Advice

Microsoft taketh away

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There’s one big disadvantage to how Apple has made updating your iPhone apps automatic: sometimes you wish you’d stuck on the last one.

If you’ve switched off automatic updating and so have a choice about it, don’t update Skype. Because Microsoft has taken away a pretty core feature. The website 9to5mac, amongst many others, explains:

Skype may have recently launched a major update to its Skype for iPhone app, but one rather basic feature went missing – the ability to listen to voice messages. A subsequent update to Skype for iPhone 5.1 still hasn’t fixed the problem.

In a support thread on the Skype site, community manager Claudius provided what must qualify as one of the most unhelpful response ever to complaints by users:

“Voice message playback is not supported in Skype 5.0 for iPhone. Please use Skype on another platform to listen to your voice messages”

Why won’t Microsoft give iOS users access to their Skype voice messages? – Ben Lovejoy, 9to5mac.com (23 June 2014)

That article includes a readers’ instructions for how to undo this stupid thing and go back to an older version of Skype. But you need patience and a steady hand.

Start it now. Just start it.

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I’m all for choosing a time to do a certain job: I live by deadlines anyway but it’s sensible and productive to pick a time that you will begin. Take a moment to judge how long something will take and assess when you’ll have all you need to complete it, then set that as a start date.

That means you can ignore it until that date and I am really all for getting stuff out of your head until you need to do it.

Except.

It’s that word ‘assess’.

I offer that the best way to assess a job is to start it. I’ve had times when I’ve had a last email with details of a job and as I’ve already known and confirmed the dates, I’ve only skimmed that message. Invariably, that’s been a mistake. Sometimes reading it over isn’t enough either.

Once or twice now I’ve done all the practical things yet as I came to start the work, realised I needed something more. Something that wasn’t apparent until I’d begun.

So I suggest you begin a job even if you’re going to then slot it into a date or a time later on. This lets you really understand what you need. It’s like checking you’ve got all the parts when you’re assembling furniture. You don’t do that and so far it’s worked out okay but you know some day it’s going to bite you.

Start the work, assemble some of the bits.

And then email the person who’s commissioned you. Having made that tiny start, you’ll be able to find some detail you need to check. Or at least that it sounds reasonable and believable that you want to check it. So you email them about that and they get the message: you’re on the case already. That goes down very well.

And then they email you back with the answer and thanking them, taking that detail and adding it to the work plan, it means one of two things.

First, you’ve started now and sometimes the ending is so clearly in sight that you might as well just go ahead and finish. When you can do a task, do a task.

But second and more commonly, when you come to do the task later, you feel like you’re already well underway – because you are.

Push on

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I’ve said this before but I happen to work best in hour-long chunks. It took me ages to find that out but it’s true and I try to stick to it now. Except, once you’ve set a timer for sixty minutes and begun working, there comes a time.

It’s usually between thirty and forty minutes into the run when you are spent.

Seriously, you’d give anything to to stop now, that’s enough, I’m out of ideas, it’s all over, surely I’ve been good, I can take the rest of the hour off, please, I’m begging now.

Push on, okay?

I’m saying this to you now because I’ve been reminded of why. I did an hour on a project I’ve been putting off for a while and, yes, just over thirty minutes in, I wanted to stop. I tapped on my iPhone to see how long was left and it was about 26 minutes. Rarely has 26 minutes looked so long.

But I did push on and in those final 26 minutes I pretty much finished the project. Got over the difficult bit, found a clever – I think – solution to an issue, drove on into new territory and found new things. When the timer sounded, I flicked at it to shut the bleedin’ thing up, I’m working.

I do also believe very much in stopping after the hour, in stopping when you are at that full flow. It sounds wrong but if you leave at the top, you come back later ready and rearing to go. If you stop when you fizzle out, you come back pre-fizzled.

But anyway, how great is it that I wanted to continue? This thing I’d been putting off, this thing at with 26 minutes left to go I was thinking kettles and biscuits and breakfast, now I’m on a burn with it and am near-as-dammit finished. That is finished in the writer’s sense of the word where it means finished, yes, but nowhere near done yet. But still, finished.

And because I pushed on to the end of the hour.

I think you can smell the smugness from there and I can only apologise. But it’s worth my looking irritating to you if it makes you try this too – and I think if you try it, it will make you feel this good as well. The only thing I don’t know is whether you need an hour. It’s so right for me, somehow, but plenty of others work best in half-hour sprints or two-hour marathons. Just pick a time, a duration, that’s a bit hard. If it’s easy, you don’t get that half-time slump so you don’t get the chance to rise above it.

I’m all for rising above things, I should do me some more of that, but it’s a combination of the satisfaction of rising above a problem and the resulting liberation that matters. At that 26-minutes-to-go point, I had a problem I couldn’t solve and ended up just trying different approaches until I found one that broke through. After that, I was just slamming down points and ideas and issues and they were coming out of nowhere, or so it seemed. That rush after the dam is fresh and it feels new and good.

‘Course, I’m a writer, I may look at this later and think it’s all nonsense, I can do much better than this tosh. But at least I’ll be thinking I can do much better. And it is always and forever easier to change something on the page than it is to make the first scratches on the paper.

Actually… today was my 245th day of getting up at 5am and it was the hardest in a couple of hundred. I’ve not come so close to turning over and carrying on sleeping since the very earliest of the days. So I pushed on then and I pushed on during the hour. No wonder I reek of smugness.

Sorry about that.

Boredom is vital

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Seriously, the last time I was bored was in 1979. But I should take the time to get bored again, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

“Boredom … protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.”

Legendary Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Why the Capacity for Boredom Is Essential for a Full Life – Maria Popova, Brainpickings (19 June 2014)

Brainpickings writer Popova expands on this in her full feature:

When was the last time you were bored — truly bored — and didn’t instantly spring to fill your psychic emptiness by checking Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? The last time you stood in line at the store or the boarding gate or the theater and didn’t reach for your smartphone seeking deliverance from the dreary prospect of forced idleness? A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard argued that this impulse to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our greatest source of unhappiness. A century later, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary about the creative purpose of boredom. And yet ours is a culture that equates boredom with the opposite of creativity and goes to great lengths to offer us escape routes.

Learn more from Popova and follow her links through to Phillips’ book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (UK Edition, US Edition).

Sushi is a McGuffin in this theory of life

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But it’s an interesting one. Really this is about discipline and patience but Creativity Post sums up a theory of living well and productively under the catch-all heading of Seven Life Lessons from Making Sushi.

It begins:

To get a seat you must make a reservation months in advance. The courses are carefully planned and the creation and serving of the meal is a multi-course symphony of sushi that some guests have even described as “stressful” yet an experience like no other. Jiro himself serves each course to his guests and carefully examines their faces as they taste his elegant works of edible art. What follows is the wisdom distilled from the great sushi chef on how to master your craft.

1. Learn from the best. Sometimes you must learn to fail before you learn to succeed. Yamamoto, a renowned Japanese food writer, says: “When you work for Jiro, he teaches you for free. But, you have to endure ten years of training. If you persevere for ten years you will acquire the skills to be recognized as a first-rate chef.”

In Jiro’s restaurant, many apprentices do not make it to the next level. Yet there are those who persevere. For example, one of the apprentice sushi chefs tried over 400 times to make egg sushi that met Jiro’s standards of being worthy to be served. When he finally received Jiro’s approval, he was overwhelmed with joy and cried.

Take away lesson: Only when you understand what it feels like to fail and try again will you be able to cherish the moment when you achieve success.

Dr Jonathan Wai, The Creativity Post (20 June 2014)

Not the takeaway I’m thinking of now. But despite my rumbling stomach, let’s both read on for the other six lessons.

Clean your desk. Go on.

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One half of my office desk is fantastically tidy and clean. Because Angela needed to use it. I cleared it all up so she could sit there without feeling queasy. But really I just moved everything to the other half which is simply frightening.

But go on, writer David Burkus, tell me what half tidy and half appalling means:

We can learn to structure environments to suit our goals and help use more effectively achieve those goals. If you’re trying to bring some more order, healthier choices, and a more generous perspective into your life, then maybe you should start by cleaning up your office and home. However, if you need a creative insight or breakthrough idea, that same tidy office could be stifling your creative thinking.

Clean Your Desk for Productivity (but Keep It Messy for Creativity – 99U (20 June 2014)

He can’t, can he? But he has more to say.

No Eureka moments

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Remember how Wuthering Heights has this weird structure where it’s really a story told to someone who tells it to someone who tells us? (I may have lost track there.) Here’s a story where I’m telling you something Time magazine says author Keith Sawyer recounts the story of researcher Vera John-Steiner who talked to creative geniuses.

She asked ’em “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“ and she expected some bits about eurekas. Instead:

Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.

Strokes of Genius: Here’s How the Most Creative People Get Their Ideas – Eric Barker, Time (21 June 2014)
http://time.com/2907776/strokes-of-genius-heres-how-the-most-creative-people-get-their-ideas/

Guy Kawasaki on innovation

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He’s an interesting guy. Kawasaki was originally best known for being an Apple Evangelist – official. That was his job title. He’s written a book called The Macintosh Way that’s still pretty good and another one I’ve forgotten that isn’t so great. But I like this talk. Kawasaki’s got this line that we should strive to change the world and there are plenty of people who say that. In fact, hang on…

Go change the world.

There you are, I’m another one. But Kawasaki does it alongside a pragmatism. Specifically this: he argues that changing the world is indeed a ideal goal but since we have to eat to survive, people who really do change the world tend to make some money.

He’s interesting, he’s funny, this is a TEDx talk, do take a look:

Eating the dog food

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So I’m after telling you to work more, that you can work more. That you can create more time to write. I may rarely have been so annoying in my life. But, just because this has been an unusual day, I want to show you that I do this too.

You’re reading the fifth posting today on The Blank Screen and all five were written on buses or while waiting for buses. I can do this in part because I am in Birmingham which has a good transport system. (Didn’t stop me getting lost and late, but.)

And I can do it because I have my iPhone with me.

One of today’s stories, Coffee With(out) Me was borne of my own experience and an idea I had for a particular friend who has that problem. Once I knew I wanted you to have this solution too, it was a matter of writing it up.

I could’ve written in the WordPress iPhone app and without exception every one of the stories ended up there for posting. But I just more enjoy writing in the app Drafts. So I did. Drafts is comfortable and somehow relaxing so I write in that, then maybe tap a button.

If I tap a button, it is to squirt the text to somewhere specific like OmniFocus. But I just as often copy and paste the lot over into WordPress.

Once it gets there, I may edit but I really just set the tags and search keywords for when I might want to find a story again. Otherwise, it’s just copy and paste into WordPress, then, wallop, published.

Once published, the stories here get automatically promoted in various places but if I really like a piece, I’ll go promote it with love too.

That writing step, that publishing and that promotion are the same for every piece. The rest of today’s went through exactly that going from me to you. But they also had steps and apps before then

I read a lot of news on RSS through the app Reeder 2. I search around a lot as I think of areas of interest and that’s all done through Safari. Any time I find or I think of something that might be useful, it goes into Evernote. I have a notebook (actually a shared entire account) that I can email in to. That applies as much to the odd stray thought that I email in via Drafts as it does to whole websites in Safari or forwarding actual emails I receive.

I use Safari again when getting a link to a previous story of mine. I use Apple’s iTunes Link Maker website to get me links for apps that work internationally. One irritation is that Apple only shows you the price of an app before you buy it. If I buy a pile to test before recommending one to you, I can’t see its price. So I use the website Appshopper.com which tracks these things.

And – full, whispered disclosure – I use Amazon Associates for links to books or DVDs. If you buy those or take a look and then buy something else, some pennies come my way. I reckon it’s better that I get them than Amazon does, but.

To get iTunes or Associates links like that, you have to log in to your account on those services and I do that repeatedly via 1Password.

So that’s, what? At today’s prices, I’m using:

Drafts: £2.49, $3.99
Evernote: free to try up to a generous limit
1Password (£12.99, $17.99 universal version)
WordPress for iOS: free
Reeder 2: (£2.99, $4.99)
Safari: free and preinstalled on iOS

As ever with these things, if you were to set out doing it today perhaps you wouldn’t rush to buy three apps and use them alongside three others. Put like that, it does sound like overkill.

But these things grow. And then when you are on buses all day, you’re glad they did. Except for finding all the links, that’s five-biscuit job.

I should also say that my iPhone battery would’ve died from all this I’d it weren’t that I have a gorgeous Mophie Juice Pack recharger plugged into it right now. I bought mine at the Apple Store in Grand Central station but I reckon you can get a cheaper deal here in the UK or there in the States.