Advice

Exploit 1Password even more

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There are things you do every day that you don’t realise others have no idea about. This week I demonstrated 1Password to two friends and told them that actually, no, we had to stop to discuss this because it was my civic duty. They’d just told me they use the same password everywhere. Yes. I shuddered too.

And I showed them 1Password. But it was a quick race through how I use it on my iPad whereas there is more you can and I do use on the Mac. This article by Melissa Holt popped up just as I was thinking about this and I think she says it better than I do. Except for one thing: I’d point out that while she and I are Mac users, all of this applies to the Windows version of 1Password too.

Here. Have some enthusing and then the start of tips to get more out of it. If you have 1Password, go use all this stuff now. And if you don’t have it, thank you for reading so far through this piece and see? Isn’t it great? Usually?

It’s no secret that AgileBits’ 1Password is pretty much my favorite thing since ever. It’s the one app that I recommend to all Mac users, and I’m passionate about people using the program to generate and fill in unique passwords for all of their online accounts. Let’s face it, if you aren’t using an app like 1Password to manage your digital life, then you either have a notebook full of your login details (not safe!) or you’re using 75 variations of your dog’s name as passwords on the sites you visit (doubly not safe!).

If you already have 1Password, though, there are a few neat tricks to be aware of to get the most out of its awesomeness. My favorite tip is that in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, the keyboard shortcut Command-\ will either automagically fill in the login for a page you’re on, or if you have multiple logins to pick from for that site, it’ll bring up the dialog box for you to choose between them. That’s much faster than clicking on the toolbar icon to open it!

3 Tips to Make 1Password Even More Powerful – Melissa Holt, The Mac Observer (12 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Busy doing nothing – official

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It’s possible that you cannot clear any time in your day to do nothing. It’s entirely possible. But Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, says he does precisely this and that it is a boon for him.

If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day (broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks). It’s a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

At first, these buffers felt like indulgences. I could have been using the time to catch up on meetings I had pushed out or said “no” to. But over time I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.

The Importance of Scheduling Nothing – Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn blog (3 April 2013

Read the full piece for the details of why he does this and exactly how it has helped.

Hat tip to the Sydney Morning Herald for mentioning this today.

We are fooled by spam – we really are

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I had a legitimate request to re-enter some credit card details the other day and still I hesitated. We are so used to these so-called phishing spam scams. So many of the details were legit – it was for an online backup service that I do use, that was the name of the machine that backs up to it, that was the right renewal date and the expired credit card number was correct – that I didn’t just chuck the email away. But I also didn’t click on it: I separately went to the online backup company’s website, logged in there and checked the details.

But apparently that’s unusual. And so unusual that I can’t brag about it: the odds are that I’ve been fooled by scams before and will again. Seriously. You get these stupid spam messages and you wonder how anyone can be taken in by them. Intellectually you realise they must be because the spam keeps coming, it must be worth the spammers’ time, but you will be head-jerk-backed shocked at how effective those emails are at getting people’s details out of them:

Even on the worst-performing phishing websites, 3 percent of users still submitted their data. On the most effective phishing sites, as many as 45 percent did.

Google notes in its write-up that this is big business for scammers, as one attacker can be responsible for millions of phishing emails.

Once a hacker is able to access someone’s account, they spend an average of three minutes figuring out how much it’s worth, and will apparently move on if the account doesn’t seem valuable enough. According to the study, hackers use Gmail’s own search function to figure out if an account is worth their time, looking for terms like “wire transfer” and “bank.”

What happens next probably won’t surprise you: The hacker tries try to get money from an account’s contact list. They send emails to the person’s friends, family and colleagues with fake stories like “we were mugged last night in an alley” in the hopes of getting them to send cash.

Google Study Finds Email Scams Are More Effective Than You’d Expect – Damon Beres, Huffington Post (7 November 2014)

Read the full piece for more details and some advice about stopping being scammed. Mind you, if you’re reading this and you also click through to read that, you’re probably more aware of the issue than most people. And being aware is a key protection.

Relax, you’re not that busy

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Stop thinking of relaxing as a ticket to laziness and build free time into your day. Relaxation relieves stress, lets you enjoy the moment and improves your problem-solving skills. So take naps. Breathe. Meditate. If you’re always rushing, develop a morning routine to set a calmer tone for the rest of the day. Don’t be so busy you’re not enjoying the precious little time you have on this earth.

How to Stop Being Busy – Sasha Graffagna, SuperheroYou (2 June 2014)

Read the full piece for more interesting and sobering, even correctly chastising thoughts.

Writer’s Notes: how to write a bio

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Your editor wants one, the festival you’re appearing at wants something for their brochure, you’re mocking up a new website, the list goes on and each one demands a bio. What a good thing that writers are ego-machines able to trot out a swift self-praising eulogy at the slightest hint of a request.

It is egotistical to write your own biography, even when you’re just talking of a paragraph for a theatre programme. But it is also a writing job. More than that, it’s a selling job. Now, this won’t exactly help you when you sit down to write one but each time you are asked for a bio or you see a place you can send it, you are not actually writing a bio. You are writing a pitch and you are writing a sales proposal and you are writing an advert.

There’s nothing like putting the pressure on you, is there?

If you’re sending a bio to someone along with material, if you’re pitching yourself and your material then your bio is very much part of that. It is factual in the sense that it must be true but it isn’t factual in the sense that it has to be a dry chronological chronicle of your career. I think schools and universities have a lot to answer for with the damage they do to how people write CVs.

Whether you regard yourself as a commercial writer or not, your bio is commercial. It is selling you – and then it is selling them, the editor and the organiser and the producer. Bios need to be something they can pop straight into their brochure or programme and forget about. Know that they will make them, the editor and the organiser and the producer, look good for having got such an interesting writer.

Oh, and it has to look different to the place down the road where you appeared last year.

As with all things sales, too, you need to do every bit of this selling business quickly. The fewer words, the stronger the words – though this is a family show – the better. Twitter is great practice for writing with flair but precision. Poets are fantastic at loading words with enough meaning to fill books. Scriptwriters are superb at dialogue that sounds natural yet conveys immensely important information.

It’s only novelists and academic text writers who are screwed.

For them and for every type of writer, though, do the Three Strikes Bio. I’ve mentioned this before, including in the book The Blank Screen but have only this moment thought of a name for it.

Here’s what you do to dash off a Three Strikes Bio.

1) Decide what and who you need the bio for. What is it selling? Your latest book, your first play, their workshop?

2) With that in mind, look through your CV for two things that are in some way relevant. If you need the bio for your workshop on teaching nuns to write about the ocean, that novel you wrote set in a convent has got to go in there. And so has your round the world yacht trip.

3) Look through your CV for one thing that is not relevant. Not relevant to the thing you’re pitching and not relevant to writing, either. Something that is so not relevant, it is far, far away from anything even approaching relevancy. For that nun ocean workshop, if you’ve once been bodyguard for a daytime TV celebrity, that’s the one.

Write these three things down and do it simply, do it straight. No embellishments, no quotes, no detail. Just third person you did this, you did, you do the other:

Susan Hare wrote first hit novel Convent Sunset while cruising the Mediterranean during her charity round-the-world race. She has also been a bodyguard for Cash in the Attic star Curt Jaw.

That’s a pretty good bio: you’d go see her, wouldn’t you? But it’s straight, factual, easy. I wanted to embellish the first line with the name of her boat but I was just after telling you not to add details, so I didn’t. But between you and me, I think her boat would’ve been called the Pink Baracuda.

Seriously, there is something about being concise that is strong. Too much detail means desperation, I think. It’s like CV: we think a CV has to get us a job but it doesn’t and actually it mustn’t. The job of a CV is to get us an interview. No less, sure, but certainly also no more. People must not be able to consider and then reject you on the information you’ve given them on the CV, they must be tempted to bring you in for a chat.

Bios are true but they are not evidentiary or documentation, they are sales.

More on being your own boss at work

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Lisa Dill, a recruiter and trainer, has written a Digital Professional Institute article about how to impress your boss and I think her last one is precisely what I’ve been going on about today here and in the newsletter.

Here’s Dill’s take:

I’m sure we all want to be the individual in the office with the next great idea. Occasionally we may even find ourselves daydreaming about how to make certain aspects of what our company does better overall. Then, all of a sudden it hits you, and you’re ready to present your next big idea. Before you do, pause, think it through, and then bring it to your boss with a plan in mind of how you’d recommend getting it done. Ideas are one thing, but making them a reality is entirely different. Presenting your boss with a game plan is going to demonstrate to her that you don’t just have good ideas, but you can put them into action. This provides her with one less thing to think about in regard to how to get something accomplished, but it also gives you ownership of seeing your idea through and the praise when it’s implemented successfully.

Five Simple Ways to Wow Your Boss – Lisa Dill, Digital Professional Institute (undated)

Read the full piece for more specific advice on handling yourself at work.

You’re your own boss

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When I went freelance in the 1990s, very many people enthused at me about what it would like not being a boss. I knew they were wrong: it was more like I was taking on 17 bosses, each of them paying me a tiny bit.

All these years on, though, they were right. And I was wrong. (Would you look at that? A man saying he was wrong. Songs will be sung of this day.)

I have all these clients, all these editors, most people have just the one boss. But we are all working for ourselves and as easy as it can be to let the boss decide everything, as even easier as it is to just complain about that man or woman, you will be more productive and you will feel better when you realise that you are in charge.

Let’s not get silly about it. Punching your boss in the face is not empowerment, it’s unemployment and a possible legal case. But take everything your job requires you to do and look at it all is if you are the manager. Which bit does your client, your boss, really need? What bits are quick wins you can knock out in ten minutes? What’s the stuff that you know is just bollocks and busy work? And what is the stuff that you can do that needs help from other people? Best yet: what’s missing? What more can you do that will be really good for you, your boss, your company and your future pay rises?

Look at your job not as what you have to do or as who you are, but instead as this business that you are running. You have clients and customers, you have resources, if you use them like that instead of constantly reacting to whatever happens next or whoever demands things the loudest, you’ll feel in control. It’s the best feeling because it’s real, you’ll feel in control because you are.

Mind you, keep doing that and you could end up being promoted to boss. Or go freelance.

Nervous habit

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few minutes before you step into the situation that makes you nervous slow down. Walk slower to the meeting place. Move slower. Even stop for a minute if you like and stand still.

Then breathe through your nose. Take a little deeper breaths than you usually do. Make sure you breathe with your belly. Not with your chest (a common problem when people get stressed or nervous).

How to Overcome Nervousness: 7 Simple Habits – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (5 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Oh, no. Exercise is good for your brain. Bugger.

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We know exercise is good for cardiovascular health, but new research has also shown that a healthy heart has effects on your brain functioning as well—and exercise plays an important role in that connection. The aorta, the main artery in the body that distributes oxygenated blood to our entire system, including the brain, is where the body’s arteries begin to stiffen as we get older, according to researcher Claudine Gauthier.

How Exercise Changes Your Brain To Be Better At Basically Everything – Jane Porter, Fast Company (5 November 2014)

Read the full piece. Just don’t talk to me about it.

Take naps, just not like this

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Today was the 276th day that I got up to work at 5am and I say this not entirely to boast – actually not to boast much at all as it’s only 276 and I’ve been doing this lark for nearly two years now – but rather to bitch about how I still struggle with going to bed. Two hundred and seventy-six times I’ve got up at 5am. I spelt that 276 out in full because it was the start of a sentence.

(If you kill me and threaten my pets, I still could never begin a sentence with a digit. Partly because I’d be dead, you did that in a stupid order. But I might even be relieved at that instead of the certain knowledge I will soon be writing about 1Password again and it is a right bugger finding different words to put in front of it.)

Anyway. Can’t start a sentence with a digit. But also writing it out in full just underlines how many two hundred and seventy-six times is. It is enough that I should surely to god have worked out how to go to bed at such a time or in such a relaxed way that I don’t want to cry when the alarm goes off.

I’m not there yet, I’m not close. But I’m getting close to being close.

And the latest experiment is the nap.

Lately I’ve been starting at 5am and working through to about 7pm and on days that I take a nap around mid-afternoon, that is a doddle. In fact, I work then to 7pm not because oh-I’m-so-busy but because I’m just into the work and not noticing the time going.

So. I’m not the first to say this and it makes me feel so very old saying it, but here you go, here I am: take a nap.

The good things first. For some reason I really enjoy the sense that I’m getting two days out of every one. I mean, I often feel like this morning was yesterday. Or last night was a week ago. It’s partly my body getting confused but also that when this is working, I am flying through things and it feel as if I am getting so much more done that I must be having more time in which to do it.

So yes, you get refreshed and you do more. Great. The energy you get from a nap, terrific.

But.

I can’t go to bed, even though I work at home. Can’t do it. So I have been napping in my office chair. I tell Siri to switch on Do Not Disturb on my iPhone and then to set a timer for 15 minutes, then I sit there with my eyes closed. And on a good day – I’ve now done this a whole four times, I’m an expert – I go into a remarkably deep sleep.

Except.

Lately it’s been a bit cold and my office tends to be the coldest spot in the house, even though I have a heater in there. So just occasionally and not because I am officially 120 years old, I have a blanket. For three days running now, I have pulled the blanket over my head as I sat there napping.

And.

Today it didn’t work.

I sat there, timer running, Do Not Disturb do not disturbing, with a blanket over my head. And that head of mine thought the words “Our little reading group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is.” You’re thinking that’s very random and the part of me that wants to appear in any way mysterious is tempted to just shut up now.

Okay, that was never going to happen. This quote is the opening line of a short story I was commissioned to write. It’s called “The Book Groups” (the plural is everything) and I am going to be reading it at an event later this month. It’s written in first-person prose by a (very) unreliable narrator and that means to me it’s dialogue. It’s a script. I am a scriptwriter even in this short story.

Now, I reckon if you’ve read this far then you’re in, you’re committed, you’ve invested time here and I can tell you something those lesser people who don’t read to the end of articles will never know. It’s this. I am very proud of how often actors have told me that learning my scripts is easy because the dialogue is good. It’s natural and real and it is what the characters would say. I am very proud of that. I recognise that if you don’t happen to be a scriptwriter you might not feel the import I do, but I am and I really do.

And, whisper it, I think I agree now.

Because I can perform The Book Groups. Not read it, I don’t have to read it anymore, I can perform the entire story from memory and in character.

This is relevant because of what happened in the nap today. I sat there with the blanket over my head, I mostly-silently performed The Book Groups, practicing away. I looked like I was furniture that had a drape cloth over it and was moving like a ghost in response to unseen and unheard drama.

I looked like a prat and a half of full-cream milk.

And Angela was working at home today.