog post, it looks like a huge update: Written from the ground up and now offering multiple journals as well as multiple images per entry.

Quite understandably the developers also need and want to make money from the efforts they put into this brand-new version and hence it will be a paid update. There is a plan to offer a 50% discount in the first weeks to sweeten the upgrade for existing Day One users. I'll be definitely putting my money down for it.

However, one of the architectural decisions made in Day One 2 surprised me and a few others current users: Day One 2 will exclusively rely on its own sync service while iCloud and Dropbox, supported for syncing in v1, will only be available as export/backup destinations.

There seem to be sound reasons and benefits for this decision:

Our new sync engine is blazingly fast, secure, and free, providing freedom from the storage constraints of some services. Day One Sync is the foundation of many exciting features and enhancements we’re developing for the future.

However, there remain to be some concerns around this decisions as it removes choice. Day One Sync might be more, less or equal reliable and secure as Dropbox or iCloud. Time will tell. But initially it only removes choice. Particular with potentially very personal data, having a choice is important to many.

There is no 100% security and hopefully everyone knows this. Both Dropbox and iCloud have been compromised before and will be in the future. At the same time Apple and Dropbox have huge engineering and security teams. It is unlikely that Bloom, the makers of Day One, can defend and protect Day One Sync in a similar way in a worst case scenario.

We use alternative sync solutions for different applications and data already, but again: Some people write stuff into their journal which they do not, under no circumstances, want to get "out". Hence the sensitivity in this case might be a little higher than usual, removing some objectivity from the discussion.

But we need to be objective: You may want to do local-only or even pen-and-paper journaling to maybe increase security. If you are using Day One v1 today, synchronising via Dropbox or iCloud, your data is as secure as Dropbox or iCloud are. Even though you can protect your Day One journal with a key code or Touch ID today the actual entries are stored in plain text. Just right click your Journal.dayone file in it's Dropbox or iCloud folder and select Show Package contents.

In its current state, Day One Sync is comparable security-wise with iCloud and Dropbox, but we have grander plans—private-key encryption. Our 2.1 update will include this advanced form of privacy and protection.

Maybe the private key encryption feature promised for v2.1 will make everyone a little more relaxed. I will definitely carefully assess Day One 2 and likely wait for v2.1 before I migrate away from v1, which will continue to be maintained as the new "Classic" version of Day One.

Per my previous comparison I think that Day One Sync is only technically comparable to Dropbox or iCloud when it comes to security. Exposed to major attacks either targeting the data or the availability of the service, Day One Sync will be challenged to deliver an infrastructure which compares to those they support in v1.

Private key encryption may be enough for me to accept this. But like most people, I simply do not like if choices are taken away from me, in particular if it is the choice of where I want to store my journal data.

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MacSparky teaches you all you need to know about custom columns in OmniFocus

Nice 3.5 minutes video by David Sparks explaining OmniFocus for Mac's new custom column feature.

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Have yourself a little OmniFocus Christmas

You are surely busy buying gifts for your loved ones these days: Making a list, checking it twice... – but what is going to be the little gift for yourself? May I suggest some small gifts which will definitely help you make 2016 a great year?

First, get OmniFocus for your Mac and iPhone/iPad (incl. Apple Watch App). Make sure you go straight for the OmniFocus Pro version. You will see why paying a premium pays off just after a few days, I promise!

Whether you have OmniFocus for a while already or just bought it because I was able to finally persuade you to put your hard earned cash into it, here is the actual self-gift which will allow you to master OmniFocus by learning from the masters of OmniFocus.

Buy Joe Buhlig's Working with OmniFocus ebook! It is full of practical advise on how you get the most out of OmniFocus every day and it is only 22 US$ at the moment!

If you enjoy video tutorials and live webinars more you should really get a subscription for Learn OmniFocus from Tim Stringer who is one of the big OmniFocus teachers out there; It's 29US$ for 3 months, 39 US$ for half a year and just 59US$ for an annual membership

David Sparks and his MacSparky Field Guide series has helped thousands of Mac users getting better with various applications, he also has a great OmniFocus Video Field Guide in store for only 9.99 US$

The first ebook about OmniFocus, updated to 2nd edition and still chock-full of incredible useful tips is Kourosh Dini's Creating Flow with OmniFocus ebook which you can get for 29.95 US$

For some additional tips and tricks please browse the collection of my humble contributions to the OmniFocus community which is free of charge, but I'd be grateful for some support

If you invest into high-end software like OmniFocus which comes at a price, you want to make sure you exploit your initial investment! All of the above resources are excellent in helping you with that. They do come with an incremental investment, but that amortises in days, if not hours.

Prepare now to get shit done in 2016! Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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Making your Review in OmniFocus a breeze

There is a lot you can do with the notes field in OmniFocus. Many things can be dropped into it to help you make your Weekly Review a real breeze.

The Weekly Review tasks are inspired by the OmniFocus book just released by Joe Buhlig. His review routines are comprehensive and his Update Review Dates script is extremely useful.

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Joe Buhlig has made great contributions to the OmniFocus community in the last months and quietly carried the OmniFocus blogging baton further as others, including myself, wrote less about their favourite productivity application and related workflows.

Today Joe released his ebook about OmniFocus called "Working with OmniFocus" and it is a very good one. There is a lot of energy and time invested to conway Joe's setup and the reasons behind it to the reader. It is one of these really valuable peeks inside a very thought-thru organisation and workflow.

While the book covers all structural aspects of OmniFocus and should help readers to arrive at the setup best for them, I myself enjoyed most the parts where Joe shares some of his tricks, like a set of Drafts actions to directly add entries from his iPhone to Someday/Maybe lists he maintains in OmniFocus, or where he provides insights into his routines, especially for his Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annual Reviews.

The overview provided by the book is a very comprehensive and practical one for the application as well as the supporting methodology. It reconnects OmniFocus to the original principles of GTD® which I haven't seen done in a long time and therefore disconnected from myself a little.

Joe is offering "Working with OmniFocus" at a special launch price of $17. Grab it now!

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"Done, Now Waiting" AppleScript for Things

Lately I am up for experimentation and changes again. At present I goof around with Cultured Code's Things a bit, because why not. Things is a high quality application, but lagging behind the rest of the market. Some would even say a lot. However, crafted in my city (Stuttgart, Germany) by people with passion and dedication to quality, I always keep an eye on it.

A few days ago I reinstalled Things to see what has changed in the last few minor releases. As I played around I realised that I was missing some of the few AppleScript helpers I use in OmniFocus. Because I am delegating a lot, the one I was missing most was the script that marked an (agenda) item complete and create a new Waiting for item for the same subject.

For example you may have this task for the next conversation with a colleague

Mike: Create summary report for Q3 @agenda

When you sit down with Mike and you tell him that we need a Q3 summary report your part is done. Now you want a new task to be created.

Waiting for Mike: Create summary report for Q3 @waiting

That's pretty much what this very simplistic AppleScript below does: Completing the currently selected task(s) and create a new one(s), due in 2 days from today, by pre-pending "Waiting for" to the original task's title and assigning the waiting tag. If the original task was assigned to a project or area the new task will be created in the same place, otherwise it'll drop into your Inbox.

The script is not offering too much options and works best with a certain syntax of to dos like in above example, but it should be so simple that you can customise it to your needs quite easily.

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AppleFaces.co has some amazing Apple Watch faces. I like the transparent one.

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Mass dropping OmniFocus Tasks with AppleScript

If you ever put either too much on your plate or collected a lot of possible tasks which you decided against later, this little piece of AppleScript Chris Dzombak is for you.

It takes the selected tasks and marks them complete. Boom! They are gone. To avoid them from popping up later as truly completed, e.g. during your Weekly Review, they also get assigned to a "Dropped" Context.

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Just a little IFTTT recipe I have created which watches a selected Trello board and creates, via the Omni Sync Server MailDrop feature, an OmniFocus inbox task for every card that gets assigned to me.

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Outlook for Mac 2016 to OmniFocus

Microsoft Outlook or its predecessor Entourage have never been the most popular email clients on the Mac, but the folks from Redmond have significantly improved it over the years and some people quite simply have not much of a choice. In particular if you work in a large corporation which historically uses (a locked down version of) Exchange.

While Outlook 2016 for Mac is a huge leap forward, providing nearly feature parity with its Windows twin, Microsoft made some changes to the AppleScript interface and how scripts get executed. Most notably the Script Menu has disappeared which removes the easy and convenient approach of dropping your AppleScript into a defined folder and subsequently trigger it from a menu or even with a keyboard shortcut.

At the beginning people also observed some changes on the Outlook AppleScript interface as well which put some of the existing scripts at risk. However, Justin Lancy's AppleScript to clip Outlook items into OmniFocus' inbox seems to still work perfectly fine. At least for emails which are the only Outlook objects I tested (and need).

Of course you are asking "Why are you not just using the Mac OS X OmniFocus Clipping Service?" Well, Outlook has come a long way, but it is not fully embracing some of Mac OS X's native features yet.

As the script still works the only missing part of the workflow is an easy way to trigger it. If you happen to have FastScripts you are sorted already. Otherwise let's ask a good friend: Alfred.

Building a workflow to trigger a script is relatively easy. In this case you need to make sure you use the "Run Script"-Action as the script won't run as part of the "Run NSAppleScript"-Action. Add a keyword and a keyboard shortcut to trigger it and you are done. I have chosen the same keyboard shortcut I use for OmniFocus' official Mac OS X clipping service and limited its scope to Outlook and therefore overwrite the system default, saving me an additional shortcut to remember.

Feel free to download the Alfred workflow. Use, change and debug it at your own risk and pleasure.

All credits have to go to Justin Lancy of Veritrope.com for developing the actual script. I just connected some boxes in the Alfred workflow designer.

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When you are doing things, when you get into the flow you like to have all you need right at your fingertips. Whether these are the minutes from the last project status meeting, the current design draft or the original brief. In good old GTD® terms this would all be called "Support Material". Some keep it neatly inside a folder, others have a system of text files and others prefer Evernote.

If you are part of the Evernote camp then you will like the AppleScript which Danny Smith came up with. You can trigger it straight from Alfred and it will

Create an OmniFocus project (eg. “Wash Car”). This is where my next actions will live.

Create a tag in Evernote, prefixed with a slash (eg. “/Wash Car”). I’ll use this to tag any emails or other stuff that’s related to the project.

Create a new note in Evernote to act as the main project support document (eg. “PROJECT — Wash Car”), tagged with the new project tag. This is where I’ll plan my next actions and keep any thoughts relating to the project.

Add a link to OmniFocus pointing to the Evernote note, and vice versa. I use local links which work on both OSX and iOS.

With some minor modification you could also run it from Launchbar or, when adding an input dialog, outside of a launcher.

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The talented Phillip Gruneich has a great post about searching OmniFocus from within Launchbar on his One Tap Less blog. The site is generally worthwhile following since Philip writes many intriguing articles on Mac and iOS automation.

But instead of just giving you a downloadable script or a readymade Launchbar Action, Philip makes the effort of teaching the basics of JavaScript for Automation. Starting from simple script variables and commands to finding the way through Application dictionaries in Script Editor he does a great job of taking you one step at the time.

Eventually, you will of course have your Launchbar Action which allows you to search your OmniFocus data.

As this is the start of a (small) series of posts, I am already looking forward when Philip talks about controlling OmniFocus with Launchbar in the next instalment.

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OmniFocus 2.3 will allow a more dense layout with configurable columns for your Perspectives. This is a much bigger change (for the better) than you think. Once the new version is out I’ll be definitely tweaking some of my Perspectives and share them here.

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If you don't like or trust the cloud but still like to keep your OmniFocus in sync then this article on the OmniFocus support forums is for you.

It explains in great detail how to configure the free WebDAVNav Server for use with OmniFocus 2. When done you can sync on your local network with your iOS devices. Of course, with the right tools and knowledge you could also expose your WebDAVNav Server to the internet and sync remotely, but this is not covered in the tutorial.

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I sometimes wish I could use a visiual tool like Trello as my personal productivity system, but the type of role and the environment I work in requires a more sophisticated approach which limits options for visualisation.

That said I use Trello as a Kanban board with my team, to layout my weekly excercise and meal plan and manage topics for blog posts.

If you want to use Trello as your trusted system than this post by Victor Savkin is for you.

Using Trello for Your Personal Productivity System

The main goal of a personal productivity system is not to manage your time, but rather to give you visibility into what is happening in your life. This enables planning work, tracking progress, and retrospecting. In this article I will talk about my personal productivity system, which is based on ideas from Getting Things Done and Personal Kanban. I will also show how to use a web application called Trello to implement it.

Keep reading

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The students’ scores differed immensely between longhand and laptop note takers. While participants using laptops were found to take lengthier “transcription-like” notes during the film, results showed that longhand note takers still scored significantly higher on conceptually-based questions. Mueller and Oppenheimer predicted that the decrease in retention appeared to be due to “verbatim transcription.”

I keep switching between laptop/iPad based note taking and good old notebook and pen. Many of the observations cited in this HBR article are shared by me: Remembering concepts is easier for me when I took hand written notes.

Maybe mind mapping is a good compromise? I shall observe myself better with regards to which notes provide greater value to my comprehension and retention.

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I defer tasks in OmniFocus a lot. Just to get them out of sight and out of my productive way. I like to see them again when, well, I like to see them again. But when that time comes I need them to come back right into my face.

It is not enough for them to just become "available" again, they need to yell at me: "Here am I again! Look at me!"

The tasks I always look at, that are in front of me nearly the entire day, are the tasks I flagged in OmniFocus as part of my daily planning. They get an over proportional level of attention. Consequently, if I need deferred tasks to pop-up in this list I need to flag them when I defer them.

Now the issue is that I consistently do this — in 60% of all cases. So things fall between the cracks and I hate when that happens.

Luckily there is Colter Reed. Colter has the same problem. Or better: Used to have it. Until he came up with this genius little AppleScript which automatically flags all tasks deferred to today. He also gives you the tools to run the script on a regular schedule like every morning at 6am (or once the computer is wakes up after that time). You can also use Lingon or Keyboard Mastero to run the script on a regular basis.

Obviously, I instantly adopted Colter's script for my setup.