Morning Pages

Mindy Kaling plays Velma. Four words guaranteed to turn Friday around.

I've been using the Routine app for a few days now and, a couple of beta bugs aside, I'm really enjoying its simplicity. Most productivity tools hamper your productivity by tempting you to endlessly fiddle with how they work. Routine does not do that. Once you've blocked out your day there is nothing more to do except get on with it. Try as I might, I can't find anything that needs tweaking or tuning.

In order to use Routine, you need to have Google calendar. I used to find this requirement from certain apps to be obnoxious, but Julien Quintard, the creator of Routine, explained during the onboarding session that it's all to do with how Google make it easy for an app to have a two-way relationship with their calendar, where Apple and Microsoft don't. It's a LOT easier for app creators to work in the Google space.

I hate Google for numerous reasons, but I've always had a dormant Google account, so I fired up the calendar, copied my schedule over onto it and linked it to Routine. It works well and syncs faster than my Apple calendar. Furthermore, once I had bitten that bullet, a whole host of other possibilities opened up.

One of those was Evernote. Remember Evernote? I haven't used that app for years, but I had heard about how much people hated the new iteration of it. I checked it out yesterday and I actually like what they have done with it. Evernote is now a little more like a desktop. It does tasks (I don't need that) and it links to Google calendar, so now I can take meeting notes in Evernote that are linked to the calendar entry for that meeting. Those notes can then go into a notebook that is specific to a project, along with web clippings (Evernote's web clipper is still excellent), other notes and related documents.

Evernote's syncing across devices is great, so I'm using it as a kind of fast, lightweight version of DEVONthink; it can hold all the data on all my current projects while DEVONthink acts as an archive/library of everything I've done.

One caveat; Evernote is no MyMind. When it comes to clipping things from the web, MyMind is increasingly streets ahead. This is now my go-to for fast input of notes, images, links etc. I should write about it properly soon.

But not today. Routine is telling me to hustle this up and get on with work. Here are today's links:

Kew Palace lookalike goes on the market in Sussex for £4.5m

A lush, luxurious Secret Garden opens in Amsterdam - The Spaces

This Forgotten 1980s Style Movement Explains A Lot About Fashion Today

Vintage Cameras Focus on the Surveillance of Modern Life in Jeff Bartels’s Uncanny Paintings | Colossal

Energetic Avians Peer from Vintage Book Pages in Detailed Paintings by Craig Williams | Colossal

Sunlight Illuminates a Full Spectrum of Color As It Filters Through Hummingbird Wings in a New Photo Book | Colossal

Silk and Stone Converge in Luxurious AI-Generated Baroque Architecture | Colossal

I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It - Nautilus

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads - Nautilus

A Brief Compendium of the First Girl Groups, Forgotten in Music History

Have a good one.