Honestly, I didn’t know where to start with this. A company is taking votes on whether to make a onesie that looks like a suit. Sort of. It’s already got more votes than it needed so this is happening, at least to prototype stage. But let someone I’ve never heard of explain it much better and with even more sarcasm than I could’ve mustered since I’m secretly curious.
News
Stop overthinking everything
Years and years ago, my therapist told me that I overthink things. I still wonder what she meant.
This article buzzed around Facebook today and I found it useful because actually, yes, I do overthink. And it is a problem.
We all do our best to stay positive, but occasionally we can slip into negative thinking patterns that can wreak havoc on our lives. We might worry about our past mistakes or current stresses, and how these could lead to negative outcomes in the future. We might obsess about or over-analyze regular experiences and interactions, reading into them things that aren’t actually there. We might find that as soon as one bad thing happens, we associate it with all the other bad things that have happened in our lives and begin to feel miserable. We might feel anxious in the present, having a hard time getting out of our own heads as we worry and obsess about the things that could go wrong.
If you find yourself in this place frequently, you are what psychologists call a ruminator, or, an over-thinker, and this way of thinking can be harmful to your health. Psychologists have found that over-thinking can be detrimental to human performance, and can lead to anxiety and depression, especially in women, who are much more likely than men to ruminate on stress and disappointments than men.
I find it helpful enough to just have my head explained there but the full piece includes the eight helpful suggestions of the title and they are good. Even the one that explains bloody walking is good for you. What is it with that today?
Bugger. Walking is good for your creativity
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
This research – as well as the nifty soundbites or anecdotal quotes that have been around for hundreds of years – suggests that the act of walking itself, not just what you enjoy along the way, is what’s beneficial. The science to back this up is long established and trusted.
Exercise, of course, gets the heart pumping faster, thus circulating more blood to the brain. This is even true on small ambles – not just powerful sprints. All this extra oxygen-rich blood getting to the brain allows it to perform certain tests much better, especially those concerned with memory and attention.
More recent research showed that walking actually encourages the brain to create new connections between cells and helps transmit messages between them much more effectively. Furthermore, it can reduce the speed of tissue degradation and even enlarge the hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial navigation and converting information from the short-term to the long-term memory.
When it comes to a boost in creativity, though, researchers said there might be something else at play. They argued that walking distracts the brain’s prefrontal cortex, as it’s this which is responsible for decision making and rule learning – among other things. With the prefrontal cortex otherwise occupied, it enables left-field, alternative suggestions to sneak in where they may otherwise have been rooted out.
Yuri Geller’s iPhone
You’ve heard that the new iPhone 6 Plus bends in your pocket. Part of me is interested in how this is news when phones by other manufacturers bending hasn’t been. Well, maybe it has in technical press but I’d not heard of it until tonight.
So there’s that sense that because it’s Apple, it becomes a big deal. I don’t think that’s terribly fair but grief, the idea of it happening to you and your phone when you’ve spent all that money. Wince.
I’m especially concerned because my iPhone 5 lived in my top shirt pocket for two years and my previous iPhones did the same yet recently I’ve been slipping it into my jeans. Chiefly because I seem to have gathered a lot of shirts without top pockets.
I will rethink my wardrobe.
What do you mean, I should look at revising my dress sense at the same time?
Hold off on iOS 8.01 update for a spell
I hadn’t even noticed that it was out but reportedly iOS 8 has already had its first update – and something isn’t working.
I’m not clear yet what it is but let’s have Apple sort it before we trying finding out.
If Google+ and the rest were people
Following on from the news that Google is easing up a bit on shoving Google+ at us wherever we go, take a look at this. It’s an oldie but a goodie and one thing to take away from it is how many, many social media platforms there are.
Good: Google+ goes slightly minus
The Telegraph spotted this:
Google has quietly removed the requirement for new Gmail users to sign up for a Google+ account, in an apparent acknowledgment that some users find it intrusive.Google+ is a social network which integrates with many of Google’s online services, including Gmail, the +1 button, and YouTube comments. The service has over 300 million active users worldwide, according to Google.
However, some insiders have expressed scepticism about this number, claiming that a user does not even have to navigate to the Google+ website to count as ‘active’; they merely have to click the notifications icon in the top right hand side of the screen.
Good. This really just a personal thing but it seems to be shared personally by a lot of persons. Where I’m okay to good with signing in to Apple’s various services – because I see the benefit and it got to me first – I find it immensely aggravating how Google pushes and pushes and shoves all of its at me. At least with Apple it feels that the benefits to me come before it pushing: it feels like I get to see why it’d be useful before it tries to get me to sign up. And while it may be that I see fewer Apple prods because I have signed up, I do see few Apple prods. And I get a lot from Google.
Now seemingly persons will get one fewer.
Since 2012, anyone signing up for a new Gmail account was required to sign up for a Google+ account at the same time. However, the company has now added a ‘No thanks’ button that allows users to opt out of the service.
“We updated the signup experience in early September,” a Google spokesperson told The Telegraph. “Users can now create a public profile during signup, or later, if and when they share public content for the first time (like a restaurant review, YouTube video or Google+ post).”
The Telegraph extrapolates from this that Google+ itself is less the poster child it used to be at the company. I don’t know. Certainly Google+ hasn’t become part of my life the way Facebook and Twitter have – perhaps because of its too-eager pushing? – but we’ll see. I wouldn’t miss Google+ but I’m happy enough with today’s news.
How a routine stops you becoming routine
I’m afraid I know nothing about comic books so I’d not heard of this guy, but Joe Keatinge is apparently a star in this world and demonstrably interesting about being productive, creative and freelance:
I didn’t [have a daily routine] when I initially went freelance and largely floundered because of it. That said, if I can pass on anything to anybody, developing a routine has helped me immensely and greatly increased productivity. It’s also something I’ve recently greatly reworked to huge benefit and something I’m still getting used to, but here’s the gist of what I strive toward.
Monday through Friday I strive to be up no later than 7:30 AM, eat breakfast, drink coffee, achieve basic sustenance for my morning, but that’s it — I don’t look at my phone, at Twitter, at e-mail, not a damn thing. I used to do that and fall into the trap of screwing around when I should be working. Even the smallest diversion can take longer time to recover from than the actual distraction itself was so I’ve learned to keep them out of the way as much as I can.
That said, I’ve found if I immediately write ANYTHING immediately, I can achieve a lot later in the day, so at this point I do just that. Sometimes I immediately jump into a page, sometimes it’s just free form writing, sometimes its something I’m on a deadline on, sometimes it’s something no one will ever see, but it is something. And in writing anything I find my brain gets going and it keeps me on track for the rest of the day, even if I get distracted later on.
Creative Spaces: Joe Keatinge – Kevin Knight, EatGeekPlay.com (17 September 2014)
There are a couple of examples of his work in the piece and they are anything but routine. But he says he’s learnt to build structure into his day both for the sake of himself and for the sake of his art. Read the full piece.
Dip into the original Getting Things Done
David Allen’s book Getting Things Done spawned an industry which has taken to doing podcasts. Allen’s own site hasn’t quite got in on the act yet, perhaps it’s on his Someday/Maybe list, but it has collated some audio interviews.
They’re all Allen talking on various radio and podcast shows so there tends to be a lot of overlap of topics as GTD is introduced each time. And I’ve had some problems getting the audio to play reliably so that’s two things against it but have a go with one and see what you think.
Evernote for Mac gets needed update
Short version: Mac users who got Evernote from the official site, go back and get the new one. If you got it from the Mac App Store, the update will be with you soon.
Longer version. If you’re an Evernote user then you tend to think that it is great but you have either one or two specific concerns. The one that everybody has is that starting a new note is slow. This is why there are a slew of iPhone apps that do nothing but quickly launch so that you can type something, then squirts your text into Evernote while you go off doing something else.
It’s also why a very welcome iOS 8 Extension is own controls for creating new notes. By itself, that doesn’t make the process much faster but we’re talking nuances here anyway: if it were that slow to start, we’d never start it.
The second concern is chiefly for Mac users. Evernote for Mac could get in knots and become frustrating to use for its speed issues, for how fiddly its tables were.
But I get to say could, past tense, because I’ve been running the updated release all morning and it’s great. From the Evernote blog:
You know what’s better than adding a new feature? Making a bunch of existing ones a million times better. That’s what today’s Evernote for Mac update is all about.
For months, our Mac team has been quietly rebuilding every underlying aspect of the app. This allowed us to tackle speed, sync, and editing in a holistic way rather than piecemeal improvements. On the surface, things look more or less the same. Hidden beneath is an entirely new Evernote, designed to put a smile on millions of faces.
Evernote for Mac: Better Note Editing, Faster Sync and 100s of Fixes – Andrew Sinkov, Evernote blog (22 September 2014)