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Turn your To Do tasks into an art project

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There are principles here that I like very much but it’s also heavily paper- and sticker-based and I just can’t handle Post-It Notes and colouring in. So I won’t be following Kelly Maguire’s exact advice but it’s terribly interesting how she turned her life around with a felt-tip pen:

For the past few months I’ve been waking up in a cold sweat freaking out about things I forgot to take care of. A lot of it is little — like forgetting to schedule a hair appointment until after they’ve closed for the day. Some of it is bigger — like the Kickstarter I did a few years ago that fizzled out. And a few things are huge — like the fact that I completely bungled my corporate tax filings for the last three years.

With some nudging from my therapist and support from my husband, I finally managed to get on top of things. My to-do list has gone from “deal with three years of back taxes” to more mundane stuff like “clean up the dried paint in the bathroom.” I used a handful of different strategies to gain control, which I’ll detail in a sec, but the biggest key to staying motivated has been to turn it into something like an art project.

Time management as an art project – Kelly Maguire, Offbeat Home (1 January 2015)

One thing she uses is called a Chronodex and you’ll see why she likes it plus she tells you where to get them for yourself, but that’s not a Chronodex…

…that’s Moonbase Alpha.


Read the full piece.

That was 2014… all of it

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And it’s already weird typing ‘2014’, it feels so long ago. Not that it feels like 2015 to me yet. Not sure when it is, then. Not sure when I am. But as part of an annual tradition that I’ve just revived, this week’s Self Distract personal blog is an expanded version of my That Was… entries that I do here.

Each month I write out for you what I’ve done. As I keep saying, you don’t need to read it but I clearly and visibly need to write it because it is one huge element of making me do things. If I don’t do anything, I’ve got nothing to tell you and how dare I tell you to be more productive.

The full year’s review is over on Self Distract in quite arse-tinglingly long detail but because I do the monthly version here, let me summarise my 2014 for you:

Writing: approximately 620,000 words
Books: 2 written, 1 editing
Speaking engagements: 88
Produced Events: 9
Scripts: 1 Doctor Who radio drama, 1 stage short, 1 education script
Fiction: 7 short stories, 2 poems, 2 revised novels and 10,000 words of 1 new novel
Blogs: 1, 294
Attended: 79 shows, launches, workshops or other events
Journalism: 45 written pieces and 3 magazine issues edited

2015
Zip.

Review: PDFpen 2 for iPad

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I’ve started writing reviews for MacNN.com and just once in a while I think some of the pieces are useful for us as writers and creatively productive kinds of people. I mentioned WordTarget very recently but this is more serious and I think more useful: it’s an app for reading PDFs on your iPad. Now, there are eleventy-billion such apps but this is much more useful because it lets you edit the PDFs.

Let me explain in this extract from the full MacNN piece:

Here’s a true story about what PDFpen 2 does. A Windows-based firm produced a year-end report that was about 80 pages and most importantly took many, many hours to create. It was all highly complex, auto-generated figures — and one huge spelling mistake. They didn’t see the mistake until the final PDF was about to be sent out to clients. Fixing it meant re-running the whole process, re-calculating everything: it meant not sending the report until tomorrow.

Luckily, one guy in the firm had PDFpen on his iPad. He opened that PDF, typed in the correct spelling, sent the PDF on its way. Total time: five minutes — and three of those had been spent on panicking.

Hands On: PDFpen 2 for iPad (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (23 December 2014)

Read the full piece because PDFpen 2 for iPad is perhaps the software I most recommend out of around thirty pieces I’ve done for MacNN so far.

Utility counts every word you type – in Facebook as well as your writing

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Some rogueishly handsome fella over on MacNN.com wrote a review of a OS X utility called WordTarget:

It’s a menubar utility for OS X which simply counts every word. Every time you hit the space bar, that’s another word counted, and that’s fine. No debate there. It does also count hyphens, though, so self-starter is treated as two words, which seems like cheating. To balance that out, however, it does not subtract words when you delete them. Actually, we found that if you highlight some words and delete them all, your word count goes up by one.

That’s probably a bug, and it’s not a significant error: the odd word here or there is not going to make much difference if you’re writing a 170,000-word book, for instance. However, it is significant that it won’t recognize that you’ve deleted whole passages. If you are really doing this to hit a Charlie Brown-like mandated word count, you’ll have to keep this in mind.

But WordTarget is meant for people who are aiming at an ideal number of words rather than a specific commissioned length. Novelists who decide they’re going to write 1,000 words per day no matter what, for instance, they’re the market here. You can presume that WordTarget sales go up every November during NaNoWrMo, where hopeful writers need to hit an average of 1,600 words per day.

Hands On: WordTarget menubar word counter (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (30 December 2014)

Read the full piece because it tells you more, it has screenshots and I worked very hard on it.

That was December 2014

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It still is, as I write this. But I’ve been doing this accountability/atonement thing monthly for the year – after having accidentally done it for someone else the year before, as you do – and there’s that word year. I’ve used it three times now. It’s on my mind. Every month I wince and tell you what I’ve managed to do (though you’ll notice I never tell you in advance what I’m planning)(I’m not that stupid). So it feels beholden to do the year’s one.

Fortunately, I can’t do that until I’ve worked out December’s doings.

Unfortunately, December’s doings were a bit light. But here goes:

Writing: approximately 31,100 words
21 articles for MacNN.com (circa 11,000 words)
4x Radio Times reviews (400 words)
1x editorial for Write On! magazine (500 words)
Soundscapes script (2,000 words)
1x poem ‘Heart’ (100 words)
3x Self Distract blogs (1,200 words)
55x The Blank Screen news articles (15,600 words)

Other:
Ran Burton Young Writers’ Session
Ran Birmingham Young Writers’ Session
Ran Reaside Clinic writing session
Edited Write On! magazine issue 5
Wrote Writers’ Guild press release re Library of Birmingham cuts
Interviewed on Russia Today
Guest at British Film Institute’s Blake’s 7 evening

Best productivity deals now on

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So you’re stuffed and sleepy and you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing’s Christmas Special. Before Doctor Who begins, go grab some of the very best deals there are for productivity tools and advice.

Email and Paperless Field Guides
All of David Sparks’ Field Guide books are half price. That includes his excellent one on Presentations plus a title I’ve not read 60 Mac Tips and a title I’m not interested in, Markdown. However, by far the best and most useful to you right now are his books on Email and a very wide-ranging one called Paperless.

Read that and you’ll transform your working life. Read his Email one and you’ll make so much more use of your email that you will enjoy it.

David Sparks’ Field Guides are all iBooks that cost now cost around £3 or $5. I actually can’t confirm the UK price because I’ve bought most of these already so the iBook Store doesn’t tell me the price anymore. Get them on the iBooks Store or check them out on Sparks’ official site.

The Blank Screen
My own book is half off too: it costs you £4.11 and after it you’ll be creative and productive. I may have mentioned this book before but this is the first the Kindle version has ever been on sale. Grab a copy now.

Drafts 4
This app for iPhone and iPad looks like a very simple notebook kind of thing. It is. Tap that icon and start typing. If you never do anything else with it, it’s still good because it’s somehow just a pleasure to write in. I can’t define that, can’t quantify it but also can’t deny it. I just like writing in this notetaking app and in fact I am doing so right now.

What happens after you write a note, though, is what makes this special. I’ll send this text straight to The Blank Screen website. But I could choose instead – or as well – pop it onto the end of note in Evernote. Chuck it over to my To Do app OmniFocus. (Which reminds me, OmniFocus for iPad is not on sale but it’ll still be the best money you spend on apps ever.)

Equally I could write a note in Drafts 4 and send it to you as a text message. Or an email. I don’t know that it’s actually got endless options but it must be close. And that combination of so very, very quickly getting to start writing down a thought and then being able to send your text on to anywhere makes this a front-screen app for me.

It’s down to £2.99 from £6.99 on the iOS App Store.

TextExpander 3 + custom keyboard
When I want to write out my email address I just type the letters ‘xem’ and TextExpander changes that to the full address. Similarly, I write reviews for a US website called MacNN now and each one needs certain elements like the body text, an image list, links, tags and so on in a certain order. I open a new, blank document, type the letters ‘xmacnn’ and first it asks me what I’m reviewing and then it fills out the document with every detail you can think of.

The short thing to say next is that this is via TextExpander and that it is on iOS for a cut price of just £1.99 instead of £2.99. So just get it.

Got yet yet? Okay, there’s one more thing to tell you. TextExpander began on Mac OS X and it is still best there. The iOS version wasn’t really much use until iOS 8 when Apple allowed companies to make their own keyboards. Suddenly you could switch to the TextExpander keyboard whatever you were doing or whatever you’re writing on your iPhone or iPad. That meant you could expand these texts anywhere. Fantastic. Except the TextExpander keyboard is somehow less accurate and harder to use than Apple’s.

So what you gained with the text-expanding features, you lost a bit with everything else you typed.

Except many other apps work with TextExpander. Apple’s ones don’t but Drafts 4, for instance, recognises those ‘xem’ or ‘xmacnn’ things and works with them. So buy TextExpander 3 for iOS in order to get these things set up and working. It’s a bonus if you like the new keyboard.

Get TextExpander 3 + custom keyboard.

Hang on, Strictly’s nearly over. These are my favourite deals on productivity books and apps available right now but remember that they won’t stay on sale for long. If you’re only surfacing from Christmas and reading this in February, ignore the prices and just focus on the recommendations. None of these are here just because they’re cheap, it is that they are superb and the sale is a great bonus.

Revealed: the tech Santa uses

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How does Santa do it? Technology. Today, Santa can run almost his entire business from his smartphone.
As a small business person, you can learn a lot from this wildly successful, world-renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Which apps does Santa rely on to run his small business? I’ve listed a few in my free Holiday Success Guide, which you can download here. They include:

Strategies: Which apps are on Santa’s smartphone?

I bet Santa has an iPhone 6. Read the full piece.

Index your own work online

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This is a very good idea and yet I go pale at the thought of trying to do it:

While online portfolios are incredibly important for showing off your expertise, there’s a second kind of portfolio—a completely different kind of portfolio—that can be a really valuable tool for all freelancers: an Ultimate Archive.

An Ultimate Archive is an “offline” portfolio for organizing and analyzing your body of work. It’s a simple spreadsheet with a link to everything you’ve ever written on the Internet. You’re likely the only one who will ever see it. But besides tracking your bylines, there are many different ways it can help you land new clients and improve how you approach your career.

Why You Need an Ultimate Archive of Your Work – Aubre Andrus, Contently (17 December 2014)

Read the full piece for more on why and some on how to do this for yourself.

Opinion: Don’t be more productive in 2015

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I see his point, but.

Here’s the problem: you’re not Superman or -woman, and even if you are, you’ve got it backwards. Have you ever seen Superman embark on twenty adventures at once? Nope, he doesn’t. He only takes on the most badass thugs that nobody else can deal with and goes at them one-by-one. He’s not multitasking to fight one villain at 7 am, save a cat at noon and then yet another villain at 3 pm. Neither should you.

If you want to get more of the great stuff done in 2015, try doing less. That doesn’t necessarily mean working less hours (though that wouldn’t hurt), but spread yourself less thin across a gazillion different commitments. Focus only on those rare activities that really make you happy and truly move the needle, everything else is just noise and wears you out. Trying to do too much at once is what makes you fail at all your good intentions. It’s what throws you right back into your old habits, before you can say “merry Christmas and a happy new year”.

Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Be More Productive in 2015 | Tim Metz | LinkedIn

Read the full piece.

In case Christmas dinner makes you very sleepy…

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Virgin Media has teamed with a couple of schoolboy inventors to come up with KipstR wristband, a 3D-printed device that will automatically set a Virgin Media TiVo box to record when the wearer falls asleep.

Designed as part of Virgin Media’s Switched on Futures initiative by 15-year-old Ryan Oliver and 14-year-old Jonathan Kingsley from Manchester, the KipstR uses a pulse sensor to tell when the user has fallen asleep. It then sends a signal to the TiVo box to pause or record a show automatically.

If the wearer wakes up, it can also tell the box to resume the programme from its paused state

Don’t worry if you nod off during Doctor Who Christmas special, this wristband will record it for you – Rik Henderson, Pocket-lint (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece.

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