Commonplace

RSS readers are a productivity hack

A few weeks ago, I pulled the feeds from my most-read websites into NetNewsWire. Here’s what I’ve found:

• The up-to-date nature of the reader means I feel permanently caught-up. I no longer mindlessly cycle through news site a random point in the day.
• Related: my work focus has drastically improved. The temptation for distraction has reduced.
• I only check the feed a couple of times a day.
• The feed surfaces content I would almost certainly miss (e.g. personal blogs).

I tried using RSS on somewhat of a whim, so these benefits have been somewhat of an unintentional, zero-effort revelation. In terms of reduced distraction, it feels similar in impact to when I deleted social media apps and email from my phone.

Day Rates

One year ago, I switched from charging project fees to day rates. It’s been transformative on lots of fronts.

Everything below comes with the following preface/caveat:

1. There’s no universally perfect charging method: I’m writing this to highlight something that’s been working for me
2. These thoughts are somewhat of a work-in-progress
3. Your mileage will vary

Until last year, I’d almost exclusively quoted project rates. This had worked ok but I’d found it difficult to get the balance right. A couple of years ago, I read Sanctuary Computer’s pieces on value pricing and quoting technology: these pieces strongly resonated with me.

The popularity of value pricing has led to pricing by time getting a bad rep among freelancers and independents. I’d never felt comfortable with value pricing, and found some issues in charging by project, so switching to time-based quoting has been a revelation.

Here are some of the benefits I’ve experienced in pricing by day:

1. Clients fundamentally understand the concept of days much more easily.
   Whether that’s pitching a week-long discovery period or a three week design phase, I’ve noticed that clients instantly understand that things take time – something that can be lost in a flat-fee (broken down or otherwise). In practice, this has meant they’ve accepted estimates more readily as it’s clearer to see where the money is going.
2. There’s no scope creep or over/under-charging.
   There’s an inherent flexibility to charging by day. Describing additional features in terms of extra days is much easier than ‘this is out-of-scope’ conversations (something I found perpetually tricky as a people-pleaser).
3. Delivering a fixed-cost quote requires a lot of upfront work.
   Instead of this, I now have a call with clients and usually suggest a short discovery phase as the first engagement. This has a couple of benefits:
   
   
   1. At the end of the discovery phase, we’ll decide on the best next steps and estimate the days needed for future phases. We adapt the scope/features as we learn more.
      
      When I used to quote flat fees, I’d feel forced to fix the scope before we know what the problems are/solutions might be. This increases the risk of ‘out-of-scope’ conversations or – worse – delivering something we know isn’t the best solution because we fixed the quote before we started working
   2. Clients who accept this are more likely to accept a flexible working approach (i.e. it’s an indirect qualifier)
   3. The risk of spending hours on upfront discovery is reduced/eradicated (pure anecdata, but every time I suggested a paid discovery phase to fix a scope, it was always rejected)
4. My calendar is easier to plan
   There are only so many days in the month, so I have a decent handle on my availability.
5. I’ve found it much easier to squeeze in days for requests/small projects.
   When I quoted by project, I felt I had less clarity in my calendar and found fitting these things in more difficult.
6. Income is easier to predict.
   I bill every month in arrears for the work completed that month. That means:
   1. The chance of delay for a milestone-related payment is eradicated as I’m paid when I work (though delays can still happen, of course)
   2. There’s no ambiguity in knowing when to bill (i.e. a feature is complete but we’re waiting for feedback/content/etc)
7. I offer a reduction in rate for some types of clients and day rates make it easier to demonstrate this.
8. It’s quicker to see whether a project is viable.
   When I charged project rates, it would be very tempting to say “yes” to a small project that wasn’t viable. When I put together an estimate in days, it becomes crystal clear when one or more phases are unrealistically short or difficult from an availability perspective.

I’m aware that some of my discomfort around project rate management are not insurmountable (i.e. ‘out-of-scope’ conversations). Changing the way I charge has helped to reduce some of the inherent frictions I found with project-based pricing, and I’ve generally found any new frictions to be easier to handle.

Without getting into the weeds, there are two common objections to time-based pricing:

1. Billing by time penalises efficiency.
   This is partly reflected in the day rate (i.e. it’s not low). More importantly, I’m not convinced that everything gets quicker/easier as I learn more. Some things do, but other things take longer as I recognise there are more potential solutions to a problem. The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.
2. Value pricing lets you increase rates for bigger businesses.
   I think this can be addressed through day rates, too. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to increase a rate or day estimate for larger companies: e.g. additional meetings/processes/stakeholders, usage rights, validation, etc.

On balance, I’ve found this new method of charging to be incredibly positive. I’m only a year in, so things may change, but I’ll be sticking with this for now.

Screen Time Security

Joanna Stern’s recent WSJ report showed how thieves can change a user’s iCloud password with the phone and passcode only. In most cases, this permanently locks the user out of the account, meaning they lose access to years/decades of photos, notes and other irreplaceables.

One of the tips to arise immediately is to use an alphanumeric passcode rather than a short numbers-only code. But if a thief shoulder surfs your alphanumeric passcode - or records it on a phone to playback later - that doesn’t help.

It turns out the steps below don’t prevent account changes – thieves can still go through a password reset flow even if you follow step 5.

I’m leaving these instructions because these steps may thwart thieves who don’t understand why the account is greyed out.

It turns out you can use the Screen Time feature in iOS to prevent account changes make it seem that account changes aren’t possible. Here’s how:

1. Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions
2. Enable the Content & Privacy Restrictions at the top of this page, and change the Account Changes option to Don’t Allow
3. Go back to Screen Time and select Use Screen Time Passcode
4. Enter a different code to your phone’s main passcode
5. When you’re presented with the Screen Time Passcode Recovery screen, select Cancel then Skip
6. When you return to the Settings page, your account section (with profile picture) should be greyed out and not selectable.

To change these settings in future, enable Account Changes in Screen Time (same steps as above). Don’t forget to disallow Account Changes again when you’re finished.

Following these steps should stop a thief changing your iCloud password. Even if they have your phone and passcode, they won’t be able to make account changes unless they also have your Screen Time Passcode (which they won’t).

Stage Manager first impressions

Ever since Stage Manager was demoed at WWDC 2022, I’ve been keen to give it a go. The idea of grouping windows by project, task or any other theme is really attractive to me and it looked like it did just that.

In the months leading up to the release of macOS Ventura, Stage Manager has received a largely negative reaction in the coverage I’ve seen. I suspect that’s mostly because of the myriad Stage Manager issues in iPadOS.

But I’ve been using it over the last few days and I’m pretty into it.

Stage Manager vs Spaces

Years ago, I tried Spaces. That kind of worked, but I didn’t like zapping between screens. That was particularly annoying if I opened an app forgetting it was in a different Space as I’d find myself whisked away from what I was doing.

(This may have changed since I last used Spaces – apologies for any mischaracterisations here.)

To me, Stage Manager feels like a more manageable and flexible version of Spaces. There’s no desktop-wide transition and, if you happen to open an app forgetting it’s in a different Stage, it’s easy to visually move the app or reorganise your Stages.

Spaces are relatively flexible, but the setup always felt a bit more fixed, not least as apps could be set to specific Spaces. Stage Manager seems more ephemeral: set up a Stage that you need right now and close it when you’re done. Or don’t.

Workflow options

I particularly like that apps with multiple windows (i.e. browsers) can have windows in different Stages. That gives a real flexibility to how Stages are grouped: they can be hyper-focused to a specific task/project or more general (i.e. a productivity Stage).

Now if the Notes app could open multiple windows, that would be very handy...

I also just discovered that making a window full-width in Stage Manager causes the sidebar to move off-screen. It then reveals on-hover, like the Dock can, which makes for an interesting use case on smaller screens.

All-in-all, I’m enjoying Stage Manager so far and would recommend giving it a go, particularly if you’ve tried Spaces previously and didn’t quite get on with it. Stage Manager definitely won’t be for everyone, but it’s good that Apple continue to over multiple workflows without forcing a specific technique on their users.

Backing up my Mac

At the end of 2021, I had the misfortune of needing to reinstall everything on my main computer. Something had crashed and the only way to get my computer working was to do a fresh install.

I was using Time Machine on a local HDD and a Popular Backup Service™ – let’s call it, I dunno, Blazing Backups – for remote backups. One of the attractions of Blazing Backups was that it also offered a service to send a physical drive in case of emergency.

As it turned out, neither of these worked particularly well and restoring was an incredibly time-consuming process. It took over a week to get things back to normal.

Restoration

Firstly, Time Machine completely failed. I’m a little fuzzy on the details now: I seem to remember the drive could be seen by the new device but it either wasn’t possible to restore from it or it hadn’t been backing up useful things. Either way, it was unusable.

And Blazing Backups was not a great experience. The online interface for manually accessing files was clunky and download speeds were incredibly slow. It took a few days of back-and-forth to get the files downloaded, on 200mbps internet, to download a little over 1TB of data.

I considered asking them to zip up the files on a physical drive and send it, but I was told it could take 2–3 days for this to even be dispatched. The packing time, shipping time to the UK and poor-timing of needing the service around holidays meant that delivery alone could have taken two weeks!

Of course, Blazing Backups can’t do anything about these things: it’s reasonable for there to be some time in preparation and shipping times are out of their control. But if you’re unlucky with holiday breaks when you need the back up, the physical disk option may not be as useful or quick as it sounds.

In some senses, my backup strategy worked: my first backup failed, but I was still able to get my files back. There will always be some disruption when your system is wiped, but this whole experience was incredibly suboptimal. I knew there must be a better way.

New strategy

Everything, except project files is stored/managed through Sync (not an ashilliate link – if you would like an extra 1GB use this link instead). It’s end-to-end encrypted and basically as easy to use as Dropbox local.

This entirely replaces my desktop. The beauty of this is that setting up a new computer is incredibly quick:

1. Download the Sync app
2. Choose the highest-priority folders to download
3. Sync other folders later
4. Download and install other apps as needed

I also use Super Duper for the local backup. This has the added advantage of also backing up applications not just files, something that Blazing Backups didn’t offer.

Project files are stored in git repositories, so those are synced very quickly.

Concerns

The only downside of Sync is that, unlike Dropbox, you can’t run multiple accounts on the same computer through the local app...yet. But I’m willing to trade that for the end-to-end encryption.

I also wondered about the environmental impact of going all-in on a cloud setup. But this may actually have reduced my cloud use as I was previously using Dropbox in addition to the Blazing Backups service, so everything has been consolidated to a single place – no duplication.

Check your backups

The advice is always to test your backups. In particular, I’d suggest checking out your remote backup’s interface for restoring files: if it’s clunky and slow, moving to a cloud service might be a better option in case of emergency.