I didn’t know that it existed at all, let alone that it was today. But today is World Standards Day, except when it isn’t. The Atlantic:

Happy World Standards Day! The International Organization for Standardization has declared today, October 14, to be a celebration of the hundreds of engineering and scientific standards from which we all benefit—everything from the length of a meter to the two-letter country code system.

It is a day, in other words, to commemorate cross-national conformance, connection, and collaboration.

But the U.S. will not be observing World Standards Day today, on World Standards Day. Instead, the U.S. will observe World Standards Day next week, on October 23.

U.S. Observes ‘World Standards Day’ on Non-Standard Day – Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic (14 October 2014)

There is a reason. It does kinda make sense. A bit. But that’s no fun at all. Move along if you’d rather have a little chortle like I did or read the full piece if you want to see what gauzy excuse the US has.

I’m a writer, I think questions can be implied but it is true that I often get emails that lack a clear question mark. I tend to reply anyway, if I’ve got something to say or particularly if I want to keep talking with the sender for some other reason. But Kristin Muhlner, CEO of NewBrand Analytics, disagrees. Fast Company interviewed her about getting work done and among the many interesting answers there was this:

“I love email. I’m probably a rare breed in that regard. I love it because it allows me to work asynchronously and to consume vast amounts of information rapidly across the business. But unless I’m specifically asked a question, I don’t respond. If a CEO responds, everyone thinks they need to respond back, and that kicks up a lot of dust.”

The Many, Many, Many Things You Should Say “No” To At Work – David Zax, Fast Company (1 October 2014)

I can’t say I’d ever heard of NewBrand Analytics before I read this (and before 99U pointed me at it) and as I say, I don’t necessarily agree with Muhlner, but she’s very interesting. Read the full piece.

Much as I liked Drafts 3 and much as I am becoming infatuated with Drafts 4 this morning, this fella knows it better. Alex Guyot, writing for MacStories, has the full skinny on what Drafts 4 does and why it’s rather hot. Guyot begins:

Drafts is one of my all-time favorite apps on iOS, not only for its amazing utility, but also because it was the app that got me started writing about technology, so it has a special place in my heart. However, surveying what the app has looked like since its last big update over a year ago, it’s been clear to me that an unchanged Drafts would stagnate in the post-iOS 8 world. In the face of new methods of inter-app communication such as extensions, documents pickers, and widgets, surviving on URL scheme-based utilities alone would likely not be enough to keep Drafts relevant.

This is Drafts though, an app that has been at the forefront of iOS automation since the field began. I should not have been worried. Released today on the App Store as a new, iOS 8-only, and Universal app, Drafts 4 is an evolution which boasts a huge number of improvements and represents a much needed shift in direction. With a UI refresh, a smarter and more accessible interface for building actions, a fantastic Share extension, a customizable extended keyboard, an enhanced URL scheme, and the intriguing introduction of JavaScript scripts for text manipulation, Drafts 4 is Agile Tortoise’s statement that they are ready for the challenges of a modern iOS.

Drafts 4 Review – Alex Guyot, MacStories (15 October 2014)

Read the full piece which includes screenshots and much more detail.

Lately I’ve been swapping the standard timer for “real life Pomodoros”: limited-time events I have to wait for anyway, like waiting for my washing machine to finish so I can hang up the clothes. I start working knowing I can stop as soon as the washing machine is done. Using real life Pomodoros means I get extra benefits like doing something fun when I’m done working or keeping up with my housework.

Real life Pomodoro – Belle, Exist (3 July 2014)

I’ve recommended the same thing to parents who have to do school runs: tell yourself you will write for the ten minutes before you have to leave. Belle (I can’t see a surname) has more examples but also more of a rationale for how it works for her. Read the full piece.

And it looks like this is what I will swap to writing in for everything, especially when I’m writing to you here on The Blank Screen.

I’ve always liked Drafts’ feel, there is something more pleasant about writing in it than there is in, say, the WordPress app. That’s hard to quantify or even rationalise but it’s also hard to deny. I enjoy writing in this just as I enjoy writing in Pages, just as I’m a little less enamoured of writing in Word. I’m fairly fine with not being able to articulate this except for how I want to impress on you that it’s important and I don’t know how. I also cannot tell whether it’s likely to be something that works for you or even matters for you if you do.

But, nebulous intangibles, aside, this is what Drafts does: it’s a very fast writing tool. Tap the icon, start writing. No setting up, no creating new documents, just tap and go. Write anything you like, anything that’s on your mind and then when it’s done, that’s when you decide what to do with it. Email the text to someone. Send it as a message. Save it to Evernote. I’ve done all of these and I’ve sent a piece of text as a message to one person then an email to someone else.

What Drafts 4 does is simplify some rough edges, adds in a huge amount of ways to send out the text to other services like Evernote, adds more ways for you to build up a series of actions: tap one button and have Drafts do a lot of work for you. Drafts 4 also includes iOS 8 extensions.

Now, the more technical you are, the more you may find that I’ve left out or simply not noticed very good features in Drafts 4. But at my semi-technical level, it’s already a gem because of that sharing via email and those iOS 8 extension.

Let me give you an example of what I’ve been able to easily do since installing Drafts 4 about 30 minutes ago. If you read The Blank Screen site much, you’ll be consciously or unconsciously used to the way that I quote and cite people. Not that you need to know this, but it is always the quote followed by the title of the original article, the author’s name, the journal or website and then the date. That takes about four steps per quote. First I copy and paste the quote, then I copy and paste the URL, then I probably copy and paste the title, and I regularly copy and paste the bit where it says the author name and the date. Dates are important to me and spelling the writers’ name correctly is vital to me too.

Drafts 4 does not remove all this. But oh, it makes it so much easier. I’ve just tried it:

It’s hard to believe now but Apple was once within 90 days of going bankrupt. Samsung isn’t in as bad a way as that but it has just announced that its profits are down. A lot. Seriously, a lot. They’ve dropped 60%.

Now Samsung copies Apple’s near-death experience – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (14 October 2014)

To do that quote, I went to the story on The Blank Screen on my iPad and selected/copied the block that had my author name in. Then I selected the paragraph I wanted, tapped on the iOS 8 Share button, chose Drafts. I’ve already told Drafts (through a very simple process) that I always want to grab the quote, the title of the page and the URL of it, so one tap gets me all that.

It presents the lot to me in a window that I can edit. So I paste in the author name. Juggle a couple of bits about and hit a button marked Capture. That saves the lot into Drafts and I just copied all of that out of its own Drafts document and into this.

There is a bit of horse-trading: WordPress makes adding the links a bit easier, here I had to write in the HTML code. I’ll look into whether I can automate that more – I suspect I can – but for the moment the convenience of only going to the website once is really good.

Up to now I’ve avoided using Drafts because posting from the WordPress app is easier. Actually, I’ve often written The Blank Screen articles in Drafts and then copied them over to the WordPress app. That’s been purely because I’ve liked the writing of it in here more than I have there.

But in exploring the new features of Drafts 4, I think I’ve discovered an old one: I can send this post from Drafts 4 on my iPad directly onto our Blank Screen website through an email.

If you’re reading this, it worked. And I am now pottering about thinking how to add HTML and graphics automatically.

Drafts 4 is now available on the App Store. It costs £2.99 and is a new app: not an upgrade from Drafts 3. But on the other hand, Drafts 4 is now a universal app so you buy it once and get to use it on both your iPhone and iPad. I’m starting to wish there were a Mac version too.