Advice

Gmail adds nice Unsubscribe feature

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Well, you’ve always been able to unsubscribe from advertising emails but Google is making it easier: if the email has a wee little unsubscribe link hidden at the bottom, Gmail will pop an unsubscribe link right up at the top where you can see it.

Two things to note. First, this is rolling out across Gmail but Gmail is big so this will take time and you may not see it just yet. But hold on, it’s coming.

Second – and trickier – think twice about unsubscribing. You know how you don’t always remember when you signed up to receive something? Occasionally you didn’t and it’s spam. In which case, hitting Unsubscribe sends a message – literally – to the spammer telling them that this is a real email account with a real human being reading it. No chance they’ll go “oh, okay, let’s take ’em off the spam list”.

Previously if I’ve had any doubt I’ve marked the emails as junk and let Mail (I use Apple’s Mail) deal with it. There is a wee problem with that: if the email is not junk, the fact that you junked it gets reported back to whichever company is delivering the emails. If enough people junk the emails, the sender is blocked. You can bet that spammers have ways around that so the only ones who suffer are legitimate companies that you really did sign up to receive emails from.

If you’re struggling with a huge amount of email newsletters and the like, take a look at Unroll.me. When you let it, Unroll.me scans your emails and gives you a list of everything that you can unsubscribe from – and lets you do that with a click. I’ve not used it myself but it comes recommended.

Work like you’re going on holiday

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I’m feeling this. Before I went away for my 20th wedding anniversary holiday, you know that I had to work like crazy. You do exactly this before any long break. And then you know that when you get back you’re going to be working like mad to catch up – plus you’ll find it hard to ramp back up to normal working speed.

It’s enough to make you ditch holidays.

But 99U suggests you pretend you’re going on more holidays and says:

The average worker’s backlog is around 30 hours, or roughly three or four days of things that are begging to be finished. How can you power through this nagging heap? Simple: treat it like you’re going on vacation.

Think of all the things that you do before you’re about to go on vacation — you rush to define the priorities, necessities and back-up plans to prepare your clients and/or team for a period of time in which you’ll be “off the grid.” Work like you’re about to go on vacation and you’ll be able to de-clutter and step far away from your projects without worry.

Backlogged? Work Like You’re Going on Vacation – Hamza Khan, 99U (8 August 2014)

I’m not sure I could keep up the pace myself. But Khan’s full piece includes advice about what to do in this faux pre-holiday time and how to manage it without burning out so much that you need a real break.

“If you work with assholes, no To Do list will help you work efficiently”

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So says designer Jessica Walsh. Don’t you love her for that? She was answering a question about how she works, what specific processes she has for handling her job and her full reply was:

The obvious answer is to-do lists and apps (Evernote, Clear, Sparrow, Text Expander, iCal). Most importantly though, I’d say to choose good clients and coworkers who are nice and open to interesting creative work. If you work with assholes / ego-maniacs / lazy people, no to-do list will help you work efficiently.

Designer Jessica Walsh quoted in 15 Designers Reveal Secrets For Staying Productive – Carey Dunne, Fast Company (8 August 2014)

I liked her pithy summary the best but the article is about her and 14 more designers all being asked various questions to do with their work and it’s an interesting read. It’s also a summary, really, of a much bigger project:

Since April, Samara, Russia-based designer Yevgeny Yermakov has been asking designers a series of five questions–about work habits, favorite books, career challenges, and creativity–and publishing their answers on his website. The project, “5 Questions for 100 Designers,” is growing into a trove of wisdom from the industry’s leading minds. Forty-four interviews are up so far, with designers from Jessica Hische to Debbie Millman to Michael Bierut.

Read Fast Company’s article for more extracts and links out to the growing 5 Questions project.

It’s okay to use Facebook Messenger

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It’s not great, but it’s okay. The security and privacy and just plain tedious issues around it have been exaggerated. True, Facebook is to privacy what Microsoft is to taste and, true, Facebook only profits by what it can leverage out of us. It’s becoming a saying: if a product is free, then you are the one being sold.

However, the specific issues around Messenger aren’t what they seemed. The complaint that most spooked me was that the app uses your iPhone’s microphone. It does. If you agree to it. Don’t thank Facebook for that qualification, thank Apple: apps cannot access your microphone, your photos, your contacts or anything else without asking you first. Android isn’t so bothered.

Facebook does make it sound as if it wants your mic for nefarious purposes where really it’s to allow you to send audio messages. I didn’t know you could, but apparently it is or it is going to be like the voice-text kind of thing that is currently in WhatsApp and will shortly be in iOS 8.

It also says that it might make calls on your behalf. Hmm. But that’s muddy-speak for if you tap a contact’s number on your Messenger screen, Messenger will dial them for you.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, it’s still a pain to deal with Facebook’s constant pressing for more access. I find it extremely annoying that I’ll get a notification on my Facebook icon for a new message in Messenger. Open one, then have to open the other, tap to go back, tap to get out, it’s just ugly.

But it’s not as murderously objectionable as I thought. Read more about this and what’s really going on over in TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog).

New York Times on the need to take a break

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I slept in this morning. It’s my first Monday back working and I slept in. Woke at 8am, it’s now slipping a wee bit past 9am and if you can really call nattering to you work, then this is the first work I’ve done. I am hours behind and I feel great.

I’m going to have to think about this. But as if to aid me thinking about it, I just read this:

Every day we’re assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions. According to a 2011 study, on a typical day, we take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986. As the world’s 21,274 television stations produce some 85,000 hours of original programming every day (by 2003 figures), we watch an average of five hours of television per day. For every hour of YouTube video you watch, there are 5,999 hours of new video just posted!

Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain – Daniel J Levitn, New York Times (9 August 2014)

I know what you’re thinking: who’s the slacker who didn’t make it 6,000 hours?

But Levitin’s point is that we need to step away from all this once in a while. And apparently, for a great number of people in the US, that once in a while is right now:

This month, many Americans will take time off from work to go on vacation, catch up on household projects and simply be with family and friends. And many of us will feel guilty for doing so. We will worry about all of the emails piling up at work, and in many cases continue to compulsively check email during our precious time off.

But beware the false break. Make sure you have a real one. The summer vacation is more than a quaint tradition. Along with family time, mealtime and weekends, it is an important way that we can make the most of our beautiful brains.

Is your brain beautiful? Or is this like football, which I think is called the beautiful game for absolutely no reason whatsoever?

Levitin’s full piece is an opinion article in the New York Times but it’s opinion backed up by some academic research that he and his colleagues have done. Read the lot for a bit more waffle but also a great deal more concrete bits about handling how our attention is so assaulted.

To work better, work less

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I feel busted. I am guilty of every single thing in this article about our attitudes to working long hours. And I am going to do something about it, even if I have to work all the hours god sends me.

It has long been known that working too much leads to life-shortening stress. It also leads to disengagement at work, as focus simply cannot be sustained for much more than 50 hours a week. Even Henry Ford knew the problem with overwork when he cut his employees’ schedules from 48-hour weeks to 40-hour weeks. He believed that working more than 40 hours a week had been causing his employees to make many errors, as he recounted in his autobiography, My Life and Work.

…It seems silly that many work long hours simply for the sake of having worked long hours. Perhaps the reason people overwork even when it is not for “reward, punishment, or obligation” is because it holds great social cachet. Busyness implies hard work, which implies good character, a strong education, and either present or future affluence. The phrase, “I can’t; I’m busy,” sends a signal that you’re not just an homme sérieux, but an important one at that.

There is also a belief in many countries, the United States especially, that work is an inherently noble pursuit. Many feel existentially lost without the driving structure of work in their life—even if that structure is neither proportionally profitable nor healthy in a physical or psychological sense.

To Work Better, Work Less – Cody C Delistraty, The Atlantic (8 August 2014)

You have to love ideas enough to be willing to hate them

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The best work you ever do will be so much trouble, so much effort, that by the end you will hate the sight of it all. But they are important enough to you throughout and you love them so much at the start, that you must be willing to hate them if that’s what it takes to get them on.

I’m not clear. I can feel it. Let me try an example, see if this is any more comprehensible. I once pitched to write a book about The Beiderbecke Affair in part because I love that show. (UK edition, US edition)

I also felt that Alan Plater’s drama series warranted the attention plus I knew there was enough material to do, I had all the professional reasons you can think of covered. But also I loved it and Alan was important to me, that’s why I picked up the phone to the British Film Institute.

Nonetheless, I knew that by the time I’d finished the book, I would’ve seen the show so often and I would’ve said the word Beiderbecke so much and I would’ve thought about it so incessantly that I would be weeping to get away from it.

Still, I knew the book was worth that. And if I came out the other end hating The Beiderbecke Affair, that was a small price to pay for hopefully getting the work to other people, introducing other people to the Beiderbecke world.

As it happens, it didn’t happen, I didn’t hate it once. I got a bit panicky, I got a bit worried about the deadline, but I never hated it.

Actually, there was one night right in the middle of it all when I was away researching Beiderbecke scripts at the Hull History Archive and I needed something to watch. I had a pizza, I had a tiny hotel room, it was so hot and I was so tired that I was nude, actually, nude and freshly showered, stretched out on a towel on my bed and deeply needing something to watch. I had certainly read several hundred pages of Beiderbecke scripts that day and I know I had photographed a thousand. (I had no scanner but I made an arrangement with the archivists that I could photograph the pages to effectively make copies of the script to study later.)

I was cross-eyed and knackered. Too hungry and too hot to just sleep, too weary to read, too bone-tired to think. There was no TV and all I had on my iPad was The Beiderbecke Affair episode 5.

And I loved it. Was disappointed that I hadn’t got episode 6 on there.

But I was willing to hate The Beiderbecke Affair if necessary. And if your work, if your project, doesn’t come with that risk, find a better project, okay?

Easy.

Did I say this already? Buy 1Password right now

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I definitely urged this in the latest edition of The Blank Screen email newsletter – do sign up for your free copy – and if I’ve met you on the street in the last few days I’ve undoubtedly pressed you on the issue. But I don’t think I’ve said it here and I must.

Buy 1Password for iOS now.

As in now. Please rush.

Well, you can take a little bit of time because it’s on sale and will be for at least a short while: it’s not one of those instant on, instant off sales. And as ever with things I recommend on sale, it is more than worth its full price so if you miss the discount, shrug it off.

So you know, the sale price goes thisaway: 1Password for iPhone is briefly £6.99 UK or $9.99 US (instead of £9.99 UK or $17.99 US). Check the maker’s website, though, because there are many options if you’re using more than one device: 1Password official site.

It’s a password manager – creates great passwords for you and then, this is the key part, both remembers them all and pops them into websites for you – and it’s also especially good at holding all your credit card details and, again, popping them into websites when you say Go. It’s also very cross-platform: I use it daily on Mac, iPhone and iPad but there is also a PC, Windows and Android version. They all play nicely, too, so if you’re a PC user with an iPhone or a Mac user with an Android phone, you’re fine. Possibly schizophrenic, but fine.

If you are on a PC or Android, my reason to urge you to buy 1Password is solely that it is so very good. Indispensable. I went from wondering why anyone would want such a thing to having it on my iPhone’s front screen and using it literally every day. Literally literally: there’s a thing I have to do every single day and I do it through 1Password because it’s so much quicker.

But.

If you’re on an iOS device, there is an extra delightful urgency to all this. Buy 1Password for iPhone or iPad on sale today and you will get the next version for free. The next version will be a significant upgrade but it won’t cost existing users anything and you will be an existing user.

I am an existing user, I am a now very long-standing existing user, and I’m excited by this – I don’t use the word lightly, I actually am excited – because of what’s coming in the next version.

The next 1Password will be the first or at most among the very first apps to use Apple’s new Extensions feature that lets one app use another. I told you that I do this thing every day: it’s using a website that I have to log in to and on my iPhone, I have to remember to go to it via 1Password in order to have the password app pop my details in. If I’ve just gone there via Safari, I either nip back and forth to 1Password, copying out my secure details and pasting them in to Safari – or I quit it all and start the job again in 1Password.

From the next version and Apple’s iOS 8, I will be able to just call up 1Password right from within Safari and have it do my doings for me. If I have the new 1Password, iOS 8 and a newer iPhone than I currently have, I’ll be able to tap my thumb in order to get it to enter secure details for me.

I’d say that if I were you, I’d buy 1Password now. But if I really were you, you’d already have it.

Quick travel tip: power your phone without an adaptor

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Check your hire car’s radio. If it has an a USB socket for playing music via your iPhone, it will also charge the phone. Not much. But enough.

The ideal is for you to have an adaptor that plugs into the cigaratte lighter but – no, actually, the ideal is for batteries to last longer but if wishes were horses we’d all be in the supermarket meat trade. If you don’t have an adaptor and you do have a low battery, the radio trick will work.

I just did this in France, driving about four hours with my iPhone on the red-line 5% battery level. At the end of it, when I peeled myself out of the car and slithered across the pavement like all my muscles had been erased, the iPhone was still at the 5% redline.

But it had worked as my GPS SatNav all the way.

So it’s not like you’re going to get a lot of power out of this radio USB connector. But you’ll get enough.

Oh, you’re so powerful, Mr or Mrs or Ms Swoon

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This isn’t me. I suspect it isn’t you, either. Creatives and artists are more focused on the work and worried about our neuroses than we are on jockeying for position and trying to make a splash in a company. But then we also regularly meet and rely on the people who do exactly this. So whether you want to appear powerful yourself or you’d just better recognise the signs in others, Time magazine has you covered:

Take up lots of space. MIT researcher Andy Yap says the way we stand and sit can give both those around us as well as ourselves the sense that we’re powerful. Specifically, what Yap calls “expansive poses,” where people adopt a wide stance when standing, put their hands on their hips instead of at their sides and stretch out their arms and legs when seated. “High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power,” Yap writes. “That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.”

Scientists who study the effects of these hormonal changes say they’re associated with status, leadership and dominance — and all you have to do is take up more space.

5 Scientifically Backed Ways to Seem More Powerful – Martha C. White, Time (21 July 2014)

Oh, someone please help me. Or someone please stop articles claiming science when they mean, at best, statistics. But there is another one of these five ways that rang a few bells with me: I’ve seen us doing this too:

Tap into the “red sneaker effect.” This is why Mark Zuckerberg can get away with wearing a hoodie. Researchers from Harvard Business School studied how sometimes looking out of place can have a positive effect. “Under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors can be more beneficial than efforts to conform and can signal higher status and competence to others,” they write. (They give the example of someone wearing a pair of red sneakers in a professional setting as an example.) Since most of us try to conform to social norms, we tend to think that people who deliberately don’t do so because they have enough social status that they don’t have to care what the rest of us think.

I did know a guy who was considered a rebel at his company because he wore something like a Winnie-the-Pooh tie. I thought this told me a lot about the company.

Read the full piece