🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#165]

An alternate Genmoji app, a Shrinking creator interview, a passkey vs. magic link login blog post, how to kill spam messages online, an MKBHD year-end recap, a beautiful media year-end recap, and a sobering look at the sum total of human creation.

@jarrod For the True Fans out there who read the comments on this post, I have two bonus links this week:

Dave Pell wrote a compelling piece advocating that you turn off all your news notifications. I'd go one further and say you should turn off the vast majority of all notifications, starting with email. 🔗 fastcompany.com

Everyone knows about using Contacts notes to write down stuff you don't want to forget about an acquaintance (right? RIGHT??), but Alex Chan opened a whole new paradigm with their tips on how to get better use out of your password manager's notes field. 🔗 alexwlchan.net

@jarrod I loathe notifications, there’s 2 in particular which are total triggers for me, so I turned them all off around the middle of 2024.

The other link is intriguing, as a reformed salesman I’ve used my Contacts app like a CRM for a while now, and whilst I also drop notes into my password app, I’ve never thought to put that much info in, but can definitely see the value in doing so.

Good links! 👍

@matjpacker Thanks for reading! But now I’m curious about your two trigger-happy notifications that you turned out. 🤔

@jarrod I’m the VP and lead program coordinator at a football (⚽️) club, we use a particular app for our teams to self-manage a lot of their activity, and whilst it’s setup in a way where comms should be pretty simple and direct, not everyone uses it that way, nor are they respectful of other peoples availability.

Often there would be messages sent to the entire club when they should have been a direct message between the parent and the coach, for example. With everyone’s different work schedules, and therefore posting times, I was getting urgent notifications at all hours of the day and way more often than not, there’s was zero urgency for a reply.

As someone who has struggled with boundary setting, I let that invade my life and essentially, it’s all but led to a dislike of football, people, and that community. Whilst I can’t turf the app entirely, I’ve blocked all notifications from it, and have set a pretty hard schedule of when I will give it attention.

The other app is Facebook Messenger, our Executive have an ongoing chat, and again it’s about respecting other’s availability and boundary setting. I’m actively trying to move this chat to one of the Microsoft chat products as we have the full cloud suite and Microsoft allows you to set work hours and encourages the sender to think about sending out of hours messages, but I’m struggling to get the rest of the exec on board at this stage.

@matjpacker Ah, yes, I’ve become very protective over the years about who and how I allow synchronous communication in my life. Asynchronous is the way to go.

@jarrod yeh, I needed to do this earlier, it’s a bit of a hangover from my old work, a salesperson who doesn’t answer their comms promptly doesn’t sell a lot…but I’ve been retired the best part of 18 months now, so now I need to make sure I stick with this change!