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Matilda Kahl on wearing the same thing to work every day

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Here’s a thing. The initial story here is that there’s this New York Saatchi & Saatchi director named Matilda Kahl who wrote in Harper’s Bazaar about why she has worn the same outfit to the office every day for three years. It’s an interesting piece and that’s what I want to point you at, but the journey to my even hearing of this has been depressingly revealing.

I don’t know the initial lead, it was something about outfits and productivity – the way that putting your clothes out the night before is a boon to your morning – but I read about Kahl on The Stylist website. Headlines aren’t necessarily written by the article writer but compare the difference between Kahl’s original and The Stylist’s take on it.

Woman wears same outfit every day to combat stress and boost productivity

Why I Wear the Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day

Even without the first-person part, you know which is which because the Stylist one leads with the word ‘Woman’. This is news because Kahl is a woman. Not because she’s a Creative/Art Director but because she’s a she. Business Insider took the same route and the Daily Mail website is just a barrage of beauty products around a slim central column text that says “every day for THREE years” and gets in a plug for a particular clothing firm. The Mail also claims to have interviewed Kahl but – what are the odds? – she appears to have ‘told’ them exactly the same words she wrote in her own piece.

But then Harper’s Bazaar, the site of her original post, interrupts your reading with a full-screen advert for an email newsletter headed “12 Shoes Every Woman Should Own”.

I’m mithered over this because of the Mail’s claiming an interview, I’m mithered because of the eye-hurting page that Mail feature is on, I’m definitely mithered because the fact that Kahl is a woman is both why this is getting any coverage – and ultimately it’s why I’m covering it too. I don’t like that but I do like that Kahl did this. I like it in part because I’ve been in meetings where I’ve felt incorrectly dressed so while I’ve not recognised the same pressures a professional New York creative has, I still recognised some of this:

About three years ago, I had one of those typical Monday mornings that many women have experienced. With a fairly important meeting on the horizon, I started to try on different outfits, lacking any real direction or plan. As an art director at one of the leading creative advertising agencies in New York, I’m given complete freedom over what I wear to the office, but that still left me questioning each piece that I added or subtracted from my outfit. “Is this too formal? Is that too out there? Is this dress too short?” I finally chose something I regretted as soon as I hit the subway platform.

As I arrived at work, my stress level only increased as I saw my male creative partner and other male co-workers having a “brodown” with the new boss as they entered the meeting room—a room I was supposed to already be inside. I just stood there—paralyzed by the fact that I was not only late, but unprepared. And my sweater was inside out. I had completely stressed myself out, and for what? This was not the first morning I’d felt this unnecessary panic, but that day I decided it would be the last.

The frustration I felt walking into that meeting late remained with me. Should it really be this hard? I knew my male colleagues were taken seriously no matter what they wore—and I highly doubted they put in as much sartorial time and effort as I had. But gender issues aside, I needed to come up with a solution to simplify this morning struggle.

Why I Wear the Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day – Matilda Kahl, Harper’s Bazaar (3 April 2015)

It’s not really the exact same thing – what is she, a man? – but it’s 15 of the same blouse and so on. Read the full piece if nothing else because you want to see what her outfit looks like. Just don’t read the comments, okay? There’s plenty in support of her but plenty that are not.

Become the smartest person in the room

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I’m not certain I agree with this because I do agree with the Aaron Sorkin line from Sports Night:

 If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.

But, still, it’d be nice to be one of the smart ones and reportedly there are ways to pull that off which don’t involve hiring a bunch of clowns. According to Gwen Moran in Fast Company:

READ . . . A LOT
It stands to reason that actively seeking out challenging, thought-provoking information will make you smarter. A widely reported 2012 study done by researchers at the University of California, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, found that students who spent 100 hours or more studying for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually had changes in their brains. The findings indicated that such intensive study showed changes in the parts of the brain associated with reasoning and thinking.

How to Become the Smartest Person in the Room: Here are Ways to Both Appear Smarter and Actually Up your IQ – Gwen Moran, Fast Company (11 June 2015)

I like that one. I like that a lot. I’m less keen on the very next piece of advice which is some junk about regular exercise. Sheesh.
Read the full piece.

Trello – visual To Dos for teams

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 There’s little getting away from the fact that a To Do list is a list. It’s a lot of words, ranged in a column, and if there is anything visual about it, it’s that together they look daunting. But there are things you can do and Trello is a free service that has a good stab at one of them.

Specifically this. You do end up with lists in Trello but each list is like a stack of little cards and you can drag them around. In an ideal, recommended, go-on-try-it Trello way, you might have one stack for all your tasks, then one very short stack for the thing you are doing now. You might also have a stack for the one thing you will do next. Also a stack for everything you’ve done.

When the time comes to railroad, you can look at your Next Thing To Do stack and slide the card over to the Look I’m Doing It Now stack. And then have a quick look through Everything On My Plate and drag out one card to be the Next Thing To Do.

The visual part is the dragging. It looks and feels like you’re doing this on paper on your desk and that may suit you amazingly well. I learnt of Trello from a friend for whom it works amazingly well: she can see what she’s got to do at all times.

Plus she works in a team and while they haven’t all adopted it yet – she’s the first one to try it out – they now have the option for the entire team to use the same free system and work together. 

It sounds ideal and it could be for them, it might be for you, right now it seems it definitely is for the friend who told me about it. 

It isn’t for me, though.

That’s for a lot of reasons and I think the first is down to how you spend that time picking the next thing to do. Time spent working on your list is time you could be spending on doing the tasks.

Next, the space you put these stacks of cards is called a board and not only can you have many boards, you are encouraged and expected to. Have one board for all the things that your colleagues are working on together but keep a separate, private board for all the secret trysts you get up. (I’m not judging.) 

That’s fine and my friend has many boards already, but for me it’s back down to the business of having one system for everything: how do you know you’re done when there are always other boards to check?

There is also the fact that Trello doesn’t have the oomph of something like OmniFocus. Plus it’s an online service. You use it via iOS apps on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s really an online service and you can’t use the apps when you don’t have an internet connection.

That’s bad. That’s the only thing I’d say is definitely bad: everything else I don’t like is personal preference, but the inability to use this when you’re away from a wifi hotspot is bad.

My friend tethers her wifi-only iPad to her iPhone to get it to work or sometimes she just uses it on her iPhone. So it’s not a dealbreaker for everyone and it does have this unusual visual aspect that is going to be worth a lot to many people.

So especially as it’s free, do go give Trello a spin, would you?

Author Tanith Lee dies

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This isn’t exactly productivity, though Tanith Lee was no shirker when it came to work: she reportedly wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories – and two television episodes. Guess which of that output I interviewed her for.

It was two years ago, I was researching a book on Blake’s 7 and because it was a phone interview I can do three things now: I can tell you it was 18:00 on 13 April 2013, I can tell you the call was 50’44” long and I can listen to her as I type. It is eerie and upsetting to listen to someone sounding so enthused and lively. I’ve learnt today that she died after a long illness; I don’t know if she were ill two years ago but she didn’t sound it. She sounded great and I was conscious that I felt lucky having an excuse to talk to her.

Her two television episodes were both in Blake’s 7 and they stand out. The first because it is mesmerising and the second because it was good when others around it were not.

But one of her 90+ novels is sort-of related to Blake’s 7: at least, she told me she is forever being told that she wrote a novel using characters from the show. She was entertaining about it and afterwards sent me a copy of the book so I could see for myself. I’m embarrassed to tell you that I haven’t read it yet.

You haven’t read my Blake’s 7 book because it isn’t out yet. The moment the publisher gets me a date I can tell you, I’ll tell you. But in the meantime, here’s just one tiny part of the interview. I mentioned that I thought ‘Tanith Lee’ was a fantastic name for a writer, it just felt right for one and she said:

When my mother was 15, she said when – when, not if – I have a daughter I’m going to call her Tanith. And so when she was 37 and had one, she did call her Tanith. It’s crazy, you probably know, but it’s the name of a lunar goddess. It was terrible for me when a child, it was wonderful for me as a young woman. As a middle-aged woman it was a bit worrying. But now I’m old, it’s great. It’s perfect, you know, the lunar goddess, absolutely.

Ugh. Post-It Notes work

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I’m not listening. I’m not. Don’t ever do this to me. Do Not Ever.

[Randy] Garner experimented to see how quickly people would return a follow-up survey if there was a sticky note attached and also measured how much information the person being surveyed returned if there was a sticky note attached vs. the group that received no sticky note.

Further experiments revealed that if a task is easy to perform or comply with, a simple sticky note request needs no further personalization. But, when the task is more involved, a more highly personalized sticky note was significantly more effective than a simple standard sticky note request. What makes it truly personal? Writing a brief message is effective, but adding the person’s first name at the top and your initials at the bottom causes significantly greater compliance.

I’ve used this personalization theory with business people around the world to great success. For example, a mortgage broker I worked with tested this approach in mailings, effectively doubling the number of phone calls from people pursuing a loan with the broker. And it’s not just effective at the office or with clients—the people you live with are going to respond to the sticky note model as well. (Try sticking one on the bathroom mirror and see what happens.)

The Surprising Persuasiveness of a Sticky Note – Kevin Hogan, Harvard Business Review (26 May 2015)

What would happen is that I would vomit. I’m papyrophobic. So here’s the link to read the full HBR article and here’s a link to read the entire research paper but I ain’t reading either.

Short answer: Lunch Bad, Chocolate Good

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Okay, that’s not really the finding of this video but it’s in there and I needed something to pick me up from the excessively jaunty music. Take one minute and one second to watch how eating the right thing in the right place, with chocolate and friends, is better for your afternoon’s productivity than a burrito at your desk. Not 100% sure what a burrito is.

UPDATE: the video isn’t displaying on all mobile devices. If you can’t see a cheery video below, try it on the original site.

Developer on why you should and how you can write in Evernote

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The Evernote blog is always very heavily pushing the use of this software – you’re understand but, still, it could lighten up once in a while – but amongst the sales talk there are good ideas. Here’s one on how this software is great for writers. I’m a writer and I use Evernote extensively. Can’t say it’s my favourite writing tool but the suggestions in this are good and also short.

In the late 1940s, Jack Kerouac wrote his iconic Beat-era novel “On the Road” in a series of notebooks. In 1951, he typed the manuscript out on a continuous 120-foot scroll of paper. It took him three weeks and, as legend has it, a friend’s dog ate the original ending.

More than six decades later, the laptop holds court where the typewriter once reigned. We still carry trusty notebooks, but now we can easily digitize the words within to keep them safe. The tools have evolved, but the need to turn ideas into written words is still vital to work and life.

Evernote is a boon for writers of every stripe. Even a few low-tech Luddites we know use it in tandem with their handwritten words. Here’s how it can support your writerly efforts…

Put it in Writing: Be a Better Writer With Evernote – Kristina Hjelsand, Evernote Blog (14 May 2015)

The first tip also links out to how Neil Gaiman uses Evernote so, okay, they’re not kidding.

Read the full piece.

New book on Blackberry is a lesson

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I’ve said this before: what really makes the technology industry interesting is that it is like every other business played in fast forward. You can see familiar rises and falls but so fast that you can genuinely see them: it’s no longer a business school exercise, it’s today’s news.

A new book concentrates on the fall of Blackberry and specifically how the iPhone effectively and dramatically ended what was the most beloved phone company in the world.

From Amazon and the publishers’ description, this is Losing the Signal:

In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong?

Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest growing company internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google’s entry in to mobile phones.

Expertly told by acclaimed journalists, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

Losing the Signal blurb on Amazon

The book is released 26 May and can be ordered now from Amazon.

How to Work Out Your Hourly Rate

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I read this ten seconds ago and rush to bring it to you. I’ll be off now trying this out for myself, will you join me? It’s an online hourly rate calculator for freelancers. Contently just covered it, saying in part:

Many people assume figuring out what your hourly rate should be is a simple task. If you’re a freelancer who wants to make $30,000 a year, just figure out how many hours you work per year and divide, right? Not quite. And as any veteran freelancer will tell you, calculating desired rates requires a much more complicated equation.

Basically, before you know thy employer, you must know thyself. BeeWits, a project management software company, wants to help you with that process, and the company’s new rates calculator is straight out of a freelancer’s dream.

Press “Calculate My Hourly Rate” and presto! Your rate, down to the cent, pops up. It would be great to have an explanation of the calculator’s exact formula, for transparency’s sake. And we’d also love if the calculator could save your numbers to refer back to in the future. But if you’re looking for a thorough tool that can take care of some multi-variable accounting, this is perfect.

The Freelance Rates Calculator We’ve All Been Waiting For – Gabe Rosenberg, Contently (20 May 2015

Read the full piece for their take on it and then use the calculator itself online.

That’s the way to do it: Alfred 2

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I’ve looked at what are called launchers – software that means with a keystroke or two you can zoom off launching apps, doing google searches, working just about anything on your Mac – and I did not do it as well as these people.

Curiously, I came to the same conclusion: Alfred 2 is the best. But reading their reasoning has both sold me on my own option and quadrupled how useful I think the app is:

We wouldn’t consider the OS X app launcher space a crowded one, but there are enough options out there that could make oneself think twice about clicking the download button. After numerous keystrokes and much reflective deliberation, we think that Alfred is the favorite launcher for Mac OS X.

Our favorite OS X launcher – The Sweet Setup

Read the full piece the whole thing but wait until you have a few minutes. It’s a good and detailed piece.