News

Getting around to using an anti-procrastination app

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“[David] Nicholls, while writing his follow-up to One Day, used a particularly brutal app, Write or Die. Ponder too long over your next word and an ominous red glow descends over the page. Then your text disappears in haphazard fashion: This is what a sntnc lks lk ftr prcrstntng fr 20 scnds.

Nicholls likened it to “writing with a gun to my head”. Unsurprisingly he didn’t produce his best work and decided that two years and 32,000 words of work were to be discarded.”

The much-delayed war on procrastination – Tom Heyden, BBC News Online (11 October 2014)

I know what you’re thinking. He only wrote 32,000 words? In two years? That’s 16,000 a year. It’s 44 words per day. No wonder he wanted an anti-prevarication app.

No wonder it failed too: I can pump out 20 pages of script or 10,000 words of text per day for up to about 6 days in a row. But while they can be surprisingly good – in that when I go back over a manuscript I can’t always tell you what was considered and what was written that quickly – the truth is that it is all considered and it must all be. It takes time to write, time in which you are not writing.

So having an app that threatens you even more than I do just can’t work. However, the full BBC News piece has a lot more to say about beating prevarication and why this is an issue for us more now than ever.

If you get fired, don’t do this

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Just don’t. I have no way to know if this is as genuine as it seems – though it’s a pointless thing to fake – and one always likes to think that there are faults on both sides.

But that doesn’t matter.

When you’re fired or you are made redundant, let it go. Because it’s gone.

And we might all bitch to our friends about how unfair it is – spoiler alert: your friends are never fooled – and okay, maybe, if you must.

But read this to see what happens when you bitch about your employer and in particular when you employer runs a website and you bitch about them on their own site.

Prepare to wince as you read the full feature.

Productivity tip of the week

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Eighteen months of work, hours of advice from many people, oodles of detail and my current project was just all so big that I was regularly derailed by it. I can’t tell you exactly what it is yet but at this stage the job was just to apply for Arts Council funding to get a project done.

The good thing is that I started the process bewildered and now I know we’ve got a strong application, I know that I did it as well as we could. One bad thing is that you obviously never know whether the bid will be successful. But even if it fails, the process taught me a gigantic amount. So that’s good. What’s really bad is that at this crucial point, I was derailed again. Knocked off the productivity train of mixed metaphors. And once you’re off, it is stunningly hard to get back on.

Yesterday at 10am, though, I set a timer on my iPhone for one hour. No way to finish the job in an hour, not even a chance of making a good enough dent. But at least I’d be doing something, I’d be inching along instead of panicking about it all the time like it was a dental appointment.

Do this for me. Do an hour. Whatever it is that is pressing on you, just take the next hour and work on it. Even if that is all you do, you are better off doing that than worrying about it. You are certain to feel better for being even an hour further along with it. And, not to scare you here, but I didn’t stop at the end of my hour. Five hours later, I’d done the application completely. I actually had finished the job. Well, it’s now with my partners on the project, it’s not submitted to Arts Council England yet, but I feel pretty fantastic.

One hour turned me from wanting to run away from this thing into wanting to do more. So try it. Just an hour. Okay?

TextExpander Touch updated, improved

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It is still harder to type on iOS devices with the TextExpander keyboard but a new 3.1 release plus iOS 8.0.2 has improved things. You want this because the very best use of the new iOS keyboarded feature is TextExpander and it is tantalisingly close to great.

The iOS 8.0.2 update has fixed the bug that meant you had to keep switching the keyboard on and off in Settings to get it to work. That’s a big thing, it would be the biggest thing except there is also now auto-correction.

A bit.

I don’t understand how it can have a bit of autocorrection. It’s as if developers don’t have access to the iOS autocorrection feature and so have to implement one themselves. That seems an enormous waste of effort and doubly so since it isn’t working. Whereas the TextExpander keyboard previously gave me no corrections at all, this one does some. Not many and not the same ones that the regular Apple keyboard does.

This wouldn’t matter a huge amount except that it is harder to type on the TextExpander keyboard than it is on the regular one. So the keyboard that is meant to speed you up with TextExpander snippets does speed you up – and slows you down too.

These new keyboards for iOS are solely for when you are typing on the glass of your device: they can’t use Bluetooth external keyboards. So I’m trying to write this on the glass of my iPad Air and I’m doing fine – except that I had to give up doing it on the TextExpander keyboard.

But at least I had a go where previously I couldn’t last a sentence.

One other improvement. TextExpander touch had one very good sound – the kind of bleep it gives when it expands some text – and one very irritating sound with the clicking keyboard. Before this update, you got both sounds or you got none. I couldn’t bear the clicking keys so I had nothing.

I so want this to work.

TextExpander touch 3.1 is available now in the App Store

Weekend read: Vanity Fair on Microsoft

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This is the kind of reporting that gets me back interested in computers: the endless grey boxes and blue screens of death drove my head away into drama and fiction and I’m good with that. But it really is a fascinating world for how it’s an incredibly fast-paced summary of all business issues. Problems come and they topple firms. Today’s right decision is tomorrow’s end of the company.

Quick aside? I once went to some talk or other where the speaker held up Dell as as an example of how to do business brilliantly. That’s a presenter who hasn’t updated his slides in a very long while and who isn’t actually interested in his own topic. Dell was a superb success but it shot itself in the foot and unless his next slide had praised their aim, I knew he didn’t know his stuff.

Back to the point. Vanity Fair has run a rather good piece about Microsoft and specifically about the pretty tumultuous changes it has faced and as yet has failed to conquer. There’s a really nice line in it:

In the old world, corporations owned and ran Windows P.C.’s and Window servers in their own facilities, with the necessary software installed on them. Everyone used Windows, so everything was developed for Windows. It was a virtuous circle for Microsoft. Now the processing power is in the cloud, and very sophisticated applications, from e-mail to tools you need to run a business, can be run by logging onto a Web site, not from pre-installed software. In addition, the way we work (and play) has shifted from P.C.’s to mobile devices—where Android and Apple’s iOS each outsell Windows by more than 10 to 1. Why develop software to run on Windows if no one is using Windows? Why use Windows if nothing you want can run on it? The virtuous circle has turned vicious.

The Empire Reboots – Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair (November 2014)

Do read the full piece. It’s a three-biscuit article and terribly interesting.

So, what, is homework any good or not?

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This is mostly a critique of a report but the quotes from the report are interesting. Just apparently not new.

Let’s start by reviewing what we know from earlier investigations.[1] First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research – Valerie Strauss and Alfie Kohn, Washington Post (26 November 2012)

So that’s not new in two ways: it’s a 2012 article commenting on how a then-recent study wasn’t great. But it cites or at least refers to a whole chain of prior reports that all say homework is a shrug, doesn’t help you one way or the other.

I can’t help but map that homework idea to the amount of cramming I do overnight before meetings. I’ll take a couple of evenings off and see what happens.

The things I do for you.

It’s so easy to break habits

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Well, I could do with fixing my tea drinking habit. And my Pepsi Max addition. I could lighten up on the curries too, or at least if I stopped having so many I could perhaps lighten up.

But about six months ago I made a plan – and put it in OmniFocus – that every day I would post one article to this Blank Screen news site. Just one. After a while, it became a habit. And there was certainly never a shortage of material.

After a spell, that became frustrating: there was always more that I wanted to say.

So I worked out timings and figured out the average time per article – it’s ridiculously variable – and also reckoned that doing two together would take less time than doing one then coming back later for the next.

In my head I was about to change the repeating daily OmniFocus task to “Post three new articles” and I began typing exactly that. But somehow the word ‘three’ changed itself to ‘five’. A slip of the mind.

But I tried it. And for at least five months, I did five stories a day. It got so doing the five was a normal part of my day. Until the end of September.

Then various events I’ve been producing all year came along and last preparation, new marketing and new research followed by the performance, it clobbered me and I failed.

I failed to post at all one day.

I remember sitting by the bed, iPad in hand, not really able to focus my eyes let alone my head. It was probably a sensible decision to fall asleep, even if my body made that choice for me.

But.

Having broken the chain once, that chain became china: it shattered at the break. It became very easy to not post at all.

Now, I don’t think you were waiting for me every day. But I was. And I’m jolted by how hard it was to break the pattern the first time yet how very, very easy it was to break it the second.

So I’m back. I promise myself and you that I’m back. But do please take a telling from my admitting to having been poor like this. You can do more than you expect with a habit and if you don’t break it, you feel great.

Breathtaking future from Adobe – er, and Microsoft?

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Is it bad that I look at this, want it and then when I see it’s Microsoft think twice? Microsoft tends to do feature lists really well, as in adding a lot of features to the list. It tends to demo well too. But then in real life the perfect demo crashes all the time. Or the features on the list don’t actually do what you thought they would (see the howls of WordPerfect users forced to switch to Word and learning that Microsoft literally – literally literally, not just very – could not do Reveal Codes). Or the features are just so hard to find that you wonder whether they’re really there or not.

So the Microsoft element of this makes me cautious. And I suppose it’s interesting that Adobe is getting into bed with Microsoft more: it makes you wonder if they’re really thinking of abandoning their power user base over on Apple gear.

But if you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator or other main Adobe apps, this will impress you.

 

 

Writers’ notes: how to write a CV

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We are taught – if we’re taught at all – that we write CVs in a certain way with chronology of work, every detail in sequence with gaps explained. References. Interests.

Bollocks.

Do this instead:

1) No modesty. There’s a difference between boasting and going too far the other way. Of avoiding boasting by instead lying by omission. You got on the New York Times Bestseller List? Say so. It’s a fact. Don’t qualify it (all US book writers were on strike that week), just state it.

2) Nuts to academic good practice: you are not applying for a university post, everything they tell you to do on CVs is wrong. Nobody gives a damn about how you’re interested in ballroom fish photography, they want to know you can do the job. Tell them that by leading with your latest work and then follow with the next most relevant thing. Divide it up into sections if that means you can group two long-apart events without looking strange.

3) Remember that the job of the CV is to get you an interview. Don’t put so much in there that they can effectively interview you on the page. The CV gets you in the door, nothing more than that.

4) Be plain, be simple, don’t go over a page.

5) References. Let them ask for those. Have them ready if you can and if you must but nobody needs them to take a look at you.

And that’s all a CV is for. Now it’s up to you with your writing and your pitching in the interview.

Watch Windows 95 on your watch

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Some people criticise this fella – you know it’s a fella – because he’s got Windows 95 running on his Android Wear watch but it crashes.

If you ask me, he’s just faithfully reproducing the Windows-for-the-D’oh experience. I do remember watching Windows 95 start up, in 1996 naturally, and wondering if this was really the future. And if there were perhaps another future I could switch to, please.