Productivity | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

The Most Helpful Techniques

Personal Productivity

Getting Things Done: The productivity technique. If you read one book, read this one. You will learn how to deal with all the stuff around you without being overwhelmed.

Zettelkasten: A way of taking interconnected notes.

Atomic Habits set you up for success.

Pomodoro Technique: 25 minutes of uninterrupted work. Then a five minute break and back to work.

Envelope Budgeting to manage your finances.

How a password changed my life: How often do you type your password? What if it would remind you of your goal?

Take a Nap! Change your life: Taking a nap works better (and is healthier) than drinking coffee.

Organizational Productivity

Use understandabe language (great Elon Musk mail).

Holacracy roles & governance meetings.

Checklists to reduce risks.

Shape Up for fast-feedback intertwined product and software development.

Notion as a beautiful, easy to use knowledge base, database and ticketing system.

Actionable metrics to see where you’re standing and where you’re heading.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) plus weekly alignment meetings.

The Tools you Need

General

Things for managing tasks and projects.

Obsidian for notes and reference material.

Groove for time-boxed focused productivity sessions.

Arc as a modern browser.

You Need A Budget to keep track of your money.

Hey to fix e-mail.

Fitbod for working out.

1Password to store sensitive data.

The Best Productivity Apps for Mac: My list of small but essential helpers.

Lights: The dashboard of your life (Notion template).

Remote Work

Twist as a deep-work focused Slack alternative that supports you rather than distracting you.

Krisp to remove background noises so you can have a call next to a construction site without anyone noticing.

Meeter to quickly join meetings across different accounts without having to manually switch them.

Latest Posts

ICloud Drive Silently Deletes Your Content

The first time it happened, I was writing a paper. The paragraphs I had just typed vanished into thin air, faster than Time Machine or Backblaze could save them. Gone. The next occurrence was during app development; Xcode suddenly flagged numerous errors in previously error-free code. My recent changes to several files were erased.

Months later, the mystery is solved: iCloud Drive detected a file conflict. It assumed different versions of the same file existed on my Mac and iPhone and couldn’t merge them automatically. This was impossible; the affected files were never opened on the iPhone. But they were in iCloud, as I had moved my Mac’s Documents folder there.

Dropbox manages version conflicts by storing all conflicting files side by side, labeled as “(John Doe’s conflicted copy)“. iCloud Drive, however, doesn’t show these conflicts in the file system. If you open the file in an editor that supports conflict handling, a popup appears asking which version to keep. Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.

Over time, newer backups overwrite older ones containing the correct version; your content is gone for good. The only way to get it back is to open the file with an editor that supports conflict resolution.1 Once moved out of iCloud Drive, even that won’t help. The content is lost.2

Masking version conflicts might appear user-friendly, but it has catastrophic consequences. You might not discover the data loss until years later, when reopening significant but infrequently used documents.

Until iCloud Drive exposes version conflicts in the file system or a central, easily accessible location, my strong recommendation is to move all crucial data out of it. Meanwhile, set up a Git repository to monitor your critical files; you might uncover surprising changes.


  1. I use iA Writer↩︎

  2. In my tests, moving the unchanged file back to iCloud brought back the conflicted version popup. This may not happen if the file has been edited or if you’ve continued working on a copy. ↩︎

Bachelor of Laws

After thirteen years I finally graduated from my for-fun studies.

Thesis: Digital Products – The Digital Content Directive and its implementation into the German civil code