Author: William Gallagher

Marco Polo found – on iPhone

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Maybe you have to be a Doctor Who fan to be alert to any news with the words “Marco Polo” and “found” but that's how I just discovered a new app that I can't make my mind up about.

Get this new app, run it on your iPhone and the next time you lose your phone around the house, just shout the word “Marco”. Your iPhone will reply at top volume: “Polo!”

I have no idea why the maker chose those words. You can change the “Marco” bit but you won't because there's no changing the Polo response.

Take a look at it on the App Store and be ready to spend your 69p UK, 99c US.

A Whole New Way to Underachieve

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Writer Ken Armstrong's weekly blog this time covers the technological way to feel like you're not doing enough. Or anything. He has a Sky+ box and:

…now, alas, my beloved box seemed to have turned on me. It has become, for me at least, a whole new way to underachieve. It’s over there now, taunting me. I can feel its red eye upon me.

A Whole New Way to Underachieve – Ken Armstrong (May 2014)

Just read it. And the go read the Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff every week. Like I do.

Fascinating New York Times self-assessment

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Get this while you can. The New York Times has done a fairly enormous study of its successes and failures in digital and at keeping print subscribers – and the whole report is online. I expected a PDF and instead it's a series of what looks like photocopy JPEGs and that makes me wonder how, shall we say, endorsed this online publishing is. Grab it now.

The Times is interesting because it has been so big and it has done so much and it has made a success of its paywall. Yet it is still struggling as all newspapers are struggling and this report reveals just how much. Most tellingly, just from the introduction, is the information that New York Times articles get read more on other sites or services such as Flipboard than on NYT's own. And that readership of the paper on smartphones has taken a little fall too.

But then the report is not without its unintentional moments of interest too:

The anxiety that filled the newsroom only a few years ago has mostly dissipated. The success of the paywall has provided financial stability as we become more digitally-focused. The sale of other properties like The Boston Globe has allowed the leadership to focus squarely on The New York Times. Both Mark Thompson and Jill Abramson have established themselves as willing and eager to push the company in new, sometimes uncomfortable directions.

Jill Abramson was forced out of her role as Editor this week.

Change your identity and feel better

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I have a bad opinion of myself. You can't tell because I write books, I do a lot of talks, I run this news website: plainly I have an ego. But you can probably guess. I'm a writer, the collective noun for us is neuroses. Sometimes this opinion of me gets in my way and I wrote recently about how criticising oneself in the third person is surprisingly more successful than doing it the usual “I bollocksed-up there” way. (I liked that post a lot: Must Do Better.) Now there's more.

Now there's the idea that you just change yourself to fix this bad opinion:

Let’s say you want to become the type of person who never misses a workout. (If you believed that about yourself, how much easier would it be to get in shape?) Every time you choose to do a workout — even if it’s only 5 minutes — you’re casting a vote for this new identity in your mind. Every action is a vote for the type of person you want to become.

How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to Your Goals for Good – James Clear

It's not the greatest of reads – Lifehacker's coverage of it is better – but try the full post.

IFTTT adds an email digest channel

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If you read that heading and knew what IFTTT stands for, you've just understood the entire story. Move along. Nothing more to see here. (But check out IFTTT's own announcement for the details.)

I do know that it stands for If This Then That and I do use the service but at such a low level that I forget it's there. If I mark somebody's tweet as a favourite, for instance, I know that If This Then That has been set up to automatically save that tweet to an Evernote note of mine. But I can't remember how I did that, I don't remember when I set it up, and I hardly remember that it's there: I just tap that Favourite button and forget about it.

So I'm not the best guy to tell you about any new IFTTT channel – any new thing you can control via IFTTT – and I don't usually try. But this one looks good:

“We’re thrilled to introduce a powerful Channel that everyone can use — no activation necessary. The new Email Digest Channel collects the content you care about and delivers it on a daily or weekly basis.

IFTTT Blog

The examples include getting the service to email you the weather report every day. Or if there's a new free app on the App Store, email you about that. (Somebody's really done that. Are they mad?) Take a look at the short IFTTT announcement and then follow its links to what people are already doing with this. If you see something you like, a few taps and a sign-in get it working for you. For free.

Urgent – Calendars 5 free today only

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Just learnt this and am rushing to tell you because time is ticking: the app Calendars 5 is free for the rest of today only.

I don’t know much about it except that when I was researching calendars for myself, it came up in features and reviews a lot.

I chose Fantastical instead but I’ve grabbed this and will check it out properly at my leisure. Go do the same, would you?

Download Calendars 5 now – but check the price is still free before you tap that button. It’s worth paying for,  I can see that already, but free is nice.

Put – the – phone – down

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UNICEF – seriously, UNICEF? – has released an app called PlayTimer which is specifically built to make you put that bloody iPhone down and go play with your kid:

Together with your child you can set how long you are going to play for and then take your child’s photo to set the playtimer. This will then lock your phone and show a black screen. If the phone is touched in locked mode – say, by a parent checking their work email – an alarm will go off. You can only turn the alarm off by taking another picture of your child – proof that you’re still playing with them. (In case of emergency, you will still see incoming calls and can make emergency calls, as no app has the power to over-ride your phone lock settings.)

UNICEF’s new app lets your children confiscate your smartphone Katherine Crisp (15 May 2014)

Read more on the UNICEF blog here or go straight to downloading the free app from the App Store

More advice on how to get hired at a job

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There’s this firm, right, and it’s looking to hire various people but one particular group is proving a problem because they write rubbish applications. Apparently Project Managers are so bad at managing to project an image of themselves that the person hiring them was driven to write an article about how they should do it. Remarkably, just as with so very many other pieces of advice for job applicants, the answer is to write better.

You can do that. You’re a writer. We forget sometimes that what we do is hard and that many, many or even most people just can’t do it. So use your skill, use your talent, write your way into a job interview.

I also think that Product Managers need to write better resumes. Designers have, for the most part, figured out that it’s more about showing than telling. It’s easy to go to someone’s sites and portfolio to get a sense of what they’re about. Product Managers still appear to be stuck in the “Let me tell you how awesome I am” rut, though. This is a generalization, of course, but what I’m mostly seeing right now is resumes that excel at vagueness. It’s not uncommon to see a sentence like “Applied world-class methodologies to create a successful customer-centric product”, or some variation of that. What does that mean?

It’s great to see proof of success, yes — stats about conversion improvements, etc. are extremely useful. But hiring managers need more than that to assess Product Managers. We need to know how you think. We need to know how you approach problems, how you work, what methods you like and don’t like, and why. And for some reason most PMs I speak to seem surprised by those questions and have trouble answering them.

How to Get Hired as a Project Manager – Rian van der Merwe, Elezea

You’re on your own – and it’s necessary, it’s good, it’s great

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Thinking about this morning’s story that Experts are wrong – says expert, I’m minded of a Self Distract post I wrote last year.

I wrote about how we naturally turn to our friends when we have something big to tell them like you’re starting a company and they cheer you on, yet:

Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one… who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.

Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.

You’re on Your Own and it’s Necessary – William Gallagher, Self Distract (December 2013)

If you can’t rely on your friends, who can you rely on? Sorry, did you really just say ‘family’? You might’ve said experts until you read this morning’s story. But there are other reasons to distrust experts. So, no friends, no family, no experts. You would think this piece would be a depressing read but I took some heart from writing it and I’ve had a lot of people tell me they found it encouraging.

Probably because it also includes the answer. You’ve got to look now, haven’t you? I hope you like it: that Self Distract piece meant much more to me than I realised before I wrote it. The act of writing it to you formed it better in my head, made me think more coherently. So ta for that.

Experts are wrong – says expert

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I’ve often thought about this: experts say this or that can’t ever happen and then it does. Or they say it must but it doesn’t. I’ve just concluded that there is always another fact or another element that you don’t know or don’t see the significance of until it’s happened.

It has scared me a bit, actually. You know that Titanic wasn’t strictly speaking called unsinkable but few people seem to know why the term ever came up. It was to do with a new system of watertight bulkheads that meant if one was holed, it couldn’t flood the others. But these holds were open at the top. Nothing could flood enough to go over the top, of course.

So I spend some time, distressingly regularly, wondering what gaping hole I’m not seeing, what questions I’m not asking:

There will always be a wealth of experts arguing a number of sides to any given issue and most will be proved wrong. Yet we still seek them out because whenever there is uncertainty, we listen to anyone who professes to know more than we do. By looking for easy answers, we’re just asking for trouble.

Why Experts Always Seem to Get It Wrong – Creativity Post

The full post has more examples, better ones than my Titanic thing, plus more detail on why this all seems to be true.