Apologies for the ad at the start.
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News
How Email became the Most Reviled Communication Experience Ever
Am I the only person who actually likes email? Apparently so.
It wasn’t until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and ripping the cord out of the wall. (He couldn’t do the same at work, but I suspect he wanted to.) This abject fear and loathing of a telecommunications technology, and the radical step Honan took to escape it—not mitigate, not reframe, not “fix,” but escape—got me curious about how we got to this point. What are the actual, fundamental design flaws—if any—with email? What makes it such a huge target for “fixing,” yet so resistant to it?
Read the full piece for advice on coping with email plus a little history of it. I enjoyed the history more but seemingly I’m a freak. I’m okay with that.
The straightforward and the scary of text editors
Listen, text editor or word processor: they’re both ugly terms and you can probably marshal brilliantly incisive definitions for what they are and why they are different but they both things you can write in. I think of a word processor as being something capable of handling complex books and a text editor as something for notes. But I have written – hang on, let me check, – just shy of 300 articles for MacNN.com this year and every one of them was in a text editor.
Some of them have been about text editors and I want to show you two that I think represent extremes of this market plus a third I say lies in the middle but which I adore. The first is Simplenote, which was recommended to me by MacNN’s Charles Martin and after a couple of months using it I wrote:
Start quick, get on with writing, finish and move on. There isn’t a Save button in Simplenote, and we just had to look to find that out: it never occurs to us to save, we just know everything always is saved. Compare that to Pages, where Apple tells us it is constantly saving yet we can’t shake that command-s keystroke twitch. One reason we trust Simplenote so readily is that we can see the result: write something on the Mac version, and it’s right there on the iOS one immediately.
We also like the fact that we often compile pieces we’ve written in a dozen different places, and can just paste them all in. No remembering to find some Paste As Special tick box, no reformatting, no format painter, just text right in. That suits us well for weblinks, too, as they just go in as text the way we intended.
Hands On: Simplenote 4.1.1 (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (16 June 2015)
Simplenote is simple but not all that powerful and nor does it need to be. At the other end, though, you get Editorial. While Simplenote is across Mac, iOS, Android and – via the web – also PCs, Editorial is only for iPad and iPhone. It is so powerful that it honestly frightens me:
Look at the improvements in version 1.2, a more significant update from 1.1 than it sounds. It adds folding for Markdown and TaskPaper, it’s got new bundled workflows, and behind that blank screen, it has new modules for its native programming language, called Python.
If you don’t know what all this means, then in theory you never have to. You can ignore every bit of it, and just write in Editorial whatever you need to write. Yet that would be like buying one of those pens where you have to click to get the ballpoint nib out — and then never clicking it. You could make marks on the paper, but you’d know you were denying yourself the ink and color this app is capable of.
It’s capable of so much that Editorial has fans. Microsoft Word doesn’t, but Editorial so definitely does. Nobody’s actually called it life-changing yet, but they have called it worklife-changing, and they weren’t kidding.
Hands On: Editorial 1.2 (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (17 June 2015)
Since I wrote that review I’ve kept Editorial on my iPad but I can’t help myself, I keep turning to Drafts 4 to write. I love that app and I love that while for some indefinable reason I just enjoy writing in it, it also has some welly.
I’ll open it in a flash, write something immediately and only then think about where I’m going to use it. I’ll write down a stray thought and maybe seeing it there on the screen I’ll think yes, that’s something I should definitely do – so I’ll tap one button and the text goes off to my To Do app, OmniFocus. Maybe I think that’s something I should tell Angela – so I’ll tap one button and it’s sent to her by text message. And on and on and on. As many things as I can need or think of, and all with one button. Sometimes that button takes a lot of setting up, but once it’s done, I can tap away at will.
I think what’s significant is that there is such a range now of software you can write in. So much so that I can spend happy hours trying them all out instead of actually writing anything. Excellent.
You possibly are or aren’t more productive when you have time off
There’s a snippy article in the Harvard Business Review that begins:
We were recently working with a company in Amsterdam, and having difficulty getting a summer meeting scheduled because of the number of executives who were on vacation. Experiencing some frustration, we began to wonder how this company actually got its work done.
Ewwww, catty.
But their VP of HR assured us, “I am confident that because of the rest and break from work that our European executives get more accomplished in their working days than those in the U.S. who burn themselves out.”
Harvard Business Review then says “this seemed worthy of some research” but you have to read it as Challenge Accepted.
After that, it gets a bit muddy. Are you more productive if you have time off? The best way to summarise the findings is in that wonderful Simpsons quote: “Short answer yes with an if; long answer no with a but”.
Read the full piece by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (HBR 17 June 2015) to see them throw statistics in your face and then try to play it both ways.
How Microsoft Word became useful again
Originally, Microsoft refused to put Word on the iPhone or iPad and trusted that its millions of users would go oh, okay then, we won’t buy an iPad. It didn’t work out quite like that and a fair short summary is that Microsoft shot itself in the foot many, many times.
For once people bought iPads and were therefore required to use alternatives to Word, they discovered there are alternatives to Word. Suddenly all of Word’s brilliance gets forgotten and all of its outrageously irritating problems get remembered as we go discover we can get more done without it. In truth we actually can’t: Word is the most powerful word processor there is but with great power comes stupid problems so something which technically does less is much more useful because we can use it more. If you can get your writing done without Word changing the formatting on you, without Word simply crashing just because you dragged in a picture like it said you could, then you get more writing done.
Shunning the iPad was Microsoft doing its once typical and once extremely successful technique of pitching its bulk against a competitor but this time the competitor won and the blowback damage to Microsoft was huge. Word ceased to be ubiquitous. People stopped buying Word just because it was Word. Not just people who were buying iPads but people who were buying word processors for any machines. Including Windows PCs.
Good. We are now back in a world where you have many choices for how you write your words and if choice can be overrated, it’s better than when we just had the one.
But last year Microsoft finally brought Word to iOS and I wrote about how surprisingly good it was, particularly on the iPhone. I’ve changed my mind a bit since then: I hardly touch it on my iPhone but I do keep Word on my iPad and I use it from time to time. It’s been steadily improved too, plus the original slightly messy business of how you could read but not write in it unless you paid some money is gone. You can now use Word without a subscription and it’s worth keeping.
I don’t find myself moving over to it for everything, even though I’d like to find one single application I could use everywhere. As it is, I’ll write on Drafts 4 for iOS, or Pages for iOS and OS X, on Evernote everywhere, Simplenote in many places and occasionally Word. I feel slightly schizophrenic which is fine, but I also find my writing is all over the place. I’ve a hundred or more pieces in TextEdit. A dozen in OmniOutliner. It can take me a spell to find what I’m sure I wrote the other day.
So I can appreciate what this fella Andrew Cunningham says in Ars Technica. The short summary is that he’s now turned. It took the new beta version of Word for Mac to tip him over, but having the one word processor on OS X, iOS, Windows and Android has snared him:
So yes, Microsoft didn’t make it to the iPad or to any of these other platforms as quickly as it could have or should have. There will be people, including some at Ars, who found other non-Microsoft solutions that worked for them in the meantime. But I find myself revising my initial “too little too late” stance to something closer to “better late than never.” A subtle distinction, maybe, but an important one.
Read the full piece.
David Allen: You’re Doing it Wrong
Previously… David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, easily one of the cleverest books I’ve read, certainly one of the most very useful, but also unfortunately just a bit irritatingly with corporate-speak. I mean, come on. Genuinely tremendous ideas explained in ways that don’t explain and do make you wish you’d never started his book.
Fast Company has a new interview with him which they summarise with this headline: “The father of Getting Things Done: You’re Getting Me All Wrong”. And I just find that so aggravating. Read the actual interview, though, and the worst you can say that he comes across as smug. There’s more about his belief we need six “horizons of focus” and I just gesticulated at Fast Company for letting him say that without following him up with “Eh?”.
Bringing those horizons into balance requires reflection, he says. “If you want to say, ‘Am I focused on the right thing?’ I would say, which one of those conversations has not been matured sufficiently or lined up with the other ones appropriately? Some people need to focus more on their goals. Some people need to stop focusing on their goals and actually get shit done.”
If you got through that quote, you got to a good bit. Who could disagree with the need to get shit done? That’s GTD in a nutshell: not the shit, at least not in that way, not the ideas, but the amount you have to get through to find the good bits. It’s just that the good bits are clever and immensely useful. Read the full piece.
Amazon to pay authors per page read
From next month, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library will pay out royalties “based on the number of pages read”.
So if your book is opened on someone’s Kindle and they leave page 1 on there long enough that they could’ve read it, you get cash. It’s not entirely 1 page equals 1 payment: instead, the money comes from a pot that is shared amongst all authors whose work gets included and then gets read. Says Amazon:
Here are some examples of how it would work if the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).
Kindle Unlimited Pages Read – Amazon
It’s that bit about a page not actually being read, there’s no way to know that, but it needs to be open on the Kindle for long enough that it could have been. There’s got to be a way to game that.
Read the full Amazon detail, though be warned it’s (possibly deliberately) the most boring thing you’ll see today.
The Successful Failure
That’s me, that is. Official. I’ve been interviewed for the US podcast series The Successful Failure: it’s about how one’s biggest, most calamitous bad times are what teach you the skills to get great days.
I’ve known the series producer and presenter, Gigi Peterkin, for years so she knew to steer me away from my haircut errors but she also got more out of me than I expected. Possibly more than I intended, but let’s not go there.
Instead, let’s go here: this is my episode on The Successful Failure website. Do take a listen to the other episodes and subscribe to it on iTunes.
You could also take a read of Self Distract, my personal blog when I mused about how much detail one can unintentionally give up in interviews.
Writers: don’t accept this
Nobody else would do what we are prone to do and what we are expected to do – working for free or preposterous rates.
Work less, make more
Maybe this doesn’t apply when you’re trying to juggle a 9-5 job and writing or you’re a writer with a baby on your arm half the day, but there is an argument that the number of hours you work does not equal the amount you get done.
A properly dry academic research paper by John Pencavel looked into it and 25 pages later concluded:
This re-examination of the recommendations relating to hours of work of the HMWC finds them
broadly consistent with our analysis: at the levels of working hours in 1915 and 1916 during the War, hours reductions would have had small or no damaging effects on output; those weeks without a day of rest from work had about ten percent lower output than weeks when there was no work on Sunday holding weekly hours constant; night work was not less productive than day work and, indeed, may have been slightly more productive.
That link is to the full PDF of the research paper so only click it if you’re really interested in this stuff to academic detail.
If you’re not, it boils down to how working 55 hours can achieve the same results as working 70 and I think we knew that. We ignore it and press on into the night, but the quality of our work and the speed drops stone-like after a while.
So don’t do that, okay?
Via LinkedIn and