How I Work (October 2018 Edition)

Taylor Otwell
3 min readOct 29, 2018

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I’ve seen a few people share their work setups / processes lately, so I thought I would do the same!

Office

Here is a photo of what my office looks like today. I need a tidy space to be in the right mindset to get work done 😅 … features Phillips Hue lighting, 4K TV, Mini Ping Pong Table, Stereo Pair HomePods, 5k iMac…

Machines

5k iMac (4Ghz i7), 16GB RAM, 512GB Flash Storage.

I really love my 5k iMac. The display alone is worth $1,000, and the computer itself is still fast enough to easily handle everything I need to do.

When traveling or working outside of the house, I use a 2017 Retina MacBook Pro with TouchBar. I honestly like this machine quite a bit even though it’s gotten some negative reviews. I’ve gotten more used to the keyboard with time and the TouchBar doesn’t bother me. The screen is amazing.

If I need to use Windows, I have a Surface Book 2.

I use an iPhone XS Max as my primary phone.

Editor

I use SublimeText 3 as my primary editor. I pair it with the Inspired GitHub color scheme, Operator Mono font, SublimeLinter, and a handful of keyboard short-cuts to run PHPUnit tests (https://github.com/adamwathan/sublime-phpunit). I also make heavy use of Sublime’s “project” features and the Cmd+Shift+P short-cut to quick-switch between projects.

That line height…

Terminal

I use iTerm2 as my terminal. I use oh-my-zsh’s default command prompt combined with the “Arthur” color scheme:

Still lots of line height…

Todo

I use Todoist a lot. All day, every day. I primarily sit on the “Today” view and delegate tasks from there. I use the “smart date” parsing when scheduling tasks to quickly assign tasks a given date / time:

Environment

I use Laravel Valet to configure my Nginx / PHP environment. The speed and ease-of-use is hard to beat. If I need to run a project within Docker (typically when using Windows), I like to use Vessel.

Communication

I primarily use Telegram and Discord for communication. I’ve managed to get my entire family on Telegram 😅 and most of my Laravel communication these days takes place on the official Laravel Discord server.

Music

For headphones, I primarily use my AirPods but I love the Bose QC35 when traveling or when I need to drown out some noise.

I use Spotify for music streaming, and primarily listen to deep / prog house electronic and rap. If you want to get a feel for what I might be listening to on any given workday, check out these playlists:

Misc

Here are some other applications I use a lot:

  • Alfred (Snippets + Clipboard History)
  • Bear (Cloud Synced Notes)
  • Calendar.app (Default Mac Calendar Client)
  • Dropbox (Cloud File Storage)
  • Encrypt.me (VPN)
  • Mail.app (Default Mac Mail Client)
  • SequelPro (Database Admin)
  • Spectacle (Window Management)
  • Spotlight (Default Mac Quick-Search)
  • Trello (Laravel Employee Collaboration)

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