I recently shared my process of planning in my Midori Traveler's Notebook on the Decade Thirty blog. I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the inserts I use, for anyone who's wondering about which ones to try.

I've had my Midori Traveler's Notebook for a few weeks now, so I'm fairly settled into it. The MTN is a notebook system that has a leather cover with notebook inserts—thin, cardboard cover notebooks that can be inserted and removed at any time. I use mine as a planner, with a mixture of ideas taken from the Bullet Journal and Strikethru systems.

My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant

This is a fascinating story that brings up some important points about the energy and support required to look after newborn babies.

At the start of each month I do a review of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. You can see them all in my monthly reviews category.

At the start of 2016 I stopped publishing my monthly reviews, as I felt I was censoring myself and getting less use out of the process. I've decided to start sharing these again, though I'll create an edited version based on my original, private notes. I hope you find them useful!

My friend Jeremey has been learning JavaScript for a while. In this post he explains a problem I came up against in my own experience of learning iOS development:

I share the backstory to highlight two main hurdles I ran into:

Enumerating the ways I love Swift Enumerations

Really simple example of how enumerations with associated values work in Swift, and why they're so useful.

Since rejoining the world of paper planning and journalling recently, I've been visiting Reddit and Instagram regularly to pick up inspiration.

It's always interesting to see how other people organise themselves and what personal quirks they've included in their own planning methods.

Update as of Feb 21st, 2017: I've removed Productive Habits from sale.

I hit a big milestone yesterday: I released my first ever book! It's an e-book version of the Productive Habits course, with all the same lessons in an easy-to-reference format, and a little extra research material thrown in.

When I was 11 I won a year-long reading competition at school for reading the most books of anyone in my year.

In 2013 I read 7 books. I don't remember how many books I read to win that competition, but I have no doubt it was many more than 7.

[A Brief iOS9 UIStackView Guide][1]

Looking into using UIStackView for the first time today, and I found this explanation really helpful.

I've been learning iOS development for about 2-2.5 years now. I started with an Objective-C course on Treehouse, then started building my first product: an app to rate your mood in [Exist][1]. These days [Exist for iOS][2] has grown into a proper mobile client for Exist, and is almost at parity with our Android app. It's live on the App Store and gets regular updates.

Starting somewhere

Curtis Herbert talks about his first ever iOS app, and what he's learned since then. I especially like his mention of the importance of business and marketing skills:

I've had a bug showing up in Xcode lately that's been interrupting my flow and making it nigh impossible to get anything done. I spent pretty much all day yesterday debugging it and finally fixed it last night. Since I had so much trouble figuring out what it was, I wanted to share the solution, in case it helps anyone else.

So here's the bug:

Get rich or die vlogging: The sad economics of internet fame

Sad, but fascinating story about what it's really like to be a "social media star".

Lately I've been feeling frustrated with the Apple community. That is, people who love Apple, who sing Apple's praises no matter what they do, who never liked the idea of f.lux but think Night Shift is the bee's knees, who think there's something wrong when they don't buy something from every single Apple event, and so on...

It's starting to feel like a grimy circle jerk that I don't want to be part of.

Since releasing my course, Productive Habits, I've been focusing on building more new habits. This year I'm focusing on habits to help me build new skills and look after my health.

One of these habits is to do push-ups every morning. I went from not doing push-ups at all, to doing them every single morning. As I write this, I'm on a streak of 45 days in a row. From zero to more than a month without stopping, here's how I did it.

I've always been geared towards getting up before lunchtime, but I wanted to be a real morning person. A get up before the sun person. A get 3 hours of work done before lunch everyday person.

For a few months I was getting up at 6am every day. But something changed in late 2015 when I moved in with my partner and co-founder, Josh. Josh is naturally a late riser and works after I've gone to bed many nights. I don't know if it was my own body's rhythms trying to align with his, or residual feelings of stress and upheaval from the process of moving house, but it took me at least six months to get into a routine of getting up before 8am again.

I've been feeling dissatisfied with my social life lately. On the one hand, I know having friends is good for your health. On the other, I avoid social situations as much as I can. I'm better at being friends with people online, where I don't have to physically (awkwardly) share the space with them. But I've been feeling underwhelmed with online relationships lately, too.

I like it when an app I rely on has an underlying subscription model. Though it's no guarantee, it makes me a tad more confident that they'll be around for a while. So many services have come and gone in recent years that I'm wary of relying heavily on anything these days, so that little bit of extra confidence goes a long way.

I pay for a few recurring subscriptions for services I find really useful. Whenever these recur, I tend to find it a happy reminder that I use these services often, and I'm supporting the teams behind them to continue their work.

Some long-awaiting bug fixes and nice improvements in the latest update to iA Writer for Mac today. Really happy to see these changes.

My inbox is full of freelance client requests this morning. This is all great news, but there's so much at once that it's just making me feel overwhelmed. This is one of those mornings when it's best to just close the inbox and focus on something else.