Advice

Create strong passwords

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Lifehacker has an interesting article called Four Methods to Create a Secure Password You’ll Actually Use and I’d like you to read it, but I’m also amused how old-fashioned the whole idea seems to me.

Because I use 1Password. I can barely remember any of my very many passwords, not because they are all very strong ones but because I don’t need to. They’re all in 1Password and right there, securely, when I need them.

But if you don’t use 1Password or any equivalents, check out Lifehacker’s article because you need stronger passwords than you’ve got now. You do.

Stop making these mistakes at work

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I work for myself so day to day I don’t have the regular office shenanigans but I’ve been there and I recognise this advice from Fast Company:

You show up to the office on time, you’ve never missed a project deadline, and you always refill the coffee pot when you’re done.

What could you possibly be doing wrong?

You’re Probably Making These Five Mistakes at Work – Cheryl Lock, Fast Company (8 July 2014)

The mistakes include not asking for feedback except at your annual review – oh, my lights, how I loathed annual reviews. Wow. Flashback. My very first annual review at a company ended with me fighting over every tick box on the form. I couldn’t see why I was being marked down for things I knew I’d done better and it turned out to be an early form of the stack ranking that truly idiotic firms used. (Microsoft used it, then abandoned it. Staff have to be graded as something like above expectations, on expectations, below expectations and it has no connection to how they actually do. Get a team of three dedicated, passionate geniuses and one of them is going to be in trouble because of that system.

With me back then, my boss got progressively more annoyed that I was arguing and how the session was taking hours longer than he expected. I think now and I thought then: tough shit. Eventually he told me that he couldn’t promote everyone, so I wasn’t getting a promotion.

It looked then as though he’d picked me because I wasn’t the sort to complain. But of course I fought and while it took me a long time to get out of that firm, I stopped working that day. He lost a worker who had been exceeding expectations and gained one who did 9-5 for the first time in his career.

So while I’m surprised at the level of passion this memory has brought back – I’m struggling to remember his name, that’s going to bug me – I suppose I’m really saying that bosses can be arses too. And that what goes on in an office is magnified. I’ve forgotten the man but I’ve not forgotten the review and even on the strange contracts I had with the BBC I would have an annual appraisal and I’d go in ready to defend myself.

I want you know now that I never got a review again that wasn’t superb. But the bad one stays. It’s like public speaking; I died at one event and cannot forget it.

But where were we? Fast Company’s list of mistakes you may be making at work – and fortunately how to deal with them all. It’s a good read, I hope it doesn’t bring back bad memories for you too.

Ex-WiFi engineer fixes your problems

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Er, with wifi. Alf Watt, ex-Apple engineer, has been speaking specifically about wifi issues, he’s not left the company to become an agony aunt. Mind you, if you’ve ever hung out of a hotel window trying to get a signal, you’d take anything.

He spoke with The Mac Observer and really spoke: they’ve done a podcast interview that goes into a lot of detail. But the MO site also includes a breakout description of the most useful points, including screenshots for those of us who don’t spend a lot of time deep in Wifi dialog boxes.

Have a mug of tea and a read.

Advice for negotiators

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By far, by very far, the most popular post on this Blank Screen site is one from April called Negotiate like the FBI. Don’t ask me why, but I get hundreds of spam comments through that one story, far more than through anything else. What does it tell us that spammers are attracted to tales of the FBI?

Its real point was how we can all in our pitch meetings use the same strategies that have meant the FBI saves lives. Not all the time, mind, but more than I would’ve pulled off. So there’s that.

Now there is the altogether less analogy-heavy advice from Ambassador Tommy Koh of Singapore. Not to knock the guy but if you want to be bored, go read the top of the Harvard Business Review article that reprints his advice. It begins with a CV that impresses as much as it dominates as much as you start quickly scrolling down to see what he’s got to say.

He has a lot. So much that Harvard doesn’t quote him all that much, they chiefly paraphrase in a list of key points that are all worth reading. Then they also have links out to videos of him. But here’s the one main direct quote from Koh:

The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we all live in our own cultural box. We should therefore make an attempt to understand the content of the cultural box of our negotiating counterparts. This will help us to avoid violating cultural taboos such as serving pork to American Jews or food that is not halal to our Malaysian or Arab friends. At a deeper level, it will help us to understand how our American, Chinese, and Malaysian friends think and how they negotiate. Armed with this understanding, we will able we will be able to customize our negotiating strategy and tactics to suit each negotiating partner.

Ambassador Koh quoted in A Great Negotiator’s Essential Advice – James K Sebenius, Harvard Business Review (9 July 2014)

Do read the full piece. Just scroll down a bit first.

Go ahead, worry some more

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A friend used to write for Z Cars, back when it was done live, and he told me once that they used to place buckets in between the sets. For the actors to throw up in as they ran between scenes. I once had a pitch meeting where I was so scared I arrived early, opened the car door in the carpark and vomited.

I then went into the pitch meeting and did it again, more metaphorically.

So clearly vomit is key. But if you go through this, you also go through the circle of worrying why you worry, you wonder if you’re inadequate. And then if you’re ever a little bit okay about something, you worry why you aren’t worrying. You worry if you’re now less adequate still. And of course you wonder why you went into this stupid career or how you ever thought you could this stupid thing.

But that might be okay.

New research from East Asia provides a solution for this apparent paradox. It finds that, for certain people, worry can actually enhance creativity.

Call it the Woody Allen effect.

“The emotions that benefit creativity may not be the same for all individuals,” concludes a research team led by psychologist Angela Leung of Singapore Management University.

If worry is your default state, intensifying it slightly may actually prompt more flexible thinking.
Its study finds that, when the pressure is on, worry appears to be a motivating force for neurotic people. “Higher levels of intrinsic motivation in turn predict greater flexibility in idea generation,” the researchers add in the journal Emotion.

Leung and her colleagues describe three experiments that provide evidence for their thesis. One of them featured 274 Taiwanese university students, who began by filling out a questionnaire designed to measure intrinsic neuroticism. They were then asked to recall a happy, worrisome, or neutral experience.

Half were then instructed to memorize an eight-digit number, which they would later be asked to recall. This placed them in a stressful, high-cognitive-load state. The others memorized a two-digit number, a far easier task.

At that point, all were instructed to come up with “as many uses for a brick as possible.” After doing so, they recorded whether they found the experience interesting and fun.

The result: Under the heavy cognitive load, neurotic people displayed more flexible thinking after recalling worrisome events. This was in contrast to people low on the neuroticism scale, who displayed the most mental flexibility after recalling neutral events.

For Some, Worry Inspires Creativity – Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard: the Science of Society (26 June 2014)

I don’t like the Woody Allen peg, that feels like an excuse for a stock photo when they’ve got nothing else to use. But at least it gives me an excuse for an apposite quote from him:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

My Speech to the Graduates – Woody Allen, included in Complete Prose (Amazon UK, Amazon US (originally written 1979)

via 99u

Cheer yourself up and have another go

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I’m British and I’ve been a journalist: I don’t know from positive thinking. And the moment you tell me to smile and how this means the population of the planet will grin inanely back at me, I’m looking to see what you’re selling or how I can get away from you.

You know there’s a but coming.

I’m not sure there is, though. I would like this to be a but. I think for me it might just be peeking out above an “Ye-ess?”

From TED.com:

We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. (Filmed at TEDxBloomington.)

And here is that video. See what you think, would you?

 

How to get going on tough days

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This should not be a tough day: I’m off to be a judge at a Royal Television Society event, I’ve been looking forward to this. But I did not sleep last night and today is proving very tough. So the idea of performing – of just being up and alert and responsive and hopefully clever and decisive – that’s tough.

As I write this to you, I have ten minutes left before I must leave.

So about twenty minutes ago, I was as far from ready as you can be. I’d like to offer you a recipe for how to get up and go but that presupposes what I’ve done will work. Right now, I’m more confident than I was, so I’m going with this.

Job 1. Shower. Again. When I’m this tired, I think the water in my early morning shower just knew to leave me well alone. It did its job, it did the cleaning, but this second shower is the freshening spin cycle.

Job 2. Shave. Probably not for everyone, this, but it works for me. Partly because you of course feel better for looking a smidgeon better, but also I have to really concentrate. My skin is so sensitive that even sensitive-skin razor blades cut me. I was lucky today but I had a standby shirt just in case.

Job 3. Listen to something. I chose to listen to a design podcast called 99% Invisible. But whatever it was, making it something I could listen to rather than hear – so speech radio instead of music, for instance – got my head working.

Job 4. Load the dishwasher. I have no idea why this helps but knowing I won’t have to come back to that later made me feel more in control of the day.

Job 5. Caffeine and terrible things. I’m sitting here with a can of Pepsi Max – I would’ve preferred tea at this time in the morning but don’t have long enough to drink it – and two chocolate mini-rolls. I have no need for any of this. But the caffeine is helping and the chocolate isn’t hurting.

Job 6. Do something in the seconds you have left. Such as write to you with a list of six jobs to get yourself going.

If it all fails, I’ll tell you. But right now I feel ready in every sense. And thirty minutes ago I was a lump.

Wish me luck, though, eh?

I did none of this

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Barely slept last night but was so tired I couldn’t focus. There’s an email I want to reply to but I’ve had to leave it because its words just were not going in to my head. Now that there is daylight and I’m full of tea, I find this which might help either of us if this happens again:

Regardless, those hours of wakefulness at night can be spent in panic or paralysis, or you can do something productive about them.

“What is insomnia, but the gift of more time?” says Michael Perlis, associate professor of psychology and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Perlis is not advocating for purposely losing sleep, but if faced with short-term insomnia, he says, it’s best to treat the time productively rather than tossing for hours in bed. Think of insomnia as an opportunity to get stuff done.

How to Turn Your Insomnia into a Productivity Tool – Jane Porter, Fast Company (21 January 2014)

Porter’s full advice boils down to not spending too long trying to get sleep, grab a pen and do some writing work instead. She has a point of course but right now I dread to think what peculiar words would’ve come.

Video – and now top 5 productivity apps for iOS

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This is more of a curio, I think: it’s the top 5 productivity iOS apps from someone who clearly prefers Android. He has that Android fiddle-with-new-toy-itus where the ability to root your phone is more interesting than getting any work done.

And he says iOS is less interesting because you’ve heard of all the best productivity apps for iOS already. O-kay.

Herewith, then, five you haven’t heard of. I think that knocks the word ‘top’ off the description but I only disagree with one – I’d recommend 1Password over LastPass, though doubtlessly for the same reason he does, it’s the one I use myself – and there’s only one I have never heard of. Find out what in the world 30/30 does here: