Get it, see it, do it:
I will adopt the Touch it Once Principle more often, especially when I’m using my smartphone (which makes it oh-so-tempting to simply read emails but not deal with them). I am ok scanning for urgency, but I will only read an email once.
Top 10 Productivity Resolutions – Ann Gomez, Clear Concept Inc (7 January 2014)
That’s actually Gomez’s number ten in a top ten list of productivity tips and I like it already. Read the full piece for the other nine.
Yeah, yeah, it’s supposed to be a book. Or a play. Or a whatever, something that’s a rather long and daunting job. Just tell yourself that you’re going to write 300 words on it right now:
I use this trick to great effect because I know I can write 300 words, at the same time that I rarely ever just write 300 words. The technique gives me an imminently attainable goal that I have no excuse not to achieve and focuses on the actual starting rather than on the finishing.
The next time you’re either stuck or procrastinating on a writing project, give yourself a goal of writing 300 words on it. (Click to tweet – thanks!)
This is really more an iOS thing than a Mac one and there is a spot of Android-osity in it too, but this week’s edition of the MacPowerUsers podcast is all about whether you actually need a To Do app.
Spoiler: you probably do.
But not definitely.
Listen to David Sparks and Katie Floyd discuss the topic and if you don’t use a task manager app, you might feel good about it. If you do, you might learn something. And if you’re in between, if you’re looking to use an app but don’t know which of the myriad ones available, you’ll certainly learn a lot.
Previously… I’ve recommended that you take yourself off with a coffee and an iPad and work through what BBC News would call a production meeting for one.
It still stands. Even working for yourself, taking a set time to work out specific things you need to do is well worth it. But today I spent about four hours on a much richer, deeper and more serious meeting with my wife Angela Gallagher.
She called it a strategy meeting. Everything we do together, all our business plans, every project we have on separately, we got them all out on the table and we worked through each one.
It was exhausting.
And you should see the pile of OmniFocus tasks I’ve got to do now.
But, wow, it was worth it.
Without exception Matt Galligan’s internal clock nudges his body awake at 6:30 a.m., give or take 20 minutes. “If I go to a bachelor party in Vegas and I’m out until 6 in the morning, I still wake up at 6:30 a.m.,” the CEO of Circa, a popular news app, told Fast Company. “I can’t change.”
Galligan taught himself to wake up without an alarm clock about seven years ago, when he first learned about body clock training. The process is simple: Set an alarm for the same time every morning for 30 days and resist the snooze button. Beware: Waking up early for an entire month, including weekends, results in a lifelong dedication to being a morning person.
To be fair, mind, Greenfield’s full piece is really about how you rig your sleep to make sure you’re ready to get up.
Still, I get up at 5am and I’m finezzzzz
The iPhone and iPad App Store is the best of these app stores in every way bar one. Usually the argument that it’s the best of them is said to be because of the sheer number of apps you can get. It’s certainly true that there are a lot: something like 1.2 million.
I’d say the reason it’s the best is that the apps on it are the best. The most mature, the most feature-rich, the simply best-designed. Hopefully it won’t always be thus but Apple has the benefit that coding for iOS and then releasing your apps is easier on its platform than on Android. And Android has the problem that its users don’t pay money. It’s a fascinating example of how a culture can arise around a technology; iPhone users will pay for an app they want, Android users think if it isn’t free, there’s something wrong with it.
Mind you, even on iOS you get people saying £3.99 is expensive or overpriced and that’s a laugh.
Just on this issue of culture and technology, I do also enjoy how there’s a funny snobbishness with some developers who make announcements apologising for releasing on the iOS App Store first. They say a lot about how great their Android version will be but the thing is that it’s plainly easier for them to code for iOS.
Nonetheless, there can be few App Stores where it is harder to find the thing you want. Macworld has done a feature about finding apps that I want you to see but as full as it is of advice for how to search this bleedin’ thing, I don’t think it’s critical enough. When Microsoft Office finally came out for iPad, I went on the store and I searched for the words “Microsoft Office” and I still couldn’t find it.
I don’t think there can be a worse example of how hard it is to find apps. IF they weren’t so useful, wouldn’t sane people give up? The doubtlessly sane folk at Macworld have persisted far better and far further than I have and they’ve got five solutions for you.
I want to suggest a sixth. One of theirs is that it’s worth searching on the developer’s name. It’s not guaranteed to help, they say, but it can and if you like one developer’s app you may well like other ones they do. I agree with that very much and would add that when you find one, there is a tab called Related that shows you the firm’s other software right there.
This is how I found OmniOutliner after being such a fan of OmniFocus and now I am such a fan of OmniOutliner. I hope this happens to you too and if it does, this Macworld article will have helped.
I am very much of the opinion that creativity is the art of plonking one’s backside down at the desk and working at the thing until you bleed. But when you have options, when you could walk away, and when it’s one of those days, take a look at these half dozen suggestions for how to get going.
Some of them are familiar such as the idea that you can give yourself permission to write rubbish at first. (I don’t give myself permission to do this, I just naturally do it all the time.) But some of the others are intriguing, such as perhaps my favourite:
Work in the Dark
If you’re feeling stifled, try working in a dimmer environment. A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology has shown darkness and dim illumination promote creativity. Other experiments discovered that you can boost your creativity by simply priming yourself with the idea of darkness—even just describing an experience of being in the dark.
Conversely, while darkness and dim lighting may be more effective for generating ideas, a bright area is more conducive for analyzing and implementing the ideas.Six Unorthodox Ways to Spark Your Creativity – Herbert Lui, Contently.net (19 August 2014)
It’s my favourite because it was the most unexpected of the half dozen – and because it feels like it rather fits in with my ridiculous 5am starts.
Do read Lui’s full piece for more on this one and the other five ideas.
The most contentious element of The Blank Screen productivity books and workshop are to do with prioritising tasks and specifically how I really believe you’re wasting your time. While he has more to say than this, here’s a fella who puts that point thisaway:
When faced with potentially overwhelming demands on our time, we’re often advised to “Prioritize!” as if that’s some sort of spell that will magically solve the problem. But what I’ve learned in the process of helping people cope with and manage their workflow is that prioritizing accomplishes relatively little, in part because it’s so easy to do. Let’s define the term: Prioritizing is the process of ranking things—the people who want to take up our time, items on our to-do list, messages in our Inbox—in order of importance. While this involves the occasionally difficult judgment call, for the most part it’s a straightforward cognitive task. When looking at a meeting request, a to-do list, or an email we have an intuitive sense of how important it is, and we can readily compare these items and rank-order them.
Here’s the problem. After we prioritize, we act as though everything merits our time and attention, and we’ll get to the less-important items “later.” But later never really arrives. The list remains without end.
The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore – Ed Batista, Fast Company (20 August 2014)
My argument is that we’re writers, usually working freelance or for more many editors, and the moment you’ve got your lovely list all prioritised up is the moment when one of those people phones you with an emergency. But Batista’s full piece goes on specifically to say that we need to be a bit callous about who we do and don’t pay attention to. He maintains that that our work is done when there are “no truly important people” waiting on us. And then:
[W]hen you read the phrase, “no truly important people,” above, you probably flinched a little and thought it was somewhat callous. I flinch when I read it, too, and I wrote it! But this understandable response is exactly why we devote time and attention to people who don’t truly merit the investment. There’s a fine line between effective triage and being an asshole, and many of us are so worried about crossing that line that we don’t even get close.
He goes on to explain his reasoning in much more detail and also to provide specifics about why and how to do this but let me summarise: there are just people with demands on your time that you do not care about.
Harsh but true. So accept that you’re more fussed about this person or that client and work to get what they need done.
That’s not to say you can or should be rude to everyone else, mind: it’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice.
There are many online services now where you can hire writers and they all have several things in common. Without fail, the writers are charging practically no money at all or sometimes literally no money at all. This is because everybody thinks they can write and part of their stupidity is that they conclude that the way to get writing jobs is to be cheaper than anyone else.
Cue a race to the bottom as every amateur undercuts every other amateur and the professionals are left being told they’re too expensive.
Now, I’d be okay with this and I might even enjoy the karma that the quality and effectiveness and sometimes actual comprehensibility of the writing you get for free is exactly as bad as you’d imagine.
Unfortunately, companies who are stupid enough to hire writers who charge no money will tend to conclude that writers are crap. You can mock them for this but it won’t change their minds. They’ve gone to a writer, the writer is crap, all writers are crap.
It bothers me that this is what they conclude and I am only a little bit mollified by the fact that they’re going out of business on Tuesday.
There is a word for companies like this and it’s the same word for amateur writers: “goodbye”.
But in this race for the bottom you can unconsciously believe that you have to lower your prices to get any chance of a look in. Often, it’s true. That destroys or at least dents my argument a bit but then this undoes the dent, this repairs it and gives it all a polish: an app developer raised his price as an April Fools’ joke and it worked.
San Francisco-based developer Giacomo Balli doubled his take on his iPhone apps thanks to an April Fools’ Day joke. When he ratcheted up the price to an eye-popping $4.99 for an app that catalogs books, he got downloads instead of complaints.
The App Store lets devs change the sale price of their apps pretty much any time they like, but most folks take conventional routes: cutting prices during sales or dropping prices to free. Balli made his previously free apps premium with just a toggle.
“There weren’t any app updates, either,” he told Cult of Mac over the phone. “Just the price.”
How a dev doubled his revenue with an April Fools’ joke – Rob LeFebrve, Cult of Mac (22 August 2014)
The full piece has some thoughts about how this worked and how it had something to do with the specific target market for this app.
But the thing to take away for me is that your price is part of your advert for yourself. If you say you are worth something, you’re worth it.
I think this is in all ways a cheat but there you go. Dan Harmon, creator of Community, argues in this video that the way to become more productive is to be lazy. O-kay. See what you think. I’ll give him this, the video is very quick.
You’d like a bit more than a single minute on this topic? I haven’t got more per se but here’s a slightly odd half-hour interview with the fella that touches on some similar ground: