Author: William Gallagher

This is why you are all the time tired

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You’re getting up at 5am, you’re stopping around 6pm. Also, you’re stupid. Nah, it can’t be any of that, except maybe the stupid. Time magazine has 14 better reasons, which include ones that I know for sure are what cause me problems:

You have trouble saying ‘no’

People-pleasing often comes at the expense of your own energy and happiness. To make matters worse, it can make you resentful and angry over time. So whether it’s your kid’s coach asking you to bake cookies for her soccer team or your boss seeing if you can work on a Saturday, you don’t have to say yes. Train yourself to say ‘no’ out loud, suggests Susan Albers, a licensed clinical psychologist with Cleveland Clinic and author of Eat.Q.: Unlock the Weight-Loss Power of Emotional Intelligence. “Try it alone in your car,” she says. “Hearing yourself say the word aloud makes it easier to say it when the next opportunity calls for it.”

14 Reasons You’re Tired All the Time – Time magazine (8 June 2014)

Click that link and immediately see a four-word summary of the whole piece. As I’m seeing so often now, it looks like a writer saved the story under a straightforward title and that’s what the URL was built from. The article itself has had its name changed but the underlying web address still refers to how /bad-habits-drain-energy/.

I love spotting that kind of thing. It’s like web detective work. CSI: WWW.

But anyway, that never-saying-no is just one of several salutary sections of advice in the full piece.

Updated iPhone Skype app rolling out

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It’s not supposed to be out until next week but an improved Skype for iPhone has launched early. I can’t see it yet in either my US or UK App Stores but some users in America are finding it waiting for them.

Whenever it lands, it will still be free and comes with definite speed improvements plus a debatable improvement to its visual design. It’s going to look more like Windows Phone.

Take a look for it now as this is the right link, it’s just not clear yet when it will have updated to the new version.

The iPad version of Skype is to get a similar redesign but there’s no word when yet.

Productivity can go wrong in the biggest companies

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When you or I fail to do something, it can be pretty bad but it is unlikely to have a visible impact on millions of people. You know where this is headed.

Apple never reveals its plans ahead of announcing them, but a fairly detailed report published prior to the conference from 9to5Mac laid out what it claimed was Apple’s map news.

Key changes included enhanced, “more reliable” data; more points of interest and better labels to make certain locations like airports, highways and parks easier to find; a cleaner maps interface; and public transit directions — that is, providing people with data about nearby buses, subways and trains. Further ahead, the report noted plans to integrate augmented reality features to give people images of what was nearby.

Why didn’t they appear? One tipster says it was a personnel issue: “Many developers left the company, no map improvements planned for iOS 8 release were finished in time. Mostly it was failure of project managers and engineering project managers, tasks were very badly planned, developers had to switch multiple times from project to project.”

It’s a take that is both contested and corroborated by our other source. “I would say that planning, project management and internal politics issues were a much more significant contributor to the failure to complete projects than developers leaving the group,” the source said.

Apple’s Maps are Still Lost – Techcrunch (9 June 2014)

I like Apple Maps: I find Google’s improved iPhone maps app a chore to work, though I too have been misdirected by Apple’s one.

Token football thing

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I’d like to say that I want to at least get in the spirit of the World Cup football excitement but frankly the only way I could possibly register that it’s happening is every single bleedin’ news programme keeps telling me so. Apparently the England team has arrived in wherever it is. Apparently this is news.

But while the existence of the World Cup has been bludgeoned into my head and before I manage to shake it out again with the very greatest of ease, I did come across this. Fantasy Football costs America billions of dollars in lost productivity.

I know what you’re thinking. They have fantasies about football?

In a recent study, it was found that fantasy football players are costing employers more than $1.1 billion in productivity every week, during the National Football League season. This statistic was brought out by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The attraction towards fantasy football is immense because of the lucrative payout that it offers. This is a billion dollar business, which involves 24.3 million players according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

However, with so much interest in fantasy football, how much of time is being devoted to real work? According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc about 22.3 million employed people spend half an hour of work time every week on managing their rosters and other fantasy football related activities.

The Impact of Fantasy Football Teams on Productivity – Careerealism

That article is dated 2013 and it sits in a website more replete with ads that I am generally comfortable directing you to. Maybe my infectious enthusiasm for football is enough to persuade you to go read the whole tedious piece, I don’t know.

They’ll hate you anyway

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Most people do not create things. At least, they don’t create anything that many other people will ever know about. You can cook for your family for twenty years, nobody outside the ungrateful brats will ever know. You can save your multinational corporation a billion pounds and they definitely won’t tell the world. But if you do something that goes out to people, if you do create something or write something or produce something, you will be hated.

You’ll also hopefully be liked or even loved but the guaranteed one is hated.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers examined predispositions towards topics that subjects knew nothing about.

Some critics are harsh by nature, not because of what they see in the creation they are criticizing.

They found a reliable trend in the responses of certain participants. Despite being asked about a myriad of unconnected topics—and asked again about new topics at a later date, to confirm they weren’t just in a bad mood—they found two abnormal groups who they classified as “likers” and “haters.” The “likers” tended to rate most things positively with zero external information, and the haters… well, you know where this is going.

Born Hatin’ – Why Some People Dislike Everything, Gregory Ciotti, 99U

I’d like Ciotti to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly but we are many years into that process by which the misuse of a word becomes the correct use just because nobody can be bothered to stop it. Nonetheless, the rest of the piece is particularly interesting about how all this applies to what we write online – and why we get some hatred back.

Lessons from being a director – part 3

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See the serious part 2 about delegation and also the power-mad-crazy part 1 about RULING THE WORLD.

How long do you think I can keep milking my directing career for productivity advice? I’m hoping I can carry on until the exciting day when I get my second-ever job as director.

But when you’re boring everyone about your power and artistic talent, you have to have more specific topics and now I have this one. Now I have realised this one: directing changes how you write.

Actually, it’s more than that: anything you do that is in some new way related to your writing or whatever your specific talent is, it changes.

I did rewrite the play on the fly to adjust for unforeseen problems, I did many, many times tweak to improve things based on the actors’ opinions. It’s common for writers to decry this but I would like to say right now that I am smug: I have always said that directors and actors should not make changes to a scene when it risks buggering up the rest of the script. Actors and directors are prone to concentrating on this scene right now, this scene you’re memorising, this scene you’re filming. And they should. They need to. Except when a brilliant suggestion that truly lifts that scene is an almighty bomb that ruins the entire point of the drama.

Granted, that’s a worst-case scenario.

I loved the whole process of directing but for me the whole process was in bringing that script to the stage. As short as it was, as specific as it was to this group, it had to be directed right and I had every syllable of that script in my head all the way through. Then I’d have multiple versions of the same scene in my head and I would be running them simultaneously.

None of which helps you, I just got carried away.

The action of doing something different in drama is the same, I think, as heading in to your home town from a new direction. There is one road into my home village in Birmingham that, for whatever reason, I rarely used as a kid. So now if I drive down there into the village, I come out into an entirely familiar world but it is entirely unfamiliar. The library is in the wrong spot. So is the school.

I reexamine them, I notice them again when I have become so used to them that I don’t.

So it was looking at this script from a new direction.

The short recommendation here is that you should go direct something. But the longer is that maybe you can find any way of looking at your story and your script that is different. Not better, not worse, just different. And see what it throws up at you, see what you notice.

Recommended: Holistic Productivity

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This is really two recommendations as this holistic productivity is just the latest edition of the very good Mac Power Users podcast. I’m not sure that this is a fair summary of the topic but the thing I took away first was that you can say productivity is how you make something happen or something be that wasn’t there before. And that this can include relaxation.

Relaxation can be a task.

It can be a job.

I need to get healthier and I need to avoid becoming as exhausted as I have lately. I no longer see those as luxuries to do later but I haven’t yet seen them as specific tasks I need to do. Work has always come first so what this idea lets me do is make relaxation be work.

Relaxation is bloody hard, so that helps.

Seriously, though, that’s just the Damascus moment I took away from this latest episode of Mac Power Users. It’s an episode chiefly interviewing Tim Stringer, a productivity kind of guy – and an OmniFocus fan so he must be alright – where he touches so briefly on this issue. And then they go into details and specifics of how he does certain jobs and what software or services he relies on.

Mac Power Users is usually a good listen and I’ve learnt a lot from it, I’ve spent a lot of money after hearing recommendations on it, but I’ve particularly enjoyed this week’s edition. Have a listen and read the show notes.

Streaming is greener than shiny discs

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So a DVD is this disc, right, and you have it, you have it in your hands and then you have it in your DVD player. Streaming video uses your TV or your computer, it uses your internet connection, it uses any number of other computers between you and Netflix or whoever you’re streaming from. And then that company has a lot of computers too. All on now, all working now, all needing support staff and a lot of electricity. Yet streaming is more ecological than shiny discs.

Americans can save enough power to run 200,000 households a year by streaming videos with efficient devices instead of driving to the store to buy or rent DVDs.

Researchers studied five different ways of viewing movies and, using a systematic method called life cycle analysis, estimated the energy used and carbon dioxide emissions produced for each. They determined that video streaming can be more energy efficient and emit less carbon dioxide than the use of DVDs, depending on the DVD viewing method.

DVD vs Video Streaming: Which Wastes More Energy? Northwestern University, University of California, Berkley (2 June 2014)

That’s the academic world’s version of a come-on title: it’s saying that watching films is wasting energy resources, regardless of which method you use. But beyond the guilt trip, there is analysis and you’ve already guessed why streaming wins:

“End-user devices are responsible for the majority of energy use with both video streaming and DVD viewing,” says Eric Masanet, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.

“Much of the energy savings estimated in shifting to video streaming comes from shifting end-user devices to more energy-efficient alternatives—in other words, away from old DVD players,” he says.

Read the full piece and learn where to read even more.

It’s not all sunshine when you use the Cloud

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We’re in that nebulous period where we keep hearing about the cloud and if we don’t understand what it is, we feel we should. Soon we won’t think about it at all and that ought to be a good thing. The less we have to piddle about making computers do what we want, the more we can spend time doing what we want and need to do.

Except.

Many years ago, I was in the office of a computer magazine when a power cut hit its network servers. Only the servers wherever they were, the magazine office and its PCs were unaffected. Or at least, they were unaffected by the power cut. They were supremely badly affected by the servers going down.

For this magazine ran all its applications from the server. Each PC had a tiny local hard disk and no applications at all. You started up your PC in the morning and it went on the network, got the applications, started working. It took forever. But during all this, you would go to the kitchen, get the tea and eventually start working. There were myriad advantages to the magazine in doing this but I suspect myriad really reduces to one: it made each individual PC cheaper.

Come the server powercut, then, everybody stopped working because everything stopped working. Except me. Yes, I was on a Mac, but I was reviewing some Apple notebook so I’d loaded the applications I needed. Even if the power had gone out in our office, I wouldn’t have noticed because I had battery power and I had all the software I needed to do my job.

On the plus side, I felt just a tiny bit smug and I also filed this away so that I could tell you about it twenty years later. This feels good.

On the minus side, everybody else got to go home.

We’re in a situation now where we are all relying on servers somewhere else. They’re now just servers somewhere else in the world and we call it all the cloud. The cloud is good. The cloud is very good.

Until it goes wrong and it does go wrong.

Adobe was in the spotlight recently when its Adobe CS cloud service, Creative Cloud, went offline for 48 hours, leaving users in the dark and preventing publication of the mobile edition of Britain’s Daily Mail. This was a disaster for the company and a much bigger disaster for thousands of Creative Cloud users trying to meet urgent deadlines — but in future failure in cloud services could damage the global economy.

Jonny Evans: Adobe CS and the dangerous cloud – Computer World via Macworld (5 June 2014)

Evans has some horror stories and a lot of statistic but he also has advice for us and for cloud service providers in his full piece. It boils down to this, though: rely on the cloud but don’t be dependent on it. There you go.