Notion

Two Skills, One Notion: The Operations Hub Behind My Morning

I’ve written about two skills in the last couple of weeks. The morning briefing one that reads Gmail, Outlook, Teams and my calendar so I don’t have to. The pre-call brief one that writes a context page for every meeting on my calendar before I sit down. Both posts mentioned Notion, mostly in passing, as the place the calendar lives. A friend asked me last week what that actually looked like. He’d built the pre-call skill from the post, pointed it at a single-table Notion database, and watched it produce briefs that were missing half the context he expected. The skill wasn’t the problem. The Notion underneath it was.

Thursday, May 28, 2026 | 16 minutes Read

The Pre-Call Brief That Writes Itself

I take a lot of calls. Partner syncs, customer technical reviews, internal architecture chats, the occasional demo. On a bad week it’s eight a day. On a good week it’s also eight a day, just with more interesting topics. Eight calls a day is more than my brain wants to hold. I would join a customer call having genuinely forgotten what we discussed three weeks ago. I would walk into a partner sync and spend the first ten minutes catching up to context I should have had on the way in. Sometimes I’d realise mid-call that I’d committed to send something last time and never had.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

The Morning Briefing I Don't Have to Write

Every morning starts the same way. Coffee, desk, the slow dread of opening four different surfaces to figure out what I missed. Gmail for personal. Outlook for work. Teams for whatever the team was arguing about in the Workflows chat at 11pm. And the calendar, because none of that matters if I’m walking into a meeting I forgot about in twenty minutes. Doing that reading manually takes about twenty minutes. Most of it is junk. The handful of things that actually matter are buried somewhere between a “FYI” message and an Apple developer notification I should have read three days ago.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 | 6 minutes Read

Building Meeting Reminder: An ADHD-Focused Menu Bar App for macOS

The problem I lose track of time. Not in a cute “oh wow, 3pm already” way — in a “the meeting started 4 minutes ago and nobody’s in the room but me and confusion” way. Calendar notifications are too quiet. Slack DMs asking “you joining?” are too late. And the moment I’m deep in a document or a terminal, the rest of the world stops existing. I’d been using In Your Face for a while — a brilliant macOS app that throws a full-screen block in front of you before meetings. It’s excellent. But I wanted to tinker, I wanted something free and open source, and I wanted to layer in a few things specific to how my brain misses meetings.

Friday, April 10, 2026 | 3 minutes Read