If forced to come up with a theme for 2024, I’m going with “Reduce & Simplify”.

I haven’t formally defined it yet, but the gist of it is to use what I already have, remove things I rarely use, and rely on fewer, simpler things.

Having many choices is great, until it’s not. I crossed that threshold a while ago and it’s not good for my brain.

So, one app per task. One notebook. One bag. Less software. Consolidate and remove. Those sorts of things.

When creating a new project folder (group) in DEVONthink, I often make use of Templates. Templates are just files in a folder somewhere that get copied into the DEVONthink database. For example, I have a project “starter” Tinderbox document named “Basic Project Template.tbx”. When inserting the template file into my DEVONthink project, it uses the same name as the original, which isn’t helpful. DEVONthink is very scriptable, so I wrote an AppleScript to rename the selected document the same as the enclosing group/folder.

I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed…shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know?

So I’m back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I’m thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I’m not sure this is any better :). At least I’m not relying on Gmail now, I guess.

I don’t get many emails these days. Nor do I send many. And yet, I spend an inordinate amount of time futzing with how I get and sent emails. I’m doing that thing again where I overthink my email process.

The only hard requirement I have with email is that it uses my own domain name. Hence, jack@baty.net. Email is still the key to many things, so allowing someone like Google to control that key is a no-go for me. My wife still uses a Comcast address, can you imagine? I get hives just thinking about it. She gets a lot more email than I do, and never gives any of this a second thought. ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace.

The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago:

Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can.