Coefficiencies Newsletter - Issue 2

Hello, and welcome to issue 2 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! Just a couple of links today and one quick thought. Enjoy!

Links #

Longplay #

I came across this article by Craig Grannell about LongPlay, the album-centric music player for iOS and macOS, and why it’s the best music app—and I couldn’t agree more. LongPlay connects to your Apple Music library and shows you all of your complete albums, filtering out singles or albums where you don’t have the full collection. By default it shows a wall of albums that you can sort (and size!) in different ways, and lets you sort your albums into collections.

One aspect I love is “album shuffle” mode, where it shuffles through complete albums in your library (or a specific collection). You can also queue up a series of albums to play. I love listening to great albums from start to finish, and album shuffle has been a fun way to rediscover old favourites or ones I added and never got around to listening to.

It’s no 3D Albums app (a guy can dream), but for now I’ll take it.

Active Pieces #

I made a fun software discovery this week: Active Pieces. Active Pieces is a ’low-code’ automation server that works like Zapier and others, letting you automate workflows across different web services using preconfigured ‘blocks,’ with a paid tier for the most useful features. So far, nothing special—except that Active Pieces offers their software for free if you self-host, letting you avoid the monthly fees that usually come with these services.

I think there’s a lot of potential in this software, and I wrote a bit about my experiments with it this week.

Idea of the Week #

I’ve written more extensively about this in my Productivity Town post, but I wanted to share a little advice about notifications this week—and why they’re the worst.

I’m honestly kind of shocked at how many notifications people allow on their phones and computers. Notifications pull me out of whatever flow I’m in—whether it’s working, spending time with my family, or even just going for a nice walk. Sometimes I want to be interrupted, especially for a text or call from a friend or family member, or a home-automation alert about something wrong at home.

But usually notifications aren’t that important. And yet there’s a whole army of product managers incentivized to send more and more notifications to drive engagement KPIs. A lot of people don’t realize (or maybe don’t really care—this could just be me) how much control they have over notifications.

The easiest way I find to kill unwanted notifications is to turn them off right from my iOS lock screen. If you swipe right on a notification, you’ll see an Options button. Tap that, and you’ll see an option to disable notifications for that app right there. Boom—done. I find killing notifications this way as they come up a lot easier than digging into the Settings screen and trying to disable them later. Here’s an example from my lock screen (caveat: I’m on iOS 26 beta, so this might not look exactly the same on your phone, but it should be similar).

Another thing I’m really vigilant about is email. I turn off both lock-screen notifications and the little red badge on email. Email is almost never urgent, and it’s something I choose to check in on every once in a while rather than being reminded about the latest sale from my favourite clothing retailer or whatever.

Wrap-Up #

That’s it for this week! Reminder to let me know if you like this or not, and pass on to a friend who might like it if you know of one.

-Tom