Author: William Gallagher

Five signs your office is creative

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If you ask me, there is just one: you produce creative work creatively. Do that and you’re creative, QED. But when you’re looking at a particular office space, there are things you can tell immediately.

Such as this: if there are big, wall-sized decorations with words like “Imagination” then there will be creative people consciously ignoring them. That’s what non-creative people think these offices need and the real creatives are the ones who wouldn’t be seen dead being motivated by that.

Visual.ly believes there are more visible indicators of office creativity and, I suppose naturally, the site lists its top five visually. Have a look.

And you think you’re busy

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Assuming you’re not actually overloaded at this very moment, take an hour or so to look at people who are. These are showrunners: American TV producers who have to run their dramas like businesses.

It is truly a phenomenal job in terms of having to be productive – and productive all the time. I remember one showrunner mentioning in an interview that the shock of the job was just how many decisions you had to make in the moments walking back from the toilet to your office.

Decisions that affect the employment of at least dozens, typically hundreds. Decisions that affect the enjoyment of millions and thereby the income, sometimes counted in the billions of dollars, that your studio or network will get.

Video chatting phones – in 1970

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Bell Labs was right about so many aspects of video chatting.

They were right that it would a little bit awkward. That it’d provide “an enhanced feeling of proximity and intimacy.” That people would use it as a way to get out of tiresome business trip. That, someday, really, we’d all use it.

They were just wrong about how much anyone would be willing to pay for it.

In 2014, video chatting is one of the clearest “hey-it-really-is-the-future” features of day-to-day life. But it was first commercially available 44 years ago, when Bell Labs debuted the private “picturephone” in Pittsburgh in 1970.

The First ‘Picturephone’ for Video Chatting Was a Colossal Failure – Sarah Laskow, The Atlantic (12 September 2014)

OmniFocus 2 for iPad just days away

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And it’s going to look a lot like OmniFocus 2 for Mac. These are good things.

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The Omni Group just announced:

Well, we’re very happy to share that OmniFocus 2 for iPad and OmniGraffle 2 for iPad have been submitted to Apple for review. And they’re both incredible.

OmniFocus 2 for iPad has some great new features and a brand new look. We’ve added a few useful extensions, too, like Sharing and a Today view. You can even create perspectives in Pro.

And finally. Expect each of those extensions in OmniFocus 2 for iPad in OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. As a free update, of course.

Just a short bit about a few apps and iOS 8 – Derek R., The Omni Blog (12 September 2014)

I’m not sure what that bit about extensions means. The full piece has a little more about iOS 8 which notably adds this new type of feature called Extensions but I’m not clear that’s what this is about. If it is then it means we’ll have OmniFocus functions available within other or all apps. That’s got to be good: that might add to the Mail Drop capability of adding tasks from Mail.

But we’ll see. And whatever the extensions are, I will have bought OmniFocus 2 for iPad before reading to the end of the sentence that says it’s available.

Shrug. Might work. Music to be productive by

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I don’t know. The other day I got into a right Kate Bush mood – it happens to us all – and I did find that I was incapable of playing her music while I worked. Couldn’t let it be playing, I had to listen hard, I simply could not concentrate on anything else.

Naturally, then, I switched her off and went to my old Discoveries playlist. (Don’t click that. It goes to a confessional piece with a long list of music and I am still holding on to the hope that you respect me.)

Allegedly, apparently and reportedly, there are alternatives to music you like. There is music you don’t listen to.

There’s a joke there, but I’m not reaching for it.

Music to be productive by. You can tell I’m not sold. But see what you think: if it works for you, I’ll give it another go.

It gets different

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You’re a writer, this happens to you: you go into a hole. Maybe it’s because you’ve had a big rejection or lot of little ones or maybe it’s just cyclical and the way you are, the way you unfortunately have to be.

I’d like to say that it gets better.

But that’s a bit Hallmark Card-like for me.

So instead, let me offer you this: it gets different.

And that is better.

Lifehacker picks the best productivity books

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Well, sort of. Very often Lifehacker.com will ask readers what their favourite something or other is and then after a few days will reveal the top five. This time, it seems a bit more open season: go to this thread and nominate a book you like.

So, for instance, you could nominate, oh, The Blank Screen – UK edition or maybe the US edition.

Thank you.

But right now there are some sixty-odd recommendations in there and I truly didn’t know there were sixty-odd productivity books. Take a look through the comments so far and see if there’s anything that takes your fancy.

This is the US edition of Lifehacker so naturally the books are chiefly American but if you can’t order them from Amazon UK, you can still get them from Amazon US and wait a bit.

Urgent – Nisus Writer Pro for Mac on sale (briefly)

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This one is important. Nisus Writer is the strangely still little-known and unfortunately a bit little-used word processor for Macs. While every other Mac word processor died in battle against Microsoft Word, this one mostly carried on. It was wounded, it may have had some time in a coma, but it survived and in recent years has been bounding back.

I don’t use it.

But Nisus is special to me because of its history and specifically of how it was the first to introduce features we now depend on. The one that jumped into my head was non-contiguous selection. Cor. That’s a teeshirt phrase. But it means being able to highlight that sentence over there, then that sentence down here, and copying them at the same time. It’s not just a time saver for copying out bits of text you need, it’s a boon at the other end to. When you hit Paste, it all goes there in one go.

I remember using it for repurposing copy from somewhere. Can’t quite recall. Maybe something like a bio where I knew these three or four bits would help in whatever pitch I was doing. Copied those out, pasted them into one new bio and I could’ve just sent the lot off like that but equally I could take some of this reclaimed time and spend it crafting the bits into one good, persuasive whole.

Anyway.

Thanks for reading my reminiscing, now go take a look at the deal. This is a MacUpdate deal, nothing to do with me, and for an extremely limited time it’s got Nisus Writer Pro for 50% off. So that’s $39.50 instead of $79.

I think $79 is a bargain anyway. But don’t be like the colleague of mine who decided to buy Final Draft 9 one day after it was on a half-price sale.

Plan ahead and lie about it, if necessary

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Here’s the thing. George S Kaufman read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men when it was published in 1937 and immediately commissioned him to write a theatre version of it. Reportedly Kaufman said: “I don’t know if there’s a dollar in it, but it’s got to be prepared for the stage and Steinbeck’s the man to do it.”

Not only did he buy the rights and commission Steinbeck, he put the writer up at his ranch.

Fine. And especially fine since at some point around then Steinbeck announced: “I don’t go to the theatre much and I don’t know a darn thing about actors.”

But he may have been telling a pork. Like all writers do when necessary, like you need to do a bit more often. Don’t seem needy but do be ready.

For in correspondence with George Albee the year before, Steinbeck said: “It is a tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theatre.”

So he was planning a stage version long before he was commissioned. (Does that sound familiar to you at all?) You have to admire his chutzpah but you also have to admire his stage play, which in this 77th year is being revived all over the world – including a production at my favourite, the Birmingham Rep.

Where he may differ from a lot of us is that he didn’t go to see his play. It opened in New York City, it opened on Broadway and it opened to immediate rave reviews and big business, but he didn’t go. Reportedly, he believed that his script was perfect and that any actual production would necessarily be a let down.

Ah, we all think that about our writing.

Don’t seem needy but do be ready. And maybe a bit more modest, I don’t know.

Of Mice and Men is coming to the Birmingham Rep from 10 October to 1 November and you can buy his perfect – I do agree with him – playscript from Amazon here.

Advance word: productivity mentoring coming soon

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Partly for your information and partly for mine: let me tell you that The Blank Screen productivity workshops are shortly to become very personal. As in one to one. As in dealing specifically with what is holding you back in your writing.

All I can specifically reveal now is that the mentoring will be based around Skype calls and where possible also face to face meetings.

I’ll tell you much more, including pricing, when it’s finalised but I wanted to tell you now because I also want to ask you: would you find it useful to have one to one mentoring with me?

I really fancy it because I’m dying to know what you’re doing. If you think you might be interested, let me know in an email to wg@williamgallagher.com. You’re not signing up to anything, you’re not committing, it’d just help me to have an idea of your interest and perhaps ask you about the kinds of things I can help you with.

I’m also telling you this now because I’m just so excited about it. Workshops are fantastic, but the individual sessions I’ve done so far have been deeply interesting.