Advice

One quick tip for writers to save money

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This applies to anyone buying anything online but we writers need every trick we can get. That’s so even if the trick and the tip in question is really small.

This is really small. But it’s saved me enough over the years that I want to be sure that you know it too:

When you’ve picked an item on an online store and put it in your shopping basket, open a second tab and google the name of the store plus the phrase ‘voucher’.

Nine times out of ten, you won’t get anything useful. Nine times out of ten you will be told there are discounts available for that reseller and there aren’t, it’s just to get you to click through or join up or something. But once in a while, and just often enough, you get 5%, 10% and 20% discount vouchers.

Usually what you get is some code word or serial number: copy that and you’ll find a spot to paste it on the online store’s checkout page.

If it worked every time, I’d have told you before. But it happens enough that Angela got an extra present this Christmas.

OmniOutliner 2 for iPad revisited

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I wrote here about how good this app was when it first came out a few months ago but today MacNN.com ran a new piece of mine about how great it is after you’ve been using it for those few months. It’s an outlining application and I am not naturally a guy who likes outlines but what I wrote includes this:

This is one of those apps where the feature list doesn’t tell you what you need to know. All outlining software lets you slap down some headings as you think of them and then fill in details or shove thoughts around until everything looks sensible. The difference between these apps is in how little they get in the way of your starting, how much they help you as you go along, and then how much you can do with your outline at the end of it.

You can open OmniOutliner on your iPad and just get going: we’ve been testing it for months on assorted jobs and keep coming back to the very basic options for their sheer speed and ease of use. But one project was going to be for several different audiences who would need different amounts of detail. We just outlined as normal but added extra columns for these audiences, adding notes where we needed to and knowing that as we adjusted the outline, those notes would follow.

Hands On: OmniOutliner 2 (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (3 January 2015)

Do read my full piece. Though I say full, I’d like to be fuller: there are options and features I didn’t get you. The one that’s on my mind to tell you is that I have a base outline now for a particular workshop I do and while I rewrite the presentation every single time, I can now start with this one outline and start shuffling. Once or twice while I’ve been presenting I’ve also tapped a button and had OmniOutliner record audio right into the outline too. That’s been invaluable when I’m revising the presentation and can simply hear how people reacted to sections where we were all talking and discussing.

I do like software and I do love software that transforms my working life. But there is a special place in my heart for software that changes my mind about something. I’m still not a natural outliner, I still like diving ahead and seeing where I end up, but more and more I’m using OmniOutliner to help me get jobs done well and faster.

Take a year off every seven years

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So there’s this fella named Stefan Sagmeister, right, and every seven years he closes his design business for the next 12 months. The obvious first thought is that this is nice for him, a second obvious thought is that you hope it’s nice for his staff if he has any – he’s not all that clear on this point – and maybe a third obvious thought is that this idea is bloody expensive.

I suspect that last, least, most unlikely obvious thought is that you’ll do this too or that you could do it too. Still, he’s very convincing about the benefits and actually rather convincing about the necessity too. Enough so that it’s making me wonder whether I’d benefit from closing my business for a minute.

Be the worst

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I feel this is more likely to apply to you than it is to me but the crux of this is that if you are the best person in a group, get out. Finance writer Emma Lincoln:

In fact, you should always try to the be the worst one in the room. If you’re the best one in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

That’s why I read other personal finance blogs, and why I’m helping organize a personal finance retreat this summer. Because when I spend time around people who (metaphorically and physically) kick my finance-ass, I’m inspired to work that much harder to hone my money-saving skills.

And when I meet couples who have done incredible things together, built homes together, traveled the world together, saved a million dollars together, I’m inspired to go deeper with A, to seek out the goals that are the most challenging to set.

Are You the Worst? – Emma Lincoln (29 December 2014)

Read the full piece. Also, hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting this.

Coincidence: more on using OmniFocus

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It’s the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: when you hear about something, you then seem to hear about it a lot. (I know. It’s weird that a psychology idea is named after a terrorist organisation but it is, so.) With my own need to restart how I use OmniFocus pressing on my head, I just found this via the excellent SimplicityIsBliss.com. As with so many things to do with software, I don’t think every detail of it is right for me but there’s a lot of good ideas in here.

And that’s especially true if you have or are considering OmniFocus but don’t know or don’t want to know the Getting Things Done (GTD) system that it follows:

do not use OmniFocus the GTD way (at least I do not think I do given that I have not read the book). I do use OmniFocus the way that works best for me.

OmniFocus and this my way workflow ensures that I never forget a task, a commitment or an action, mine and others. It keeps me focussed on what I need to be doing now. It reminds me what to do next. It helps build an agenda for what to discuss with people, and what was talked about before. It helps me know what was done and why.

Without it, I could not manage the myriad of projects, tasks, actions, commitments and reminders I deal with every day. And to make things even better, OmniFocus 2 evolved towards my way and added ease of use and features where my way needed it the most. I am sure that for many of you of you, the GTD way works well. For others, you have your own ways to use OmniFocus. This was mine.

Omnifocus My Way – Hilton Lipschitz, The Hiltmon (26 May 2014)

Read the full piece.

Yes! Chocolate improves your memory

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There’s more to this, in fact there’s a lot more and it’s all to do with improving your memory or something, but I focused only on tip number 1:

1. Nibble on chocolate: Just this week, we learned that eating chocolate might lessen age-related memory loss. Columbia University researchers studied almost 40 adults between 50 and 69 years old, and found that those who drank a high-flavanol cocoa mix every day for three months performed better on memory tests and had higher activity in the area of the brain linked with memory

Ways To Boost Your Memory – Samantha Zabell, Real Simple (no date)

Read the full piece for the rest. Best to get a bar of Bournville dark chocolate first, though. For some reason. Hat tip to Time magazine for spotting this on 31 December 2014.

Starting over with OmniFocus and Evernote

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I think this is digital decluttering. And like all decluttering, I already know which of it I’m going to put off. My Evernote is a steaming mess of about 4,000 notes with 800 of them in the inbox and if it weren’t for the software’s very good search feature, I’d be regularly sunk. But it does have good search, I am not sunk, it can wait another day.

Whereas I’m starting over with OmniFocus.

This is my rather beloved to do app and I put my ability to cope with lots of projects entirely down to this software. But one big new project came in December and is hopefully continuing for a long time. I have two meetings this month that should lead to one enormous project and one gigantically enormous series of projects. Can’t wait.

Plus one big change at the end of 2014 meant a thing I do that has been albatross-shaped is pretty much entirely gone. I’ve walked away from a thing and am feeling so good about it that I think might even start to enjoy saying no.

But.

One bad project gone, one new one in, two new ones looming and most things churning over, it is time to apply that ability to say no. Time to review everything and chuck out what I don’t want to do, what I am not going to get to.

And the reason to do it is not that I’m some kind of OCD-based guy who needs everything in its place. I refer you to the steaming mess of Evernote above. The reason is that lately there has been so much in OmniFocus – I have added so much – that I’ve stopped checking it. You shouldn’t have your head in OmniFocus all day but you really should look at it from time to time. A very sensible thing to do is look at it first thing in the morning, for instance, and that’s where I go wrong.

When you have a lot on and some of it is pressing at you terribly, you go straight to the keys and you start working on that. If checking OmniFocus were a quick thing, as it is built to be, as it is intended to be, then two minutes checking that while I boil the kettle will help my day astonishingly.

I’ve been looking through my OmniFocus now and can tell you that I have 2,513 things to do and they’re arranged in 88 projects. It could be worse: while I was looking, I ticked off something like 30 tasks that I’ve actually done and just not got around to noting.

Take a look at these 88 projects, though:

That is a mind map I did over Christmas: it’s a visual representation of everything I was working on at the end of 2014 and my only hope is that the image is too small for you to see the details. What I want you to see is how steamingly messy it all is. And I want you to see it so that you are hopefully nodding when you see this next shot, which is how I’m doing the projects for 2015:

Is that better? It’s certainly duller with all those colours reduced to just a couple. But I did this in an app called MindNode, which I do recommend a lot, and it chooses the colours. Add a new thing, it gives you a new colour. So that overall purpleness is not a choice, it is a consequence of my collapsing things into fewer categories, fewer projects.

Next job: translate that mindmap into OmniFocus folders and projects. Back in a bit.

Make a tickler file be more than a nice name

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I like tickler files but really just because I like the name. They’re a system for making sure you don’t miss events that happen some months off or tasks that should be done at certain times of the year. They’re also meant to be paper files, specifically the kind of cortina-expanding file folder I can just about distantly remember. And that’s why ticklers are just names to me: I need a software equivalent.

Here’s someone with a solution. But first, their definition of what a tickler file is good for:

Put simply, a tickler is a method of ensuring that information that you need gets to you at the right time. For example, if you receive tickets to a concert that takes place on 21 Feb 2015, then you don’t need those tickets until that day. With a tickler, you can make sure that your tickets resurface on the correct day but you can forget about them until then. The concept works with meeting agendas, invoices, subscription renewals and any other task that needs to happen at a specific time.

The reminders function of many software programs can be seen as a tickler function but the most effective ticklers won’t just remind you of something at a specific time, they’ll provide all of the relevant information at the same time. Lots of apps can do this but my preferred solution is Evernote.

Four Steps to Create a Digital Tickler File – unnamed author, Productivity SOS (29 December 2014)

Possibly the only thing you need to know in order to work out this whole process is the last word in that quote: Evernote. I’m an Evernote user and even today was glad that I was: a telephone support line said something like “Well, when did you phone us before?” and because of Evernote I was able to say “17 November, next question?” like a right smartarse. I actually think that this particular use of it takes more effort than I’d stick with but take a look: it’s smart and it clearly works if it works for you. Read the full piece.

Turn your To Do tasks into an art project

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There are principles here that I like very much but it’s also heavily paper- and sticker-based and I just can’t handle Post-It Notes and colouring in. So I won’t be following Kelly Maguire’s exact advice but it’s terribly interesting how she turned her life around with a felt-tip pen:

For the past few months I’ve been waking up in a cold sweat freaking out about things I forgot to take care of. A lot of it is little — like forgetting to schedule a hair appointment until after they’ve closed for the day. Some of it is bigger — like the Kickstarter I did a few years ago that fizzled out. And a few things are huge — like the fact that I completely bungled my corporate tax filings for the last three years.

With some nudging from my therapist and support from my husband, I finally managed to get on top of things. My to-do list has gone from “deal with three years of back taxes” to more mundane stuff like “clean up the dried paint in the bathroom.” I used a handful of different strategies to gain control, which I’ll detail in a sec, but the biggest key to staying motivated has been to turn it into something like an art project.

Time management as an art project – Kelly Maguire, Offbeat Home (1 January 2015)

One thing she uses is called a Chronodex and you’ll see why she likes it plus she tells you where to get them for yourself, but that’s not a Chronodex…

…that’s Moonbase Alpha.


Read the full piece.

Bollocks to New Year’s Resolutions

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Look, it’s your choice: say bollocks to them now or say bollocks to them in a few days, weeks or maybe if you’re very strong, months. The start of a new year comes with more engineering strain than it should, given that the whole thing is an artificial construct and – wait, that does sound like engineering.

I mean this in the same way that you see when we change our clocks, putting them forward or back an hour. Every single time I can guarantee I will end up in a conversation where it’s 8pm, say, and someone tells me that: “Of course, it’s really only 7pm”.

No, it isn’t.

It isn’t 7pm, it isn’t 8pm, the very most you can say about it is that it’s now. (I have a watch that just says ‘Now’ instead of having any hands or digits at all. It is by far the most accurate watch I’ve ever had though I think it’s lost some time lately. That’s my excuse for buying an Apple Watch and I’m sticking to that.)

Anyway, we just collectively agree to call now 7pm or 8pm or whatever it is. There’s a rich source of drama in this – Alan Plater did two terrific radio and then stage plays about when the UK adopted one single time zone and it’s the only time I’ve resented him for finding the drama before me – but now, right now, the clock and the calendar are the same. They are artificial constructs, things we created and that we choose to agree on.

Which all makes sense and is in all ways sensible, practical and – yep – productive. What isn’t is all this stuff we hang on to certain days like pegs. Our birthdays. Shouldn’t it be our mothers getting presents? Anniversary of some seriously painful stuff there. And New Year’s Day. If you didn’t make any resolutions, you at least thought about how you’re not making resolutions.

And if you did then you also know that the New Year’s Resolution Effect lasts but a very short time. Come a rotten wet Tuesday in February, the resolution field is at best membrane-thin.

Which means at some point you go from feeling you must and/or should make resolutions to feeling bad that you failed at them. Come next New Year’s Eve and the next cycle, you go through the same thing but now you have last year’s failure weighing on you. You have every year’s failure weighing on you. If there were ever a resolution that you might actually succeed at, you kill your own chance by the certain and correct knowledge that you have failed every single time before.

Seriously, then. Bollocks to it all.

Don’t make a resolution for the New Year, don’t plan to change something for your life, do something to change today. Do something different or better or new or worse or stupid or anything today. Then tomorrow you have a success on your hands. Possibly a regret too, but we need a few of those.

We want so much and we can do so much. But we can do it one pixel at a time.

Listen, I am by nature a pessimist and I fight it chiefly by racing to do the next thing before the current one dies. Christmas and New Year is sometimes tough for me because I can’t do so much racing. But I used to believe – and I used to think I was clever in believing – that the walk of a thousand miles ends with but 10,997 steps.

(I worked it out.)

This is true. It is also true that the usual form of that saying, about beginning such a walk, is trite and cliché.

But it has a point.

I just think we need to add one more point to it.

Work on something you enjoy doing now and get the enjoyment out of it now. Whether it becomes something bigger, whether you finish the novel or get the TV commission, there is pleasure and satisfication and accomplishment and art in the journey. So enjoy the journey.

Lighten up about the new year and bollocks to new year’s resolutions.