It is a Kickstarter campaign but it’s already achieved it’s funding, this is happening.
It’s called Electric Objects. Go check out the Kickstarter page. At this stage, you’re not pledging, you’re buying at a pre-sale price. And then admittedly waiting a bit.
Today’s tricks for getting going worked. I am sure nobody could’ve told that I was asleep but then, I was so tired, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them telling.
Zonked again now, but.
No tricks for the rest of the day, just relaxing and a tea. Sold.
This should not be a tough day: I’m off to be a judge at a Royal Television Society event, I’ve been looking forward to this. But I did not sleep last night and today is proving very tough. So the idea of performing – of just being up and alert and responsive and hopefully clever and decisive – that’s tough.
As I write this to you, I have ten minutes left before I must leave.
So about twenty minutes ago, I was as far from ready as you can be. I’d like to offer you a recipe for how to get up and go but that presupposes what I’ve done will work. Right now, I’m more confident than I was, so I’m going with this.
Job 1. Shower. Again. When I’m this tired, I think the water in my early morning shower just knew to leave me well alone. It did its job, it did the cleaning, but this second shower is the freshening spin cycle.
Job 2. Shave. Probably not for everyone, this, but it works for me. Partly because you of course feel better for looking a smidgeon better, but also I have to really concentrate. My skin is so sensitive that even sensitive-skin razor blades cut me. I was lucky today but I had a standby shirt just in case.
Job 3. Listen to something. I chose to listen to a design podcast called 99% Invisible. But whatever it was, making it something I could listen to rather than hear – so speech radio instead of music, for instance – got my head working.
Job 4. Load the dishwasher. I have no idea why this helps but knowing I won’t have to come back to that later made me feel more in control of the day.
Job 5. Caffeine and terrible things. I’m sitting here with a can of Pepsi Max – I would’ve preferred tea at this time in the morning but don’t have long enough to drink it – and two chocolate mini-rolls. I have no need for any of this. But the caffeine is helping and the chocolate isn’t hurting.
Job 6. Do something in the seconds you have left. Such as write to you with a list of six jobs to get yourself going.
If it all fails, I’ll tell you. But right now I feel ready in every sense. And thirty minutes ago I was a lump.
Wish me luck, though, eh?
Barely slept last night but was so tired I couldn’t focus. There’s an email I want to reply to but I’ve had to leave it because its words just were not going in to my head. Now that there is daylight and I’m full of tea, I find this which might help either of us if this happens again:
Regardless, those hours of wakefulness at night can be spent in panic or paralysis, or you can do something productive about them.
“What is insomnia, but the gift of more time?” says Michael Perlis, associate professor of psychology and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Perlis is not advocating for purposely losing sleep, but if faced with short-term insomnia, he says, it’s best to treat the time productively rather than tossing for hours in bed. Think of insomnia as an opportunity to get stuff done.
How to Turn Your Insomnia into a Productivity Tool – Jane Porter, Fast Company (21 January 2014)
Porter’s full advice boils down to not spending too long trying to get sleep, grab a pen and do some writing work instead. She has a point of course but right now I dread to think what peculiar words would’ve come.
This is more of a curio, I think: it’s the top 5 productivity iOS apps from someone who clearly prefers Android. He has that Android fiddle-with-new-toy-itus where the ability to root your phone is more interesting than getting any work done.
And he says iOS is less interesting because you’ve heard of all the best productivity apps for iOS already. O-kay.
Herewith, then, five you haven’t heard of. I think that knocks the word ‘top’ off the description but I only disagree with one – I’d recommend 1Password over LastPass, though doubtlessly for the same reason he does, it’s the one I use myself – and there’s only one I have never heard of. Find out what in the world 30/30 does here:
If you ask me, this is a set of apps for fiddling with your phone instead of actually getting some work done, but I am an iPhone user, so.
From the site LifeHack – note, that’s not Lifehacker – comes a series of five steps for learning something and of them all, number 1 is best. Number 1 applies in so many places:
Focus on number of repetitions, not on the amount of time we practice.
When we say that we “studied for five hours straight,” we are often deceiving ourselves. How much of that five hours was spent in focused attention? How much time did we spend on distractions, like checking our email, or Facebook or Twitter? The key is not the length of time we spend when learning something. The key is the amount of learning repetitions that we engage in. Repetition is one of the most powerful levers we have because it wires our brain. The power of repetition is well known by top performers, athletes, musicians, and the military. Time spent is not nearly as important as the number of reps.
So here is the first step: get rid of the watch. Instead, focus your attention on completing repetitions. Instead of saying, “I’ll study my notes for two hours,” say, “I’ll read my notes through, line by line, three times from start to finish.” This causes you to focus your attention on results. It also eliminates the “illusion of effectiveness” because you can’t fool yourself. Either you completed the task, or you didn’t.
5 Hacks to Speed Up Your Learning – Ryan Clements, LifeHack (undated)
Read the rest. I’m still exploring the LifeHack site; haven’t decided what I think yet.
Previously, Microsoft updated Skype for iOS and took away voice messages. That old thing. Who’d use that? And wouldn’t be willing to trade in their iPhone for an Android device in order to listen to a voicemail message? See Microsoft Taketh Away.
You know it wasn’t a plan to rob iPhone users of a core feature but the way it was handled, it sounded as if it was and anyway, the result is that we were robbed of a core feature. And because of Apple’s usually handy automatic app updating, we got this improvement without noticing.
It’s now fixed. But Skype/Microsoft really doesn’t like to admit to a mistake however obvious. So the return of voicemail messages is not a bug fix and they obviously won’t apologise for the problem. Instead, it’s a new feature you should be grateful they’ve added in. I was grateful before, it is a good feature, but we had it and this is like ten fishing for compliments after screwing us around.
From the official blog:
We have been reading and listening to your feedback ever since we launched the new remastered Skype for iPhone and have been hard at work incorporating your suggestions. With Skype 5.1 for iPhone we included the ability to delete a conversation, edit a message and added a “Skype”-only contact filter, to name a few. Today, Skype 5.2 for iPhone adds more of the features you want most:
Voice message support: When you receive a new voice message from someone, it will show up in the conversation. To listen, just press play.
This happens. Someone sends you a giant email full of personal detail, personal conversation between the pair of you, and oh, in the middle, there’s a job they need doing. Actually, it’s a job where you need to ask someone something for them.
Highlight that bit. Just that bit. Only that sentence. Now hit Forward.
Practically whatever email system you use, you will now have in front of you a brand new email message with that highlighted text and nothing else.
You didn’t have to copy and paste, your email just did it for you. Address the email, send it off, done.
If that one email has several tasks for many people, do this to each one. Highlight, forward, send. Highlight, forward, send.
If it’s a task for you and your To Do app can handle this, you could do exactly the same thing but email the task into your app. OmniFocus users get a secret email address for precisely this job. And I use the bejaysis out of it. Highlight, forward a task to OmniFocus, done.
It’s a scanner, I’m surely going to be telling you that it’s X fast and Y quiet and does many, many Zs. But actually I want to tell you that it is therapeutic.
Maybe that’s a little bit because we’ve all slogged through using naff scanners before, the kind built into naffer printers and my Doxie is flawless. But it is also genuinely relaxing and even calming as you sit here watching the telly and gently feeding in A4 pages as you go.
There are much faster and there are more convenient scanners – I’ve still got my eye on the Fujitsu ScanSnap range – but just now Angela needed something scanned urgently and I barely blinked before sending it back to her as a multi-page PDF.
Mine is specifically the Doxie One which is currently £113.05 from Amazon UK or $127.27 from Amazon US. But there are others.
Take a look at it in action too. This isn’t my video, I don’t have a tidy enough desk to let you see anything here, but: