2019 reflection question

Posted by Hugh
Jan 4, 2020 at 04:01 PM

Over the last twelve months, in an effort to get more done, I’ve been trialling anti-distraction software and, following David Sparks and others, “hyper-scheduling” (all on a Mac).

As far as anti-distraction applications are concerned, I’ve tried Freedom, Focus, Be Focused Pro and FocusMe. So far I’ve found FocusMe to be the most flexible, Focus and Freedom in its pro version to be in different ways expensive, and Be Focused Pro to be inexpensive but jarring in its design. My current preference is FocusMe (although I like Focus’s UI).

In hyper-scheduling trials I’ve tried Tick Tick and Skedpal. Skedpal was very intriguing but reminded me of similar apps with scheduling algorithms that I tried on Windows fifteen or more years ago, with immense possibilities for wasting time by tinkering. After trying Tick Tick I can understand why there are fans of it on this forum. It’s a reliable and nicely designed application, and works well on both Mac and iOS. In the end however for hyper-scheduling I returned to the combination that I already owned of OmniFocus and Fantastical, and drag-and-drop (because, though slightly less pretty than Tick Tick, the combination is reasonably simple to use and in the round works almost as well as Tick Tick does).