This is my first blog post on my new site powered by Squarespace! I am really excited that I have taken the step of securing my own domain name as well as subscribing to Squarespace to power my writing. These “writerly moves” show me being nice to myself and taking ownership in my writing. I am really looking forward to the writing that will take place here over the coming year! I have a bunch I want to write about in this initial post. Before I get to any of that…I want to start by talking about my new workflow.

Instead of writing in the Ulysses app on my iPad Pro then directly posting to Wordpress and pushing to Twitter I will now be writing on my MacBook Pro using the Mac version of the Ulysses app to capture, revise, and edit my ideas then sending them to Squarespace using a not so direct but otherwise simple (copy/paste) method. That might sound a bit convoluted but I enjoy using the Ulysses app and the Mac app version is actually really good. So…for now…I will continue to use Ulysses as the space where my ideas start.

As my Winter Break slowly begins to melt away I want to touch on some things I’ve been geeking out to that I think will have positive outcomes as this new year begins. I’ve updated my OmniFocus workflow. For a long time I have been using OmniFocus just for work. Most of what I have on there is automated because there are certain things that I have to get done on certain days. As I got closer and closer to making the decision to move to Squarespace I decided that I wanted to use OmniFocus for some fun, personal stuff. I decided to create a few folders Personal and Work.

Here’s what that looks like now…

I moved all of my work stuff into the Work folder and renamed one of my 3 single action projects. Here’s what that looks like…

I created 3 new single action projects for my Personal folder. Here’s what that looks like…

Home and Apartment may not sound like “fun” stuff to my reader but putting them in this folder has helped me become more mindful of what needs to be done within these spaces and would could be done within these spaces and that’s a positive thing! I also have Writing in this folder and we all know how much joy writing brings me! One more thing…I am trying to use a new tag with my actions. It’s called “Next” and I am hopeful that by using it it will help me stay focused more on tasks and not so much on date and time. I’ve been using it with my Home project since I’ve been home for Winter Break and have found it helpful…another positive.

Widget screen and Siri Suggestions update. I’m in week 3 of this experiment and will say officially here…on my new blog…that the experiment over! I am all in on this workflow with regards to using my iPhone XR. I’ve added a new Shortcut to the Widget screen which opens the Forecast view of Omnifocus for me. This has been helpful since I’ve been playing around with the “Next” tag for my actions…another positive thing! I’m thinking that I will take the Omnifocus widget off as all of my other actions are date/time specific and show up on my Apple Watch. Heck…I’m going to go do that right now!

The concept of refraining as it is explained by Pema Chödrön …is something I’m experimenting with right now. I’m almost finished with Chodron’s book titled: When Things Fall Apart which is where I first came across this “thought technology.” The book is really short and Chodron’s writing style is such that you feel like she’s speaking to your directly…a very intimate experience. This concept of refraining has had a big impact on me. So much that I am trying to track “it” with a project titled: Refraining in the Timery app. Here’s a look at where it is in my Saved Timers…

Any time that I am by myself and I choose to “do nothing” I activate this project timer and just sit. I’ve only tried it once since creating the timer but plan on trying it more over the next few days. I will make a note to mention how this is going in future posts. Yearly Themes update… I recently listened to the latest Cortex podcast where they talked about Yearly Themes. This gave me a chance to think about my current theme, the Year of Right. I think I’m going to stick with this theme for a while longer but within that thinking, I am aware that there are certain aspects of the theme that I could “drill down” on and possibly come up with a new theme.

Well…that’s it for now. The next time I write and post to my new site I will have been back to work for a week and…a year older!