Author: wg

Email your To Do tasks right into OmniFocus

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I can’t tell you that I am obsessed with OmniFocus and then go away. Equally, I can’t ram a thousand enthusiasms down your throat. So let me compromise by giving you one reason, just one, that OmniFocus works for me.

Emailing tasks. 

There’s a feature called Maildrop and it is extremely simple yet transformative. Do I mean the word ‘yet’? Maybe it’s so useful, maybe it became so instantly part of my work specifically because it is simple.

Here’s the thing. I’m a writer so I spend a huge amount of time at the keyboard and easily the majority of things I have to deal with come via email. So I’ll read the email and if I can deal with it right then, I’ll deal with it right then. Otherwise, I forward it. 

To my secret OmniFocus email address.

I’ll tap or click the forward button, Mail will auto-complete the address as soon as I type the first couple of letters, and then wallop, sent.

And then the next time I look in my OmniFocus To Do list, there it is. The task is the subject heading of the email – so I might well change that to something more specific either when I’m forwarding it or now as I poke about in OmniFocus – and the body of the email is a note within the task.

Many, many times I will get one email that has several tasks in it. Highlight one of them, tap forward and Mail creates a new message that has only that text in it. Then whack it off to OmniFocus. Go back to the original email, highlight the next bit, whack and wallop.

You could also set rules to do this automatically: any email from your biggest client gets routed straight into OmniFocus for you. I have never once tried this. But you could.

What I have done very often is email in to OmniFocus from wherever I am. OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear but if you’re at a PC or you’re on someone’s Android phone and need to note down a task, email it to your secret address.

Last, if I’ve got an email where my reply is about the task, I’ll BCC it all to my secret OmniFocus address: in one go, my recipient gets his or her reply and I have that task in my ToDo list. 

Once I forgot to BCC it and the secret address showed up in the email I sent someone. Next time I went in to OmniFocus, there was a task waiting: “Pay Jason the £1 million you owe him”.

Harrumph.

I can’t remember a time when Maildrop wasn’t a feature in OmniFocus or when I wasn’t using it. I don’t just mean that as a way of saying cor, it’s great, it’s indispensable. I do think that, although I wish it could do more, but I also mean it literally: I’ve not a clue when I started using it. Which is a huge shame because if you can be bothered to poke about a bit, OmniFocus will tell you how much you use the feature.

I just went to check for you and it says: “Used 982 times, most recently 2 hours ago”.

And the very big surprise for me is that it’s a whole two hours since I last used it.

Learn more about OmniFocus Maildrop here and have a look at the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions here. 

SlydooTasks To Do Manager

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Full disclosure: I’m an OmniFocus obsessive (nee user) and I’ve said before that it would take primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to get me to move away from it.

But then, I was pretty addicted to Appigo’s To Do app before finding OmniFocus so I can be moved. More, OmniFocus isn’t cheap. Actually, I think it is ridiculously cheap given how much use I get out of it and how enormously it has helped me but if you buy it and it just doesn’t do it for you, then it’s expensive. There are three OmniFocus versions (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and I spent £80 ($130 US) on all three.

Whereas SlydooTasks is 69p or 99c US. It’s too soon to say that it’s being recommended to me but I am hearing about it and the thing that keeps being said is that it is particularly good at filtering your tasks: letting you see the wood for the trees. 

Before you spend that whole 69p and, more significantly, the time that it will take you to explore a new app and decide if it’s the one for you, take a look at a YouTube video by the developer that walks through it all: http://youtu.be/g7wJJhc5sk0

And if you then fancy it, SlydooTasks is in the iTunes App Store (UK link, US link).

Hands up, I dun it, it was me

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A fella I’d never heard of writes about working on software I’ve never seen and it is rather compellingly frank. Brad McCarty puts his hand up and accepts mistakes he’s made before talking about how that acceptance led to things getting better:

http://uptake.co/no-room-for-excuses

I found this via The Loop website.

Advice for the overwhelmed

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Lifehacker has a suggestion for – wait, I’m forever telling you about good-to-great Lifehacker articles, have you bookmarked that site yet? – one way to cope when you’re drowning:

http://lifehacker.com/try-an-s-o-s-stop-organize-secure-when-you-re-over-1477798160

Try it. I have my own systems and they are in my book, The Blank Screen (US link, UK link). Mind you, I think this business of coping on bad days is so important and I believe what I can tell you about it is potentially so useful, I give away that Blank Screen chapter for free. Here it is: Bad Days from The Blank Screen.

I hope it and the Lifehacker article are useful to you.

Updated 1Password now available

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A particularly good update for the password-management software is now out on both the makers’ own website and the Mac App Store. This is specifically an update to the Mac version: doubtlessly the Windows one will come soon and the iOS ones have already been updated with these features or the equivalent.

The best of these features being how 1Password handles the times you change your password on a site. I’ve often hit the issue where I’m not sure if I’ve updated the 1Password entry or I’ve created a whole new one. So for my ISP account, for example, I currently have five entries: same username, same website, different password. Every time it’s been that I’ve had the most enormous rush on and couldn’t stop to figure this out, so I’ve ended up saying yes to saving the new password as a new site and given it names like “ISP login FROM JULY 2013”.

Now when you are on a site and you change the password, 1Password says oi, do you want to make a new one or is this an update? One tap, done. 

There are also lots of little nice twiddles in the mini 1Password that lives in your Mac menu bar. I use that more than anything: wherever I am, two key presses and mini 1Password either whacks the username and password in for me on a site or it pops up with a choice of sites or options, whichever I want.

This is release 4.1 of 1Password and it’s free to existing users. We’re special. If you’re not an existing user and you don’t already have anything like 1Password, you need 1Password because there is nothing like it. 

Cost: free to existing users, £34.99 or $49.99 (but check for volume discounts, family packs and special bundles)

More details and download links: http://blog.agilebits.com/2013/12/06/1password-4-1-for-mac-the-little-big-update/

You’re on your own and it’s necessary

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“It just seems like, you agree to have a certain personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone.”

Angela Chase (Claire Danes) in My So-Called Life

pilot episode by Winnie Holzman

Maybe you were the class clown in school. If you run in to someone from there today, you still are. To them. You’re somewhat older and you’ve been through the wars but that doesn’t matter. You’re the clown, they’re the ones who were your best friends even though you now cannot see what you had in common with them. She’s the one you fancied and, god, if you aren’t still tongue-tied talking to her.

We are slotted into types and categories by everyone and we do it to them too. This is true, this has always been true, and it has always been interesting when you run into more than one set of friends at the same time. And it’s hugely more interesting now that we have Facebook and you can see the strata of your life reflected in those friends who knew you here, who knew you there. 

But there is one result of all this that actually holds you back. That stops you doing things.

It’s this. Call five friends and tell them you’re moving to New York. You haven’t got a job there, it’s just something you’ve got to do and you hope to find somewhere cheap to stay at first. I hope that at least one of your friends will be excited for you but you know that at least four, probably all five, will try to talk you out of it.

They’d be right to. No job? Nowhere to stay? They’re looking out for you, they care for you. This would be why they are your five closest friends that you can call about this stuff.

There’s a part of them, too, that reckons New York is a long away and they’ll never see you again. You can’t object to that, that’s lovely.

Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one who goes to New York. You’re not the one who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.

Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.

So you can’t take their advice. You just can’t. If you did, you’d never do anything. I sound like I’m criticising your friends but really the only thing I dislike is what they do afterwards. After you’ve moved to New York, after you’ve started your business. Then they tell you they always knew you could do it. Sometimes they take credit. That, I criticise.

But the rest of this is just practical: no advice from friends, just don’t do it.

If you want to do something, if you want to start something new and your friends cannot give you the advice or help that will get it going, then you’d think that you would turn to strangers.

Unfortunately, if you find a stranger who knows all about New York and starting businesses, the odds are that they sell relocations to New York and they sell services to new businesses. They don’t see you the way you were because they’ve never seen you before. But they also cannot be looking out for you as well as your friends are. 

Which means, sorry, you’re on your own. It’s a horrible place to be because you are a composite of your friends and these strangers: it’s easier to stay where you are and it’s easy to find falsely rose answers too.

Look for people who have done or who are doing what you want to do. Work with them. I believe now that this is why writers’ groups can be so useful: writing is an illness and nobody understands that more than other writers. I say I believe it now because I’ve only recently found a kind of group that works for me. Proper, traditional, meet-every-Friday groups have never done it for me: I’ve not fitted in or the group doesn’t want the same things I do. (Example: I’m a professional writer, I write to be read, but two groups I tried were more into the cathartic nature of writing for oneself, writing for pleasure.  Fine, but not for me.)

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands. It’s a programme without an overt agenda: they even say there are no meetings and sessions, but there end up being meetings and sessions and they are terrific.

I come away from those enthused, fired up, certain that I can do whatever mad idea I currently have – and then I do it.

Thereafter, I’m the guy who does that mad thing. 

I’m being fairly specific about Room 204 here when I wanted to talk in much vaguer generalisations. I’m talking about all of your friends and everything you do.

But hopefully there is one friend who both wants what’s best for you and sees that it is this new mad idea you have to pursue. If you also see both what’s best for her or him and you see that it is their new mad idea that they have to pursue, marry them.

The Steve you’ve never heard of in computers but should have done

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So there’s this computer programmer, right, and we’re talking someone who was the first freelance programmer, who built a UK startup into a firm worth hundreds upon hundreds of millions, who incidentally nearly died in the Holocaust – and I’d never heard of her before today.

And that would all be because of that word ‘her’. 

Dame Steve Shirley.

She was a young girl in Nazi Germany, she was a girl in a boys’ school – because girls’ schools didn’t teach maths – and then she was a woman in computing. A friend’s just written a novel that touches on the topic of the Suffragettes and I couldn’t read it without the old simultaneous emotion of pride that human beings could fight for what was right – and shame that there even needed to be a fight at all. Her novel quotes a journalist of the time and the journalist in me today wants to pick him up by the collar and explain with lots of emphasis about impartiality.

I can’t abdicate responsibility for my ignorance over Dame Shirley: I worked in computing, I wrote a lot about computing, I know a huge amount about the Silicon Valley history, I should know about her. I wrote that subject heading above with the presumptuous presumption that you didn’t know of her either and I’m sorry for trying to drag you into my ignorance.

Now you definitely know about her and now I certainly know about her – and I am an instant fan. Thanks to Brain Pickings and in particular this post about Dame Shirley and her autobiography, Let IT Go. And there’s a terrific video about her on that page.

The fact that she did all she did while so badly treated just because of her sex reminds me of the line that Ginger Rogers danced every step that Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels. 

Best word of the day: Schumpeterianism. And how it can help you be productive

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It apparently means “creative destruction”. I’d not heard the word before and I still can’t pronounce it with confidence, I also have a bit of doubt that I can spell it. So think of this paragraph as my making a run up to leaping straight in to it and seeing if I can write the word Schumpeterianism.

I need tea. Don’t ask me to do that again.

I’d like you to nip straight to this Lifehacker article rather than listen to me but so you know what you’re getting, it’s really a piece about how to take criticism and use it. How to take criticism without it hurting. For some reason this week I’ve been in several conversations where something similar has come up: my The Blank Screen book has a whole chapter called How to Get Rejected and it’s helped people. A reader tweeted at me that this specific chapter had ignited him. Oh, that felt good.

But hang on, you can read The Blank Screen any time. (If you’re in the States, it’s waiting for you here instead.) Have you already seen this article about – deep breath and no, I hadn’t thought of copy-and-paste until you just said it – Schumpeterianism?

If I got that word wrong the first time, I’ve now just copied-and-pasted the error. So much for your great idea, thanks a bunch. I blame you.

The you who I hope is now nipping off to read the original piece here on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/apply-schumpeterianism-to-push-through-criticism-and-1473769363