THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hi Friend,

As we all experiment with AI and how it can help, I went down a rabbit hole over the last month that I wanted to share. I called it “The Daybook”. It was an automated daily note. It ran every night, pulling in my calendar, my open tasks, my repeating chores, and anything else I might need before the day started. It was pretty advanced and I enjoyed building it.

But I found myself not looking at it. So I tinkered with it. And I still didn’t read it. The assembly was never the problem. By the time that page existed the thinking was already done, and somebody (or some thing) else had done it.

A note handed to you is something to review. A note you wrote yourself is something you already know. I realized that writing the list is how I find out what’s on it.

For a long time I’ve had an analog version of the Daybook. It’s a Field Notes notebook I carry around with me. The technology is wood and graphite and paper. The process is full of glorious friction and my Daybook experiment proved I actually need that friction in my life.

So I retired the Daybook. There is a lot that my computer can help me with. It just turns out I need to manage my life for myself. If I want to know what matters today, I have to be the one who writes it down.

Your pal, David

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered how everything I make fits together, I built a Field Map: one page with the free shows, the Field Guides, and the Labs, and how they connect.

This Week in the MacSparky-Verse

• ​Daylite is wiring itself up to Claude through a local MCP server, currently in private preview. People shouldn’t have to build their own apps because the tools they pay for won’t meet them where they are, and this is the better answer.

In the MacSparky Labs, we covered a lot:

• I made a video on the AppleScripts I use to raise, lower, and mute Apple Music without touching the system volume
• We had the August meetup on Thursday morning, which was my highlight of the week
• The Book club recording on Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act shipped, an hour on whether creativity is inherent or learned
• I made a video on Pastebot 3, the ground-up rewrite Tapbots just shipped, and whether it’s worth $39
• I published The Lab Report podcast on Apple’s best June quarter ever and the stock sliding 10% anyway

That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.

Learn Quickly with Shortform

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Shortform.

Today’s issue was about the automated daily note I built and then stopped using, and it turns out two very different books already made the case for why. Shortform has guides for both, so you can get the argument in about fifteen minutes instead of a weekend.

Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, is the one that changed how I think about my own systems. His whole argument is that you can’t organize your way out of having a finite life, and every productivity system promising to get you fully on top of things is making a promise it can’t keep. It’s the one book I’ve committed to relistening to every year.

The Bullet Journal Method, by Ryder Carroll, is the practical flip side. It’s the case for the handwritten list, on purpose, with the friction left in.

​Sign up for free through my link and you’ll get a discount. Pick one. Give it fifteen minutes.
​