Month: April 2014

France wants to stop emails after 6pm

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You have to be in France. You have to be a manager there, too, because ordinary workers can lump it: if your boss needs you to answer your emails all day and night, you’ll answer them or else. But if a French plan to protect stressed bosses works, it will logically help everyone. Follow. When your boss is not allowed to go on email in the evenings then he or she can’t be emailing you anything. Everybody wins.

In many jobs, work email doesn’t stop when the employee leaves the office. And now France has decided to act. It has introduced rules to protect about a million people working in the digital and consultancy sectors from work email outside office hours. Those are taken to be before 9am and after 6pm. The deal signed between employers federations and unions says that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check messages.

Michel de La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers, has said that “digital working time” would have to be measured. Some emailing outside of office hours would be allowed but only in “exceptional circumstances”.

Could work emails be banned after 6pm? BBC News

I’m more sympathetic to this idea that I might have been before. I used to live by the bleep of my incoming emails and now I’ve switched it all off. Almost all. Certain people’s emails make a bleep but the majority don’t. And I switched off push notifications too. Suddenly my battery life is longer and I am able to concentrate on more work because I just don’t get interrupted so often.

And I can tell you exactly where in Damascus I had this blinding revelation. Do read the BBC article because it is interesting but for useful ideas – specifically for useful ideas you can use right this moment – buy David Sparks’s book about Email from the iBooks Store.

Is it a task? Is it an event? No, it’s… er… um…

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I was in a meeting last night and was told I had to do something – but only if certain other things happened. Broadly, if any of these things go wrong then I have to do this or that or the other depending on what and where and when.

It all makes absolute sense but it makes sense to me now. I don’t know that it makes so much sense that I will remember it in a year’s time when one of these things goes wrong.

Plus, I got into a state recently because my OmniFocus To Do list was so full of stray ideas and stuff that I will never get around to that I wasn’t getting around to the stuff I needed to do. I was seeing trees instead of wood. I was feeling like I’d lost all control of everything. And while I’m back now, while it feels great to be on top of it all once more, the road to that misery is to bung in things that you shouldn’t.

And I don’t know. I can’t put this particular instruction in my calendar, that’s obvious. But I can put it in my task list. Yet if I do, when exactly do I tick it off? Possibly never, certainly not for a month, probably not for many months. It would sit there forever, really.

This is starting to happen more and more. I don’t know how I’ve coped with it before, I’m not sure that I have coped with it before, but it’s happening now and I need to deal with it now. So what I’m trying is this: I’m creating Evernote notebooks devoted to the organisation or the project. Those instructions are now one note that will stay in Evernote forever. Because that’s what you use Evernote for: it’s for remembering forever. And if I never look up the notebook again, it’ll be because I don’t need to. Fine.

But will this work? It sounds sensible to me. Except in a month or a few months or a year or if ever this thing goes wrong, then will I remember that I have these Evernote notebooks?

I should add a task to OmniFocus that says “Check the Evernote notebooks you created in order to not have tasks in OmniFocus that you need to check”

Three calendars, no waiting

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Thanks. I was thinking about how we use calendars and how I have been working to use mine more but there was one exasperating thing. Yet just working out how I would describe it to you may have solved it for me. May.

It’s Fantastical 2. I bought this for my iPad and it sits there right alongside OmniFocus so I can and do work all my tasks and times together. It’s working so well that I’ve been using my ancient copy of Fantastical 1 for iPhone too and this week just bloody well caved in and bought the update to Fantastical 2 for iPhone. Still can’t tell you what the functional difference is but I like the look of it and I like paying for something I am using a lot.

Only, I have had to keep Apple’s Calendar app around too. On both iPad and iPhone, I’ve needed that because event invitations have come in via it. I’ve got notifications of event invitations and had to open Apple’s Calendar to see what they were and to say yes or no. Then I’ve closed Calendar and by the time I’ve opened Fantastical, the accepted event is in place.

That’s just a chore, though. Clearly I would prefer event invitations to come up in Fantastical and save me that trip out to another app and back. But before I said that to you here, I fact-checked like a proper old-fashioned journalist and it appears I’m wrong. It appears that Fantastical accepts invitations and that you can say yeay or nay right there. I cannot see how and I cannot see why it hasn’t happened before. Could you send me an invitation so that I can try it out? But  I am now convinced it’s true because there’s evidence on the internet. (That never goes wrong.) Evidence including screen grabs of it in action.

Mind you, the reason there are screen grabs of Fantastical showing event invitations is because people have been asking why it doesn’t or how the hell it does. So I’m not alone and if I am not yet fully imbued with the knowledge of how to do it, the next time I get a calendar invitation I will take a little time and figure it out.

If that happens, I don’t need Apple’s Calendar any more. Not on my iPhone and iPad. It’s still the calendar I use on my Mac: currently Fantastical for Mac is a menu drop down and I think I heard it may become a more fully-fledged app so while I continue getting used to it, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

You can’t get rid of Apple’s Calendar on iPhone or iPad, it cannot be deleted. But you can bung it in a Apple folder alongside the weather and stock apps that you never use.

But Calendar and Fantasical. That’s two calendar apps.

And I did say I use three.

I’m using Mynd on my iPhone. No matter what, I would have to use something else on my iPad because Mynd is iPhone-only for now. But as I’ve mentioned before, I did not appreciate that it is actually a full calendar app. It’s just so useful for telling me the very next thing happening and a slew of rather spookily great extra features to help each meeting or appointment go well. But it is a full calendar, you can do everything you do on Calendar or Fantastical. (I don’t know about event invitations. That’s another thing I’ll need to try. Could you hurry up with that invitation? Is that too much to ask?) 

So not only do I have three calendars on my iPhone, two of them are on my front page, the home screen.

It feels wrong, it feels like a waste of space on that screen and it feels like an unnecessary division of mental effort. But I don’t think to use Mynd unless I’m going to a meeting and want all its extra gorgeousness for that one particular event.

Similarly, Fantastical 2 has a lot of features for running your To Do list and I so much, so completely fail to think of Fantastical for tasks that I even tried to switch that off. You can deny Fantastical permission to access your Apple Reminders list but if you do, I found it also wouldn’t let me enter any events. So with reluctance, chagrin and some annoyance, I allowed Reminders and just choose to never use them.

Why would you use Apple’s Reminders either directly or via Fantastical when you have OmniFocus?

Funny: OmniFocus has a calendar in it. Yet I use that. I use it to glance at the day and see how much is going on.

I should get a Venn diagram going here of how these four apps (Calendar, Fantastical, Mynd, OmniFocus) overlap and what I do and don’t use in them.

Or I could just get a life and accept that where I used to eschew all calendar apps, I now have three.

The world’s first wifi kettle now on sale in the UK

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ikettleDon’t let me buy this.

For the past few months, I’ve mentioned this kettle in my Blank Screen workshops but have had to say that it’s only available in the States. Now it’s officially here in the UK but I’d like you first to wait until it’s actually stocked – Amazon UK says temporarily out and Firebox says coming 23 April – and second to just think about what a wifi kettle means.

Stumbled in the front door from work exhausted? Nervy half-time ad break during the World Cup final? Slaving away on a late night project and can’t waste a second? Whatever the urgent hot-drink scenario, a simple one-touch setup allows you to instantly control the iKettle from anywhere in the house with your smart-phone.

iKettle on Firebox.com

I work at home and wouldn’t know one end of a football from the other, but yeah, otherwise, that’s me. I am drawn to the idea of being able to tap a button on my iPhone and have this kettle go boil itself in my kitchen. And for it to then send a push notification back that it’s done.

Except.

The kettle is £99.99 UK, or will be, depending on whose release date you see first. That’s not a problem. Well, it’s not a convenience either, but if you were in the market for a kettle and were looking north of whatever’s on sale at Tesco, you could spend a lot more. Seriously more. Amazon lists some kettles for over £300 apiece. So the £100 iKettle with wifi isn’t a bargain but it looks like one next to these others.

That’s not the except.

The except is that I know. I know. I absolutely know that I would press that button without having thought to put water in.

So I reckon that would work out at about one hundred pounds per mug of tea.

“Siri, cancel my appointment…”

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I’ve already lost the ability to check the weather on my iPhone in any way other than asking Siri. I already add more reminders to OmniFocus via Siri than I do through typing. And I have some days when Siri is worthless. But I have more days when it is great and sometimes, just sometimes, it is astonishing. A friend had to pull out of a coffee chat and, partly because I had my hands full, partly because I wondered if it would work, I said to Siri:

Cancel my appointment with Steph

And it did.

Took it off my calendar.

As ever when a gap comes up, other events can shuffle about to fill it so I tried saying:

Move my 4pm meeting to 2pm.

And it did.

It genuinely is becoming faster and handier to talk to my phone than to type. Never thought that would happen – and I’m struggling to believe that it has. I remember years of promises that voice control was coming and here it is. If only Siri were consistent.

You don’t have to be creepy about it

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But do your homework about people. I just had a terribly fun meeting with someone – er, I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did – and before I got to her, I'd read her blog. I'd seen her professional pages, I'd read what she did, I had an idea of some of the work she did.

I intended to stop there. The idea of coming to a meeting entirely cold makes me wince but equally I'm there to meet you, I'm not there to show off my deep research. I really want to meet you: easily the best part of journalism is that you get to bound off and say hello to people you might otherwise never come across. Utterly love that.

And I stopped intentionally looking into this woman's background. But I've been trying a free iPhone app called Mynd and it did some digging for me without my realising it.

Mynd is like a calendar assistant; I found it because I was exploring calendars and looking for why I nearly missed an appointment recently. I also found it because it got mentioned a few times by Katie Floyd on the Mac Power Users podcast. All it does, I thought, is show me my entire day in one screen: how many events I've got to get to, where the next one is, what the weather's like today. I also found that it calculates how long it's going to take me to drive to somewhere and it will say so right there on the screen: you need to leave in 10 minutes if you're going to make the appointment. Sometimes it sounds a notification too. I haven't figured out why it's only sometimes.

But I have figured out that it believes I drive everywhere when really it's more that I drive almost nowhere. So I got a Mynd notification that I ought to get out of Dodge and start the car right now when I was already on a train to London.

I was going to ditch it for doing that. I have Fantastical now that does all the work I need of managing my appointments and events. (Fantastical 2 for iPad is £6.99 UK, $9.99 US. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is £2.99 UK, $4.99 US. The iPad prices are launch offers and will shortly increase by about 33%.) Plus I don't care about the weather and when I do have a mind to wonder about whether it's going to rain, I ask Siri.

But.

There is a panel on this Mynd screen called People and up to now it has always been blank. Today it showed a photo of the woman I was meeting. And it got that photo from LinkedIn. When I tapped on that photo, it showed me her short LinkedIn bio and then it had options for calling her. If you're running late, you open Mynd, tap the person's photo, then tap to send her a message. If you've got the number of her mobile, anyway. Or an email address.

That would be spectacularly handy if I were ever late for anything but usually I'm cripplingly early. Still, it's impressive.

What was even more impressive is that I scrolled to tomorrow, saw the first meeting had a fella's photo there – and behind it was a list of related Evernote documents. It's just reminded me of the last note I made when talking to him. Right there. I'd forgotten I'd ever made a note but there it is.

It's like Mynd gives you a personal briefing before you go to meet someone. I don't think that means you should skip looking in to them yourself, but I feel wildly efficient about tomorrow now. And I won't feel wildly stupid if he mentions the topic of my last note.

Mynd is free for iPhone on the App Store. There's no iPad or Android version.

Have a look at the Mynd website too. It proposes using the software as your sole calendar for a week and I've just learnt that you can do that. Bugger. I think I'll continue using it as an adjunct to Fantastical but it's handy to know that all the ordinary calendar functions are in this Mynd app as well.

Click on the wrong link sometimes

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Wait. I sound like I want you to deliberately click on advertising links or something that would bring me giant pools of money. What I mean is that sometimes in our constant journey through the internet, the odd left turn can be a very good thing.

There are entire sites devoted to sudden left turns, most notably or at least most famously StumbleUpon.com which has nothing but new links and at most a gentle hand on the tiller to steer you in directions you might like.

But today I was going to meet someone and as I read her blog, I found she's in to productivity and had what sounded like a great link to a David Allen Getting Things Done video. Except when I tapped on it, I didn't notice that I'd actually tapped on the next link down. No connection to productivity, no connection to the woman I was going to meet, just something she had found and liked. Something I had not heard about. So while it took me a moment to realise this wasn't David Allen, I am so glad that I found it:

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: she had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
Jill Bolte Taylor's Powerful Stroke of Insight – TED talks

I should go back and get you the David Allen link too but, ah, Bolte Taylor is more interesting.

Update: the Facebook battery drain is true

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As always, your mileage may vary, but I’ve been following the advice from this morning’s piece about Facebook and it’s true: my iPhone battery lasts longer now. The quick summary of this piece is that Facebook uses Location Services more than you’d usually want and it uses Background App Refresh far more than anyone in the world who doesn’t work for Facebook would like it to do.

The idea came from a writer named Scotty Loveless of Overthought.org and I wrote:

[His] piece is very persuasive. I don’t know the writer Scotty Loveless and hadn’t heard of Overthought.org before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I’ve immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen – April 8, 2014

I’ve now tested out what he says and it’s true. Here’s the test:

[Write] down your usage and standby time, press the sleep/wake button (or lock button, as some call it) to put the device to sleep, and set the device down for five minutes. When you come back, take note of the change in time. If your device is sleeping properly, then the Standby time should have increased by five minutes and your Usage time by <1 minute . If your Usage time rises by more than one minute, you have a drain problem. Something is keeping your device from sleeping properly, significantly shortening the time it will last.

And here’s what happened on my iPhone:

battery

Those are two shots taken five minutes apart. It’s got to be approximate since there are no seconds – 61 seconds would therefore count as 2 minutes – and this is probably why the two Standby times are 6 minutes apart. My iPhone was sitting on my desk doing nothing for up to six minutes yet look at the usage figure. Something used my iPhone’s battery for up to two minutes.

And it was Facebook. I know because I took the article’s advice and switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook (and not for anything else) and here’s what the same test got me:

battery2

My iPhone was again on standby for five minutes and that’s what it shows. But it also shows no usage in that time. None at all.

I’m convinced.

 

 

 

 

Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like.

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Sorry to play fast and loose with Betteridge's law – which says the answer to any headline question is no – but of course it is. Of course Facebook is draining your iPhone battery. Everything you have and everything you use on your iPhone drains it, that's what the battery is there for. But a new and very persuasive article says it is draining it a lot. Far more than you'd expect and actually far more than it really needs to.

Apps that can make or receive calls, like Skype, Viber, Tango, Whatsapp, and Facebook are able to check for incoming calls without notifying you. I believe these types of apps sometimes abuse this exception and could have possibly influenced Apple to add Background App Refresh as the sanctioned method for this type of behavior.

I think this is why disabling Facebook's background services is so influential on battery life: I speculate they are abusing the fact that they have VOIP call features to run in the background more than they should. It would provide a better experience for people using Facebook, sure, but people would never know Facebook was the cause of their battery life issues, and would definitely blame the device or iOS itself.
The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain – Overthought.org

The piece is very persuasive. I don't know the writer Scotty Loveless and hadn't heard of Overthought.org before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I've immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

He's more of the school where he says what something is for so you can decide whether you need that feature or not.

With the two Facebook ones, I don't need either. You don't need either. The location service lets Facebook say your post is from New York City or wherever – and if is were there, I'd be writing that in the update. Background refresh has nothing to do with you getting notifications of messages and comments: they work completely separately. So there is no reason to have it on. None. Not for you or me – but seemingly there's an advantage for Facebook. I am okay with denying them this.

That's the thing that makes me pause: it's oddly appealing to think a genuine problem I'm having is somehow Facebook's fault. But I'm trying all the things the article says and we'll see.

Lifehacker: Delete your way to productivity

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Often, we don’t notice something until we need it and then it appears everywhere. I’ve spent this weekend deep-cleaning my working life – see I nearly missed an event today – and once I’d deleted a huge amount of projects I’ll never get to, I found this:

Getting things done often has more to do with removing barriers than actually accomplishing a task on your list. Whether you have too much email, too many creative blocks, or a myriad of distractions, it’s time to metaphorically (and sometimes literally) press the delete key and make your work surmountable.

Delete Your Way to Productivity – Lifehacker

It’s possible I also missed this because my mind tuned it out over that wincing misuse of the word myriad. (You can’t believe how many times people get thait word wrong. I must’ve read myriad articles where it was cock-eyed.)

But otherwise, that article is a good read. It makes a fine start with discussing how one can and perhaps should delete emails. Then it extends that into deleting distractions and finally deleting whatever blocks your productivity and your creativity.