Author: William Gallagher

That was May 2014

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Previously… I used to report to someone what I’d done in the month, more to make me feel accountable than to actually be accountable, now I carry on with you. The list is sanitised because so much is confidential until things are finished, but.

Also, for the first month in over a year, I failed to make notes as I went along. That rather surprises me, given how much I have felt the benefit of doing this. But it also means that this time I’ve had to rely on checking my calendar and To Do list. Doubtlessly I’ve left things out, which can’t mean much to you but makes me crinkle up my mouth at me.

But now read on for May 2014.

Writing: approximately 61,400 words
The Blank Screen news blog: 157 entries totalling approximately 46,000 words
Self Distract blog: 5 entries totalling approximate 5,400 words
Completed script “Murder at Burton Library”
Approximately 4,000 words of novel
Approximately 6,000 words of non-fiction book

Events:
Produced five events:
Two young writers’ days
One productivity workshop for the Federation of Entertainment Unions
One Steven Knight interview evening for the Screenwriters’ Forum
One theatre event at the Birmingham Rep

Pitches/calls:
Only made 21 calls but was called about two projects and the pitches for both were successful

Meetings:
Attended Royal Television Society committee meeting
Attended Writers’ Guild committee meeting as secretary
Production meeting in a train station bar
An organisation I admire offered to support a new series of books I’m writing/producing
Plus I spent two rather idyllic days away working on a new drama project – and one of my colleagues wrote a poem about it and me. I am blinking as I say that to you. Just… just… wild.

Press:
Doctor Who: Scavenger reviewed in many fan sites including Artron Reviews

One more thing. This is the 500th post on The Blank Screen news site. I’m proud of that: 500 since the end of November last year. Just wanted to tell you and to take a moment to notice it myself.

Now iTunes Radio is rubbish

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I like it. I was listening to iTunes Radio for some hours this morning. Did get sick of the ads again, but I like the music and I’m not sure I’m alone in this. But allegedly, reportedly, I am because rivals Pandora and Spotify are far better – and because Apple was too arrogant to see this.

“Pandora is an awesome radio that blows iTunes Radio out of the water. Seriously, iTunes Radio sucks and it sucks because of Apple’s arrogance,” one former, mid-level [Apple] employee said. “I was floored by the decision-making skills by management over and over again.”

Apple employees confirmed that management actively ignored iTunes’ streaming competitors, with some managers refusing to open or use Spotify. One source said that as recently “as last year,” some members of management didn’t even know that Spotify was an on-demand streaming service, assuming it was just a radio service.

“The management in particular were pretty much tone-deaf in what Spotify was and that’s why they’re panicking now,” the source said. “They didn’t understand how Spotify worked, which is why they thought iTunes Radio would be a Spotify killer.”

“Arrogant” Apple Managers are the Reason Apple Needs Beats – Aylin Zafar, Buzzfeed (5 June 2014)

I don’t know. It has the ring of truth yet the piece as a whole is so down on iTunes Radio that I doubt the details. Still, it’s an interesting read and if right, may mean that Apple’s new purchase of Beats will lead to something better.

It’s an ugly headline that has Apple in it twice but otherwise you believe those quotes, don’t you?

Produce your phone calls to make them easier and quicker

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18th Street Phone-1I’ve only got three phone calls I have to make today but I started at 11am and as I write this, it’s 11:13 and I am finished.

As you can expect and fair guarantee from any round of phone calls, they aren’t all finished and done with: right now I’m waiting for a call back from two people with more information and an email from the third. But the calls are all made and these issues are all underway and the response rate would be no different if I’d spent the day fretting over them.

And I do fret. Given that I’m a journalist and it is routine to phone people up, I find it really hard calling for myself. So I do several things to make it better. To make me do it, really.

There’s quite a bit about this in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) but since writing that I’ve been focusing on one particular piece of advice I learnt for it. I’ve made making calls be my thing, be the work I have to get better at. And I’ve done it by making days like this. All of which boil down to this:

Produce the calls.

You don’t go into any meeting and you don’t ever pitch without knowing who you’re talking to and what it’s about. So I take some time during the morning to build up a list in Evernote of who I am calling. I run my life through the To Do software OmniFocus and it’s very easy to use that to get a list of calls to make: I just tap or click on a button marked Phone and it shows me every call I have to make in every project, ever. But if I then start writing that out in Evernote, I can build up this:

Who I’m calling at what company

What their phone number is

The specific aim of the call and the most recent conversation or correspondence we’ve had about it

All obvious stuff but each line does something in particular. The first one, who I’m calling where, that acts as much as a heading as it does a To Do. Then the bit about their number is crucial – I know that sounds obvious, I know you’re thinking that without it I won’t have much luck calling them but it’s more than that. The point is having the number right there. See the name, ring the number, go. That’s the plan.

Then the specific aim is equally important to both sides. Usually there’s just one thing you can get done in a call so I pick that and we’re off. Knowing it, knowing it precisely and having written it down focuses me on it so that I am right on the topic and they get a quicker call out of me.  And similarly, how we last left something means I sound like I am on top of things, I am fully aware of what we’re doing and also that I’m moving this stuff on, I’m not hanging about, I’m not kidding. Without being rude or abrasive, you know I am working and this is business and as much as I may like nattering with you, today we’re doing this thing.

So I’ve spent the morning building up that Evernote note in between other jobs, then it comes to 11am and I start. See the first name, see the number, I’m dialling it before I can hesitate and it’s ringing while I’m fixing the rest of the information in my head. Ring, speak, done, next. See the second name, see the second number, I’m dialling.

I do also use Evernote to make notes about the calls and that’s not brilliant yet. What I find is that I will build up a lot of information under a call but then the next time I have to call them, that information is back in the previous day’s call list. I need to get more organised about copying the information out and into a single place per person or per project or per something. Not sure what yet.

But it’s surprising how much sheer data you can write up about a call. I record just whether I got them or voicemail, I make a note that I said I’d call back and perhaps when if I said a particular time. Also any numbers they need to tell me like fees or contracts or purchase orders. The list goes on and on.

One extra is that I also record the time of the call. I do that in Evernote but using a TextExpander snippet. As the phone rings and as I’m reading, I will type the words “Called at…” and then the TextExpander snippet ;ttime – a semi-colon and the word ‘ttime’ which pops in the current time. If it’s a long call or I’m routing through a hundred service desks who keep me waiting, I’ll log the time along the way because why not?

Then the last thing I do after all the calls is I make a note of them in a separate Calls Made list in Evernote. This has no function at all except to make me want to make more calls. It’s showing me that I’ve made 162 phone calls so far this year and, hand on heart, I wish I hadn’t looked because I thought it would be more impressive than that. Just 162 in five months? I promise to do better.

Starting now. I’ll just add today’s 3 to the list and I’m on 165. That’s a bit better.

How Chocolate Might Save the Planet

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Saving the planet is good, obviously. But mmm… chocolate…

Okay, the logic in this piece from America’s National Public Radio is just that people prefer chocolate to sex and that if there are enough Mars bars in the world, we will therefore have fewer babies and the population won’t continue to destroy the planet with its demands for resources. Fine. Back to the chocolate – and how it works, how it actually works on us.

Plus statistics about that sex thing.

When you unwrap it, break off a piece and stick it in your mouth, it doesn’t remind you of the pyramids, a suspension bridge or a skyscraper; but chocolate, says materials scientist Mark Miodownik, “is one of our greatest engineering creations.”

How Chocolate Might Save the Planet – Robert Krulwhich, NPR

Go grab a Snickers and read the full piece.

You’re delusional – but stay that way

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We have no clue. I’m always surprised when someone remembers me, I’m regularly misjudging how meetings went, I haven’t the faintest idea about myself or what in the world I do. But apparently neither does anyone else – or at least, not apart from a very specific few – and apparently it’s also a good thing. It is good and even essential to be completely deluded:

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

You are Now Less Dumb – David McRaney (UK edition, US edition)

The quote is from McRaney’s book but I read it in a Brainpickings.org article about this topic which also pulls in advice from Helen Keller and comments from Hunter S Thompson/

Neither of whom are remotely as good a writer as what I am, like. Hmm. Not sure this is working.

Take a day off

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I’ve been trying to do this all week and especially after Tuesday night. I went to a book event by Pigeon Park Press and had a good time, enjoyed them, bought a book, met friends, it was great. Until I saw a photo of the event posted on Facebook and I looked like a ghost. I am secretly certain I fell asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to me.

So I took Wednesday off.

Completely.

Only worked from 6:30am to 4pm, off to a thing, then back working at about 7pm.

Today I am taking today off. It is Thursday. I am on holiday.

I know this is nice for me and if you’re reading this in your one break during a ferociously busy day, I’m no longer your friend.

But that’s the thing with all this productivity: sometimes you have no choice but to keep going, as when you’re in that ferocious day. Other times you feel you have to keep going because you need the money: a freelance life has its benefits and I’m having the creative time of my life but financially stable, it ain’t. Then – this may be just me, I realise that – you feel you have to keep going because you write books about productivity and you run workshops and you talk about it all the time.

Look at that photograph. I’m the guy with his hand on his face. I swear to god I was probably holding my head up vertical. Which, if nothing else, is extraordinarily rude to the Pigeon Park people.

pigeonI can see now that the woman to my left (your right in the photo) is author Katharine D’Souza. If you see her, please apologise for me.

I’m off for a day out and I hope that you’ll be able to join me some day soon in spirit if not right now today in actuality.

 

Who needs Siri when you’ve a $10,000 phone and a real assistant?

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I would totally buy one of these. If I had $10,000 and no sense, if I had a need for an assistant more accurate than Siri, and if this new Vertu Signature Touch phone ran iOS. As it is, I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t and it doesn’t.

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(Image from Vertu and via Wired.com)

Actually, I’m not even sure I like the look of it. For that cost – and please note that $10,000 is the starting price for the base model, you can spend up to $21,900 – I’d want to like looking at this plastic and metal embodiment of a bank loan.

Wait, I’m feeling the cost of this but only intellectually. Let me punch myself in the stomach with the Sterling prices. The base model is £5,972.41. The top one is £13,079.58.

Actually, that sounds reasonable. I’ll take two. Have you got them in blue?

Oh, wait, there is a tiny extra. Just £1,791.72 or $3,000 per year extra:

The Signature Touch’s Concierge service is what sets it apart from other phones. It’s free for the first year, then jumps to around $3,000 a year. Concierge makes the phone more like an American Express Black Card or a diplomatic passport. It works like this: You request (legal and somewhat reasonable) things via the Concierge app, and then a real, live person makes them happen. You basically have a personal assistant on call at all times. A little button on the side of the phone fires up the Concierge app directly. The assistant who helped me was Celine. She was great.

To commence my Vertu experience, the company offered to book me a dinner reservation at the members-only CORE:Club to show how the Concierge could gain access to exclusive places. I declined that offer, as I wanted to test the Concierge using my own requests.

Instead, I checked OpenTable at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday and found popular restaurants fully booked that day and on the weekend. There was nothing available for dinner at ABC Kitchen in a few hours or brunch at Red Rooster the next morning. I opened the Concierge app and asked for reservations at 7:30pm that night and noon the next day, knowing it would be tricky. No problem, reservations booked. Thanks Celine! On another Saturday night, I was a head-nod away from getting a group of five on the VIP list at a fancy club called Avenue. If we’d been willing to pay $200 apiece for a table and bottle service—and had any intention of actually going—we’d have been in. Coincidentally, $200 is the price of a normal phone.

What It’s Like to Use a $10k Phone with a Real-Life Personal Assistant – Tim Moynihan, Wired (5 June 2014)

Read the full article: Moynihan is very conscious of the cost yet also able to step away from that and see the benefits and the problems of the phone and service.

Technology brought to heel

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Two things I can’t look at. Ballet dancers and women teetering in high heels. I get it, I get it especially with ballet and the remarkable, unearthly beauty of dance – but have you looked at their toes? Standing on the tip of your toes. Walking on them. I feel queasy. And there is nothing that can be done to help them.

Whereas seemingly there may be something that can be done to stop high heels breaking ankles and generally keeping the medical industry in pocket. It is a little bit like the kind of solution you’d expect to see in Thunderbirds or concocted by Professor Branestawm but it’s from Silvia Fado Moreno, a graduate of the London College of Fashion, so it must be good.

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That image, and more, are on Gizmodo’s site where writer Jordan Kushins says:

Check out the hydraulics on these babies! Moreno’s creations aren’t exactly subtle—at all—but they do offer an interesting take on the idea that the mechanics of our bodies are complex, and hey: That humanoid machinery deserves footwear that’s going to really and truly support it.

I Would Totally Wear High Heels Equipped with Hydraulic Springs – Kushins, Gizmodo (2 June 2014)

I came across this via Digg and an article in something called The Daily Dot which I think is the clearer, sharper read.

John Oliver gets trolls working for a good purpose

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At stake: the fact that you or I can create a website and people find it as easily and quickly as anything by gigantic billionaire-funded multinational corporation. The internet has always been a level playing field and that has been how it grew, it’s been how it’s great. But it genuinely is at stake.

Watch John Oliver’s piece about it on Last Week Tonight for exactly how and why. And then when you’ve heard him encouraging internet trolls to put their evil power to good, bask in the news that it worked.