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Quickie: Apple offering 0% finance again

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I don’t like debt but two years ago I bought my office iMac throughly Apple’s finance deal because it was 0% and I decided I would rather the money stay in my account than theirs. I was still glad when the monthly payments were over but it was a handy thing for my business.

Handy enough that I did look into it again when the iPhone 6 came out. This 0% finance deal wasn’t available then – but it is now.

It may have been for some time: I just had a notion it might be there as a certain big holiday is coming. And yep, there it is. The cost of Apple gear with this is significantly lower than with typical finance options from Apple and others.

Get over it. By writing about it.

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I’ve only fairly recently discovered this for myself: when I’ve had a particularly bad time, especially if it were my fault it was so very bad, then writing about it helps me. The two times I’m thinking of, I wrote to friends. One of whom didn’t want to know and I wish to God I’d never sent it, but the other asked – and I didn’t send it to her. I wrote out a long email explaining everything and, the writer’s mind kicks in, the end result was far more structured and comprehensible than the whirlwind in my head. I wrote that, read it, understood it and had no more need to send it to her. “I’m fine, thanks,” I wrote instead.

Of course, things that upset and paralyse me are as nothing compared to what happens to some people:

In one of my leadership development workshops, we invited participants to write up and present an account of a difficult experience. We ended up with more than we had expected when Simon, a senior executive at an oil company, told the group about a harrowing experience that he had never properly digested.

On an assignment in Nigeria, Simon and five colleagues visiting one of the company’s oil rigs had been taken hostage. Two of the other hostages were killed in front of him almost at once and he was only released after long and drawn-out negotiations on the size of the ransom. He told us that he had never been able to put the experience behind him and was still plagued by nightmares.

But he also told us that writing up an account of this experience for the workshop had been somewhat cathartic for him.

To Get Over Something, Write About It – Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Harvard Business Review (26 November 2014)

Read the full piece for a quite academic but thoughtful exploration of how this works for us.

Evernote claims people are ditching PowerPoint in favour of the note software

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Well, actually, the headline writers at Evernote claim that: the article they head stays a little away from the topic. It’s also even more of an advert than this sounds but Evernote gets some wriggle room here because PowerPoint is rubbish. Treat this less as an ad campaign aimed at PowerPoint users and more at telling you how Evernote has this Presentation Mode.

Hand on heart, I’ve ignored it because I do all my talks with Keynote and like it a lot. But this could be handy.

Meetings are a major part of our daily routine. At their best, meetings foster collaboration and openness. At their worst, they leave us feeling drained and directionless. The frequent culprit: slide decks. The problem can be summed up with one word: preparedness.

In the world of slides, being prepared for a meeting refers not to productive time spent getting your thoughts together, but rather the hours devoted to fiddling with design templates, and turning good ideas into bullets. The result of this preparedness is a presentation that’s more pitch than discussion. It’s locked. Your team’s feedback will have to wait.

There’s a better way, and it overcomes all these shortcomings. It’s Presentation Mode. We use it everyday and it’s had a significant impact on the quality of our meetings. They’re faster, more focused, and more collaborative than they’ve ever been.

The New Presentation Mode will Change Your Meetings – Andrew Sinkov, Evernote Blog (3 December 2014)

Read the full piece.

Review: OmniFocus Video Field Guide

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David Sparks writes a mean Field Guide book: I’ve read his work on going Paperless, on using Email and on giving Presentations. All good enough and interesting enough that his announcement of a video version was enough to be news. That it was a 150-minute video about OmniFocus made it a recommendation. And the fact that you could and can watch a sample segment from it on Sparks’ official site made it a certainty that I would tell you about it.

And a fair certainty that I’d buy it for myself.

Now that I’ve bought and seen it, though, there is more to say. If you do have OmniFocus then unless you’re so good that the Omni Group employs you, then it is easily obvious that you will benefit from this video and enjoy it a lot.

If you’re at the stage of looking into OmniFocus, of looking into To Do apps of any kind, that’s a trickier thing. It’s 150 minutes long but it doesn’t hang about: it gets very specific, very quickly and I enjoy that, but I don’t think it doubles as a selling tool. No reason it should, but if I were back at the point where I was trying to decide whether to buy OmniFocus, I think you need something more first.

Maybe not much more. Try the videos on the Omni Group official site: they’re adverts, of course, but they give you the flavour of the software. And if it looks good to you, try a couple of YouTube videos about it. Then buy OmniFocus and go buy David Sparks’ OmniFocus Video Field Guide for $9.99.

The end of sitting on your end

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Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.

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The research reads like a Surgeon General’s warning: Prolonged periods of sitting can lead to obesity, heart disease, blood clots and spinal compression, according to the latest medical studies.

To combat this modern office horror, an artist and an architecture firm from the Netherlands have re-imagined the office with all the chairs pulled out from under us. The exhibit, called The End of Sitting, is a geometric landscape of surfaces of varying heights on which to lean.

Standing room only: Startup office of the future promises ‘end of sitting’ – David Pierini, Cult of Mac (3 December 2014)

Read the full piece where that photo comes from too.

New: OmniFocus Video Field Guide by David Sparks

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I would tell you that I am an expert OmniFocus user but it’s a lie. I am expert at the specific bits of it that I use daily. (Hourly.) (Minutely.) David Sparks knows the whole thing and now shows it to you.

He’s done this before with the original OmniFocus in a whole series of screencast videos but now he’s done it more in the form of his Field Guide books. These are all very good, very excellent books that seem to cut through complex issues and just tell you what’s what and what you need to know now. Somehow they are that relaxed and yet by the end you know everything. The books are particularly fine pieces of work and now there’s a video one for OmniFocus.

It’s about all the versions from Mac through iPhone and iPad. And it’s 2.5 hours of video: 150 minutes. You can watch a sample on Vimeo or just go buy the whole thing from Sparks’ site here.

As expert as I think I am, I know about this new video because I’m on the guy’s mailing list and it can’t have been above four minutes since I got the email, checked the sample, bought the whole thing and came here to tell you.

You just tell yourself you’re entitled

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Generally considered a negative trait, entitlement, in small doses, can actually have the positive effect of boosting creativity, according to a new study to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Various studies have found that those who feel entitled are less likely to help others or apologize and are more likely to want special privileges, break rules, treat their romantic partners selfishly and make unethical decisions.

Entitlement boosts creativity – Jim Patterson, Vanderbilt (18 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Via 99u

So it’s been done before, so what?

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I wish I thought that. I’ve a project now that I want to do more than anything but it has been done somewhere else before and that is killing me. One of the people backing me points out that it’s also been done in Paris and Vienna and doubtlessly America too so it’s not like I’d be stealing from this particular somewhere else.

You know how when something is on your mind, it’s like the world or at least the internet seems to gather relevant stuff and throw it at you? Usually when you’re trying to avoid thinking about it. But sometimes when you need it too. So today I found this:

Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.

A better question to ask is, “have you ever done this before?” Or perhaps, “are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?”

Originality is local. The internet destroys, at some level, the idea of local, so sure, if we look hard enough we’ll find that turn of a phrase or that unique concept or that app, somewhere else.

But no one is asking you to be original. We’re asking you to be generous and brave and to matter. We’re asking you to step up and take responsibility for the work you do, and to add more value than a mere cut and paste. Give credit, definitely, but reject vemödalen.

Of Course It’s Been Done Before – Seth Godin (18 November 2014)

Find out a touch more – including what vemödalen means – in the full piece.

The Writers’ Toolkit today in Birmingham

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This isn’t productivity and if I were being productive I’d have told you about it sooner. But the annual Writers’ Toolkit event is on in Birmingham today and I’m there all day. Here are the details of the event.

I’ve produced one panel for the Writers’ Guild – and will be there all day representing the Guild so look for me at the stand, would you? – which I’m particularly keen to see. The Job Lot’s Stuart Lane and film writer Andrea Gibb are talking about Writing for the Screen at 10:45.

But then I’m also speaking on another panel about being a non-fiction writer and I’m getting to chair a discussion about how writers can, should and do use the internet.

It’s always a good day and I’d be going even if I weren’t working. But I might have got to sleep in a bit more if I were just strolling up to enjoy it all.

See you there?