Author: William Gallagher

Pattern weeks – part 2

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I'm still fiddling. Previously on Pattern Weeks… I was working to bring some kind of structure to my typical or pattern week, chiefly because every week was changing and I knew I wasn't getting enough done. For a detailed previously and maybe reasons why you might like to think about it too, see Pattern Weeks.

Now I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote that and was planning all this back on 31 December and we're now a fortnight further on.

But I do have the plan, at last, sort of.

I ripped up lots of versions and settled for working out a list of things that I really have to get done. I used OmniOutliner for that; lots of bashing in things as I thought of them, as a search of my calendar and To Do list brought them up. And then lots of juggling around. A fair bit of realising that this bit or that was quite similar to something else on the list, I could save some time by doing them one after another.

I ended up with tent poles in the week: inviolate times when invoiolate things have to be done inviolately. They won't be. But they will be more than if I weren't looking out for them.

And that's nearly where I am now. I've got the list, the kind of super-list, the overall no-details-but-big-picture list and I have these tent poles. Certain few of these things have to happen at certain times and I know the things, I know the times.

The intention is to end up with wallpaper on my Mac with this pattern in my face. I'm about a quarter of the way through producing that image in Adobe Illustrator and it's a Tetris-like calendar kind of image with big red boxes, little green ones and some yellow 'uns too.

I'm trying to work out how I'll show that to you when it's done and all the boxes have all their text in – without you being able to see that the big red box that stripes across the whole week at the same time is really just breakfast.

But I'm getting there and it's proving useful plotting and pondering. So I wanted to share that with you, even as I can't yet share the plan.

Tag. You’re it

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In the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, you would save a document and never find it again. I used to spend a lot of time split between PCs and Macs and regularly I would struggle to understand where something had been saved. (Especially with downloads: where the hell did they go?) More recently, we've had Spotlight on Macs and Windows Something on Windows 7 that mean you can find anything you like pretty instantly.

I know the Spotlight stuff the best: I regularly use it to search for, say, the word “invoice” and tell it that I want to see only Word documents created between April 2012 and March 2013. (Can you guess what I was doing there?) Wallop, there they all are.

That one feature, which so many people simply do not know is right there on their 'puters, has undone two decades of how I work. And it's undone it for the better. I no longer spend time creating chains of folders so that I can find, say, all Acme invoices done for copywriting in February 2013. I just save all my invoices in one place and they're waiting for me. If I want a particular one, Spotlight finds it. If I need to compile something about them all, I just open that one folder.

I think that's probably saved me a gigantic amount of time and effort. So much so that I'm very glad I listened when I was told about it, I'm certain that I have no need for any other solution – but I am also willing to listen again if you've got something better.

And people are saying they have something better. Hand on heart, I do not know. And I have ignored it for years. But now this thing is built in to the OS X Mavericks that I use most days and it's right there. Doesn't make me use it. Doesn't require me to do anything. I can continue ignoring it. But it looks at me. It looks. Like that, that's what it looks like. And all the time I'm hearing people talk about how great this thing is. They say it's so great that it is about bleedin' time that Apple added it.

It is tags.

If I save that Acme invoice, I already have a habit now of calling it by a fairly descriptive name so that I can see what it is right away whenever I open the invoices folder. I stole this idea from David Sparks and his extremely good Paperless book wherein I learnt to name files like this: “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”. (To just nip off the subject of tags for a second, because this has proved so useful, Sparks also recommends using TextExpander to put that date in. So I go to save and instead of checking the date, I type the letters “;df” with the semi-colon and without the quote marks, and TextExpander pops in today's date for me. If, as usual, I'm playing catch up, I will then change that date but it's still faster. Now, carry on.)

So I've got Spotlight, I've got this descriptive filenaming system which without my doing anything is always sorted into date order. I don't know that I need anything else.

But still there are tags.

If I save my invoice “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”“ then before I hit the actual Save button, I can type in some tags. I can type a row of words like invoice, Acme, copywriting, difficult client, bad day, don't do this again, paid really well, used the word purple, invoiced, not paid yet. And on and on and on. I can type these, they are tags, and so far I have never done it.

Except I guess that's a lie. Tags are new to OS X Mavericks – they're already in Windows, at least since Vista, and that would be great except I read Microsoft's advice on how to use tags and I glaze myself over – but they've been in other things. There are tags in Evernote. And I have used them there.

Just inconsistently.

Hang on. Let me check. How do you check how many tags you've used in Evernote?

Apparently it's 316.

I truly do not remember typing more than one. I remember typing 'recipe'. And I remember that because I spent some time thinking, have I already typed 'recipes'? It turns out I had. So now I have two and I don't know which to use when I search for a recipe. Instead, I just go to my Food notebook or I use Evernote Food. Or I use Paprika, an entirely different recipe app altogether. ("An entirely different recipe app.”)

I told you I don't know. Hand on heart, I said. Are tags any use to me? If they're not, why have I written 316 of them in Evernote? If they are, why have written zero in OS X Mavericks?

I can tell you one reason for that: if you create a tag in OS X Mavericks then every folder you open includes that tag in a list on the side. Brilliant: tap or click on that tag and you only see the files that have it. Tap or click on several tags and you'll see all those files that have both. So with a couple of clicks I could see all invoices sent to the bad client who pays well. But I have 316 tags in Evernote, if I did that in OS X Mavericks, how long would the list of them be? It would be 316 long and by the time I've scrolled through, I could've found the documents.

Oh.

Consider this a live blog.

Because right now, this moment, exactly as I reached for an example to tell you and then wrote it out, I've just changed my mind.

I do think having 316 tags listed out on the screen is ugly and a chore to read through, but I do suddenly see that being able to pick out invoices from a bad client who pays well is something that I would like. And it is something I would use.

I may have to look into tags a bit more, then. I was telling you all this by way of showing that time spent knowing how you can find things on your computer will help you save a lot more time later. And recently I seem to have been in many conversations with fellow writers who complain they can't find anything. But now I'm thinking I should spend that time myself to understand more about tags.

Thanks.

Also, I was telling you this in order to then point you at someone who knows what they're talking about or at least doesn't write to you until they know what they're talking about. That won't catch on. But here's a particularly interesting take on it all from Lifehacker: I've Been Using Tags All Wrong.

Post-It Notes: yet another handy thing Evernote does for you

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I will never use this. I will so very never use it that I think my mind simply blocked its very existence: it's an Evernote feature that works rather smartly with real-life Post-It Notes. I hate Post-It Notes. I have a think about tiny scraps of paper, makes my skin crawl, and that is one big reason why I got into using Evernote and all things electronic. But it is smart. It is really smart.

Wade Roush is into this and says on Xconomy:

The Post-it Camera is a feature of Evernote’s iOS app (iPhone and iPad only so far) that accesses the device’s camera and helps you take a clear, evenly aligned picture of any Post-it note. It then creates a digital replica of the note—basically, it sharpens up whatever wording is on the note and cleans up the background color. What’s cool is that you can set Evernote to store these digitized notes in specific notebooks according to their color. It’s best at recognizing green, blue, pink, and yellow. (And yes, you’d better believe that this is all a big co-marketing operation: 3M sells Evernote-branded Post-it notes in the correct colors.)

Read his full article for details of how to use this, unless you're me in which case have a skim across the rather long piece for many other Evernote-y and organisation-y gems.

It’s handy to have a raging ego

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You’re going to be asked for a bio or the cover image from your book. Or a link to where people can read your work. Every time anyone asks you, they will ask for those same things. So keep them ready.

Spend the time now to write a bio and get your best photo of yourself. Get the cover JPEG from your publisher – or just than it from Amazon. The publisher will have the kind of high resolution images needed for magazine printing but most of the time it’s going to be a website who is asking you and a grab from Amazon is fine. If you don’t grab it from there, they will.

But it’s better if you do it. It is always better. You know you can’t get the wrong image and you know they could. It’s the same with links, it’s even the same with bios: you are only dealing with you but they might be featuring ten people and mistakes happen.

They’re less likely to happen if both you and the magazine or website are organised. You can’t do anything to make them be better prepared but you can do everything to make sure you are.

So schlep through all this writing of bios, select an extract from your writing, get all the right links for your work (remember to get both US and UK links at least), prepare the images and then keep them all in one place.

Specifically Dropbox.

If you sign up for a free Dropbox account you get 2Gb of space to store files in and the ability to send anyone a link to any of them. They get the link and they can click or tap on it to download the lot: it’s not only handy, it’s essential because images can be too big to email directly.

I keep a folder on Dropbox with all my cover images in high and low res versions, copies of my CV tweaked for different markets and some short and long bios plus headshot photos of me.

I tell you, I look at that folder now and I looked at it a lot when I was making it and I fair blush with embarrassment at being so egotistical.

But then I’ll be asked for a bio to go in an event brochure and I’ve sent back exactly what they need before they even noticed they’d hit send. Obviously I like that and obviously it’s useful for them to have this stuff right there.

But there is another reason to do it. Like anything else in my Blank Screen book, I am very much an advocate of spending a little time now to save a lot of it later. You’d think that it would take the same time to write a bio when asked for it as it is to write up one early, but that’s not the time saving.

This is. Last year I did a thing as part of a group and we were all required to provide various bio details and headshots. I replied with it all immediately – and never had to think about it again. Some of my colleagues took days, a fair few took weeks and at least one took months to do the same thing. And you can bet that all the way through those months they were thinking about it. Putting it off, wishing they had done it, telling themselves they’d definitely do it this weekend.

That’s the time you save: all that thinking and procrastinating. That’s why you should do all this now and get it done.

But it is also fun to be able to zap the stuff back to someone when they ask. Bless them for asking, too.

The most boring feature of iOS 7

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“Popular Near Me” on the App Store. It sounds good: wherever you are, go to the App Store, tap this button and you'll see which apps are the most popular right there. Where you're standing. Exciting.

I just tried it at home and all anyone seems to be downloading is transport apps for how to get away from here.

Maybe they're trying to tell me something.

Why and how to lie about your email address

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You've done this: you've gone to a website because you fancied something there and the site required you to register before you get it. So you haver a bit but eventually figure that you want it enough that it's worth handing over your email address.

No more.

If I choose to give Tesco, say, my email address then what I'll do instead is claim that it is tesco@williamgallagher.com. You know how they always send you an email asking you to confirm your address? It works. I get that and I can reply.

Is there a need to sign in to NASA? Then I'd be nasa@williamgallagher.com. You can see a pattern here. And yes, it's because I own my domain name williamgallagher.com and yes, I can write anything. And yes, I have told a site that my address is bollocks@williamgallagher.com.

And yes, if you emailed bollocks@williamgallagher.com I would get it.

Except.

I wouldn't, actually. Anything at all @williamgallagher.com is routed out to my real email until it causes a problem. If I signed up for a shop with something like supermarket@williamgallagher.com and then, what do you know, look at that, my spam rate booms up, I'll look at the address that spam is sent to. If all the viagra adverts are going to supermarket@williamgallagher.com then, flicks a switch, that address is gone. Send anything and everything you like, it will never get through.

And that did happen with wherever it was I registered as bollocks@williamgallagher.com. So I switched that off.

All you need is your own domain name – which is great because it also means you're not tied to @hotmail or @aol or anywhere else – and the ability to fiddle with its email settings. That'll be part of your control panel wherever good domain names are sold.

One thing against all this. I have sometimes registered with a site I was certain I'd never come back to again – and I was wrong. I suppose I should change that registered address to my real one, but I can't even remember what it is because I log in to most things through 1Password or through Safari and they both pop the login details for me.

But come on, it's fun being able to look someone in the eye and say yes, my email address is dippydippygumdrops@williamgallagher.com. Wanna make something of it?

Working for yourself is harder and better than you think

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Lifehacker has a smart post about what it's really like when you go work for yourself. Some of the details are very USA-specific – naturally, since Lifehacker is an American site – but the principles are the same here in the UK:

Often, people want to freelance or start their own business because they're lured by the freedom of working from home. If that's what you care most about, you're probably better off trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute and learning about the downsides of working from home rather than leaving your employer to work for yourself.

List articles – 5 things to eat, 10 things to sell or whatever – are usually quite lazy pieces of writing that are also pointlessly empty. And I'll give you seven reasons why. But this one is simple and straight and practical: I'm not sure I've ever read it all put so well as Lifehacker does.

I've been freelance since the mid-1990s but I also had an enormous crutch of a regular client for a dozen years so I felt I eased into this life. Can't imagine going back now, but I can imagine doing this freelancing an awful lot better: when you've read that article, follow its many links out to further advice. It's a smart collection.

I must be a great writer, I get up early.

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Hand on heart, I'm having trouble adjusting to getting up at 5am to write. Given that today is the 190th time I've done it, I may have to accept that I never will figure it out. Alternatively, I'll have to accept the old man concept of naps.

But the problem is at the end of the day and during the evening, it's fine when I get up and often it is fine actually getting up. Not today, as it happens, but often. Okay, sometimes. Alright, once. Once I fair bounced out of the bed. Madness.

However, I think my getting up early like this works as much because the phones don't ring – and I cannot call anyone – as because it happens to be the time that suits my writing. In my head I'm a late-night jazz kind of guy, possibly without the jazz, but in my typing fingers I'm an early riser.

I know you can't equate the time you get up to the quality of your writing, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people trying. Now comes what may hopefully be the definitive analysis. It's got to be definitive because it doesn't come up with an answer. It just shows you a lot of facts. A lot:

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author.

Take a look at Brain Pickings' gorgeous infographic about famous writers and what time of day they got up out of their beds, the lazy bastards.

UPDATED WITH AUDIO: The Blank Screen on BBC Radio WM today

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15:48 Listen to the show here: 25 minutes, MP3 And the book we talk about is my The Blank Screen (UK edition)

12:17 GMT UPDATE I had a blast on BBC Radio WM. If the listeners who phoned in had half as good a time, then they were robbed. Audio to follow later UPDATE ENDS

Just a quick note to tell you that I'm going to be on BBC Radio WM's Adrian Goldberg show some time between 11am and noon talking about The Blank Screen book and how we writers can get going, can get off our backsides and write.

BBC Radio WM is the Corporation's local station for Birmingham and the West Midlands. I actually started my career there doing work experience in the 1980s so it's always a particular treat to be on it.

If you read this before 11am GMT then you can catch it streaming live and I'll update this with a link afterwards.

Always assuming I don't make an eejit of myself in it.

The Blank Screen book:
UK paperback
USA paperback

Jerry Seinfeld disowns the so-called Seinfeld Method

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This was everywhere. It's even in my book, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition). Comedian Jerry Seinfeld allegedly has a big wallplanner and puts an X through each day that he writes. You can see how it would build up to a chain of Xs and his advice for being as famously productive as he is was this and this alone: “Don't break the chain.”

It is very good advice. He just didn't say it and doesn't do this Seinfeld method.

He was on Reddit's Ask Me Anything discussion this week and when asked about this, said:

“This is hilarious to me, that somehow I am getting credit for making an X on a calendar with the Seinfeld productivity program. It's the dumbest non-idea that was not mine, but somehow I'm getting credit for it.”

Read the whole (very long) discussion directly on Reddit. This point comes about a mile into the chat but there's a lot else to enjoy along the way.