Month: April 2014

Go away. Far as you can.

Posted by

1

I went to a Catholic school and I think every kid there was Irish Descent. That’s how I thought of it: capped up, Irish Descent. Like that was a thing, a statehood, a nationhood, like Irish or English or American, I was and we were Irish Descent. Then I went to college and nobody was.

Nobody else was.

They weren’t Irish Descent, they weren’t Irish and nobody was Catholic. It was wonderful. I can feel my eyes opening as I tell you this. To go from one familiar situation like my school to the unfamiliar one of a college. To go to a situation with the promise of so much being unfamiliar, so much being new and different. I basked in that and I’d say that I learnt more from the experience than from the lectures, except that’s far too easy a thing to say. You should’ve seen the lectures.

You know all this. You know that going away is good for you. Now Time magazine reports that:

Research shows that experience in other countries makes us more flexible, creative, and complex thinkers.

How does studying or working abroad change you? You return with a photo album full of memories and a suitcase full of souvenirs, sure. But you may also come back from your time in another country with an ability to think more complexly and creatively—and you may be professionally more successful as a result.

These are the conclusions of a growing body of research on the effects of study- and work-abroad experiences. For example: A study led by William Maddux, an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, found that among students enrolled in an international MBA program, their “multicultural engagement”—the extent to which they adapted to and learned about new cultures—predicted how “integratively complex” their thinking became.

How Studying or Working Abroad Makes You Smarter – Time

Before we go too far down this line, I need to tell you that copying-and-pasting that segment out for you also brought along a Recommended headline which was this:

Kate Middleton plays volleyball… in heels

If you’re thinking that were one even to accept the concept that this might be news, the entire story is there in the headline, you’re right. The headline just links out to a video. Want the link? The things I do for you.

Anyway. Time magazine, eh? I do still have it in my RSS feed and it regularly has features I enjoy. Including this one about studying and working abroad.  Take a look at the whole feature: there’s not much more to it than I’ve quoted but it has links out to the research it reports on.

10 PRINT “HELLO, WORLD” GOTO 10

Posted by

0

It’s fifty years since the computer language BASIC was invented and probably thirty since I could’ve told you unprompted that it stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I’m not sure how many years it is since this was the startup screen I saw for most hours of most days:

 

bbcmicrocursor

 

It’s hard to conceive how we got from that to what I now see every day:

macdesktop

But we got there in part, in a very big part, through the impact of BASIC and the generation it sent into programming computers. I was one of them, I just got in trouble for always wanting to add in plot twists.

Read the origins and history of BASIC in Time magazine. Told you Time was good for a read, when it isn’t running royal videos.

 

Do this and you’ll get a job

Posted by

0

The New York Times has been running a short series called How to Get a Job at Google. It’s very much about getting a vocational education, it’s mostly rather down on the concept of getting a degree in what interests you even if that won’t directly set you up for a career in the burger and fries industry. But among the long part 2 feature last weekend, there was this about writing a CV.

Laszlo Bock “is in charge of all hiring at Google – about 100 new hires a week” and says about CVs:

“The key,” he said, “is to frame your strengths as: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.’ Most people would write a résumé like this: ‘Wrote editorials for The New York Times.’ Better would be to say: ‘Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.’ Most people don’t put the right content on their résumés.”

How to Get a Job at Google, part 2 – The New York Times

I read that translating the word job into the words freelance contract – and, actually, also translating resumé into CV – but what he then says about interviews is surely useful advice for any session where you’re pitching yourself:

“What you want to do is say: ‘Here’s the attribute I’m going to demonstrate; here’s the story demonstrating it; here’s how that story demonstrated that attribute.’ ” And here is how it can create value. “Most people in an interview don’t make explicit their thought process behind how or why they did something and, even if they are able to come up with a compelling story, they are unable to explain their thought process.”

There’s a not a gigantic amount more in the full Times piece but see what you think of the guy’s opinion on whether liberal arts qualifications have merit.

By the way, this is the 300th news post on The Blank Screen. Let us raise a mug of tea. Clink.

Stop trying new software

Posted by

0

Shudder. If it’s easier to be productive than it is to write anything – and, oh my lights, it is – then it is easier still to pretend to be even more productive by forever trying out new software tools. I am completely fine with this. If I hadn’t played, I mean, investigated, then I wouldn’t now be using OmniFocus and where would we be then? We wouldn’t be here: you and I, talking like this, it would not have happened if I hadn’t moved to using OmniFocus to get tasks done. That’s a scary thought. I knew that software was transformative, but I say this to you and I remember when I was first trying it out and I considered going back to my previous To Do manager.

That was a near miss.

Anyway.

I am definitely pro exploring and investigating. Except there’s this fella, Frank Chimero, who argues that enough is enough and I think he has a spectacular point:

Being an early adopter is exhilarating in the same way that riding a rollercoaster can feel like travel. You’re moving, but you’re not actually going anywhere, only devising ever-increasingly complex methods to make yourself feel slightly more barfy. You are in a loop de loop of productivity, changing for change’s sake. I made an agreement with myself in January: no new apps on my phone or computer. Don’t do new stuff. Just do your work.

Text editor, spreadsheet, email, pencil, paper, Photoshop. OK. That’s enough.

No New Tools – Frank Chimero

Is Chimero his real name? Seems wrong for someone saying you should stop where you are. But he means it and you see there where he says he made this agreement with himself in January. We’re now in May and he has things to say about how it’s going in the full article here.

 

Process stories – finding how you work

Posted by

1

By coincidence, two friends talked to me about this lately: how we writers go about our writing, the way that we get it done. The process, the writer’s process. I was thinking that the short answer is a shrug: you do what you need to. But there is a comfort to having a system that works for you, specifically there is a comfort in that if you know you are always writing at the last minute and that always turns out okay, maybe you can stop beating yourself up about it now.

I can’t tell you my process. I can go on about the 5am starts (today was day 231 of that, by the way) but that’s less a process, more a stupidity. It’s 8:30 so now and I have written 1,200 words on one project, I have done a pile of emails about a couple of events I’m producing, I have drunk quite a lot of tea and gone through my To Do list. Including the stuff I found I’d done over the weekend, I ticked off about twenty items on that list. I think I probably only actually did six or seven of them this morning. But they’re done. And yet this isn’t a writing process, it’s a productivity one. Because it’s easier to be productive than it is to write anything down.

Maybe that’s my process: do everything else rather than write. It’s a rubbish process.

So I would like to find you a way to write that is efficient and quick and gets things done. But I haven’t found it because I can’t find it because I think the very notion is bollocks anyway. Not if the aim is to be efficient. If the aim is to explore your own writing and to end up having written instead of just thought about writing, that’s different.

One friend, Alex, says she’s still finding her system, her process. Then either by total chance or because we writers are all forever thinking about this stuff rather than actually writing, another pal, Ken, wrote a blog about it:

If there’s a point to this post. I think it’s this. I think there are lots of ways of writing and if you’re stuck staring at the notebook or the plotting software, consider letting it go for a while and just writing. Just write. See where you go and where you end up. Just don’t settle for what you write in that initial foray.

My Way is Not the Best Way but it’s Mine – Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff

He’s a smart guy, he writes very well and his blog was a key impetus in my making my own Self Distract be a weekly thing. Have a read of the whole piece, would you?

Negotiate like the FBI

Posted by

0

Specifically, negotiate like you’re the FBI and the person you’re dealing with is currently holding hostages. They have your attention. You have theirs. You both have guns.

Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree has taken the FBI’s Behaviour Change Stairway – a diagram of their standard approach – and applied it to the freelance life like so:

The Behavioral Change Stairway Model was developed by the FBI’s hostage negotiation unit, and it shows the 5 steps to getting someone else to see your point of view and change what they’re doing. It’s not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.

Six hostage negotiation techniques that will get you what you want – Barking Up the Wrong Tree

You’re wondering how he can say there are five steps when his article claims there are six. You are right. The five he lists there are FBI-based ones and the six are similar but extrapolated steps that make this fit the kind of situations we are hopefully more likely to encounter.

He’s boiled down the FBI’s distillation into these five or six steps but probably the first one is the key thing to focus on:

1. Ask open-ended questions
You don’t want yes/no answers, you want them to open up.

A good open-ended question would be “Sounds like a tough deal. Tell me how it all happened.” It is non-judgmental, shows interest, and is likely to lead to more information about the man’s situation. A poor response would be “Do you have a gun? What kind? How many bullets do you have?” because it forces the man into one-word answers, gives the impression that the negotiator is more interested in the gun than the man, and communicates a sense of urgency that will build rather than defuse tension.

But then you’ve got five more steps before they put the gun down and/or you get what you want. It’s quite a fascinating read, especially if you’ve seen eleventy-billion cop shows with exactly this kind of scenario.

Read the whole feature.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom

Posted by

0

Even when I loved Aaron Sorkin for Sports Night and the first years of The West Wing, I was aware that he could be parodied. Then Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had some problems I thought were peculiarly obvious from the start. And now The Newsroom has a central character I cannot see for how there’s a line of previous Sorkin male characters standing in front of him. So while I still wish I could write like him, I found this new parody alarmingly spot-on.

I’m going to stretch a point here and say that I’m showing you this because it speaks to how we can all fall into traps in our work. But really I’m just showing it to you because I enjoyed it so much.

Distraction-free writing with Noisli

Posted by

0

You may never have seen such a brightly-coloured screen for writing. Wait. You may never have seen such a gently soft and reassuring – no, it’s bright again, hang on, now a kind of brown? Whoa, yellow.

Noisli is a web-based text editor that deliberately throws distracting colour changes at you and optionally adds in noises. Oooh, I like this blue. Cyan now. Not so keen on green.

You’re not supposed to so consciously notice the colour changes, it’s really intended to be a purposeful distraction. Especially with the sounds on, Noisli helps you focus on your writing by slipping background noise into your noggin. Just enough. It appears that we work better when there is something going on, just a little something, than when we work in total silence.

It works, too. I really don’t like the yellow but most of the colours that come by as you type are quite restful or quite sparking, quite energising.

I’ve played with the sound of rain but there is also lightning, waves, lots of things I don’t understand from the icons.

There’s just one thing to note: as the website itself says, this is in beta. Your work should be saved but do yourself a favour for now and copy the text out to somewhere else every now and again. And go have a play with Noisli.

Take a breath. Or a holiday. Or something in between

Posted by

0

A couple of weeks ago I got an email that so annoyed me, I wanted to reply instantaneously. But instead I calmly made lunch, watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother – and then exploded.

It was going so well until the end there, wasn't it? I sounded so calm and professional. Once in a very long while, though, it is fun to make the ground shake – and that's not what I want to talk to you about. It's that 45 minute break I took before replying, that's what's key, that's what you and I need to talk through.

Number one thing: just because someone has emailed you, that doesn't mean you have to reply at all, let alone that you have to reply right away.

I'm a scriptwriter and the analogy I leap to is when you read a script that has a character asking a question. In a bad, tedious script, the next character will always answer it. In good scripts, they won't. For at least three reasons, the greatest being that it is extremely boring. Then there is also the fact that we don't tend to talk like that in real life. And there's also that often the answer is a chore to get by because you've done all the work with the question.

Follow. Here's a bad line of dialogue:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?

You know that the next line belongs to his son. You know that this happens a lot, you know that his son uses the Dad Taxi all the time. You know the father doesn't like Sally. And you even know what time the next scene is going to start and end. It's not that bad a line, since it gives you all of that attitude along with all of those facts, but it is a question that does not need an answer. In real life, the kid would sulk. In scripts, bad writers automatically write him an answer and that answer will be rubbish. It will be an answer because of course he must reply with one. It won't have any value, it will just be a delay before the next thing happens.

Just let me stay on scriptwriting dialogue for a moment. This is an aside, I know, but even in an example, I want to be clear that there is a difference between an answer and a response.

This is how that exchange would go in a bad script:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?
SON: But you promised you would! I've told Sally I'm coming and everything.

And this is it in a better one:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?
SON: I can go over to mom's, she'll drive me.

It's a response and it also tells us that the mother and father are divorced.

Anyway.

Back to the point about replying and responding instantaneously. We do think we have to, we feel bad if we don't. It's as if it's a phone call to us, we feel the pressure to reply, the pressure that the other person is waiting. And they are.

But still: train yourself to not automatically reply to emails.

I'm not saying be rude, I'm saying avoid kneejerk reactions by avoiding replying. Maybe just for a short while, maybe forever.

A few days ago, a friend asked advice on a technical thing and I didn't know the answer. I was replying instantly to say this when the phone rang and I had to go off doing something. I felt bad leaving her hanging, leaving her thinking that I might be able to help. About an hour later, I got to reply to her – and in the hour I'd thought of something. Completely unintentionally, completely without planning or even conscious thought, something had whirred away in my noggin and popped out when I was ready to reply. It didn't solve her problem, it didn't save the day, but it was useful and I got it because I took time before replying.

That was an hour. The lunch and HIMYM was about 45 minutes.

Jo Warwick writes on the Dumb Little Man website that maybe you should take a break that is proportional to the issue. Have a coffee, take a walk – or even take a holiday. Seriously.

Take some timeout and let the dust settle, before you do something drastic, that you just might regret…
The expense of replacing some things in life and starting again can be too costly, heart-breaking or sometimes impossible and you could end up losing the one thing that it’s totally irreplaceable….
So walk away, take some space and give yourself however long you need to breathe, calm down, relax and gain a little perspective on the situation.

How Not To Make A Drastic Mistake You Will Regret – Dumb Little Man

It's not like you can just take a hike whenever you feel like it, she's not arguing that. But she is arguing persuasively that time out saves lives. Read her whole piece on the Dumb Little Man site that, actually, I'd never heard of before ten minutes ago. I'm off to have a look around it.

Seriously, no deadlines. Unless..

Posted by

0

Yesterday's post on not setting deadlines for your tasks got me a lot of reaction from people saying they have to set deadlines or they don't get things done. And I do agree that even a fake deadline can be a motivator.

What I'm saying, though, is that most tasks do not need this so don't do it. Don't give deadlines unless they are real or you really need it.

So for example, straight from my own To Do list this right now:

Change Evernote and Dropbox passwords

I need to do it, I want to do it. In fact, I want to do it quite regularly. But it doesn't have to be done today, it doesn't have to be done tomorrow. It's in my To Do list and I will see it every time I choose to review my entire list. I'll see it when OmniFocus says it's time for me to review my project called “Mac &c”.

But I won't see it today. I didn't see it today. I just had to go looking for it now, trying to find a good example of all this. (Confession: it was difficult. It seems most everything I'm doing is urgent.)

Or this:

Book Four Oaks train for Wednesday morning

That obviously has a deadline, doesn't it? If I didn't see that task on my list until Thursday, I'd be sunk. So in theory I would have a deadline of Tuesday and maybe a start date of last Friday when I was asked about going to this school.

I say in theory because I don't know. I just found that task in my list now but I've already done it, I've already booked that train seat, so I just ticked the task as completed and it's gone. Vanished before I could remember to check what the dates were for you.

This is how most of my To Do list work goes now: I check the list, see I've done a lot of the things already, I tick them all off. I used to find something on the list, do it, come back to tick it, pick the next thing, go away, and so on. Rinse, repeat. Now I see what I've got to do today and I just go do it. My life runs by this To Do list yet I hardly look at it. That's one thing I adore: I don't have to be a slave to checking this stuff yet it just still gets done.

And one thing that used to make me come back to check the list every few minutes was how often I would set deadlines. Fake deadlines. Really just the same as writing it all out on a piece of paper and pretending you can get the lot done tomorrow.

Here's a third type of task from my list now:

Write 20,000 words of novel MW by end of May

There's a deadline right there. It's fake. Nobody is waiting for it – well, nicely, they are but not specifically at the end of May. But I am doing a writing buddy thing for April and May with someone who's particularly good at fiction so I want to have a substantial chunk to show her by the end. (I'm on about 13,000 words, thanks for asking.)

If I miss that end of May deadline, it doesn't matter. It's more than just letting myself down since I have told this buddy that I'm doing it. She may not be waiting for it, she may be dreading getting it, but I've told her it's happening so I feel held to account.

That's good. That's planting a stick in the ground and working towards it.

I have no problem setting deadline dates for this fakery.

I just want you to stop doing it for “Buy beans at supermarket” too.