I'm delighted to announce that Leader Fables has been renewed for a second season! And by "renewed," I mean that Casey and I loved making season one of the show so much that we decided to do another one about a favorite topic of ours: intentional productivity. During this season, we're dedicating an episode to each of the Five Altitudes of Planning, including:

1. Weekly preparation
2. Daily planning
3. Quarterly reviews
4. Live planning & Annual reviews
5. Putting It All Together
6. Managing Margin (bonus episode)

We kick off the season with an overview episode packed with tips and strategies to help us prepare to plan our weeks.

Finally, this season, we're starting a show newsletter. Signup for the newsletter to receive exclusive content, and enter to win a free copy of two books: Free to Focus and Deep Work.

I'm super excited to announce a podcast that's been in the making for quite some time. It's called Leader Fables, and we think you'll like it. My cohost, Casey Clark, and I use the power of storytelling to examine leadership strategies and tactics. You will enjoy the stories and may even enjoy our commentary.

In the first six episodes, we discuss leadership topics through the lens of middle management, including:

1. Strategies for new leaders
2. Tips for building and inheriting teams
3. Developing team norms and rhythms
4. Strategic planning
5. Maintaining focus amid chaos
6. Team celebration

The first two episodes are available now, where all fine podcasts are found. Please give them a listen and let me know what you think. New episodes drop every Tuesday at 10 AM MT.

Over the last couple of years when traveling internationally, I have packed a separate “day bag” to use when out-and-about and I thought others might find the contents of my day bag of some interest. Usually the trips I take involve frequent multi-hour bus rides and I have found it invaluable to pack a small bag that includes travel necessities as well as some of the tools I use to get work done when away from my desk.

The Bag

I usually take two bags with me when I travel: a day bag and a larger backpack that accompanies me on the long plane rides. The key difference between the two bags is the larger one carries my laptop, which will not fit in the smaller day bag (nor would I want it to). When flying, I fold up the day bag and store it in my carry-on rollberboard luggage as I only ever need one of the two bags with me at any given time.

Put simply: my day bag contains a subset of the items packed in my backpack.

After trying a few different bags to serve as my day bag, I settled on an all-canvas brown messenger-style bag by Gearonic. It’s light, has plenty of pockets and ample storage. It’s easy to sling around one shoulder and is comfortable to walk with. Without question, it’s one of my favorite bags and the most inexpensive one I own.

Productivity Tools

I have strived to pack the minimum amount of technology in my day bag with the goal of keeping the bag relatively light and minimal. For example, I have deliberately chosen not to pack a power brick or an external battery to charge my iPad and iPhone as the tablet gets all-day battery life and in a pinch can be used to charge my iPhone using a USB-C to lightning cable.

There are two key pieces of technology I carry with me, they are the 2018 11” iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard, and the Amazon Kindle Oasis.

Over the last three years or so, the iPad has become a trusted productivity tool for me instead of just a media consumption device. While there is some work I can only perform productively on my Mac, I can do most things on the iPad, such as writing prose and status reports, reading and annotating PDFs, performing desktop-class web browsing, and processing email and Slack messages. Honestly, if I had to pick between owning an iPad or iPhone, I’d pick the iPad every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

My iPad is also equipped with a cellular radio. Fortunately, Google Fi includes international roaming at no attitional charge so I often have connectivity to the internet whereever I happen to be in the world.

Since getting my first Kindle back in 2008, my reading habits have changed dramatically. Being able to read in a comfortable position and have control over line spacing and font size on a screen that doesn’t strain my eyes has turned reading from a chore into joy. I couldn't imagine going back to reading voluminous paper books or performing marathon reading sessions on my iPad. I read over a 1,000 printed pages a month all on my Kindle Oasis.

In addition to packing an iPad and Kindle, I also pack a USB-C charging dock for my Apple Watch as well as my AirPods Pro. While my Apple Watch doesn’t often run out of battery in the middle of the day, it’s the one device for which I haven’t determined the best time to charge as I often use it as a my morning alarm. There have been moments when my watch has died mid-day—having a charger on hand for these rare occasions is nice. I also use my AirPods quite a bit, either paired with my iPad or iPhone, to listen to podcasts and infrequently music.

Lastly, I often carry the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter and the USB-C to to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter as there are times when I need to transfer files to a friend’s USB dive or plug my iPad into a projector for a presentation. Admittedly, these times are pretty rare, however the adapters are light and easy to pack,

The Bare Necessities

A day bag wouldn’t be complete without packing necessities to get you through the day. I have found the following items to be very useful and often invaluable:

• Field Notes notebook. Whenever I need to jot down a note, or a thought, I’ll whip out my field notes notepad and jot it down. I’ll review the notebook later process any pertinent into my trusted systems for note taking or task management.
• Pens and a highlighter. Having a fine-point everyday pen that you like to write with is a must and you never know when you might feel the need to highlight a note in your field notes or a travel itinerary you received on a bus ride.
• Travel tissues and hand sanitizer. You never know when we’ll need a tissue and hand sanitizer is a must when in developing countries. I usually sanitize my hands before eating food and always after using an outhouse.
• Travel Tylenol and Carmex. I’ll admit, I don’t always drink enough water when traveling and therefore sometimes I get mild headaches. Having some Tylenol on hand during these moments is a god-send as is having chapstick to rub on sun-parched lips.
• Lens wipes. Anyone who wears glasses should carry a couple lens wipes to wipe sweat and gunk off glasses. They’re also useful for cleaning screens.
• Snacks. My snack of choice to pack in my day bag is fruit leather. You can usually find all-natural varieties that taste good and don’t dry out your mouth and, more importantly, give you a boost of energy or help you stave off hunger.

These items are placed the the front-most outer pockets of the bag for ease of access.

I love to travel and having a day bag with just the right things and no more has really helped me enjoy my time away from the confines of a hotel. It’s even helped me be a little more productive during down time without having to lug around all of my technology tools. My day bag is one of my favorite travel necessities and I couldn’t imagine going on another trip without it.

During the course of my workday, I paste dozens of web links into emails, Slack messages, iMessages, and my personal notes. I hate having to ⌘+Tab to Safari, hunt for the tab I need, click on the address bar, highlight & copy the tab’s URL, and then ⌘+Tab back to the app I was using and paste the link. This sort of context switching often interrupts my writing flow and train of thought.

To make this workflow a little bit easier, I devised a simple, but effective, TextExpander AppleScript snippet to grab and type the URL of the active tab in the front-most Safari window. Here it is:

tell application "Safari" to get URL of front document

This is useful most of the time, however there are instances when I’d like to get a list of all my open Safari tabs and pick the one I’d like to paste. With a little bit of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro magic, this is pretty easy to accomplish.

Here’s the AppleScript I authored to display a pick list of open Safari tabs, devided by Window. Once a tab is chosen, it outputs the tab's URL:

-- Get a list of tabs in Safari
tell application "Safari"
  set _tabNames to {}
  set _tabURLs to {}
  set _frontTabName to name of front document
  
  -- Create a list of URLs separated by window
  set _windows to every window whose visible is true
  repeat with _window in _windows
    set end of _tabNames to "----------"
    set end of _tabURLs to ""
    
    repeat with _tab in _window's tabs
      set end of _tabNames to name of _tab
      set end of _tabURLs to URL of _tab
    end repeat
  end repeat
  set end of _tabNames to "----------"
  set end of _tabURLs to ""
end tell

-- Pick from the list of open tabs and output the choset tab's URL
set _currApp to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text)
tell application _currApp
  activate
  choose from list _tabNames with title "Safari Tabs" default items _frontTabName
  if result is not false then
    set _tabChoice to item 1 of result
  else
    return
  end if
  
  repeat with _i from 1 to the count of _tabNames
    if item _i of _tabNames is _tabChoice then return item _i of _tabURLs
  end repeat
end tell

Keyboard Maestro makes it easy to (1) run this script when a bit of text is typed (in my case .turl) and (2) paste the URL of the selected tab. For reference, here’s a screenshot of the macro I built in Keyboard Maestro:

Note: The "Execute AppleScript" action needs to be set to “Type Results” upon successful execution.

Hopefully these two shortcuts, designed to quickly grab a link from Safari, will help you as they have helped me stay in the flow and save a little bit of time in the process.

Speaking of email, I’ve been wanting to jazz up my email signature for some time because, ya know, email signatures are boring and very predictable. Until today, my default signature, outputted using a TextExpander snippet, contained a valedictory and just one other word: my first name. I thought it might be fun to add an inspirational quote at random to the bottom of my signature line, which now looks like this:

Here’s how I did it.

I recently created a spreadsheet of quotes for another project, and I thought it would be neat if I could create a script to consult the spreadsheet and output a formatted quote at random. Turns out, it wasn’t very hard to do just that with a little bit of AppleScript and TextExpander magic. Here’s the AppleScript:

property _quotes : missing value

(*
  Get the list of quotes from a selected Apple Numbers file and cache
  the list of quotes in a property that will be used for subsiquent
  executions of this script.
  
  The list of quotes should be in a table on the first sheet of a 
  Numbers document with the quote in column "A" and the quote's author
  in column "B". The first sheet should only contain this one table.
*)
if _quotes is equal to missing value then
  -- Get a reference to the current app that will be activated
  -- after the Numbers document is selected and it's content read.
  set _currApp to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text)
  
  tell application "Numbers"
    activate
    
    set _quotesDocPath to POSIX path of (choose file with prompt ¬
      "Quotes Spreadsheet Location:" default location ¬
      	(path to home folder))
    set _doc to open _quotesDocPath
    tell front document to tell active sheet
      tell (first table whose selection range's class is range) to ¬
        set _quotes to rows's cells's value
    end tell
    
    close _doc
  end tell
  
  tell application _currApp to activate
end if

-- Pick a quote from the list at random
set _quote to item (random number from 2 to count of _quotes) of _quotes

-- Format the quote and output the author's name in uppercase.
return "\"" & item 1 of _quote & "\" —" & (do shell script "echo " & (item 2 of _quote) & " | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]")

All I needed to do next was create a TextExpander snippet to run the script. Then add the newly created script snippet to the bottom of snippet responsible for outputting my signature. Here's screenshot depicting one of my signature snippets that includes the random quote snippet:

Note: the first time the script runs, it prompts for the location of the Numbers spreadsheet containing the quotes to use. TextExpander may also need to be granted permission to read files located in the home folder.

I’m pleased to report this works quite well. The only catch is the TextExpander snippet needs to be changed slightly whenever the quotes spreadsheet is updated (for example, by adding a new line to the end of the script entry). This will cause it to reload and cache the updated quotes.

My Apple Numbers quotes spreadsheet can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy doling out little morsels of inspiration one email at a time!

Email is a communication method that must be tamed. Left unchecked, many knowledge workers, and particularly managers, can spend the majority of their time reading and sending email—like a human communication router.

When I served as a technology executive at a fast growing, mid-sized, software company, there were entire days where an inordinate amount of my discretionary time was dedicated to managing email. Without question, this was a poor use of my working hours. And as a result, I have worked to develop a handful of methods to tame the beast we call email.

I’ll start by detailing two particularly effective methods I use to deal with what I call "bulk messages" followed by how I approach checking email and tuning notifications.

Newsletters

If you’re like me, you probably get a bunch of email from companies and organizations you like. You probably also get emails from people that somehow find you but you have no interest in doing business with them. More often than not, these are not urgent or important messages requiring your immediate attention and therefore should not hit your inbox.

Instead, these bulk communications can be filed away into another folder bypassing the inbox altogether. Fortunately, this can be achieved using a mail rule, allowing you to batch review these messages when you're low on energy and have some free time.

The mail rule I setup to file these types of messages away is pretty simple. It moves messages to a folder named "Bulk" that contain one or more words or phrases that are most likely to be found only in bulk emails. The words and phrases are as follows:

• opt-out
• unsubscribe
• viewing the newsletter
• edit your preferences
• email notifications
• update profile
• manage your account
• email preferences

If you use Gmail or G Suite as your email provider, here’s the “has the words” search string I used to create my bulk message filter:

"opt-out" OR unsubscribe OR "viewing the newsletter" OR "edit your preferences" OR "email notifications" OR "update profile" OR "manage your account" OR "email preferences"

I have found this rule to rarely file away a non-bulk message, but your milage may vary.

One nice ancillary benefit of corralling bulk messages into a single folder is that it gives you a punch list of all the newsletters you’re subscribed to. This makes it relatively easy to work through the list and unsubscribe to the ones that are no longer of interest.

Since setting up this simple rule, hundreds of messages a week that would have normally hit my inbox get filed away for later review.

Distribution Lists

If your company is anything like the ones I have worked with, chances are you get a lot of email via lists you’re a member of. Many of these distribution lists are used to send non-urgent, and often unimportant, company announcements that don’t need to be read right away or responded to immediately (or at all). For this reason, especially if you work in a company that sends a lot of non-urgent, for-your-information type of emails, you may benefit from having these messages skip your inbox by setting up a mail rule to file them away for later review.

Email Checking & Notifications

Once implemented, the two bulk email suggestions should reduce the number of email notifications you get by an order of magnitude. However, you may want to do what I’ve done and reduce the number of notifications and unread message counts further (and by "further" I mean "to alomost zero").

I determined some time ago to only process email a few times a day: once in the morning, once at mid-day and once when finishing up work. This has worked relatively well for me, however due to the nature of my work, I often need to send email messages outside of my processing windows. For this reason, I have all but turned off email notifications and unread badge counts. This allows me to leave my email app open without having to be reminded of how many unread messages I have waiting or getting pestered by notifications.

I do make use of the VIP contact feature on my Mac and iOS devices. For the few people that are on my VIP lists, mostly key leaders I work with on an irregular basis, I like to get notified immediately when they send me a message.

Since implementing these three simple strategies for taming my inbox, I can confidently say most email that does get through is more deserving of my time and attention. It effectively cuts out a lot of the “white noise” that would otherwise accumulate in my inbox, enabling me to deal with email on my own terms, to which my time and attention (and my delete key) are eternally grateful.