Advice

“Why I Left iCloud Reminders for Todoist”

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I’m just after telling you that Things is briefly free now on iOS and I was thinking of saying it’s the second-best To Do app on Apple gear. But there is this: Todoist. I’ve used it and haven’t in fact got one single pixel of a memory of what I thought about it. But MacStories writer Federico Viticci is a fan and a compellingly persuasive one.

In a three-biscuit long article, he talks about how Apple’s Reminders turned out to be much better than he’d expected yet eventually he had to move on:

Reminders isn’t built to scale for people who manage dozens of projects and collaborate with others to assign tasks and keep track of due dates. It’s not Apple’s fault – it’s right there in the name: Reminders. It’s not called “Projects” or “Todo Pro”: Reminders is a lightweight list system with support for dates, alerts, and lists shared with others.

I guess it was naive of me to think that, with a growing business and changes to my personal life, I wouldn’t face an increased amount of responsibilities. Reminders couldn’t keep track of the new complexities and people in my life. I started forgetting about things I needed to do; sometimes I forgot to mark tasks as done so other people wouldn’t know what my status was; and, other times Reminders wasn’t working for them but I was forcing them to use it because “iCloud never had issues for me”. Both the Reminders app for Mac and Fantastical for iOS were overflowing with assignements and notes that were hard to find and that just kept piling on each other day after day.

Why I Left iCloud Reminders for Todoist – Federico Viticci, MacStories (19 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Very important: Things for iOS is briefly free

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Stop reading this and go get both the iPad and the separate iPhone version of Things on the App Store.

Are you back? Things is important because it’s a very good To Do manager and I don’t believe it’s ever gone free before. I could be wrong, but To Do apps fall into four tiers that they generally stay in. There’s your free ones, your low-price, your higher price and your OmniFocus.

To my mind OmniFocus is the best by far and what it does for me is worth an awful lot more than its asking price. I used to say that I relied on OmniFocus so much that if I had to pay the money again, I would. I don’t say that any more – because I did pay the money again. New versions came out and I bought them faster than you can read this sentence.

But.

Before I found OmniFocus, I very strongly considered Things.

In its favour, it has a great name. I’ve got Things to do. Sold. I am a sucker for a good name and this is a good name. Then it seemed to me that it was more powerful than anything else I’d tried up to then and at the time I was moving to needing something with much, much more oomph. I had so much more to do at that point and actually it’s only got worse.

Also, Things looks great. Today I’d say OmniFocus looks very good and even if it didn’t, the look wouldn’t be enough to make me switch. Right now, this minute, nothing is enough to make me switch. But you spend a hell of a lot of time in your To Do app so the look – both in terms of its aesthetics and in how it works for, what you press and what you tap – that’s important. You can’t quantify it but you also can’t deny it.

In the end, I think I tried the Mac version and it just didn’t take. Not for me. I wish I could tell you why, I wish I could point to something. I can with the iPad version that I’ve just downloaded and played with: there doesn’t appear to be a way to set a start date for a task. A deadline, sure, but not a start date. I regularly now have work that is scheduled months out and while I need to plan for them, it’s unproductive of me to plan now, to plan the day before, or to have a reminder every day in between. So I tell OmniFocus that my planning task should first show up on my list about a week or a fortnight before the due date. Can’t see a way to do that with Things.

Sometimes this stuff can be a bit buried under preferences and suchforth so I could be wrong.

And I told you I just downloaded this to play with. I did that to get you the screenshot above and to see what Things looks like now, a few years down the road. Why not? It’s free.

Until 28 November.

Because the reason for this rare free-dom is that Apple has chosen Things as its app of the week. Come next week, something else will go free.

So go grab Things right now. Remember that the iPhone and iPad ones are separate, they’re not universal. So grab them both right now. Even if you haven’t the time to play with them, grab now and you can use them tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever you have a minute or a need.

Just go

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It is always better to go than not. If you’re invited somewhere, if something is happening and you can get to it, get to it. The worst that can happen is that you have a bad time and a good story to tell about it.

Okay. The worst thing that can happen is that you have a bad time when you could be at your desk writing. But you still get the story, it just happens to you instead of your having to make it all up.

So go.

I’m minded of this because I went to a poetry event last night and though I did fancy it, I knew it was going to be a long day and I knew I was behind on various things. It would unquestionably have been better for me to stay at my office working instead of spending the day chatting with people and the evening watching a poetry performance.

Unquestionably.

But it was undoubtedly better for me to go because it fuelled me. I met with people I like very much – I hadn’t realised they would be there, it was a hugely unexpected delightful bonus – and I enjoyed the poetry. It was fuel. It was leaded.

It didn’t have to be. It is not the job of poetry to inspire a writer to write. I don’t think poetry has a job, it just as purpose and a role and a position and a power. Let it do what it may and trust that what it may do is alive.

But it does also fuel me. And the thought of this evening is with me still tonight. Whereas, if I’d worked on into the evening, by now I wouldn’t be able to tell you with any certainty which text I’d written then. Which text was the day before. I might be able to make a stab at it but you’re a writer, you know this: you revise and replace all of your writing all the time. If I wrote something last night, it might not survive the day. And that’s fine, that’s necessary, but choosing to step away and do something that isn’t work, that wasn’t work, that actually took work.

And it’s always worth it.

Try the 60-60-30 rule

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Well, it’s not a rule. Not even really a guideline. More a suggestion from writer Mosse Rodbay:

I’m personally using the simple 60-60-30 rule which means I work in two highly focused 60 minute blocks of time without any interruptions where I simply turn them all off. Then I relax for 30 minutes and check e-mail and social media which I must admit is highly addictive. I hope this post will help you as much as it has helped me getting more work done while also having more fun!

How to Have More Fun and Get More Work Done – Mosse Rodbay, Get Verified (undated but November 2014).

Read the full piece.

Take a moment to look around you

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This afternoon I was saying to someone that I realise I rarely stop to look around. As in the Ferris Bueller sense of how life moves pretty fast and if you don’t look, you may miss it. Fine.

Except, I then spent this evening at a poetry event. I went with one friend and by chance knew many, many people there. At one point in between the poets performing, I took the moment to absorb that I was sitting in a group of seven people I like very much. The chance of it, the people involved, it was startlingly special to me and I looked.

How to switch off Evernote’s Contexts feature

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I was going to call this How and Why to do it, but you don’t need the why. Context is a new feature in Evernote that completely unhelpfully recommends Wall Street Journal articles that are not in any way related to your note.

Okay, that’s not how Evernote would describe it. But, hey, I’m in an Evernote note where I keep my invoice details and popping up in my way is a notification that “UK Police Drop Begg Charges” and that the WSJ wrote about this on 1 October 2014. I’m sure the case is riveting, but I don’t know who Begg is and he (there’s a photo too, it’s a he, whoever he is) doesn’t get a mention in my list of invoice numbers.

But on the Mac and I presume PC versions of Evernote, go to Evernote/Preferences, find Context, uptick Show Context.

Done.

So far I’ve not been so interrupted by Context on my iPhone or iPad so it’ll be interesting to see if the preference carries over to it.

Beaten to it: the Christmas productivity gift guide

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Well, it’s really the techie or geeky Christmas gift guide. And there’s much in it that I wouldn’t have thought of, let alone picked. But if they only picked the things I would, there’d be no point telling you about them.

And them is Katie Floyd and David Sparks of MacPowerUsers. The latest edition of the podcast is their annual gift guide. They have a thing about not repeating gift recommendations from previous years and I see the point but I don’t see the point: if it’s still the best thing to buy, it’s still the best thing to buy.

Still, here are the best things to buy for Christmas according to MacPowerUsers.

Editors like you to negotiate your fee – within reason

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Flashback. Some time in the 1990s. I was doing copywriting for various firms and one rang up with an emergency. What would it cost them to do this right now and send it back? I could hear the desperation and I’m ashamed to say I upped my regular rate by some vast amount. (I’m not being coy, this is ages ago, I can’t remember the figures.)

“Sold,” she said.

Instantaneously.

So much so that I knew I should’ve asked for more. But I did do one savvy thing: having upped my rate for this one emergency job, I never lowered it again for the ordinary ones that followed.

On the other side of the deal, though, I can tell you that I have never had a freelance writer question a fee or ask for more money.

The website Contently has good piece now about exactly what editors can do financially – short answer: not a lot – and what they think of writers who do negotiate – short answer: quite a lot.

Sometimes, asking for more money is a dead-end; but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. “Most of my clients have a specific budget for content,” said content strategist Jessica Ashley, a former senior editor at Yahoo! Shine who now works as editor-in-chief for TapGenes.com. “I lobby hard to get writers fair compensation, but I appreciate when writers negotiate their fees. It’s just good business, and I appreciate writers standing up for what they can offer to the site.”

However, standing up for fair compensation does not mean you should pretend to be a hardline agent. The way you present your request will definitely have an impact on how it’s received.

“It’s important to be both confident and kind,” Ashley said. She suggests explaining what you can offer for your proposed rate using “ands” instead of “buts.” For example begin with a direct stance: “My current rate is $200 per post, and I would be thrilled to contribute to this site because…”

How Do Editors Really Feel When You Negotiate Rates? – Meagan Francis, Contently (10 November 2014)

Read Francis’s full piece for more.

How to find your passion in life and work

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I knew my passion was drama and writing and while I went the wrong way for a time, I still think I was lucky to have these obsessions that I could eventually do something with. I don’t often like to use the word lucky to do with writing because it isn’t luck or chance, I wanted what I do now and I worked for it and I got it. But I started from the advantage of know what I wanted to do, even as I didn’t think I could do it. It’s much more common to not have a single clue.

It’s much more common still to then feel that the answer is to find this thing you’re passionate about, then you could do it, then you could be as happily workaholic as I am. And by extension, if you can’t find it, you can’t. Writer Oliver Emberton has a smart piece about this:

Too many of us believe in a magical being called ‘passion’. “If only I could find my passion”, we cry. “Finding my passion would make me happy”.

Well, passion is real, and very powerful. But almost everything people believe about finding it is wrong.

Childhood is where passion goes to die

In theory childhood provides a great opportunity to try a bit of everything, find your talents, and with them, your passions.

But think for a moment how badly the system is stacked against you. Say school lets you try 20 subjects, ranking you against thousands of other children. Those aren’t good odds. Most kids are, by definition, around average. And it doesn’t matter how much we improve education, because people need to feel exceptional to feel passionate, and improving education simply moves up the average.

Say you’re one of the lucky ones, and you’re top of your junior math class. The education system will keep rising your difficulty until you find a level – like college – where you’re not exceptional anymore. Even if you actually are objectively pretty great, once you feel merely average, you’ll find your passion slipping.

And that’s if you’re lucky. What if your passion was for art? From an early age that passion is compromised by its social consequences. “It’s hard to make a living from painting” say your parents. “Your cousin is doing so well from engineering. Why can’t you be more like him?” And so you put your passions to one side, and let them wither.

In a population of billions, it’s obvious that not everyone can be unusually great at a handful of academic subjects. What if your true skills are in speechwriting, or creative dance, or making YouTube commentaries of videogames? None of those things are even on the syllabus.

And so most people grow up without much passion for anything.

How to find your passion – Oliver Emberton, personal blog (undated but probably 10 November 2014)

Makes me think of UK Education Minister Nicky Morgan’s asinine comments about arts subjects. Which then makes me think of poet Jo Bell’s calmly smart and classy rebuttal.

But back to the passion point. Emberton presents that as one of several rules to getting beyond the passion issue. Read the full piece for the rest of the rules plus some apposite illustrations.