Stay Focused with These OS X Productivity Apps

Tags

Apple, freelance, internet, mac, organization, osx, tech, yosemite

Hellscape.

Your computer desktop is a hellscape of distraction. And so is mine. But mine is slightly less so, because of a number of strategies and utilities that I employ to keep it as clean as possible.

The basic idea here is to stop keeping so many browser tabs open – email, Facebook, calendar, your to-do list, articles to read, videos to watch – it never ends. And the result is that every time you glance at your browser’s title bar, you’re bombarded with the distraction of all these open circuits and loose ends. It is absolutely counter-productive to a focused workflow, whatever you’re working on. Below are some strategies and utilities that I use to tame the Beast.

First, the Big 4 \m/

Better.

MailTab Pro for Gmail

Do you keep your email open in a browser tab at all times? Of course you do – what do I think you are, some kind of Luddite? Well, stop it. It’s distracting. MailTab Pro for Gmail is a menu bar app that alerts you when email arrives and gives you quick, browser-less access to read and compose. It looks and behaves exactly like gmail in your browser, but tucked neatly into your menu bar. $1.99 for the pro version; there is also a free version available.

Similar competing apps exist, as do menu bar apps for Yahoo Mail and other services, but I can’t vouch for those.

MenuTab Pro for Google Calendar

Think you see a pattern? You’re right. Get all of those pinned tabs out of the way and up into the menu bar, where you can access them when you need them without the psychological overhead of a browser.

MenuTab Pro for Google Calendar is a simple app that keeps your Google calendar in your menu bar, out of sight and out of mind – until you need it. $1.99.

Wunderlist

Wunderbar.

This one’s sort of a twofer. I’m assuming you already use a to-do list like Wunderlist or Toodledo. If you don’t, proceed immediately to wunderlist.com and sign up for an account. There is nothing quite so liberating as a to-do list that follows you everywhere you go, from desktop to laptop to phone to tablet. Well, that or maybe representative government. But you already have that. Sort of.

Anyhoo, once you have your to-do list set up, you will want 24/7 access to it, and you will begin keeping a tab open in your browser for it. Have you learned nothing from me, padawan? Ditch the tab, and install the free menu bar app. (Or, if you prefer, Toodledo.)

MenuTab for Facebook

And finally, if you’re like me, you enjoy Neil Diamond and are jealous of your wife’s relationship with your cat. Also, you have infrequent interactions on Facebook, but are compelled to constantly check to see if you have any alerts, despite all good sense. MenuTab for Facebook will fix that nonsense. Just stick it up in your menu bar and it will tell you when it’s time to check; in the meantime, those pictures of your cousin’s dinner won’t miss you one bit. Free, or $1.99 for extra features.

Next, Clean up Those Loose Ends

Evernote

Hopefully by now you have installed and are faithfully using your to-do list. That’s great, but what about when you need to make a note longer than a few words? Stop opening TextEdit, and start using Evernote.

Evernote allows you to create notes, sort them into notebooks, and sync them across multiple devices. It’s like Apple Notes, but with greater portability. You can use Evernote natively to sync your thoughts across OS X, Windows, iOS and Android, and there are several options for using it with Linux.

YouTube ‘Watch Later’

If you’re a YouTube power user (does that sound as ridiculous as I think it does?) you already know about the Watch Later playlist. But if you’re a casual user, you may not be aware. The Watch Later playlist is created in your account by default. Whenever you come across a video that you want to watch – but not right now – hover over the thumbnail and you’ll see a little clock icon in the lower right corner. Click that to add the video to your Watch Later list. When you have a few minutes for a break, check out the playlist (in the upper left of your screen) and see what you’ve queued up for yourself.

It’s a thousand times better than keeping twenty YouTube tabs open for stuff you’re totally going to watch, like, whenever you get a sec. For realz, yo.

Ok, so by now you ought to have your email, calendar, to-do list and Facebook apps running out of sight in your menu bar, and you’re tracking your projects with your to-do list and keeping notes with Evernote and sticking all those cat videos into your Watch Later list. If we’ve done this right, you might be able to – gasp – close your browser! And not even with tabs open so they all come back when you relaunch, but actually close it all so it opens cleanly the next time you actually need it. And as long as you don’t need it, it can stay closed, and your desktop is now free of distraction! Huzzah!

Honorable Mention

TotalFinder

I’m not sure TotalFinder is a productivity app per se, but it goes a long way to cleaning up your desktop, and I sure couldn’t live without it, so here it goes.

TotalFinder is the Finder replacement that ought to come stock with OS X. It maintains a single window with tabs for multiple directories, and keeps that window hidden when you don’t need it. A hotkey brings it up when you need it, and hides it when you don’t.

It also has a whole host of other options, so you can have granular control over your Finder experience, if you’re into that kind of thing. $18 and worth every penny.

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GnuCash: Show Outstanding Invoices

Tags

freelance, GnuCash, invoicing, linux

GnuCash Accounts Tab

UPDATED BELOW 2015-04-06

I recently switched to GnuCash for invoicing. While it’s quite powerful, it does have a bit of a learning curve. And while I’ve mostly been able to figure out what I need to know with the googles, one feature has eluded me: how to get GnuCash to show me a list of outstanding invoices.

It seems like a pretty obvious feature, but my searches for it always ended on a message board with someone telling me that it simply can’t be done. And while that may technically be true, I stumbled on a trick last night that is definitely close enough for funk.

And here’s the trick: it’s a two-step process. The menu item you need is only available from a certain tab. So:

GnuCash Customers Tab

Start on your Accounts tab. Click Business->Customers->Customer Overview. This will open the Customers tab. Now, with the Customers tab selected, click  Reports->Customer Listing.

This will open the Customer Listing tab, which shows you all of your clients and what they owe. It’s easy enough to ignore the clients with $0.00 next to their names, and that leaves you with a list of clients who have at least one outstanding invoice. Mind you, it still doesn’t show a breakdown of specific invoices – but you can click on the hyperlinked outstanding amount to see a breakdown of invoices for each client.

GnuCash Customer Listing Tab

It’s not ideal – I would really like a one-click solution that simply shows me every currently unpaid invoice – but it’s whole lot better than “it can’t be done.”

2015-04-06 – UPDATE

Reader Rich T. emailed me to suggest a further improvement to this method:

You stumbled on the same thing I did.  It might help to:  1. On the options dialog there is a checkbox to ignore zero balances.  2. "Save -> save report config as" will let you give it a name and recall it as needed.

Edit report options

So, picking up from where we left off above with the Customer Listing tab active, there is a button in the toolbar called Edit report options. Click this, deselect “Show zero balance items” toward the bottom of the dialogue, and give it a “Report name” up top. Click Ok, then go to File->Save Report As… and give your new report a name.

Now, you can simply click Reports->Preconfigured reports and choose your customized report. Even better, it will only show clients with outstanding balances. So much simpler!

Thanks, Rich T., for the suggestion!

Use NeoFinder to Reclaim Hard Drive Space

Tags

backup, editing, freelance, osx

Duplicates Found

I’ve written about NeoFinder before. It’s a great tool to keep tabs on files across multiple external hard drives. (Basically, it creates a searchable database of every file on each of your drives, which you can then quickly search even when those drives are not plugged in.)

Ok, so that’s great. Easily worth the cost of a license. But what’s even better is the built-in “Find Dupes” feature. Once you’ve cataloged all your drives, just hit the Find Dupes button and it will let you know what projects or files are living on multiple drives.

I cleared over 100 GB in just a couple minutes when it reminded me that I had started a recent project on one drive and then moved it to a portable drive to finish it. (And it found quite a bit more than that, which I’ll deal with when I have a bit more time.)

Check out NeoFinder if you haven’t already. Really – I’m totally vouching over here. Great stuff.

Simple, Efficient Backup for Creatives

Tags

backup, editing, freelance, mac, organization, tech

NOTE: This article was originally posted 8/11/2013.

Backing up our data is important. We all know that. But particularly for creative professionals, our data is our livelihood. Lose one project due to hard drive failure, and your reputation is ruined with that client forever. And yet, so frequently I find that freelancers and even small companies don’t maintain adequate (if any) backups. Why?

Expense is always an issue, but with today’s hard drive prices, it’s no excuse for risking your client’s work and your reputation. If the confusion inherent in the backup landscape is your excuse, then I’m here to help. You don’t need a RAID array or a NAS or a SAN or a data locker to take basic precautions for data redundancy. Below is a simple, effective backup strategy I developed for a small production company I used to work for, and which I implement now in my own freelance practice.

Step 1 – The Archive
This is where your projects go to die. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Let’s say they “retire.” Because you never know when a client will want an update to something you produced for them two years ago, or if you’ll want to go back and grab an old After Effects animation to use as a template in a new project. The Archive is where projects live after you think you’re done with them.

The Archive is simple. For every hard drive you need to keep archived material, you buy two. So if you have 1 TB worth of old projects, you buy two 2 TB drives. You put all your projects on one of them (leaving room to grow), and then you mirror it to the second. Whether you need one, two, or twenty drives, you keep them all mirrored, all the time. There’s no mismatching – each hard drive has an exact mirror. There’s no throwing projects just anywhere and then trying to remember to back them up somewhere else later, when you get a chance, and THEN trying to remember where on Earth either of those copies went. Projects enter The Archive chronologically, so when you need something you just need to remember approximately when you finished it, and then find that drive.

Step 2 – The Working Drive
Next, for active projects, you get a portable drive and a place to back it up, and do the same thing. If you’re a freelancer, that’s pretty much it. If you’re a company with multiple editors, you give each editor a personal portable Working Drive and a place to back it up. They keep all their active projects on that drive, and they keep it with them for those inevitable times when a client needs something unexpected over the weekend.

If you’re a freelancer, it works in the other direction – your Working Drive is always available to bring to a client’s location when necessary, and always has your current work on it. You can just buy two identical portable drives, but a cheaper solution is to back it up to another desktop drive. I use Time Machine to back up my portable to my Time Machine backup drive along with all my system files.

Step 3 – The System
Now we have a simple, elegant backup solution. Keep all current work on your portable Working Drive, and keep that drive either mirrored or backed up to a desktop drive. When you close the books on a given project, move that project to The Archive, make sure that it’s mirrored, then remove it from your Working Drive to reclaim the space for your next project.

You can perform the mirror backups manually, or you can use software to automate the process. If you’re on a Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner is a free program that will keep two drives matched, always updating one to match the other whenever changes are made. (If you’re using a PC, then you probably have 20 different options, none of which actually work any better than CCC.)

Bonus Level – Off-site Backup
If you’re serious about backup, you need to also think about off-site backup. Keeping all your drives mirrored protects you in case of hard drive failure, but in case of fire/flood/theft/volcano, you’re still hosed. So if you want to take that extra step, it’s built into the system: just take those mirrors and keep them somewhere else. If you’re a freelancer, keep them at a friend’s or family member’s house, or store them in a bank safe deposit box. If you’re a small company, send the mirrors home with some trusted employees. You’ll need to retrieve them when it’s time to update the mirror, but c’est la vie, amirite?

Agitator Level – But what about the cloud?
If you’ve got Verizon FiOS or an OC-3 connection, by all means, just dump it all to the cloud and forget everything I said. Crashplan has some reasonably priced plans and comes highly recommended by the interwebs. But for the rest of us, HD video is far too massive to realistically back up to the cloud. It would take days of a constant streaming upload to backup just a few hours of footage. So please stop showing off; if we had FiOS in our area, we wouldn’t rub your nose in it.