I'd not heard of her before this very minute and I'm not yet clear who she is, what she does or where she does it. But Gayle Allen makes a lot of sense about pushing one's boundaries and a lot of it is deliciously uncomfortable:
80% and go: lose the desire to be perfect. If you can get to perfect the first time, you’re probably not dreaming big enough. Give it 80%, get it out there, and get ready for feedback. It’s coming. It’s okay. Use it. Learn from it. That’s how you’ll get to 100%
A quick fix when your problem is you and how you're feeling. This works especially if you're feeling slow and lethargic, it's good if you're feeling in any way too below par to get any work done.
Go see somebody.
I don't mean a doctor. I mean arrange to get a lunch or a coffee with someone now.
It may well be that what you ought to be doing is staying right where you are and getting this bastard piece of work done, but the odds are good that you would just continue pushing the pieces around without getting anywhere. And the odds are high that whatever you do accomplish will be about as below par as you.
So if the hour or the day is not going to work out, spend that time or a key part of it going to have a coffee with someone.
Because it does three things.
The obvious first one is that coffee will perk you up, you use a percolator to perk you up now.
But there is also the business of who you go to see. There's the issue of whether they can see you, but before you pick up that phone you need to have thought of someone to call and you need to have an idea of what to call them about. Maybe you can just phone them with the idea of getting a coffee; I tend to need something more to offer them, like it's a coffee about doing this or it's a tea about doing that. Whatever it is, you have to pick the person and you have to think of what you'll say and you have to phone them.
And you'll then have to do that with the next person if your first choice can't make it.
Then when you do meet them, though, that's when the third and by far the biggest boost comes. This works with anyone you meet, anyone at all. But it's greater if it's someone you like. Greater still if it's someone you in any way admire. It is beyond measure greater if you also fancy them.
Whoever they are and whatever you think of the way they flick their hair, you will be performing for them.
There is just no possibility that you will present yourself as this half-dead sloth who could barely type a word. You will bounce. You will lie.
And the lying and the performance will pick you up.
Then get back to work as quickly as you can before it all fades.
TO DO LIST
Argue with Congress
Pick up laundry
Avoid a land war in Asia
As President Obama gives his State of the Union speech, take a look inside how he works. If POTUS isn't the busiest person in the world, I don't know who is. And you know you can learn from how he physically does the job – regardess of your politics.
Last year, 99U went through detailed articles about the President's day to day regime in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, amongst others. Culled from those pieces is a straight list of just five things to do when you're juggling the fate of the free world in your hands.
Shudder. Hack College suggests that you should erase something you've memorised in order to fix it in your head. I think I went pale at the thought. Write something down, commit it to memory and then hit delete. I swear I just hallucinated a popup dialogue saying “This operation cannot be undone”.
But if you're braver than me, there is more about this and 19 less scary ideas for people with bad memories on Hack College's 20 Memorization Techniques for College Students. Also a great photo.
Spotted by Lifehacker
It genuinely astonishes me how many people haven't even heard of RSS. If you have and you're even now looking at this through an RSS newsreader, hello. I've got nothing for you: skip along to the next story from your next favourite website. But if you haven't heard of it before, you have now and I want to evangelise you into trying it yourself.
This is what happens when you try it, this is what I do every day. Sometimes many dozens of times a day. Waiting for the kettle. Standing in a queue. Taking a break from work. I'll just read the news on my iPhone or my iPad or my Mac, whichever is in front of me at that moment. And whatever news has broken since I last looked. There are websites I read every single article on yet rarely go to. There are others whose headlines I read every day and often then go to in order to read the full article.
It definitely means I read more websites than many people, but I don't take any longer doing it.
To do this, you need an RSS newsreader. There are eleventy-billion newsreaders in the world and there are ones for PCs, Macs, iOS and I presume also Linux and Android. Windows, OS X, anything. Everything. There are free ones aplenty but I bought one called Reeder for iPhone/iPad which cost me a whole £2.99. I would be surprised if I haven't read a million words in that app.
But just Google “RSS” and your computer or phone of choice and take your pick.
Then go to a website you like and look for the RSS button. It's that orange one with white stripes like radiating waves and it's often the orange one that says RSS next to it. Click on that and you'll either wallop off automatically to your RSS newsreader with the site just waiting for you to say yes, add this one forever – or you'll get a new webpage. Copy the link, open that in your RSS reader, say yes, add this one forever, and you're done.
RSS isn't the friendliest concept: you understand it but some sites make it hard to find and then offer you options you're not interested in. If you're given a choice of RSS links, one will be called Atom and one will be called RSS. I truly have not one single clue what Atom is: I've never tried it.
And I have tried a lot of sites. Something like 300 at the moment.
Two quick things. You'll notice I've now said RSS umpteen times and not told you what it stands for. I think it's like DVD; you know what it is and you watch a billion DVDs but you may not know that it stands for Digital Versatile Disc (or was going to stand for Digital Video Disc originally). RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Exciting.
The other thing is just that I can't recommend Reeder without warning you that the Mac version isn't on sale at the moment. Various changes to the world meant it stopped working and the update isn't here yet. It's taking quite a time but I like Reeder so much I'm waiting for it.
That's it, carry on. And see you in my RSS feed. I've got two. Oh, yes. Two. Get me. Actually, yes, get me: my personal Self Distract blog has an RSS feed at http://williamgallagher.com/selfdistract/feed and The Blank Screen is on http://williamgallagher.com/feed
Automatically putting your contact details at the end an email can be great, handy, daft, silly or even sometimes a little bit dangerous.
You want to know about the dangerous bit, don't you? And I want to tell you. I'm going to be a little circumspect because the person involved could conceivably read this and I don't to either upset her or open the story back up again.
It's like this. I'm a freelance writer, it is handy for me to give you a way to phone or email if you have some work you think I'd enjoy. So a long time ago, back in the 1990s, I used to include my mobile phone in the signature on all my emails. All my emails. That's the point, isn't it? You write this automatic block of text called a signature, you write it once, you never think about it again. I never thought about it again. Until a woman saw it – I'm going to do that anonymous name thing and call her Pentangle. No idea why.
I knew Pentangle but it had been a gigantic number of years since we'd been even in the same city, I believe, so whatever way we found each other online, I was glad and it was fun. Except I sent her a cheery email and it included my phone number as all my emails did.
She went quiet.
And after a few days emailed back saying she'd been in some turmoil about my giving her my number like that. Did I expect her to give me hers? What would her husband say? If you're reading this like it's a joke then I'm doing a bad job: she was serious and it was a big thing for her. I'm ashamed to say I joked it off: it didn't occur to me that she could really be this serious. I tell you, nobody fancies me, it just doesn't happen, I wouldn't notice or understand if it did. But something like it was happening then.
I hadn't met her since those years before, this was all innocuous email stuff and actually to this day I have not met her. But it spiralled off into her consulting her minister for advice about what to do, it went to late night phone calls from her, it went to my being CCd on emails about me that she'd sent to her friends.
It only stopped when she went in to hospital to be treated for some mental health issues. I don't know what, I didn't really dare ask her for fear of exacerbating whatever was happening, and it's now a long time since I heard from her. I often think of her and hope she's okay, but.
So that took longer to tell you than I expected. Sorry about that. Let me skip straight to the happier, sillier, dafter end of things. There is a tremendous spoof of legal email signatures written by the site McSweeney's.
For real examples of how not to do it, advertising guy Ken Segall wrote back in 2012 about the signatures that came on his phone by default – and one that is a lot worse than “Sent from my iPhone” – and he has suggested alternatives.
Yet it genuinely is handy for certain people to have your phone number. You want them to. And you can say that to them in one email but nobody remembers which email you mentioned your number in. So whacking it at the end of them all, could genuinely be useful.
The issue is not the usefulness, it's not the bit about it being at the end of your email, it's the word 'all'. That's where this goes so very badly wrong.
So right now, I have no signature at all. Not one. Not a pixel. I've certainly deleted the “Sent from my iPad” and not just because I was emailing someone who believed I was working for them on the Mac in my office. Instead, most emails I send out get no signature – and all the ones that could use one, do.
I do it through TextExpander from Smile Software. When I'm at my Mac and I'm emailing you, if any part of the back of my head thinks you could use my contact details, I type “;sigw” (without the quote marks) and, wallop, it's all there. An entire signature with contact details and a couple of links. That's my work signature; I intended to do a “;sigp” with my personal signature, but I've never bothered.
It's great on my Mac because even though I type very quickly, that just means I've rattled off “;sigw” at lightspeed and the rest of the text is there within a beat. It's not so good on my iPad and iPhone: there is a TextExpander for iOS but it can't insert itself into Mail in the same way. If I'm that fussed, I will go to the TextExpander app, type “;sigw” and copy-and-paste it into the email but generally I don't tend to be that fussed.
But I am fussed enough, especially on my Mac, that I do this TextExpander lark a lot – and it has paid off as an email to one person gets forward to another and suddenly I'm getting work from strangers.
Tomorrow will be the 200th time I've got up at 5am to write. (I do that Monday-Friday except when work takes me away or I have colds/holidays.)
I am considering marking the occasion with a celebratory lie-in. What do you think?
Apparently.
Previously… having cracked getting up at 5am weekdays to write (tomorrow is my 200th time) I determined to better schedule my week. I've replaced my beautiful iMac wallpaper with a very rough and graphically ugly timetable for the week with times for phone calls, development of new pitches, financials and a couple of other things. Most of the week is left blank for the actual work and this is all a pattern for what the week should be, it's never what it actually is. (Read Part 4 here.)
But now, another week along, I think I can call it: the pattern week works.
The bad thing is that it feels like having a job.
I kept the number of sections on the timetable to just a few and yet it's enough that I clock-watch for the first time in my adult working life. I am conscious that the hour for phone calls is coming up. I am very conscious and rather relieved when that hour is done.
The calls may be the biggest success, though. We all have our tough spots, the things we struggle with in business, and for some reason mine is making cold phone calls. I'm a journalist, I've been a journalist, I'm used to the automatic picking up of a phone to call people. If you don't know something and you know who does, ring, ring, hello.
But cold calls pitching for work, I find that hard and one thing I was determined to do this month was make myself do more calls. I decided I would do thirty in January: it's a big number when 1 is hard, but it felt achievable. And since I could obviously only make work calls during the working week, that meant I had to do more than one per day to make the total. I've gone a touch further and scheduled to make calls only four out of five days. It does give me a break on the fifth day but it also means I absolutely have to make several calls each day in order to hit that thirty. So I have to do several and I have to do them at a certain time.
I don't have to.
This is all self-imposed.
But having imposed it on myself, it now feels real. It feels like I have to. I figured that the need to do several and having a starting time to do it means that I will get going and that as I finish one call I will immediately go to the next without thinking.
It's working.
The aim was 30 calls in January and there are 18 days in which to do it. (That's Monday to Thursday, each week.) That means I have to make 1.67 calls per day.
I've made an average of 3.4 instead.
To date. With a week to go.
I've made 48 calls and considering I found 1 so hard, I am hoping that I've also cracked my phone issues. There are definitely moments when it feels like a game and very many moments when yes, I've hung up from one call and been dialling the next in the same breath.
So that's good and the pattern weeks idea has demonstrably helped me in at least this one area.
But what tickles me is that I've learnt in my game, in my various types of writing, phone calls aren't half as effective as emails. I could already do emails: I'm good at emails!
I would not being doing the job I am, I would not be enjoying it the way I am, I would not have had the wide-ranging, bouncy career I have – if it weren't for the Mac.
I'm not kidding.
Apple's Macintosh made such a difference in my life that today, on its thirtieth birthday, I've written about it over on my personal blog, Self Distract.