Give yourself time back and make your Outlook meetings shorter
Jamf has this wonderful all-company gathering every year called Subzero. The entire company comes together, virtually or otherwise, and reflects on the previous year and plans for the year to come. This year we were joined by Erica Dhawan for a fantastic conversation around teamwork, collaboration, and innovation.
I think a lot about meetings… maybe because I'm in so many of them these days. π In particular, I think about video meetings now that so many of us work remotely. I work 100% remotely now, from my home, and my days can pretty easily get stacked with back to back meetings. Finding time for bio breaks, refilling my water bottle, and other things like that can feel tricky.
When I was working out of an office I could fill my water bottle on the way to my next meeting. There's something about online meetings that make you feel like you have to be "on" the whole time, to show accountability. Or whatever. I think you know what I mean.
Something I've found really helpful is changing Outlook's default meeting length to shorter timespans to build in breaks between meetings. This is kind of like how the classes in school are often 50 minutes instead of an hour to make sure students have time to walk to their next class.
Gmail has this capability built in, which I'm used to from previous organizations I've worked for. Outlook has this too, but it's not in the Mac client. Boo. However! You can find it in the Outlook web app. Digging into the Outlook settings online can be a bit of a bear, so here's a quick link:
Outlook online Events and invitations settings
On that screen is a checkbox to "Shorten duration for all events." If you check that box, you'll see options for ending events early. (If you're a punk rock time kid like me, you can also start events late. π) You can then choose options for meetings less than an hour and over an hour.
Once you make your selections in the Outlook web app and save, those settings will be picked up by your Mac Outlook client.
Embrace giving yourself time back in your day. ❤️
Awesome Mac admins tools 2021 refresh
I'm mainly proud I got this done before 2021 actually ended. π
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| Photo by Gaurav Baya on Unsplash |
The awesome-macadmins-tools list started as a list of things I used to share in my Mac admins toolkit talks, which in turn was inspired by a talk my dear friend Tom Bridge gave many years ago at PSU Mac Admins.
I dumped in things I thought were cool and kind of called it a day.
Then GitHub grew and changed, some apps changed hands, some things disappeared, others fell out of usefulness. Standard internet stuff.
Last week I finally went in and did a big cleanup and refresh of the list. A few notable changes:
- subsections and items therein are now in alphabetical order
- lots of new tools have been added, including getmacosipsws.py, installinstallmacos.py, sus-inspector, The MUT, the macOS Security Compliance Project, and other new things I've already forgotten
- "power-ups" is now "utilities"
- …probably other things (it was a big refresh!)
2021 vJNUC session is now on YouTube
Good news for anyone that did not register to attend this year's (virtual) Jamf Nation User Conference and want to watch one of the many great sessions from the schedule: vJNUC 2021 sessions are now available on YouTube. This includes the session I co-presented with Bryson this year called "Between two Jamfs: a conversation about Jamf Pro best practice."
Head over to YouTube to see the full list of session videos that you can watch, or you can check out our session embedded below. ππ»
Session handouts are available on my previous post about the session here.
Awesome Mac Admins Tools list update
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| Photo by Mark Hayward on Unsplash |
Hey y'all. Just wanted to let you know that I made a few updates to the awesome-macadmins-tools list today.
Notable changes:
- There is now a Command-line tools section
- Added Nudge, Low Profile, MIST, and the SAP Icons generator app
Resources from Between Two Jamfs at vJNUC 2021
Hey friends! It was so great to to join you all in chat and on the Mac Admins Slack during our JNUC 2021 session "Between two Jamfs: a conversation about Jamf Pro best practice."
π©π¨
I wanted to make sure to take a moment to reshare some of the resources we shared from our chat, including the session handouts! Unfortunately there is no transcript to share yet, but I'm going to try my best to get a transcript generated and shared here whenever I can.
We also noticed after the session ended that there were some questions asked that we didn't see in the chat window. I'm going to post a follow-up blog post later this week and do my best to answer some of those questions. So stay tuned for that!
vJNUC 2021 session coming soon
Hey friends, next week is virtual JNUC!
Bryson and I joined forces to put together a session to provide a forest-view look at approaching best practice for a Jamf Pro server. You can register and add the session to your schedule using the following buttons:
Check back here next week for links to the session slides and handouts, as well as (hopefully) a full transcript.