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Case study part 1: Melissa Dale, investigative officer for Acme Ltd

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Okay, she doesn’t really work for Acme Ltd. I can’t really tell you where she’s employed but please picture a very, very big UK organisation.

Similarly, she’s also not an investigative officer, though that title is pretty close to the real one and does give you an idea of what she does.

Last, she’s not called Melissa Dale. I just asked her: what would you like me to call you since I can’t use your real name? I have no clue why she picked Melissa Dale. But it’s a good name, isn’t it?

Here’s the thing. Melissa works a compressed week at Acme and is fairly new to it or at least fairly new to her current responsibilities. But she’s just suddenly taken on much more work: her own jobs have grown plus she’s inherited tasks from a colleague.

Melissa has never before been a To Do list kind of person but now she says she has to be. The sheer volume of work drove her to writing a To Do list:

Because I felt a bit overwhelmed and felt I had to get it out of my head and onto paper. To tame it.

She specifically chose to write her list on paper despite Acme having all manner of computer systems and Melissa herself being very familiar with her Mac, iPhone and iPad:

It’s a more tactile thing. It feels the best way of getting it out of my brain and onto there a list. It’s more physical doing it pen to paper rather than on screen. [I don’t usually write To Do lists but] it seems to work for me sometimes.

She is now using a computer but not through wanting the benefits of a To Do task manager. Instead, she moved to her Acme PC specifically:

Because the list got so long and I kept taking things off and adding things to the bottom. I felt I couldn’t be bothered to keep writing it out every day so that drove me to a computer.

Right now she’s using just a list in Microsoft Word. If you’ve read this site for more than ten minutes and you noted that Melissa has a Mac and iOS devices, you may be thinking I would recommend OmniFocus.

I did. But she doesn’t want to go to OmniFocus, she doesn’t want to go to Things or any other system:

Because I don’t usually write To Do lists, I need to find for myself what works for me.

By this process, Melissa began with no list at all, then moved to paper and is currently writing in Word. I expect she’ll find To Do managers next – but I could be wrong. That’s why I’m going to be following what she does over the next few months.

That sounds mean, like I’m following her from a science or statistics interest when really I just want her to be okay. Still, she’s so different to me that it is fascinating to see what she solutions she looks for and what solutions she finds.

Besides, she said that thing about needing “to tame” her tasks. How could you not now follow someone who says that?

Cramming doesn’t work: space out learning and revision instead

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After six hours of looking at study material (and three cups of coffee and five chocolate bars) it’s easy to think we have it committed to memory. Every page, every important fact, evokes a comforting feeling of familiarity. The cramming has left a lingering glow of activity in our sensory and memory systems, a glow that allows our brain to swiftly tag our study notes as “something that I’ve seen before”. But being able to recognise something isn’t the same as being able to recall it.

Different parts of the brain support different kinds of memory. Recognition is strongly affected by the ease with which information passes through the sensory areas of our brain, such as the visual cortex if you are looking at notes. Recall is supported by a network of different areas of the brain, including the frontal cortex and the temporal lobe, which coordinate to recreate a memory from the clues you give it. Just because your visual cortex is fluently processing your notes after five consecutive hours of you looking at them, doesn’t mean the rest of your brain is going to be able to reconstruct the memory of them when you really need it to.

Memory: Why cramming for tests often fails – Tom Stafford, BBC News Online (18 September 2014)

I don’t know, I’d need to be more organised in order to have the time to space out when I revised or crammed. But read the full feature for more, if you’re not currently cramming.

The way you work is not the way I work

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I think that’s obvious. And I hope I’m aware of it all the time. For instance, I might well ram OmniFocus down your throat but I doubt there’s a time I’ve actually recommended it that I didn’t also give you the important reasons why you might not want it. (OmniFocus is astonishingly great and transforming but it doesn’t run on Windows or Android so if you do, it’s no use to you. Also, I think it’s more than worth the money but it does cost more than most so that is a factor.)

Similarly, I might ram iOS and Apple down your throat but I fully accept that there are reasons to like using Windows, even if I’ve yet to discover any.

But I’m worrying about this today because I’m listening to David Allen on Mac Power Users. That’s an interesting mix. Allen is a very clever guy whose Getting Things Done book has helped me greatly – I give him a lot of credit in my Blank Screen workshops and where I don’t promote my own books from the stage in those, I do promote his. Yet every time I listen to him, I feel he doesn’t get it for writers and creatives.

He’s very clear and strident and adamant about the thinking behind getting things done, which I think is fine, but he’s pretty clear and strident and adamant about the specific tools he uses. And where.

For some years I’ve wondered why he doesn’t update his book to reflect how much the world has moved on. Getting Things Done presumes, for instance, that you can only make business calls from your office and that you can only get emails from there or your home, not from your phone on the way. It is what it is, it was written back in the Victorian era of around 2001. And I was very alert to this MPU interview where he mentions that he is finally doing a new version.

It’s just that the more I heard, the more I suspect it’ll be pretty much the same thing with perhaps the odd nod to newer technology. I should and I will have to wait until early next year when it comes out, but amongst all the really excellent and clever ideas he mentioned on MPU, it was still that he is clear and strident and adamant. Maybe you can now email on your phone or your iPad as you go between work and home, but you shouldn’t.

He doesn’t. He won’t. He likes to do this stuff at his desk and that’s where he’ll do it. Fine. Whatever. But that’s not the mark of someone who’s grasped how much things have changed.

I was waiting for MPU’s David Sparks and Katie Floyd to press him on technology and they did. Floyd mentioned how there hadn’t been all this stuff back when Allen wrote the book and he disagreed. Said that there had been the Palm Pilot then and nothing has ever come close to how great that was.

Yeah.

Also, he writes his tasks down on paper he keeps in his wallet and says if you use electronic methods, well, good luck. Specifically, you’re going to end up with tasks in many places – which is precisely what I think of people who use scraps of paper.

He does use technology, though: he has a To Do manager built for him on top of Lotus Notes. I had to Google whether Lotus Notes still exists and, actually, no, not so much. It’s long been IBM Notes and I can’t tell if it’s radically improved from when I had to use it back in the 1990s, but even Allen says nobody’s going to go out and buy [Lotus] Notes to run a To Do manager.

He does swap back and forth between that and OmniFocus. And the reason he goes back to Notes is that someone in his company is developing their To Do app. I can easily, readily see that having a tool custom built is going to be good, just not on Notes.

I’m wrong to rant, I feel. The new version of the book may change my mind, it may address everything I feel needs translation and conversion in the original. But yet again during an interview with him, I went from oooooh to oh.

But I’m going to watch how clear and strident and adamant I get when I’m talking to you about how I work and how you could.

In the meantime, have a listen to this smart man on Mac Power Users.

Charge your audience by the laugh

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A comedy club in Barcelona is experimenting with charging users per laugh, using facial-recognition technology to track how much they enjoyed the show.

The software is installed on tablets attached to the back of each seat at the Teatreneu club.

Each laugh is charged at 0.30 euros (23p) with a cap of 24 euros (£18). Takings are up so far.

Comedy club charges per laugh with facial recognition – Jane Wakefield, BBC News Online (9 October 2014)

Speechless.

Tip: returning Siri to navigation

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Here’s the thing. You’re driving using Siri as a Satnav on your iPhone. Since the phone is plugged into the car and therefore thinks it’s on mains, you can just say “Hey Siri” and ask it what you like, when you like. It is great.

Except.

You’re navigating along and you get a text. “Hey Siri, read my texts”, you say. And it does. That’s nice.

What’s a lot less nice is that your iPhone then sits on that grey-black Siri page waiting for you to press the button to ask it something else.

Don’t. Do this instead. Say: “Hey, Siri, what’s our ETA?”

Siri will tell you. Many people don’t realise you can do this at all but the trick is not that you can do it but that Siri reacts in a certain way. It tells you the ETA – and then it goes back to navigating. It goes back to the map and its turn by turn directions instead of the grey-black emptiness of the Siri page.

There will be other questions that work but the ETA one seems to do the job because it is related to navigating. Somehow iOS 8 knows to pop you back to navigating after you’ve asked this.

Bonus: when you do this a lot, as I do, you get to ask the ETA many times and you get to learn what your ETA is. I rarely care but now I’m very familiar with distances on the motorway.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry – but you might do what I want

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An article on Listverse offers an interesting take on how sometimes it’s worth losing our cool. Though one reason it’s interesting is that it’s also pragmatic. Here’s one section:

Negotiating is all about being levelheaded and outsmarting your opponent, right? Not entirely. All of our interpersonal interactions function on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one. Research shows that sometimes getting mad can help your case. People are programmed to be cautious around someone who is angry. Therefore, it can make the person whom you’re haggling with more cooperative if you get upset—they’ll try to give you stuff to appease you.

However, there are a few caveats to all of this. First of all, this usually only works with Europeans and Americans. Asian cultures find displays of anger during negations to be rude, so blowing your lid may hurt your case. Second, if you do get angry, it has to be real anger. If the guy opposite you thinks you’re faking it, they’ll actually increase their own demands. Researchers say that faking anger erodes trust. If they find out that you’re trying to game them, they’ll be less cooperative.

10 Surprisingly Pleasant Things You Get from Anger – Monte Richard, Listverse (9 October 2014)

Go on. Read the full piece for the other nine points.