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Gizmodo on the apps we thought were cool

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Oh, the shame. Today I use apps like OmniFocus and Evernote to get serious work done. Back when all this started in 2008, our tastes were less sophisticated. And I thought I was above all that as I read through Gizmodo’s mocking list of ex-cool apps like the iBeer and the pocket lightsabre.

And then I saw the last one on their list. I used that. I liked that. I am shamed.

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It’s Bubble wrap:

Just like its real-life counterpart, Bubble Wrap was a delight to those doing the popping and soul-crushingly obnoxious to everyone else. And yet—always satisfying.

The 9 Most Popular Apps No One Uses Anymore – Ashley Feinberg, Gizmodo (21 July 2014)

Please read the full list and share in my shame.

At last – Facebook adds Read It Later feature

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Or it will. Currently this is rolling out across Facebook’s eleventy-billion users and I haven’t got it yet. When it comes, it will definitely let you mark an interesting update and save it to read sometime later. It’s going to be for those updates you don’t have time to read right now but you’re doubtlessly also going to use it for bookmarking favourite updates.

What I’m hoping for – and can’t tell until we get to play with it – is this will finally be a way to deal easily with bleedin’ invitations. You’ve had this: pop, someone’s invited you to something. Unless you decide right then that you want to go and also that you can, invitations are a pain. I have ignored invitations just to postpone having to make that decision. I’ve come off Facebook to postpone either making that decision or losing track of the event.

There is a way to handle this and I’ve shown you before. But with the best will in the world, what I showed you was a cludge.

If Facebook’s new feature will just let me tap a Save for Later button, that could all be solved. Except that I’d need to remember to look at my saved items regularly.

Here’s Facebook’s announcement.

Productivity tips from The Blank Screen in your mailbox

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The Blank Screen email newsletter is sent free every Friday morning with a key productivity tip, a lot of news and advice, plus recommendations and deals of the week.

There’s also a bit where I own up to what I’ve been working on all week but that’s more my using you as an accountability partner, the way that I now know if I didn’t do anything, I wouldn’t have anything to say. So thank you for that.

Add your name to the mailing list to see for yourself

Don’t do things too early

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The website Fast Company calls someone who does things too soon to be a ‘precrastinator’ –

A precrastinator – one who completes tasks in advance – may think they’re beating procrastinators at their own game but that’s not true

‘Precrastinating’ and Why It’s Just as Bad as Procrastinating – Lisa Evans, Fast Company (14 July 2014)

Go on.

Professor David Rosenbaum and graduate student Cory Adam Potts conducted an experiment in which participants were given the choice of carrying one of two heavy buckets full of pennies down an alleyway. One bucket was placed near participants at the start line, while the other bucket was placed closer to the finish line.

Surprising the researchers, the majority of participants picked up the bucket that was closest to them, even though it meant they had to carry it farther and expend more physical effort. When the participants were asked why they’d chosen that bucket, the majority replied they wanted to get the task done as quickly as possible. The desire to lighten their mental load was stronger than their determination to reduce their physical effort.

I’m not convinced that’s precrastination, I think there’s got to be an element of spatial awareness there, but there is one persuasive point in the full article. There’s the suggestion that procrastinators can do better because they simply have longer to think about things.

David Sparks’ Presentation book now out

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This book was released sometime overnight, I got it around 8am, I’m maybe a third of the way through the text – I’ve not looked at the many videos yet – and I have a complaint.

He’s so persuasive about preparing your presentation before you ever go near Keynote or PowerPoint that I resent the bejaysis out of him. I have one presentation to give tonight and three tomorrow. I wanted a quick fix! I wanted a magic sauce!

I do have the very smugly gratifying fact that a few of the things he says I do already swear by. So it’s not as if my talks this week will be bad, exactly. God, I was nervous enough already, thanks a bunch for this. But I do also recognise and am persuaded of how they could be better. So you just wait for next week’s talks.

Presentations: A MacSparky Field Guide is now out in the iBooks Store (and only the iBooks Store) for a truly ridiculously cheap £5.99 UK or $9.99 US.

This week’s MacPowerUsers podcast is all about the book and the topic of presentations so you can get a good idea of whether you’ll like the book from that. But, spoiler alert, you will.

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Using the ‘Side Hustle’

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I’m not sure about this but I think I’m just thrown by the title.

Jullien Gordon speaks at TEDx about the importance of the side hustle. Now, sometimes it’s hustlers, sometimes it’s hustlas, and he does define his term right at the start of the video. But that definition is a bit wide. A hustler/hustla (delete as applicable) is someone who is a bit entrepreneurial.

However, I really like his next term: the definition of income, he says, is not how much you earn but how much you have left over at the end of the month. That’s smart. That’s what got me listening to the rest. See what you think, would you?

UPDATE: there’s a problem with embedding video for some reason. While I look into it, if the video below doesn’t work for you, try the direct YouTube link: http://youtu.be/N10gHr58qqM

Free (and paid) week planners for creative people

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The site Productive Flourishing makes a good point:

After years of struggling with the planners designed for and by office workers, I figured out that it wasn’t me that was the problem: it was the design of the planners.

Creative people approach their work differently. Most of us don’t work 8–5, and we don’t have projects that we can plan to get done during the same times each day. The limiting factor for us is not the amount of time we have available, but rather the type of time we have available.

One size does not fit all when it comes to planners. Check out the planners below to see which ones best relate to what you’re trying to do, and give them a try!

Free Planner – no credited author, Productive Flourishing (undated but July 2014)

And here’s an example of what one such plan looks like. This is a month’s action plan:

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The full article contains very many such free planners but also links out to a set of paid premium ones.

Make your kids be more interesting

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Sorry, this is not how to do that, it’s why you should – and how in this day of everyone studying for exams yet not learning anything, being interesting gets you through doors. In this case, The Atlantic magazine specifically means through the doors at Harvard, but the principle works everywhere:

“We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who get in.

Faust’s top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children interesting!”

For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting.

How to Get Into Harvard – David A Graham, The Atlantic (30 June 2014)

There’s not a great deal more to the full article but I found it an encouraging read.

A better – lovelier – Lorem Ipsum

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Maybe you have a classical education and lorem ipsum brings back memories to you. Probably more likely, though, is that you’ve seen it in word processor and page design software where it’s used everywhere as sample text. The words fit designs better than “abcdefg” or certainly “xxxxxx” would.

It’s so common that if you have the right version of Microsoft Word, open a document now and type exactly this:

=lorem()

You’ll get a tonne of lorem ipsum filler text spewing out like a Latin-crazed TextExpander.

But.

If you do know Lorem ipsum, you also know how much it has been burnt into your head. You might not be able to quote any of it beyond those first two words, but you know it, you recognise it.

And now a company called Hyperakt has created what it calls Social Good Ipsum. Same idea, same easy-to-generate, just different text. You go to their website, say how much text you want, tap a button. It all flies out and then there’s a simple copy button to grab it all for you.

I just tried it and asked for 20 words. I got this:

Educate solve, sharing economy political connect our ambitions Global South. Dignity combat malaria; legal aid, integrity investment clean water; forward-thinking.

I like it. The process isn’t flawless: the Copy button didn’t work for me here on an iPad and the first time I asked for 20 words I actually got none at all.

But next time you need some Lorem ipsum, use this.

Via Swiss Miss