Advice

Dramatic timing

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Pretend you’re presenting Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor or any of those: spread things out for maximum dramatic effect – and it’ll help you get it done.

This one needs an example. I’ve just taken over running a programme of about 24 writers who are being paired up into buddies. It got complicated: the number varied, everyone must pair with everyone else but only once, some dropped out, some joined, all that. But in the end, last Sunday, I had the list of who was to work with whom.

And as I was about to post it on the group’s secret Facebook group, I stopped. Instead of the whole list, I just put the first pair up. And announced that I would reveal the rest throughout the day. I was called a tease.

Every thirty minutes for the rest of the day I revealed one pair. It was a daft and a fun idea but you can’t believe how it helped me. I became very conscious that I had to write a new, funny announcement every 28 minutes or so. So I’d post the new one and immediately get on with other work I had to do, shovelled through as much of that as I could before my alarm went off and I did another announcement.

I got a huge amount of work done that day and it felt like a game. If there is anything of yours that you can spread out like this, give it a try, okay? It focuses you like nobody’s business.

Now, there is actually a strong chance that not one single one of those writers noticed this because they could’ve just come on at the end of the day and seen the whole list. So next time I’m going to spread it out over days. I don’t think that will help my productivity, I think it’ll be more fun.

Screw what most people think is normal

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That’s a quote from an article I want to show you. The piece is about productivity tips from various people I’ve never heard of but are reportedly great. That’s fine, that’s what caught my eye and what I read on to check out for you. Plus, some of the tips in it are genuinely useful, such as this one:

Niki Papadopoulos: My editor always says, “OK, well, try writing it then.” In other words, she means, get started. She usually says this right after I explain a big sweeping idea for a book or a chapter or an article. Planning is great, but productive people get moving.

28 Secrets of Exceptionally Productive People – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (9 September 2014)

Maybe I like this one because it rather fits with what I was saying earlier about not over-planning

But then I saw that line “screw what most people think is normal” and I like that. I want to say that to you every day. And also now use it as a tease to get you to read the full piece and find out what specific productivity tip it relates to.

Write one sentence

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That writing project you’ve got do to. Write one sentence now. Just dash it off this minute. This minute.

Did you do it? You’re a sentence closer to being finished.

And what kind of crazy-mad Hallmark Card happy-clappy stupid advice is that? You’re a sentence in to your book. Whoop-de-do.

But, hey, look at me. You’re a sentence further into your book. It’s written and it isn’t going away, it is only going to be added to. Maybe with one more sentence tomorrow. Probably with a lot more, but at least one sentence tomorrow.

By the end of a year you have 365 sentences. Call it ten words per sentence – no reason, no statistics behind it, it’s just reasonable enough plus it makes the maths startlingly easy – and that’s 3,650 words you’ve written.

It’s not enough. Nowhere near enough. But it’s a damn site more enough than 0.

Don’t spend too much time planning

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Spend some, obviously. But when you have worked out a stunningly precise plan for a project you know that three things will happen, starting with:

1) Some of it will work out exactly as you intended and it’s great

Happy for you. But then:

2) Some of it will be wrong

You will have made mistakes, you will have misunderstood something. And:

3) Something unexpected happens

There is always something unexpected or it would be in your plan and you’d call it expected.

What worries me and occupies me a lot about this is how fragile we really are. You hear about impregnable secure places that get broken into because the plan didn’t consider that baddies could be hiding in the laundry truck. The greatest, biggest, best-defended castle is taken over because who’d be suspicious of those two monks?

There is a saying that you should hope for the best yet plan for the worst. Fine. But don’t plan too much because it’s pointless.

New iOS keyboards: TextExpander in use

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Android users have long, long had the option to replace whatever the standard onscreen keyboard is with anything else they like. Keyboards that are in some way better, if not for everyone then at least for some. That’s cool. The same idea has now come to iOS for iPhones and iPads and that’s cool too.

I just didn’t care. I type fine on the Apple one. Yet if the first thing I bought for iOS 8 was OmniFocus 2 for iPad, the second was the TextExpander keyboard. Switch that on and whatever you’re doing on your iOS device, you can instantly call up every snippet of text you use a lot or just want a lot or just always misspell.

No question: I was going to buy that TextExpander keyboard and I was never going to look at the Apple one again.

But.

All this about using TextExpander snippets where you couldn’t before – such as Mail or any Apple app – is true.

Yet.

I just don’t like it.

The TextExpander keyboard itself saves you all this time with expanding out snippets of text that I use a lot but then it loses me far more time because it is substantially harder to type on. The overall QWERTY keyboard is smaller than the regular Apple one but also each key is remarkably smaller and harder to hit.

I make far, far and three times far more mistakes typing on that TextExpander keyboard. And what you gain in its snippets you lose with the autocorrection and suggested words. There are no suggested words and ‘d like to say that there is no autocorrection but every now and again suddenly I will get a correction automatically applied.

Plus, getting this keyboard means both downloading it and setting it up. The final stage of setting it up is to tell your iPhone that yes, you want the TextExpander keyboard to have full access to your device. Fine, but that option doesn’t appear at all until you’ve been in once, set up everything else on the keyboard, come out and gone back in again.

And then regularly, even routinely, you will swap to the TextExpander keyboard and it will warn you that you haven’t set this full access up. Oh, yes, I have. Oh no, you haven’t.

I suspect that’s a a bug at Apple’s end but the fact that I get it is often is probably tied to how I don’t, afterall, stick with TextExpander’s keyboard. I swap back to it to do a particular complex snippet, then I return to Apple’s own where I can actually type.

That can only happen when you’re using the onscreen keyboard: I’m writing now on my iPad using a keyboard case and it is impossible to use the TextExpander keyboard or switch it on so that I can use my snippets.

So it’s a great idea but it has this first version bug which is probably Apple’s, it won’t or can’t use the regular autocorrection service and the keys are tiny. I think it’s also an ugly keyboard.

Which means I’m a bit disappointed. I wasn’t interested in iOS keyboards before but I am very interested now and it is a disappointment.

TextExpander’s keyboard extension comes with the latest version of the app, which costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US.

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Yes, I use technology a lot, but…

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I’m going to be circumspect here because I don’t want someone to know that I’m worrying about them quite this much. I’m certain sure they’ll be fine, I just worry because I wonder.

This is someone who does not use technology.

Now, that might be true of you too, except that of course if it is then hello, welcome to your first use of technology. There is no reason you should be in to this stuff, just as there is no reason in the world I should ever be interested in football.

Except that I guess that’s a lie. There is reason to use tech.

I don’t like that. If I told this person that there were reasons, they would all be about work. I run my business through my iPhone and iPad, I am not short of reasons why this stuff is great. But automatically putting it that way feels like automatically saying you should use it. It feels like saying you should forget what you like and don’t like, you should – you must – use technology. That’s not me, that’s not the way I want to be.

Listen, I have a friend who owns an Android phone.

I don’t phone her, but.

You can’t really urge someone to use this stuff by saying they have to. It’s like saying you must buy this computer instead of that because its backside cache is better. It might be true for all I know, but it’s no actual use to for making the decision. It’s no use to you at all.

This particular person does tend to use what I’d call Stone Age computers and I have the impression that doing anything on them is a chore. If that were me, I wouldn’t bother doing it and I think I’d soon conclude that anyone who did is a bit of a geek. Unless you like computers, you wouldn’t put yourself through this alchemy.

So I do get why she might not be drawn to technology. I do. I just think she sees it as something geeks use. I think she sees it all as a toy. That it’s happy for you if you want to play in your sandbox, that it’s not for her.

It is for her.

It is very for her.

She’s joining the legal profession: technology is made for her.

I imagine whatever firm she ends up with is perhaps likely to issue her with a phone but I know for certain sure that the firm she ends up with will be built on technology. She’ll have to use it, so she’ll have to learn it, and I think that makes all this a slog.

You just want to say that of course you wouldn’t miss that appointment change if you could read your emails on the way like all your rivals. You just want to say that Evernote would fix that problem. OmniFocus would completely remove that worry.

You want to say that your rivals will be the ones in court with the ability to find and cite page 112 before you’ve got the book out.

But you don’t. So instead you write a blog post about it and hope that by the end you’ve formed your thoughts into some kind of order, said William writing on his iPad and posting to the web via a WordPress app. Technology much? Doesn’t seem like it here, this seems straightforwardly, boringly obvious.

Stop overthinking everything

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Years and years ago, my therapist told me that I overthink things. I still wonder what she meant.

This article buzzed around Facebook today and I found it useful because actually, yes, I do overthink. And it is a problem.

We all do our best to stay positive, but occasionally we can slip into negative thinking patterns that can wreak havoc on our lives. We might worry about our past mistakes or current stresses, and how these could lead to negative outcomes in the future. We might obsess about or over-analyze regular experiences and interactions, reading into them things that aren’t actually there. We might find that as soon as one bad thing happens, we associate it with all the other bad things that have happened in our lives and begin to feel miserable. We might feel anxious in the present, having a hard time getting out of our own heads as we worry and obsess about the things that could go wrong.

If you find yourself in this place frequently, you are what psychologists call a ruminator, or, an over-thinker, and this way of thinking can be harmful to your health. Psychologists have found that over-thinking can be detrimental to human performance, and can lead to anxiety and depression, especially in women, who are much more likely than men to ruminate on stress and disappointments than men.

8 Ways to Stop Over-Thinking and Find Peace in the Present Moment – Dr Kelly Neff, The Mind Unleashed (9 September 2014)

I find it helpful enough to just have my head explained there but the full piece includes the eight helpful suggestions of the title and they are good. Even the one that explains bloody walking is good for you. What is it with that today?

More good stuff from iOS 8

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It’s the update that keeps on giving little gorgeous details. This is a favourite of the less-obvious ones: iOS 8 gives you a bit of a nudge about what’s using your phone’s location-aware feature. Often you need that, more often you don’t.

It’s funny how many apps want to use your current location, it’s as if the developers fancied trying it out because it was new. The result is that every app seems to ask you to allow it to keep tabs on your location and over time you say yes enough that it becomes a long list.

Which eats into your battery power because they all keep yelling “are we there yet?” at the phone.

Now iOS 8 will nudge you. Just occasionally and just the odd app at a time. But when it happens, you get this. (And I said yes to this one.)

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Facebook sure loves your iPhone’s battery

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Previously… the Facebook app was shown to be a bugger for sapping your iPhone battery for no damn good reason. It’s still doing it. Ever since learning that about the app, I’ve had a habit of killing it each time I come out.

To be fair, I also kill it because I’ve had people believe I was online when I wasn’t. They got quite ratty.

So that was two good reasons to force-quit the Facebook app and I did, I do, I will. I’ll just avoid using it much more now.

Because of iOS 8’s great new feature that tells you what’s eating your battery time. Look at this. And tell me I really used Facebook five times more than I did OmniFocus yesterday.

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