Author: William Gallagher

What happens when you switch off your smartphone

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I mean, seriously switch it off. Keep it as a phone instead of the entire world in your pocket and knocking at your door. Spoiler 1: it works out just fine.

Spoiler 2: I’m not going to find out for myself.

I’m fine with reading about it in a happy piece from someone who has now clearly achieved the kind of zen utopian state we can all aspire to just so long as we never get there:

In 2012, I realized I had a problem.

My iPhone made me twitchy. I could feel it in my pocket, calling me, like the Ring called Bilbo Baggins. It distracted me from my kids. It distracted me from my wife. It distracted me anytime, anywhere. I just didn’t have the willpower to ignore email and Twitter and Instagram and the whole world wide web. Infinity in my pocket was too much.

I wanted to get control, but I didn’t want to give up my iPhone altogether. I loved having Google Maps and Uber and Find Friends and an amazing camera.

So I decided to try an experiment. I disabled Safari. I deleted my mail account. I uninstalled every app I couldn’t handle. I thought I’d try it for a week.

My year with a distraction-free iPhone (and how to start your own experiment) – Jake Knapp, Medium (31 August 2014)

Find out what exactly happened and how to do it yourself, if necessary.

All rise and sing a song of praise to your employer

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Look, I worked for the BBC and we didn’t sing about it. We came close: we were so enthralled by the idea and the ideal of the corporation that we took lower pay and kept higher hopes, but still, there are limits. We used to get very, very sarcastic about the motivational signs around the offices. I can’t imagine how we would’ve reacted to having to sing songs about the Beeb.

But I’d like to. I’d like to imagine it. I’d like to have seen what we made of being asked to sing lyrics like this:

Thomas Watson is our inspiration,
Head and soul of our splendid I.B.M.
We are pledged to him in every nation,
Our President and most beloved man.
His wisdom has guided each division
In service to all humanity
We have grown and broadened with his vision,
None can match him or our great company.
T. J. Watson, we all honor you,
You’re so big and so square and so true,
We will follow and serve with you forever,
All the world must know what I. B. M. can do.

—from “To Thos. J. Watson, President, I.B.M. Our Inspiration”

Altogether now.

That’s from a book called Songs of the IBM – and if the phrase “the IBM” doesn’t pin this down to a certain time for you, I will. It’s 1937. ‘Square’ was a compliment and workers were willing to compliment their bosses in 4/4 time.

Go take a look at Ars Technica’s coverage of this historical gem. No, don’t look, take a gawp.

Elders react to Oculus Rift

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It makes a change from all those stories about teenagers reacting sarcastically to old technology: this is a video about older people reacting confusedly to new technology.

Notice that I said older, not old. And ‘elder’ is in the title of the video.

This has nothing to do with how I happen to be old enough that I have only just about got the faintest notion what Oculus Rift is and not quite as much interest:

You’re still on your own

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Earlier this year I wrote a piece called You’re On Your Own and It’s Necessary. I did it over on my personal blog, Self Distract, but it so belonged here that I nicked it for the book Filling the Blank Screen.

The point of it was that we naturally turn to others when we are hoping to do something new but those others naturally hold us back. It’s a sticky subject and a rocky road but we do make ourselves into the people we are and our friends tend to be ten minutes behind us while our families can be years and years behind us.

What I recommended in the piece was that you seek out people who are doing what you want to do and you ask them about it. They are naturally going to be biased: if it’s worked for them, they will be enthusiastic and if it hasn’t, they’ll be over-enthusiastic to cover that they were wrong. But still right or wrong, genuine or false, real or not, they are speaking from experience.

I keep thinking and thinking about a writer I hired once. This was a very long time ago and what specific details I can remember, I can’t tell you. But let’s say he had a very specific niche he wrote in. That’s what I hired him for and he was fine, I was happy with the piece. We chatted away during the process, though, and he told me that he’d discussed this niche with his wife and they are concluded that he needed to invest in rather a lot of specialised equipment so that he was able to write from authority. I can picture that conversation, I’ve had that conversation, and it scares me.

Here were two smart people discussing something crucial to their futures. And I don’t know, but I had the impression his wife wasn’t a writer and wasn’t in this specialised niche. So her best source of information about it was her husband.

And I thought he was wrong.

This specialised equipment was expensive and it changes a lot, he would be spending a lot of money now and then regularly spending a lot more. I wasn’t sure there was enough interest in this specialism to earn him much money writing about it. He got that article out of me but I never returned to the topic while I was on that magazine.

I just think a lot about this pair discussing and deciding their futures based on a possibly false premise. I think about it a lot. I think about it especially when having potentially similar conversations with my wife, Angela. We discuss everything and I need her, I don’t feel I know something until I’ve got her take on it.

But very many times she will be working from only what I’ve told her. What if I’m wrong?

And I am wrong, of course, I am wrong often. Such as when I started writing this to you and I had an idea that I wanted to explore certain things. It was going to be all about that previous article – it was recently picked up by another site and I’ve had head-jerkingly gorgeous comments on it – and it was going to be about more. I was thinking about how when we write for places we can be deeply embedded there yet we can also be outsiders.

I was going to explore that as a way of baring my soul a bit to you. Making myself uncomfortable about it because I’m working with about ten groups and organisations and eight of them are making me feel terribly important, terribly good. But that leaves two where I am and I feel that I am an outsider.

I was going to examine why this was affecting me when I’m a writer and I am self-employed: I really belong only and solely to my own group, my own company. I was thinking about how you go native and it can colour how you see things.

But instead I went off into this business of whether I am wrong, whether we are wrong, ultimately whether we can ever be right. That cuts closer to me than even this inclusion/exclusion topic that is so on my mind this weekend. And I know that you’re finding it a bit miserable. I can see it in you.

You’re wrong.

Yes, we can end up making our decisions based on faulty or incomplete premises. We can certainly put too much on the shoulders of our partners even as we deny them impartial or better sources of information. But isn’t that life?

And isn’t that actually rather good? Scary, sure, but also alive.

I was with someone today who was going to a music festival specifically to find out what it was like, in fact going in order to have gone. She was planning it like mad, she spoke of finding out the rules when she gets there. I’ve never been to a music festival but it seems to me that the point of it, beyond hopefully enjoying the music, is to dive in without a plan, without all that much thought, and just swim.

It reminded me of a line in Doctor Who where Christopher Eccleston, performing a Russell T Davies script, says to a new companion that:

“The thing is, Adam, time travel is like visiting Paris. You can’t just read the guidebook, you’ve got to throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers – or is that just me?”

It gets harder. It really gets harder. But without deliberately making bad choices, without deliberately deluding yourself, take the impossibility of predicting the future as an excuse, as a reason, to go make as many futures as you can.

Elmore Leonard’s other rules for writing

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So here’s the thing. Elmore Leonard wrote a lot of seemingly very visual novels but he’s somehow been really poorly served by the film and TV dramatisations of his work. Consequently I think he’s underrated but one thing that has made him a star with writers is his famous list of 10 Rules for us.

Here’s that list in the New York Times and if you don’t know it, it’s more interesting that what I’ve got for you now.

But if you do know it, take a look at this. This is a video of actor Timothy Olyphant – star of perhaps the best Leonard dramatisation, the series Justified – reading from the novel Swag. It’s a section about two criminals and includes Elmore Leonard’s rules for being criminals. I think it’s equal parts fascinating and revealing that there is so much crossover in his two lists of rules;

Hat tip to The Atlantic.

So what do you think of this?

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I promise I do this for real, I don’t do it from some contrived Machiavellian planning: if I don’t know something, I’ll ask. But you can use this simple thing in a contrived Machiavellian planning way.

Even if you believe in the whole “There’s no such thing as a stupid question” mantra, sometimes you’d just rather hold your tongue than look stupid. New research suggests, however, that you’ll appear more competent to others if you ask for advice rather than keeping quiet.

Asking for Advice Makes You Look More Competent, Not Stupider – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (28 August 2014)

I’m not sure stupider is a real word, but.

But I think the principle is true because I’ve seen it: if you ask someone their advice or their opinion, they do like it. I don’t think that’s surprising but what might be is that because you have made them feel smart by asking them, they really do conclude that you are smart for the same reason. You’ve spotted how clever they are, therefore you are clever. QED.

Aren’t we human beings peculiar?

No, unless we set out to use contrived Machiavellian planning.

Sticks work better than carrots – official

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I do this all the time: unless I work enough to earn these things, I constantly deny myself gardening, vegetables, milk chocolate, football, all sorts of things. I may help me cope with the loss of these with periodic dark chocolate, tea and good books but that’s private, that’s my business.

We do often hear that we can reward ourselves when we do something and I’ve done that. But there is an argument that the masochists amongst us are right to punish themselves into action. Plus, we’re writers, that’s practically a synonym for masochists.

Fast Company suggests what I think is a halfway house between punishment and reward. Risk. Specifically, do something to trigger our loss aversion, which is a technical term to describe our aversion to losing things.

Self-motivation comes in a numbers of forms but masochism, on its face, seems like a dubious strategy. But what if various boundaries aren’t enough?

In those cases, when something absolutely has to get done, we have another, albeit extreme suggestion: Waste large sums of money.

“The science of loss aversion says that we hate losing $100 about twice as much as we like winning $100,” said Nick Crocker, behavior change expert and founder of the fitness app Sessions, which MyFitnessPal acquired in 2013.

What Results? Try Punishing Yourself – Rebecca Greenfield, Fast Company (28 August 2014)

Greenfield’s full piece makes this case but uses a New York Times article about loss aversion and that article is more akin to the sunk cost theory I’ve covered before. This is off the point of punishing yourself to get results but I think it does tie in to how we hang on to things we should ditch but just can’t because we fear losing anything.

New York Times:

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even something as simple as a coin toss demonstrates our aversion to loss. In a recent interviews, Mr. Kahneman shared the usual response he gets to his offer of a coin toss:

“In my classes, I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’

“People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”

In other words, we’re willing to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid the possibility of losing.

The Sketch Guy: Overcoming an Aversion to Loss – Carl Richards, New York Times (9 Decemeber 2013)

Sometimes you just have to let things go. Because they’re already gone.

Streaming yourself writing – madness or genius?

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I lean toward madness. But that’s just in general life. Over this specific question, I truly do not know. I do know that I won’t be doing this. But maybe it has more benefits than it might seem. This is a video of a fella named Ross Pruden. It’s a video of him writing. For hours.

Actually, for four hours. He says at the top that it’s a marathon five-hour writing session but, face it, he could’ve been pretty sure nobody would watch to the end to find out. Let the man have a lunch break, why don’t you?

There’s a lot of piddling about at the top but then it is a straight locked-off shot of this man typing. You can’t see what he’s writing but there is a clock, a word count and a total number of stories he’s written. All these numbers go up just about exactly as excitingly as football scores change on Ceefax. I’m honestly torn over what I’d watch more of: at least football has – no, I’m stuck for anything football has. Fortunately, there are other choices than football or this, but before you too race off to ANYTHING else, do take a peek.

Take a peek to see if I’m kidding. I’m not, but you need to know. And then have a think: is he doing this because it’s a brutally persistent form of accountability? To save you digging into this as I have, you should know that Pruden has a bit of a mission on: he was trying to raise Kickstarter funds for a writing project. Is it a spoiler if I tell you he succeeded? Take a look at his Kickstarter page.

But maybe, just maybe, we could live stream ourselves writing. You and I. Maybe it would be competing for the world’s most boring Skype call – a hotly contested trophy – or maybe it would really, really, really make us write.

You go first.

After Pruden:

Who cooks your breakfast at 5am?

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Nobody. What are you, mad?

I do this thing of getting up at 5am to work and I’ve mentioned it enough that last night I got into a conversation about how it works, specifically what my morning pattern is. And the key thing a friend wanted to know was whether my wife Angela also got up at 5am, whether she cooked me breakfast.

This is a friend and she wondered this: I cannot believe you have given my morning routine a single thought but if she’s wondered this, maybe you have too and I really can’t leave you thinking Angela has to do this stupid thing just because I have to do this stupid thing.

I’m up at five and I shower and I do make some tea, naturally, but then I’m straight to the keyboard and I am working. Around 7am, maybe 8am on some days, Angela will get up and I will cook breakfast for us both.

I feel I’m wasting your time telling you this but the slightest possibility that you’d think I’m off here in fairyland pretending to be an early morning writer while Angela suffers, I can’t bear that. Shudder.

Now, since you’ve got me on the subject, I am ravenous. Wait while I phone Angela up and ask what she’s made me for lunch.

Shudder 2.