Habit Over-Tracking

I’ve long been a believer in the practice of habit-tracking. Ten years ago, I first came across the concept through an app called Way of Life. I eventually moved on to the category-leading Streaks, spent a brief time with Grow, and ultimately landed on Awesome Habits, which I’ve been using for nearly two years now. Regardless of the tools we use to do so, I think it’s a good idea to consciously choose meaningful routines and intentionally keep ourselves accountable for sticking to them.

The funny thing about a habit tracker, though, is that its purpose is to eventually make itself obsolete. By nature, habits are habitual, meaning we don’t need external forces to keep them going. We just do them. The point of these tools is to turn our desired behaviors into regular parts of our everyday lives through repetition.

At a certain point, the tracking part becomes unnecessary, and that’s a victory. It means we’ve accomplished what we set out to do. But still, I’ve found it hard to stop tracking these habits even when I know I don’t need to anymore.

After all, the entire premise of habit-tracking is built on the idea of positive reinforcement, and that can become a habit in and of itself. I like seeing my progress bar for the day fill up, and I love the feeling I get when it hits 100%. Don’t get me started on how much joy I get out of building up a long daily streak for each goal.

It really is a fun process, but I have to remind myself that the process isn’t the point. I’m not doing these things to check them off a list; I’m doing them because they’re important to me. It’s not about the tracking at the end of day.

I recently realized that many of the habits I’d been keeping tabs on had become regular parts of my routine. I didn’t need the app to remind me anymore. I was just logging them out of… well, habit.

And so I decided to get back to the true purpose of habit-tracking by removing the items that are now fully-formed. I cut my list of daily tasks in Awesome Habits down from ten to five. This allows me to focus on the habits that truly need my attention instead of just logging data for the sake of it.

I’ve been able to keep up all of my deleted habits naturally, without the use of the app, which only proves how effective the app has really been. Now, I have a much shorter list of habits I’m trying to integrate into my daily routine, and the others are just a normal part of everyday life.

Do I miss the ridiculously long streaks when I check the app? A little. But I have to remind myself that the tracking isn’t the point. It’s forming good habits that matters, and in that sense, this move is a win.

I’m thankful for tools like Awesome Habits that help me live a more intentional life every day. Even more so, I’m happy that I can rely on these sorts of tools less and less over time as I become better at living out my desired habits on my own. There’s no way to quantify personal growth, but I think my list of archived habits is at least an indication that I’m moving in the direction I want to go.

Play 2.0

It’s no secret that I’ve long been a fan of Play, the watch later app from Marcos Tanaka. Today, Marcos released version 2.0 of the app with two major new features and a fresh payment model.

First up is Channels, a new section of the app where you can follow YouTube channels and create a feed of new videos. As videos are posted, they’ll appear in your Inbox where you can choose to either save them to watch later or remove them from the list.

This has instantly become my favorite way to keep tabs on my favorite channels without needing to use the YouTube app or add them to my RSS reader. It’s really quick and easy to find the videos I want to watch, save them, and clear out the rest.

The second tentpole feature of Play 2.0 is enhanced library organization with folders. Before, you could categorize your videos with tags and smart searches. Those options remain, but they can now be further grouped into folders.

For those who watch a lot of YouTube videos and want fine-grained control over how their library is broken down, these folders are going to be amazing. I currently only use three broad tags for videos: tech, TV, and music. But I could see them becoming folders containing more detailed tags in the future.

These are two great additions to Play, and they arrive alongside a fresh business model. The app still costs $3 upfront and includes all of the video-saving features you’ve come to expect from Play. To unlock channel-following and folders, you can sign up for Play Premium, a new subscription that supports the development of advanced features extending the app’s capabilities. It costs $3/month, $20/year, or $100 for a lifetime subscription.

I love this new setup. It keeps the app’s core functionality accessible at a ridiculously low price while giving users the option to support its development on an ongoing basis in exchange for some really nice additions. And it sets Play up for a bright, sustainable future ahead.

I’m thrilled with the changes Marcos has brought with Play 2.0. They’ve already made it much easier to keep up with my favorite creators and established the app as an even more essential part of my daily media habits.

If you haven’t tried Play yet, now’s the perfect time. It’s a steal at its base price, and if you decide you want even more out of it, Play Premium is always there to take things to the next level. It’s available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV.

The Need for Silence →

Greg Morris, reflecting on a walk he took without headphones:

I find that excessive consumption of content prevents me from fully developing my own ideas. The ideas I do have, influenced by various media, never seem to fully materialise or reach a conclusion if there’s a constant influx of new ones… I need those interludes of silence to explore and expand on them before moving on to the next.

I often find myself nodding along while I read Greg’s blog, but this one just felt like he was reading my mind. It’s important to make space for silence—even boredom—in our daily lives. It gives our brains time to process, synthesize, and form new ideas.

I think I’ll leave the radio off on an upcoming drive and let my mind lead the way.

Bridges

Today sees the release of Bridges, a new app from Jonathan Ruiz for saving, organizing, and formatting links. I’ve had the opportunity to test the app throughout its development over the past year, and it’s become an integral part of my creative workflow. Now that it’s available to everyone, I’d like to share how I’m using Bridges and why I’m sticking with it.

The concept of a link-saving tool isn’t a new one. I’ve tried plenty of them myself. But what sets Bridges apart from the rest of the pack is its focus on making it really easy to get links back out once you’ve saved them. It isn’t a vault for locking links away forever; it’s a funnel for storing links and then putting them to good use.

After all, the purpose of collecting links is to do something with them. Whether you’re building a list of interesting articles to read later, gathering research for a project, or putting together show notes for your podcast, you eventually want to act on the links you save. That’s where Bridges shines.

But let’s back up a bit. Before you start using your links, you’ll need to save them. Bridges offers a couple of different ways to do that. You can copy a link to your clipboard, open Bridges, and use the Add Link button to save it manually. (Hint: You’ll want to go into the Settings app and give Bridges permission to access your clipboard without asking each time.) Or you can use the share sheet extension, which works best for my use case.

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I mainly use Bridges to assemble show notes for my podcast, Magic Rays of Light. Those links come from various different sources: the TV app, social media, my RSS client, text messages, and more. But whenever I find a link I want to save, the process is always the same: I open the share menu and choose the Bridges icon, which has made its way to the top of my share sheet.

One nice touch when adding links to Bridges is the ability to rename them. The app will automatically pull in the title of the webpage you’re saving, but you can easily change it before hitting Save. For example, I have a specific way I label trailers in my show notes, but the video titles from YouTube don’t always match that format. Thanks to Bridges, that’s no problem; I simply change the name as I’m importing the link, and the title I choose is permanently saved with the link.

There’s an additional method for saving links that I’d like to see added to the app: Shortcuts. Bridges doesn’t currently include any Shortcuts actions, though I’ve been told by the developer that they are on the roadmap. When they come, I think the most obvious way they’d be helpful is for adding links to the app. This would give users the ability to save links without going through the manual process of the share sheet and maybe even sort them into folders automatically. This is a feature that I’d love to have.

Saving links is just part of the equation, though. You also need to organize them, something the app helps with handily. Every link in Bridges is saved into a folder to keep things nice and tidy.

The app comes with two folders out of the box: Junk Drawer and Read Later. Junk Drawer is the default folder that links will be saved to from the share sheet unless you choose a different one. Think of it as an inbox where you can keep links that haven’t been organized yet. Read Later is, as the name implies, as place to save things you’d like to read at some point in the future. It’s really just a suggested use case for the app to help you get started.

You can create as many folders within Bridges as you want. When you choose the New Folder button, you’ll be prompted to choose a name, icon, and color for the folder you’re creating. SF Symbols serve as folder icons with a variety of categories to peruse and a search bar to help you find just the right one. Apple’s system color picker is built-in, too, which makes it easy to find the right shade.

Links can be moved between folders at any time, so you don’t have to overthink your file structure too much. My suggestion would be to start with a few broad categories and add more over time if you find a need for them. Creating new folders is an enjoyable process, especially when you track down the perfect icon, like when I found the Apple TV icon for saving recommended TV shows and films.

While links are organized into folders, folders themselves are further organized into collections. Collections give you the ability to group folders into sections, which can be used to break things down by project, link type, or different areas of your life.

In my Bridges setup, I have a collection called MROL (short, of course, for the name of my podcast). Within the collection, I have a folder for each segment of the show: upcoming releases, recommendations, news stories, and so on. This two-tier structure keeps my podcast links separate from any others that I save while also allowing me to more finely sort those links into different sections for my show notes. I really appreciate this organizational approach.

Browsing your folders in Bridges is a treat thanks to the unique way it displays links. Folders are shown in a vertically-scrolling list that show each folder’s name and icon, as well as the number of links it contains. But within each folder’s listing is also a horizontally-scrolling view of preview images for each the links contained in the folder.

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This method of displaying information is similar to the way Apple shows album art within collections in the Music app, but it’s not something I’ve come across in a productivity app. It gives Bridges a whimsical flair, and it’s genuinely useful. It allows you to quickly scan the links in a folder without having to actually open it. This UI is outstanding.

From the list of folders, you can choose a folder to open its full list of links. Or you can choose one of the link preview images and go directly to that link’s detail view. These two views are where the app’s final—and most important—bit of functionality comes into play.

As I stated above, the whole purpose of Bridges is to not only to enable you to save and organize links, but to help you format them for use and sharing as well. While the saving and organizing tools are top-notch, this last set of features is what makes the app indispensable for me.

There is no one way to share a link, despite the fact that most apps only allow you to share the raw URL. Sometimes, you do want the URL to paste into a web browser. Other times, though, you might want a nicely-formatted hyperlink for an email, an HTML tag for use on a website, or a Markdown-style link for the blog post you’re working on.

Or if you’re feeling particularly spicy, maybe you want to share a link in JSON. Why would you do that? I don’t particularly know. But I there are people a lost smarter than me who use JSON for all kinds of stuff, so I’m sure the use cases are quite cool.

Thankfully, Bridges offers the ability to share links in all of these formats quickly and easily. From a link’s detail view, you can copy it in hyperlink, Markdown, HTML, JSON, and URL formats by choosing the Copy button next to the format you need. This screen also includes options for editing the link’s title, opening it in your browser, and deleting it. Whatever you want to do with your link, you can do it here.

The array of sharing options that Bridges offers is impressive, and it covers a huge number of uses cases. But the app doesn’t stop there. In addition to copying individual links in your preferred format, you can share all of the links in a folder at once.

At the top of each folder screen is a Copy button that brings up the same formatting options as a link’s detail view. Once you choose an option, Bridges will copy all of the links in that folder to your clipboard in the selected format. Then you can take those links and do whatever you like with them.

In my case, that’s putting together show notes each week. For you, it might be sending a gift wish list to your family or something completely different. Whatever you want to do with your links, there’s no faster or easier way to share them in the perfect format than with Bridges.

I do wish it were easier to clear links out of folders once I’m done with them. Since most of the links I save only stay in Bridges for a week, I’m constantly deleting them one-by-one using the swipe options in the folder view. This is another case where Shortcuts actions would come in handy, and I hope to see them added in a future update.

This app has done wonders for my podcast show notes workflow. No longer am I keeping a jumbled list of links in Notes or trying to remember to paste them into a Markdown document and type the format manually. And as proud as I am of my previous Shortcuts-based approach to building show notes,sometimes it’s easier just to use a tool that’s built for the task.

Bridges is built perfectly for a need I have: saving links for show notes. But I’ve been enjoying it for general link-saving as well, and I believe its use cases go far beyond my own. I think a lot of people can benefit from the app’s tools for saving and organizing links, and it’s a must-try for anyone who regularly needs to share links in a particular format. It’s simply the best app I’ve found for dealing with links, and I highly recommend giving it a try.

Bridges is available on iPhone and iPad for $3.99 and as a separate purchase on the Mac for $3.99. (The Mac version features a different UI from the iOS version but includes all of the same features.) Links, folders, and collections are synced across devices with iCloud.

Non-Default Apps

As we’ve established, I’m a faithful user of Apple’s built-in system apps. But as I was putting together my Default Apps list, I was struck by how many of the tools I use everyday don’t fall into the same categories as the ones that Apple provides.

While I get a ton of use out of Notes, Reminders, Safari, and the like, they don’t do everything I want my devices to do. So rather than turn to third-party apps as alternatives to Apple’s offerings, I rely on the App Store for software that accomplishes things my device can’t do out of the box.

I thought it was only fair that I share my go-to apps for these categories as well.

For day planning, I use Structured. I could block schedule everything in Calendar, but that would stress me out and mix critical meetings with mundane tasks that aren’t as time-sensitive. Structured puts my tasks, appointments, and day plan together in a way that makes perfect sense to me.

I consider my writing app to be something separate from a word processor. While Pages is the go-to for anything I plan to print, iA Writer is where I do the vast majority of my writing, including these blog posts. Markdown feels like second nature to me and provides just enough formatting options without getting in the way with too many.

My habit tracker is Awesome Habits. Could I piece together something similar in Reminders? Probably, but it wouldn’t be as nice, or as focused.

Everlog is my journaling app of choice. Technically, this still isn’t an alternative to an Apple app until iOS 17.2 ships, but I don’t think I’ll be straying anytime soon. The Journal app is iPhone-only for the time being, and that’s just a nonstarter for me.

An app that’s become really important to me lately is Mango Baby, which bills itself as a newborn tracker. It’s how I know when my son needs to eat, how many diapers I’ve changed in a day, and whether or not it’s bath night. I’d be lost without it, and trying to create something similar in a shared note or spreadsheet just wouldn’t be as helpful.

I save YouTube videos I want to watch later in Play. Safari Reading List might be able to save links, too, but I like Play’s auto-tagging system, and it’s got a big update coming soon that I’m quite excited for.

All of my media tracking is done in Sequel, which I mostly use to keep up with movies and TV shows. Nothing could ever fully replace Apple’s TV app for me, but Sequel is a great complement to it and my go-to for checking on what’s coming soon and where I’m at in a particular show.

Chronicling can be used to track anything you want, but I use it specifically to log household chores and make sure I’m keeping up. Again, Reminders could do this, but not nearly as well as Chronicling does. It’s a little silo just for household tasks, and I love it for that.

Finally, for countdowns I use Up Ahead. There’s some overlap between events in this app and my calendar, but I find it helpful to have a widget telling me how close certain big days are so I can plan accordingly. Up Ahead is instrumental for that in a way calendar alerts never could be.

While I find so much value in the system defaults provided by Apple, I also wouldn’t be able to get by without my favorite third-party apps. My devices would feel broken without them. I feel like I’ve struck a good balance between using the defaults for the basics while going beyond them with other tools when my needs grow.

It’s constantly changing, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m thankful for every app on this list, and my Default Apps list before it, because they each make my life better in some way.