I’ve been a time-blocker/time-boxer for a long time. “Wake”, “Fitness”, “Prep” and “Admin and Email” have been the first four time blocks each weekday for the last two-plus years, and “Deep Work” usually ensures I can hammer out the most important task of the day before noon. If nothing else, time blocking has provided me peace of mind in knowing I have some time set aside to do a particular thing each day.

The method in which in that time blocking is completed has changed more than a few times, however. I used Sunsama a few years ago, but ultimately found the daily planning and shutdown rituals to be a bit too much each day. I tried using a combination of Reminders and Fantastical for a bit, but found things just didn’t quite jive as well as I liked. I also tried Notion and Notion Calendar for a bit, though this melded work and home life together a little too closely.

Akiflow has long been a time blocking option — it competed directly with Sunsama multiple years ago when I was deep into Sunsama. Akiflow’s biggest hiccup back then for me was its Google-first feature-set — I wasn’t in the Google ecosystem at the time, so Akiflow was a non-starter.

Fast-forward and I’m in the heart of the Google ecosystem, and I’m eager to try another new method for tracking tasks, deadlines, and projects, all inside a time blocking methodology that I feel I can’t live without. Akiflow has lasted longer than I originally expected it would in my personal tool stack, and it may well stick it out through tax season. But it isn’t without its faults.

Here are three quick anecdotes from my first three weeks with Akiflow.

Time Slots

Akiflow introduced a third type of input that makes a lot of sense for time blockers: time slots. When creating a new item, you have three choices: a task, an event, and a time slot:

• Tasks are check-off items added to your calendar, which default to a 30-minute duration. They can be applied to a project (which I treat as “Areas”) and be locked to a particular calendar (say if you have a “Work” or “Personal” calendar).
• Events have whichever duration you choose and act quite like a regular event created in any calendar app. Projects/Areas can be applied to the event as well.
• Time Slots are effectively events inside which you can hold tasks. Time Slots can have a project applied and can be added to a specific calendar of your choosing. You can then drag and drop tasks from your task inbox inside the time slot.

I find myself using time slots all the time. In general, my day revolves through multiple two-hour blocks. Inside the “Admin and Email” time slot at the beginning of my day, for instance, I drag and drop any emails or administrative tasks from Notion that I want to get done before my day really starts. In the first “Deep Work” time slot, I drag and drop the big project work I need to get done — whether that be a Notion link directly to an office project inside Notion — or a task with a link to a Craft document where I can build out more tasks and research.

Time slots are a true epiphany moment for me. Akiflow has taught me I was actually using events as time slots rather than the true concept of an event.

If not for time slots, I’d like have put Akiflow aside at this point.

iOS Apps and Quick Capture

Akiflow’s iPhone app is quite excellent. It looks great, uses screen space quite nicely, and allows for quick daily organization throughout the day. I especially like Akiflow’s widgets on iPhone — they are big, bright, and easy to use.

There are some issues here, though.

First is the iPad app — Akiflow’s iPad app is feeble. The app can’t be used when the iPad is in landscape orientation, and the rest of the interface is quite simply a blown-up copy of the iPhone app. One would hope a proper iPad app would be at or near the top of the priority list.

Second is Akiflow’s capturing methods on iPhone. I found the entire process kind of tedious. Tap on the button in the right corner, and you can throw together a naturally parsed sentence to create your task, event, or time slot. The hiccup is in the final “Add” button — instead of hitting the big checkmark on the keyboard to add the task and get back to the main view, you have to hit “Create” in the top-right corner to actually create the task/event/time slot.

This doesn’t seem so bad in writing, but it’s difficult on iPhone and when on the go. Oftentimes you only have one hand to type in a task or quick thought that hit you, and needing to navigate to the top to hit “Create” or to save an edited item simply gets in the way.

Overall, I quite like the way the Akiflow iPhone apps works and operates. The app is very well-designed and flows pretty smoothly on a small iPhone screen. The iPad would be better if it simply didn’t exist, however, and I hope this is in the cards for the near future.

Integration Hiccups

Lastly, integrations. Akiflow touts its integrations pretty heavily on its website and, when they work, they work pretty nicely. For emails, you can either label or star an email to send it instantly to Akiflow. Notion items can be added to Akiflow through properties. And there are a whole slew of other integrations for developers and designers.

All would be well in this department if the integrations worked. I’ve had to reset and reset my Notion integrations multiple times. When it is working, the integration takes forever to sync. I truly don’t need to wait 15 minutes or more for a Notion item to sync over to Akiflow. By that point, it’s faster to simply copy the item’s link in Notion and paste it into the dedicated field in the task/event/time slot in Akiflow.

Second, emails — I cannot for the life of me get my Gmail account to send emails over to Akiflow. I’ve tried the option to star an email and to label an email, but they simply won’t send over. When I emailed for help, I was provided an email that required me to turn the integrations on and off, to delete and reinstall the app, and to restart the app. Once again, this shouldn’t be too big of a deal. But finding 15 minutes during the week to troubleshoot an app that should work is not in my cards.

Summary

It’s a good thing time slots are such a fantastic option for managing a calendar and a productivity system. If not for time slots, I would have paid Akiflow the cash for the short subscription and called it a day. Instead, time slots are Akiflow’s absolute saving grace at this time.

Presently, my productivity system looks largely as follows:

1. Plan my day and brain dump my tasks in handwritten notes in reMarkable.
2. Create those time blocks and time slots in my actual calendar.
3. Drag and drop tasks into time slots throughout the day.
4. Rely on Akiflow to remind me of all tasks, events, and time slots as each day progresses.

Akiflow is a bit complex and costly (though I recommend traveling the off-boarding path if you are looking to save some money), but I can see it sticking it out thanks to its implementation of time slots. Time slots are one of those retrospectively obvious features that just work for me, and I hope to see more of this type of feature in other apps like Fantastical in the future.

Happy day-before-Blue-Monday, friends! I hope you’re not feeling like it’s Blue Monday. But it’s difficult not to feel this way — we here in Southern Manitoba had a week of abnormally warm temperatures, and we are now staring down the barrel of credit card bills and -30 Celsius for the entire week ahead. And, if you’re a Canadian baseball fan, the last 72 hours of signings likely didn’t help with the Blue Monday vibes. Why do we live in Manitoba again?

I have this internal goal to read 12 books this year. And though I’m not sure if I can make it, I am certainly seeing the benefits of more daily reading. Meta-wise, my reading workflow is still being built out. So far, it’s pretty simply done inside the Kindle app, with highlights being fed into Readwise for spaced repetition. I started the year reading on the largest iPad Pro, but this has been quickly supplanted by the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It’s a wonderfully sized device for reading.

Another device that looks great for reading: the Viwoods AiPaper Reader (or the Colour model here). I’m probably starting to accumulate too many devices at this point, so the Viwoods is going to stay on my wishlist for now.

Reading has helped with more than just knowledge workflows, though. I’m in the middle of Morgan Housel’s most recent book, The Art of Spending Money. So far, I preferred Housel’s first book, The Psychology of Money, which opens with the following lesson:

Here’s the thing: People from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.

I despise — yes, despise, hotter-than-a-thousand-suns despise — the attitude of “things being obvious”. There is seldom a situation where “This is the correct way to do things” when it comes to situations people argue over. If people have differing opinions about something, it’s because it’s a complex topic, and it takes walking a few miles in that person’s shoes before you can better understand the reason for the debate.

There’s this little video going around from the latest Landman episode (I’m not a TV-watcher in the slightest, so I haven’t seen the show). The young lady meets with her principal or advisor, and she brings up a heated topic for discussion. The principal — a 60+ year old lady — takes a huge deep breath, pushes her chair back, and looks sternly at the young lady. When asked what she’s doing, the older lady says, “I’m preparing myself to be offended.”

Golly.

“I’m preparing myself to be offended.”

Rather than consider the young lady’s commentary — of which she has no idea what the young lady might say — she just jumps to a half-cocked, ready-to-fight persona. Rather than look for a teaching moment, the old (“wise”?) woman readies herself for verbal warfare. There are remarkable scenes in The Great Gatsby — the one with Leo DiCaprio — where two men verbally berate each other, and the loser of the argument is the one who flinches, loses control of his temper, and raises his eyebrow. The scene is mesmerizing — there is an active verbal assault on each other’s belief systems, and neither party in the debate even becomes flush red in the face.

I’m not wise enough to know where in the world this problem came from. We jump to conclusions faster than a 180-character post or a 10-second video on TikTok. If the first words out of a person’s mouth aren’t reflective of what you believe, it must be because that person is Insert the most vitriol adjective for someone here. “If you don’t believe what I believe, you are, quite simply, a fool.” “The truth is just so obvious to everyone but you.” You know, stuff like that.

Every person has a story or a past. There are reasons — almost always complex reasons — for difficult decisions that were made and which resulted in a poor outcome. Never is someone “crazy” or “stupid”. They are a product of their lessons, their upbringings, their circumstances. It is our job — as reasonable human beings who control our emotions — to query those lessons, upbringings, and circumstances and attempt to discern why a person does or believes the things they do, or why a certain situation ended with those particular results.

There’s always, always, always more to the story. Figure out the story and figure out the result. Skip the story and make your assumptive-self fall further down the ladder.

This is about as blunt and harsh as I can get. I’m tired of presumptions. I’m tired of irrational polarity. I’m tired of 10-second decisions. These actions push people away, when the only chance to build a bridge is to bring people in.

One other thing I read this week:

Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.

The hard thing to do is give the benefit of the doubt to someone you vehemently disagree with. What’s easy in life when giving someone the benefit of the doubt? You assume a lot less about the world around you and focus on the things in your life you are grateful for.

Easy decision: Choose the hard thing to do.

A Quick Thought on AI-Written Material

I worked with a client recently who made an interesting remark about artificial intelligence. He’s older, successful, and wise — you get the drift. He said he prefers finding written material with spelling mistakes in it because then he knows it’s not written by AI, and he knows the writer knows everything in the material. The opposite being: If you’re using AI to write something, it’s easy to not know what’s inside your writing, and you may be writing something you didn’t intend to say or didn’t intend to include.

I’m neither positive nor negative on AI — like I described above, it’s complex. AI is a fascinating tool for certain parts of my work, but I’ve immediately noticed brain rot creep in around topics easily handed off to an AI bot. Long-term, I imagine I have to come up with a workflow to combat the brain rot.

In summary, though, I appreciate the gentleman’s insight regarding AI. Every so often, the spelling mistake is the key to landing the deal.

Marshmallows and the Best Life

Kevin Wild, a long-time reader of this site and writer of one of my longer-read sites as well, posted this thought-provoking piece recently. It’s short and sweet and is sure to make you wonder which path is the right path. Head over there to read his post before reading my commentary below.

Read it? Good.

I appreciate Kevin’s perspective. Like all things in life, I imagine “Screw it, I’m eating the marshmallow now” is best done in moderation, with a healthy balance of leaving marshmallows for the future in other areas of life. You can’t YOLO your way in every decision or situation. Kevin will surely know this, and I will never imply he doesn’t.

But.

I fear “YOLO”-style thinking chains human beings — that they become slaves to experiences, to pursuing a “best life” defined by gratification. That if you don’t get to experience something, you’re falling short of your potential in some way. If you miss the experience, you aren’t living your “best life”.

I believe there is a great deal of freedom in letting go of this pursuit of gratification. Instead of chasing gratification and satisfaction, I believe most human beings would find more meaning in serving others. Human beings exist to serve, not to be served. And so there is freedom in letting go of an endless pursuit of gratification and adopting a pursuit of service to others.

Perhaps, to bring it back, the best life is one where you don’t eat the marshmallow at all, but build a factory so everyone else can eat marshmallows instead.

The Second Cup

I went to Tokyo with just a 35mm prime

First off, Adrien’s voice is just so soothing. This is almost an ASMR video. Second, I had a giggle when Adrien said something like “Don’t worry about disrupting someone in a big city; if you come back, you are never going to see them again next time.” My wife and I honeymooned in NYC in 2013, and we went to a baseball game. There was a gentleman selling beverages at the game who had a strong New Yorker accent. We then travelled back to NYC one year later and went to another baseball game, but with an entirely different team. There he was!, the same gentleman selling beverages in a different stadium for a different team. Now, the likelihood of seeing him again increases because it was baseball, it was summer, and so on. But I found it insanely unrealistic to have run into the same gentleman two years in a row in a foreign city.

A Visualization of the History of Paris

I’ve always loved Paris. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because it’s such a photogenic city.

Interior Browns and Greens on Instagram

I wondered where my wife was getting her interior design inspiration these days. Our bedroom is now entirely brown and green.

Fresh Links From the Week

Here were a few things I shared from the past week. If you want to stay on top of the list throughout the week, don’t be afraid to subscribe via RSS.

• Bowlus Rivet: An Ultralight Luxury Travel Trailer
• Akiflow: A Time-Blocking Digital Planner and Calendar

I really need to start posting more of these during the week.

Happy Sunday. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.

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