News

Proof that small moves work

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Well, at least call it proof that small moves add up. As I write this, it’s 18 August 2014, The Blank Screen news site has been running for 265 days and we’re closing in on 1,000 posts. That’s coming soon but we’ve already exceeded 250,000 words posted.

A quarter of a million words since 26 November 2013.

That’s something like three times more words than the book that started all this, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition).

If we’d written as much fiction in this time, we’d have a trilogy of novels. If I had a dollar for every word I’d be writing to you from New York and inviting you over for a coffee and a dinner.

I do want to revel in this a bit, I do feel rather good about it, but I also want to think about how you can as equally argue that it happened by accident as that it did from hard work. I won’t dismiss the work it took but right now, today, I don’t see any of that, I just see that consistent, regular effort has built something I didn’t have last year.

Next time you or I reckon we don’t have time for something or perhaps that we don’t have enough time for it, let’s remember that, truly, small moves work. I could be less smug about it, mind.

News: the Best of The Blank Screen is coming

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We’re about to hit the 1,000th article on this productivity site and as proud as I am of that, I think it’s rather hard to find anything older than a week or two. So I’m producing a book version which will feature the best 100 articles or so. I’ll make sure you get a special heavily discounted price, okay?

I have my favourites, I have the ones that other sites have picked up and championed, plus of course I have the statistics of which pieces did the very best.

But I’d like to have your opinion. If there’s a piece you particularly found useful, would you let me know? I’ll mention this again on this week’s email newsletter but in order to hit the 1,000th deadline, we have to move quite quickly.

So if something pops into your head right now, please email me right now, okay? I’ll be able to take your thoughts until the end of the week – Friday 22 August 2014.

Thanks – and, blimey, who’d have thought we’d get to 1,000 at all – let alone already?

Hic – What did I do night?

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I don’t need this and I’m not suggesting that you do either, but, well, we all have friends who might find this a wee bit useful, don’t we?

Sobrr [is] a social networking app that deletes everything posted to it within a day. Photos, messages, even friends and new connections all disappear after 24 hours, a spin on the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. The idea, summed up by Sobrr’s catchphrase, is to help users experience “life in the moment.”

Sobrr’s 24-hour limit does two things. First, it offers users a social media safety net. That photo of you doing a keg stand? Share it! It’ll be gone before you sober up. Second, it encourages users to repeatedly check Sobrr for new content they know will soon be deleted.

Social Network Sobrr Deletes Your Drunken Debauchery After a Day – Kurt Wagner, Re/code (16 August 2014)

The full piece is here but you really want to go to Sober directly, don’t you? I mean, your friend wants to go there.

How to handle email backlog: Select All, Delete, Shudder

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When Russell T Davies, with Julie Gardner and more, brought back Doctor Who to television, he automatically got a BBC email address. He just didn’t know about it for years and the story goes that he only found out when BBC IT finally asked him about it. He sat there with someone from IT as they opened the mailbox and of course there were eleventy-billion unread emails.

Davies says he had the IT person delete the lot.

I’m with him there, I think I’d have tried reading them but ultimately he was right and I’d have been wrong. Nonetheless, for my own email inboxes that I actually know about and actually use, I couldn’t do that.

Now Daimler is doing it for us. Specifically, for its employees when they go on holiday. If they want.

The full story is on the Financial Times website where you’ll need to register but, as a non-FT registeree, I found it on The Atlantic which quotes the Times as saying:

The Stuttgart-based car and truckmaker said about 100,000 German employees can now choose to have all their incoming emails automatically deleted when they are on holiday so they do not return to a bulging in-box.

The sender is notified by the “Mail on Holiday” assistant that the email has not been received and is invited to contact a nominated substitute instead. Employees can therefore return from their summer vacation to an empty inbox.
“Our employees should relax on holiday and not read work-related emails,” said Wilfried Porth, board member for human resources. “With ‘Mail on Holiday’ they start back after the holidays with a clean desk. There is no traffic jam in their inbox. That is an emotional relief.”

Auf wiedersehen, post – Daimler staff get break from holiday email – Financial Times (August 2014)

Amazon: if you’re going to quote Orwell, do it right

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I did not see this. But then I also haven’t written an email trying to paint myself as the goodie in the fight between Amazon and Hachette publishers. Previously I’ve confessed I’m a bit lost in the details yet Amazon’s email so enraged me that I’ve become, well, enraged.

The bit of the Amazon email that left the most bad taste in my mouth was the company’s bad taste in tying its commercial interests to the Second World War. But it also said this:

“The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.”

An Important Kindle Request – email from Amazon (9 August 2014)

The New York Times was a bit more thorough than I was: it checked the source. The newspaper reports:

This perceived slur on the memory of one of the 20th century’s most revered truth-tellers might prove to be one of Amazon’s biggest public relations blunders since it deleted copies of “1984” from readers’ Kindles in 2009.

A moment’s web searching would have revealed to the Amazon Books Team, which is credited as the source of the Hachette post, that it was wildly misrepresenting this “famous author.”

When Orwell wrote that line, he was celebrating paperbacks published by Penguin, not urging suppression or collusion. Here is what the writer actually said in The New English Weekly on March 5, 1936: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument for cheap e-books. “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Instead of buying two expensive books, he said, the consumer will buy three cheap books and then use the rest of the money to go to the movies. “This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, it is a disaster,” Orwell wrote.In a Fight With Authors, Amazon Cites Orwell, but Not Quite Correctly – David Streitfeld, New York Times (10 August 2014)

NYT’s full piece also quotes a tweet to Amazon from technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, who wrote:

He was using irony. It’s a literary device. You sell books. What is wrong with you?

CARROT – the To Do app with mood swings

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Recently updated with more moods or something. CARROT – it doesn’t stand for anything, the maker just got caps lock stuck for a bit – rewards you for doing your To Do tasks.

And punishes you for not doing them. The punishment is all in the form of sarcasm, which I like, and bits about displeasing her, which I’m a little uncomfortable with. It just speaks to a certain type of relationship that appeals more to a certain type of man than I am. Especially as the command to backup your To Dos is to say “back me up, girlfriend”.

But, still, think of CARROT as that English teacher you had. The one who scared the life out of you yet for that life of you, you can’t understand how. None of the other teachers were that good.

And let’s look at the rewards because they are what make CARROT sing, I think. When you first get CARROT and you enter a few tasks, that is about all you can do. You can’t fiddle the list about to put it into a new order, for instance. Not until you’ve earned the right.

You earn the right and you earn points by ticking off To Do tasks. Now, the first thing I would do is add in tasks like “Do whatever”, “Tick a task off”, “Lsfdjfsdjkfsdfu” and tick ’em as done until I got whatever points I wanted.

But that’s me. You’re far too nice to have thought of that.

With more tasks done come more rewards in terms of features. CARROT will never be all that powerful but this earning new features is clever: it’s both a reward and a way of avoiding you being swamped with detail at the start. You’ll more appreciate and you will more understand features like getting CARROT to work with Siri if you build up to it.

I like all that. But features are only one type of reward and I don’t know what to call the other, far more numerous type. As an example, though, at some point when you’ve done enough tasks, CARROT will say you’ve earned a kitten and let you name it.

I’m having difficulty picturing this working in OmniFocus.

But I do like another reward, which is an ongoing story – and the latest version of CARROT, just released, includes an inch more story for you to get.

If it’s not powerful, CARROT is at least lively and that’s no bad thing.

CARROT is available on the App Store for iPhone for £1.99 UK or $2.99 US.
See more on the official site and have a look at the CARROT promo video – which includes a very HAL 9000-like look for when you’ve made CARROT unhappy:

Weekend read: the end of in-flight video

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At least, the end of those terrible, terrible screens in the back of the seat ahead of you.

Earlier this year, I boarded a United flight from Newark to San Diego. After passing the first few rows, a young boy turned to his mother and asked, “Why aren’t there any TVs?”

“It’s probably an older plane,” she responded — but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The aircraft, a 737-900 with Boeing’s Sky Interior (a Dreamliner-esque recessed ceiling lit with blue LEDs), had only been flying for a few weeks. It looked new, and it even had that “new plane smell” most passengers would only associate with a factory-fresh auto. But despite the plane’s clean and bright appearance, the family only noticed the glaring absence of seat-back screens. To them, our 737 might as well have rolled off the assembly line in 1984.

Why your brand-new plane doesn’t have a seat-back TV – Zach Honig, Engadget (6 August 2014)

You’ve already guessed that it’s because we watch more on our iPads with their gorgeous screens and just about anything we fancy watching. It’s not hard to beat those dreadful airline screens with a limited selection – all of which has been edited. They’re edited to take out material that might upset you as you fly in an airplane – I believe Snakes on a Plane gets shown as a three-minute music video – and they’re cropped to fit the crappy screens.

But what interested me in this full Engadget article is why airlines hate those screens too. That’s what sold me: this is true, this is how it is going to be on all aircraft, everywhere, just as soon as they can pull it off.

Self Distract: the end of Kindle?

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My personal blog this week is about a claim that ebooks and specifically Kindle have had their day and are now steadying off as just one format instead of the dominant one. I don’t know if it’s true but there’s something to it and I’d be okay if ebooks stayed as one option.

I just wish Kindle books weren’t so ugly.

Read more over on Self Distract.

Update: Hachette responds to Amazon

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I stayed out of this both on here and in my head because I thought Amazon vs Hachette would play itself out quickly, that there was doubtlessly posturing and arguments on both sides, and that I didn’t really understand all the ramifications anyway. Then Amazon sent out a cloying email that so antagonised me I had to vent about it. Apparently their plea for us to email Hachette worked enough, though, because now Hachette has replied publicly.

I still don’t understand all the ramifications. And I’m still not saying Amazon is the bad guy, I’ve just said that they write some really aggravatingly patronising bollocks in their emails. So for completeness, here’s the full text of Hachette’s response.

Thank you for writing to me in response to Amazon’s email. I appreciate that you care enough about books to take the time to write. We usually don’t comment publicly while negotiating, but I’ve received a lot of requests for Hachette’s response to the issues raised by Amazon, and want to reply with a few facts.

• Hachette sets prices for our books entirely on our own, not in collusion with anyone.
• We set our ebook prices far below corresponding print book prices, reflecting savings in manufacturing and shipping.
• More than 80% of the ebooks we publish are priced at $9.99 or lower.
• Those few priced higher—most at $11.99 and $12.99—are less than half the price of their print versions.
• Those higher priced ebooks will have lower prices soon, when the paperback version is published.
• The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all because it was not intended to replace hardbacks but to create a new format available later, at a lower price.
As a publisher, we work to bring a variety of great books to readers, in a variety of formats and prices. We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all ebooks, and that all ebooks do not belong in the same $9.99 box. Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and ebook. While ebooks do not have the $2-$3 costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.

This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves. Both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment, but we do believe in a book industry where talent is respected and choice continues to be offered to the reading public.

Once again, we call on Amazon to withdraw the sanctions against Hachette’s authors that they have unilaterally imposed, and restore their books to normal levels of availability. We are negotiating in good faith. These punitive actions are not necessary, nor what we would expect from a trusted business partner.
Thank you again and best wishes,
Michael Pietsch [Hachette CEO]

Thanks to Digital Book World for the text and to Jason Arnopp for the tipoff.