Making The Best Of It: Things Do While At Home Quarantine

With the fraught situation that the world currently finds itself in, many of us are searching to re-establish upended routines and find ways to slow the spread of COVID-19. One of the admittedly small positives is that the "stay at home" orders that many of us are under have wholly removed any excuse not to get things done around the apartment or house.

Many folks I know are cleaning up their homes and putting things in order. There's a prediction that personal lawns and gardens will also be the nicest they've been in years. However, this is Mac Edition Radio, so we'll write about things we can do with technology that we've put off for a little bit or perhaps way too long. Here are some things I'm doing:

Email:

1) Cleaning out my email. I have a bonkers amount of email in my three highly active accounts. I'm certainly not getting anywhere close to "Inbox Zero," but I am making progress every day.

Lists:

2) Unsubscribing from seemingly random email lists. This task could be 1a), but those email lists that annoy you right now will probably still annoy you when this is all over. Unsubscribe now!

Digital Photo:

3) Making a big and ugly photo management transition. I've been using Adobe Lightroom Classic for about five years. Before that, I used Apple's Aperture, and before that, I used iPhoto. My Aperture library includes 27,000 photos accounting for 290 GB of storage. Adobe offers an automated import from Aperture into Lightroom, but the process is notoriously slow. No time like the present! After a few days, my iMac is 18% done …

Writing:

4) Finding time to write. The "day job" is hectic right now, but I'm writing for Mac Edition Radio (of course!) and for some completely unrelated blogs. I've also accelerated work on a automotive history book I'm creating in Adobe InDesign that had lain relatively fallow for a few months. In general, this feels like a good time for content creation of any sort.

What are you doing with your technology life that you've previously put off?

Stay Safe!

John Mulhern III, Posted 3/31/2020