In this week’s newsletter I mentioned how I’d seen a film about the making of the foil I use for wrapping food. This is not that film. It’s far more irritating. But if you skip the entire first 90 seconds, you get a shallow tale about how this stuff is made.
The full story is (delete as applicable) fascinating or terrifying. But even this empty surface tale is enough to make think they really shouldn’t go to all this trouble, I’ll just eat out.
I think it was football. Is Chelsea a football team or a goldfish? I’m sure it’s one or the other and I’m certain that what it or they do is massively important to them. But I was just watching Community on my iPad when TuneIn Radio popped up a notification telling me this breaking news that, frankly, I’ve already forgotten.
As notifications go, this was stylish enough and more importantly as notifications go, this one went. But in what algorithm did TuneIn Radio see I’d tuned in to the Today programme on Radio 4, heard that it was in the middle of its Thought for the Day, sigh and say aloud “at least it isn’t the sport” before switching it off, and conclude that I must want sport and/or goldfish news.
It’s bugging me now. Hang on.
No, I can’t get the notification back to check what it was about.
Maybe I’m just narked at being so interrupted by something so trivial – to me, anyway. I could blame TuneIn Radio for notifiying me when I hadn’t said I wanted to but, let’s be fair, maybe I allowed notifications back when I installed it a few years ago. That this is the first-ever is a little suspicious but it could be my fault, it could be finger trouble.
But I don’t think an app with such a broad use as TuneIn Radio should do this. It’s not like I’ve elected to install a Wimbledon Cricket app, then I would think it reasonable that it send notifications, especially if I’ve said okay. TuneIn Radio is a quick way of tuning in to pretty much any radio station anywhere in the world. It’s nicer on the iPad than BBC’s own iPlayer Radio, I use a fair bit.
I could’ve got the answer wrong if it asked me to allow notifications. But if it had ever asked whether I wanted sport or goldfish news, there is no question but that I would’ve said no.
So I’m narked that TuneIn does this.
As of thirty minutes ago, Apple has fixed a serious bug in the App Store. If apps were instantly crashing on launch, try them again.
If they still aren’t working, check for updates and that will sort it out.
It’s not clear how many apps were affected: it wasn’t limited to any one manufacturer.
Late last night I installed OmniFocus on Angela’s iPad – because we have family sharing on she can use my copy – and it wouldn’t launch. Whereas I installed my OmniOutliner for her two and that’s fine.
This is one of those cases where the next time you get chance to look at the problem, it’s already been solved.
So that’s good. But I don’t know, bendgate followed by iOS 8.0.1 and .2, it’s not great.
Even Evernote users forget this: there is a version of it that runs on the web. We forget it because we’re forever in the PC, Mac, iPhone or Android client editions and have rarely any need to go to evernote.com. But we can and it has always seemed as if the Evernote company believed we did. Suddenly, though, there is a reason to.
Revealed in beta form this week is a new online version that is fast and is meant to turn Evernote into the place where you do all your writing. I don’t know: the handiness of the client versions is hard to beat. But the new Evernote.com does look very nice:
It’s very clean and distraction-free. I quite like some distractions. But if you’re already an Evernote user and you’re okay with using beta versions of software, go to evernote.com and have a look. More details on the official Evernote blog.
Pretend you’re presenting Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor or any of those: spread things out for maximum dramatic effect – and it’ll help you get it done.
This one needs an example. I’ve just taken over running a programme of about 24 writers who are being paired up into buddies. It got complicated: the number varied, everyone must pair with everyone else but only once, some dropped out, some joined, all that. But in the end, last Sunday, I had the list of who was to work with whom.
And as I was about to post it on the group’s secret Facebook group, I stopped. Instead of the whole list, I just put the first pair up. And announced that I would reveal the rest throughout the day. I was called a tease.
Every thirty minutes for the rest of the day I revealed one pair. It was a daft and a fun idea but you can’t believe how it helped me. I became very conscious that I had to write a new, funny announcement every 28 minutes or so. So I’d post the new one and immediately get on with other work I had to do, shovelled through as much of that as I could before my alarm went off and I did another announcement.
I got a huge amount of work done that day and it felt like a game. If there is anything of yours that you can spread out like this, give it a try, okay? It focuses you like nobody’s business.
Now, there is actually a strong chance that not one single one of those writers noticed this because they could’ve just come on at the end of the day and seen the whole list. So next time I’m going to spread it out over days. I don’t think that will help my productivity, I think it’ll be more fun.
There’s a rare chance to take my one-day creative productivity workshop for free – if you’re in the NUJ, Musicians’ Union, Equiity or the Writers’ Guild. And if you can get to Birmingham on 23 October. And if you book your space very, very quickly. More details on the Federation of Entertainment Unions site: http://bit.ly/1xtHJNU
That’s a quote from an article I want to show you. The piece is about productivity tips from various people I’ve never heard of but are reportedly great. That’s fine, that’s what caught my eye and what I read on to check out for you. Plus, some of the tips in it are genuinely useful, such as this one:
Niki Papadopoulos: My editor always says, “OK, well, try writing it then.” In other words, she means, get started. She usually says this right after I explain a big sweeping idea for a book or a chapter or an article. Planning is great, but productive people get moving.
28 Secrets of Exceptionally Productive People – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (9 September 2014)
Maybe I like this one because it rather fits with what I was saying earlier about not over-planning
But then I saw that line “screw what most people think is normal” and I like that. I want to say that to you every day. And also now use it as a tease to get you to read the full piece and find out what specific productivity tip it relates to.
That writing project you’ve got do to. Write one sentence now. Just dash it off this minute. This minute.
Did you do it? You’re a sentence closer to being finished.
And what kind of crazy-mad Hallmark Card happy-clappy stupid advice is that? You’re a sentence in to your book. Whoop-de-do.
But, hey, look at me. You’re a sentence further into your book. It’s written and it isn’t going away, it is only going to be added to. Maybe with one more sentence tomorrow. Probably with a lot more, but at least one sentence tomorrow.
By the end of a year you have 365 sentences. Call it ten words per sentence – no reason, no statistics behind it, it’s just reasonable enough plus it makes the maths startlingly easy – and that’s 3,650 words you’ve written.
It’s not enough. Nowhere near enough. But it’s a damn site more enough than 0.
Spend some, obviously. But when you have worked out a stunningly precise plan for a project you know that three things will happen, starting with:
1) Some of it will work out exactly as you intended and it’s great
Happy for you. But then:
2) Some of it will be wrong
You will have made mistakes, you will have misunderstood something. And:
3) Something unexpected happens
There is always something unexpected or it would be in your plan and you’d call it expected.
What worries me and occupies me a lot about this is how fragile we really are. You hear about impregnable secure places that get broken into because the plan didn’t consider that baddies could be hiding in the laundry truck. The greatest, biggest, best-defended castle is taken over because who’d be suspicious of those two monks?
There is a saying that you should hope for the best yet plan for the worst. Fine. But don’t plan too much because it’s pointless.
Our car was filled to the brim, children and dogs and all. Halfway through the two-day trek to see family in Norway, my wife was at the wheel. I was fiddling around with my brand new iPhone, which truly seemed a magical product after years with Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. The large touchscreen, the integrated GPS, and the 3G data connection made the phone a window to the world where data and the physical finally coexisted and interacted in a way that felt right to me. It was also a window into the behaviors of other people accessing this world.
Someone—I do not know who—had used Gowalla to tag this little island in the middle of the lake as a point of interest, and so the island became interesting to me. The chance meeting with this island, which existed to me only as a data point, has remained in my mind for years. What did the existence of the island, not as a physical place in the middle of a lake in Northern Sweden, but as a digital place discovered on my phone, really mean?
Well, it means this was surely written between 2007 and 2012 as that’s the lifespan of Gowalla. With that new iPhone reference too, you’re looking at 2007. But such is life, such is the way the web works, this is from The Atlantic which insists it was written this year.
So there are a couple of extra layers to this now. There’s the original point about mysterious points of interest on digital maps and the thought of who placed them there, why they did it and what the place means to them. But now there’s also what happened to this specific place and to all places that were marked on Gowalla and the answer seems to be that they have just gone. Vanished. (There’s a tiny bit about what was supposed to happen to the Gowalla data on Wikipedia. You can trust it about an online site.)
And there’s the business of when this was really written and posted. You may notice on The Blank Screen that every quote has its full first-publication date stated but there is an argument that you make your website seem fresher if you don’t.
I don’t agree with this. Certainly if your latest post is dated six months ago, you’re in trouble. But otherwise, I think you just cost readers some confusion. Most of the time I don’t care when something is written but there are moments when it becomes an issue. Such as here when we can just about place Finn Arne Jørgensen in his car in a certain point in time as well as a certain point in Norway.
Maybe he’s just a very slow writer. But he’s an interesting one. Take a look at the full piece.