Author: William Gallagher

What’s your morning ritual? I have no Ikea

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Listen, would you take a look at this for me? And let me know if it is as crazy-sinister as it seems?

Ikea has been studying us. I’ve always known I’ve taken my life in my hands when I cavort through their mockup kitchens or ride on the carts in the storage bays. But this is when we’re at home.

The company has been studying the morning habits of people in various places and there is an idea here that we can see whether, for instance, New Yorkers are more productive than Parisians. I am curious.

But I need you to tell me they don’t name names.

Ikea’s analysis of worldwide morning habits (via The Verge)

New Toy Syndrome

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I truly thought this was just me. If I’ve found, say, an app that works for me and I think is good, I maybe over-enjoy using it. Right now I’m havering over my forthcoming review of OmniFocus 2 for Mac because I’m wondering how much of what I like is down to it just being an old feature done in a new way.

Whether it is that or not, I am greatly enjoying using that software and it has changed how I do my work. So I’m fine with that, I’m more than fine with it – except that there is good reason to suspect it will change. It will tail off.

Clive Thompson writing in Medium:

Psychologists have noticed the novelty effect for decades. Back in the 1930s, the Hawthorne Works factory decided to change the lighting for its workers to see which would improve productivity: Higher levels? Lower levels? It turned out that it didn’t matter which way they went — any change in the workplace produced a temporary boost in productivity. Scientists call this the “Hawthorne Effect”, and while the historical record of Hawthorne is still being scrutinized, the novelty effect it epitomizes is seen all over science. Indeed, many scholars suspect novelty effects are behind some “positive” results in social-science experiments. A bunch of researchers will say Hey, let’s experiment with giving elementary-school kids individual laptops! and lo: The children do better! Except the improvement might be not because of the tool itself, but merely because the kids’ world becomes different and interesting, temporarily.

The Novelty Effect – Clive Thompson, Medium (6 June 2014)

I find that last part about kids supremely depressing. But where I might also be unhappy at the thought my new shiny OmniFocus 2 for Mac may lose its iridescence soon, I’m okay with it.

Because OmniFocus 2 for iPad is coming.

Hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting the novelty article. And hat tip to The Omni Group, because.

Lessons from being a director – Part 2

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Yesterday I shared perhaps the most important lesson I have learned in my long, long, day-long career as a director.

There is another. Who’d have thought there could be two life lessons from directing?

The lesson is to delegate. I am used to doing everything myself and I’ve often argued that this is good. Whenever you can take on a task yourself, it is great because you know you’ll do it. Waiting for other people so very often means it doesn’t happen.

So I’m not a control freak in that I need things be done my way, I’m a productivity freak in that I need things to be done.

Yesterday’s play needed me to work with the cast but it was in a writing session and there were a lot of people there. Normally I’d fuss over everything, I’d think myself smart for finding a way to incorporate everyone. But there was no time.

I have an assistant when I’m leading these writing groups and yesterday it was poet and writer and journalist Justina Hart. I told her she had an hour and I needed this, this and this. Never gave her another thought, I got right on with the next crisis.

And at the end of the hour I had this, this and this from her and the group. I’ve no idea how she got there but the result wasn’t just what I would’ve done, what I had wanted, it was better. Far and away better.

Let go, William. Tell good people what you want and then get out of their way.

Six Subtle Things Highly Productive People Do Every Day

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I should do me some of these.

Eric Barker, writing in Business Insider, heads the list with this unexpected advice:

If you start the day calm it’s easy to get the right things done and focus.

He's got much more to say about why that works and also what specific steps you can take to make it happen, to make it happen every day. Plus another five detailed things that I know I've done some times. And must do more.

Read the whole piece on Business Insider – though sorry for the irritating ad page you have to tap through first.

Lessons from being a director

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Seriously, listen to me here, I have such a long history of directing. I directed my first play this morning.

It was a ten-minute short written by myself and the Burton Young Writers' Group which we've worked on in a few of the monthly sessions I've led with them this year. Writing West Midlands, which runs the groups, funded the hiring of a real cast to perform the kids' work and it went tremendously.

But the other day, someone asked me if I were directing it and I just said yes.

I had to, there was nobody else who was going to do it, it was just obvious that it would be me as the group's leader. But as soon as I'd said 'yes' aloud, the voice in my head continued with the word 'oh'.

I'd been thinking of the project as a writing one and I suppose a little bit as a producing one. I've been becoming very irritating about producing lately: there's a way to argue that I produced six events over the last six weeks and yeah, yeah, enough already, shut up William. My wife Angela Gallagher has been an event producer and it thrilled me to be doing the same thing, to be able to really learn from her. It's one thing asking her every detail of what she's doing when she's doing it, it's another to be needing to put that into practice for myself.

But I didn't think about directing.

Until this week when I was one of the people casting.

So I recommend becoming a director by default and preferably at speed and even more preferably while also writing and producing. Keeps your mind off it.

And then I now also further recommend directing with as little time to spare as you can.

I had an hour today. But I knew exactly what I wanted. And this is the productivity lesson I taught myself:

If you know what you want, people will do it

If they're good, they'll also question it and improve it and grow it with you, but they are bringing their talent to what you want so just bleedin' get on with deciding it and telling them.

We changed a lot, not least because one actor had a ferociously bad day trying to get to us in time and didn't manage it. We changed oodles.

But I have never been so clear about what I wanted a production to be, not even when I've been writing scripts. And to see it work, to see talented actors do what you want and take it further, I tell you, I'm hooked.

Maybe you have to be a writer and possibly an English writer to really get this but I am used to adapting to what everyone, anyone else wants and to do it this way around felt like just getting on with it. I like getting on with things.

And I loved directing this play. Ten minutes? Young Writers' Group? Sold: it was a career highlight. Especially seeing the faces of the kids as their work was performed. I feel priviliged and happy and that I've learnt a lesson or three.

Go direct something, would you?

Google minus

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ZDNet's latest opinion piece about Google and specifically Google+ has a title that could be called ambiguous. It's hard to know if the writer Violet Blue is really for or against the company and the service. Because the headline is:

Thanks for nothing, Jerkface

It's come up now because of the two key people behind Google+, one of them has left the company abruptly and the other is now saying it was a mistake to get involved with it.

Now, I deeply dislike having to have a Google ID. It royally pissed me off that I used to have a pristine gmail address that nobody knew about – that sounds bizarre but it was a thing of beauty. At the end of every day or the end of every session writing something, I would email it to that address. More, I would also email it from that address. Any email received that wasn't sent to that address and also from that same address was immediately and automatically deleted. Consequently I had good five year run of every draft of everything, all right there and unsullied by spam.

I can't have that now.

People started getting really annoyed at me for ignoring their Google+ invitations. I never saw them: how could I? Instantly deleted, that was the entire point. And since I never gave that address out to anyone, how could they possibly know how to email me there? I still don't know when it happened that my address got out but I reckon it was when Google started joining services up.

Whatever the reason and whenever it happened, I can no longer use that gmail address for my archive. I've tried creating a new one but it is a true bugger trying to switch between them. Recently I did a magazine piece that required me to take screengrabs of Google Hangouts and I created a pile of addresses and IDs so that I could quickly generate some conversation threads, take the shot and get outta there. To this day, six weeks on, Google keeps logging me back in as one of my fictional IDs. I have specifically logged in as my original, own, real Google ID but, nope, I click to go to somewhere else and I am there as my fictional self.

But.

As intensely irritating as I find the whole Google login stuff to be, I am conscious that I don't mind all the Apple login stuff. So I figured that it was just me. Because I use Apple Mail and various other Apple-y things, it is convenient to use an Apple ID and I don't have to think about it much. I presumed that if I were to be using Gmail as my main email and I was into lots of Google services, I'd be fine about that one instead.

Apparently not.

Many people now use Google+ without even knowing it, through its non-consensual cross-posting on YouTube, Android photo integration, the takeover of Google Talk, and the infinite ways in which people every day make Google+ profiles without realizing it. Want to make a comment on a Google product (even if you don't know it's a Google product)? Google makes you a Google+ profile.

Thanks for nothing, jerkface – Violet Blue, ZDNet

Blue pulls together tales I'd half-heard of how Google's actions have caused real problems for people. Not just my boo-hoo archive problem (I've switched to saving everything in Evernote, by the way, except that I don't always bother, I just let it stay there in iCloud) but actual, serious, real-world problems:

For LGBT, political dissidents, activists and at-risk people everywhere, Google's little Google+ project became a loaded gun pointed right at anyone whose privacy is what keeps them alive.

Users found out in January 2014 when Google+ force-integrated chat and SMS into “hangouts” in the Android 4.4 “KitKat” update.

At-risk users were disproportionately affected, most especially transgender people who needed to keep their identities separate for personal safety and employment reasons.

One woman was outed to a co-worker when she texted him, and risked losing her employment.

Allegedly, Google shrugged at that. Find out exactly how and what more is riling Blue in the full ZDNet piece.

The short history and long reach of iOS

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If I were going to contort this into a piece of advice about being productive, I'd be saying something about how small moves and tiny steps really add up. I think I'd also being saying that sometimes you need to say bollocks to everyone else and keep going. To know that it is better to take some criticism lumps now and really earn the praise later rather than try to please everybody each step of the way.

All that is true. I've just surprised myself. I was honestly thinking it was a contortion saying all that, that it was plainly a justification for just showing you something I enjoyed reading. But having written it down, I realise I mean it.

Still, I did just enjoy reading it. The Verge wrote about the development of iOS, the operating system that has underpinned every iPhone I've ever had:

In what is widely regarded as his greatest presentation ever, Apple's Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world on January 9th, 2007. In the five-plus years since then, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch have literally redefined the entire world of mobile computing. That world is moving so quickly that iOS is already amongst the older mobile operating systems in active development today. That certainly doesn't mean it's underpowered or underfeatured — quite the contrary. Through what can only be described as relentless and consistent improvement over the years, Apple has made iOS one of the most feature-rich and well-supported platforms on the market.

iOS 7, the system currently powering Apple's mobile devices, offers an easy-to-understand smartphone operating system to new users, a powerful platform for app developers, and a relatively un-fragmented experience across multiple devices. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about iOS is how similar the OS as it exists today is to the OS as it existed 2007, yet the number and breadth of features that Apple has baked in since then is mind boggling. Far from suffering from the “feature creep” that typically bogs down operating systems over time, iOS has managed to stay relatively snappy and is more internally consistent than anything else available today. And iOS 8 — launching on devices this fall — looks to evolve the story even further.

How did we get from a platform that began without third-party apps, multitasking, or even copy / paste support to where we are today? Read on to see exactly how Apple evolved its mobile platform over the years, in our history of iOS.

A Visual History of iOS – The Verge

Grab this now – PopClip is on sale until Sunday

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When you tap on a word or a line in iOS to select it, up pops a series of options right there. Copy, Paste, all that. PopClip gives you that on the Mac and I have regularly heard how great it is, I’ve just not got around to trying it. PopClip is on sale, I tried it, I can’t believe I haven’t become addicted to it before.

It is a very fast way to copy some text – it’s very much like the mini-toolbar in Word – but once you’re used to that, you can add more options. I’ve now had PopClip for around eighty seconds and I’ve already added options to send the selected text to Evernote or as a new task to OmniFocus.

So I can write ‘Add PopClip to your office iMac’, then select that text in quotes and send it to OmniFocus.

That looks like this:

Screen Shot 2014-06-06 at 20.46.14

Consider that a live example: I really wrote that, I really selected it, PopClip really gave me those options and I have really chosen that icon at the end. That text is now in OmniFocus waiting for the next time I’m back at my office Mac instead of here on my MacBook.

PopClip usually costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US. I now know it is supremely worth it. But if you buy it on the Mac App Store between now and some time on this coming Sunday, you’ll get it for 69p UK or 99c US. It’s being done as part of a deal on the AppyFriday.com site but just go right to the App Store: go right now.