Phil Bowell

In a little break from work I’ve added a dark theme to my install of the new Bayou theme from @Mtt and tweaked some light theme colours.

Finally looking into the work of Brandon Sanderson, I’ve always enjoyed fantasy but managed to miss his work somehow. Any recommendations on where to start? 📚

It’s a dark mode day. Outside is gloomy and grey, it’s raining, and everything feels like it’s in dark mode. There’s been a few of these kinds of day recently, normally they coincide with extrovert days at work, when my calendar is chock full of meetings and there’s no room to actually Do The Work.

Today is a bit different.

Whilst it’s a dark mode day outside, and consequently a dark mode day on my Mac I only have a couple of calls today so I have chance to find some flow. These days feel rare and for once I’m happy it’s a dark mode day. I can cocoon myself at my desk, headphones on, my time to work playlist in my ears and I’ll have a stretch of time to do some design work.

Updated my iPad to 18.3 last night, can’t tell if the WiFi being so crap is a result of that or the cafe I’m in. Seems ok on my iPhone though…

Having initially abandoned trying OmniFocus 4 I decided to give it a run over the last week. I forgot how nice sequential projects are for only showing the 1 task that needs to be done to make progress.

It happened, I downloaded Omnifocus 4 on my lunch break but there’s no way of easily getting emails into it from Outlook. I guess that’s the end of that experiment.

The CEO of Sonos has finally stepped down which took a lot longer than I expected. The damage is already done for me though, I won't buy another Sonos product again.

It’s so cold today I’m actually considering going to buy some thermals… it’s almost 11am and it’s still frozen outside.

Followed a few accounts from Bluesky in Micro.blog. Going to see how that goes and then I’ll probably delete my Bluesky account. Essentially I just want one place to go to see all things non-RSS.

Barry Hess in a post about the state of his task manager makes the point that he is DDoS’ing himself with To-dos and Reminders. Essentially there is so much stuff in his task manager and he has lost trust in the way it works to ever see the right things at the right time.

I feel his pain. I have been bouncing around task managers for, at least, the last 6 months trying to find a way that works for me to see what I need to do at the right time. It feels that the biggest issue for me, is that as work dials up its corporate security it becomes harder to wrangle all the incoming jobs in one place. Tasks can be assigned to me in at least three different pieces of software, none of which are able to be integrated. On top of this I have the tasks coming in from chats and meetings, plus keeping track of and breaking down all the tasks into chunks that make them doable.

All of this leaves me with a constant feeling of overwhelm. There’s too much to do and no enough time to do it. There has to be a better way…