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The 29 reasons you’re reading this article

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Medium writer Gilad Lotan argues that as addicted as we are to lists in articles, we are particularly prone to odd numbers. Especially 29.

And I thought the reason we saw so many of these articles was just that they are easy for the writers. Write a list, forget bothering to have a structure or any reason for the reader to read on through the whole piece. I have obviously never done this ever, ever.

But if I were to do it, I would use lists. Let me give you 29 reasons why:

You make a Listicle. How long should it be? 5 items feels a bit short. 30 Feels a tad long, and way too even. But 29 seems like a good, shareable length. What if I tell you that using data we’ve found statistically significant difference between performance of odd vs. even numbers? Sounds odd? Read on.

Lists have been around for a long time. From the Bible to the Billboard charts, packaging items in lists is an effective way to gain heightened attention from a broader audience. The format makes content more easily consumable, promising an effortless way to get through a finite amount of information. Choosing the right length involves a dash of voodoo magic and a lot of speculation.

The 29 reasons you’re reading this article – Gilad Lotan, Medium (1 July 2014)

For once, the speculation seems sound and backed up by experimental data. Do have a read of the full piece.

8 Simple Tricks That Will Help You Ace A Job Interview But Rob You Of Your Innocence

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Job interviews are stressful, but here are some time-tested tips to impress any potential employer and render you unable to look at the world in the same unsullied light.

1. Prepare Ahead Of Time
Rehearse answers to common questions a few days beforehand to trick the interviewer into thinking your answers are genuine reflections of your thoughts. This is a lie all job seekers participate in.

2. Give A Firm Handshake
A firm handshake is an effective way to make a good impression, but will also destroy your inner child a little each time you do it. You’re a manipulator of people now.

8 Simple Tricks That Will Help You Ace A Job Interview But Rob You Of Your Innocence – Clickhole (24 June 2014)

Read the other six on the full feature.

Free video tutorial for OmniOutliner for iPad

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This is the product that turned me into an outlining user. Not an outline fan, but definitely a user and appreciating the value of the things.

And this is a free tutorial on using the iPad version. It’s from Screencasts Online which is normally a subscription service but does the odd freebie. I’m not sure this is their best but there’s a lot in OmniOutliner and I learnt from watching it:

One in seven would give up friends before smartphone

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There’s a flaw in this survey of American smartphone users: they say this about giving up friends but they also say that they leave their phones on all the time so that they can be contacted. By whom?

Re/code got the whole survey this came from and that’s the statistic they pulled out but there are others. Of this poll of US users:

74 percent keep their smartphones within reach throughout the entire day
60 percent sleep with their phones and that number increases to 84 percent in the 18-29 year olds demographic, while their European counterparts are more likely to keep their devices in the next room
17 percent of women would give up their best friend for a week instead of their smartphone
53 percent keep their phone sound on even while they sleep

There’s more on the survey page.

Day One journal app goes free (briefly)

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Even if you can’t get around to looking at using it yet, grab this now: the acclaimed Day One diary app has just been made free for iOS.

I bought it a couple of years ago and it changed things. I recorded more diary details than I ever normally do and I enjoyed it.

I made a calculated decision to move away from it, though, because I use Evernote so much. I thought it would be the same, that I would journal just as much. Technically speaking, I was right. There’s no real difference between tapping out a diary entry in Day One than there is a note in my Journal notebook in Evernote.

Except that there is a massive difference. For the months I used Day One, I bet I wrote an entry every day. In the year since I stopped, maybe I’ve made two notes.

I should go back to Day One and if you haven’t already, you should go get into it now.

Free mindmapping software for Mac (but hurry)

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The new mindmapping application for Mac OS X, Quick Node, is temporarily free on the Mac App Store here.

I haven’t used it, I just learnt of the price drop from £13.99 UK and $19.99 US and wanted to tell you.

But I do use mindmapping now and I do sometimes find it very useful. I had a project I was late starting recently and I used Mind Node on my iPad to let me whack down every thought I could muster about it. Then I could see that okay, those two ideas could go together, if I find another one for here than that’ll sound better, and then I just wrote up what was in front of me. It worked too.

So visual thinking can be good but it isn’t for everybody and I find it isn’t for everything I do. So the chance to try it out for free has got to be a boon.

Note, though, that Quick Node doesn’t support OPML: you can’t very easily create a mindmap and then export it to something like an outlining app or a To Do manager. You can save in Quick Node’s own format plus TIFF image or PDF but effectively this makes it a personal-use-only tool. I only use Mind Node personally, I have yet to share any of the maps with anyone else, but I do regularly export to OPML so that my To Do manager, OmniFocus, can import it.

Quick Node – Easy Mind Maps and Diagrams for OS X is free today (July 3, 2014). If it’s gone off sale by the time you look for it, the price will probably be that aforementioned £13.99 UK and $19.99 US but in its short life the app’s price has bounced around a lot so it may yet be more.

Work while you sleep

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Sounds perfect: where do I sign up? Sleep is for tortoises, except at 5am in the morning when only the insane are up, alongside the nightshift, suffering parents and all farmers.

From The Muse:

…What if you didn’t have to say goodbye to sleep in order to be productive? What if you could utilize your sleeping hours to actually get chores and tasks done?

8 Ways to Get More Done While You Sleep – Catherine Jessen, The Muse (12 June 2014)

I’m listening. Go on.

We decided that you should be able to be productive while you sleep, so we’ve rounded up these eight awesome links that will inspire you to dive under those covers and catch come Z’s (while still getting stuff done).

O-kay… and an example? Give me one example of the 8.

1. Develop creative solutions by allowing the intrinsic part of your brain’s pattern recognition systems to assess what it saw during the day and spit out innovative answers in the morning.

2. Do you need to remember something important? Studies show that we can reinforce existing memories during deep sleep. Make sure you’ve already reviewed or learned the material you want to memorize at least once before conking out.

3. Make money while you sleep by siphoning off a portion of your paycheck into an account where it can grow thanks to compound interest.

That’s three, but thanks. The last one is specific and financial, the first is a psychology way of saying give it a rest and the second is the kind of optimistic thinking I employ the night before a deadline. But each one of these and the other five tips is really just a heading and then includes a link out to more detail and more research. Do give the full piece a read, then.

Time and space

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I got up at 5am this morning to write but I also came to a certain spot. Instead of my office, I am in my living room working on my MacBook Pro with its endearing keyboard fault. (There’s something wrong with the W and Q keys so every time you’ve read w or q I have actually keyed Apple-1 or Apple-2: I set a Keyboard Maestro shortcut to save me having to take the keyboard apart or take the time to bring it in for repair.)

But the reason I’m here is that here is where I started writing a short story. I’ve been commissioned to write one and as part of the job, I had an evening with a readers’ group. When I got home that night, I had an idea pounding away at me and I had to get it down, so I sat on my couch and typed a few notes. That was the intention. I ended up writing around 500 words of story, feeling it out, experimenting, testing whether the idea was really a story.

And every now and again, I come back to this couch to continue it.

It just feels right. I had this with The Blank Screen book which I wrote primarily on my iPad while working on a massive non-fiction title in my office.

Location matters more to me than I realised and I think it might mean more to you than you’ve thought. I don’t know, but I’m surprised at the depth of difference it’s made to me and if it helps me this much, in some intangible way, then I want to see if it helps you.

Follow. I don’t consider myself a journalist any more but I certainly was one for a long time and as part of that I grew the ability and the preference to write wherever I happen to be and for however long I happened to have. A sentence here. An article there.

Part of moving to drama is that I’m having to reach further inside myself and somehow what’s around me physically is getting in the way.

I still can and I still do write wherever and whenever I can. But coming to this couch to write the short story, going to the Library of Birmingham to do my regular OmniFocus reviews, it helps.

I’ve found this through accident. Can you try it deliberately? Try writing your next thing somewhere else and see if it helps you.

And then explain to me how I can claim this helps me write my short story when I’m visibly not writing it, I’m visibly talking to you instead.

The 5am anniversary

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Today is the 250th day I’ve got up at 5am to write. That doesn’t feel like much given how long I’ve been a writer and it will feel feeble if you’re a farmer. But I want to mark this little anniversary in some way.

I only just thought of that this morning as I lurched very slowly out of bed. Yesterday I fair bound up out of there, today was tougher. Perhaps I should’ve kept a record but very broadly I think the 240s have been some of the hardest since the very first 5am starts.

It definitely goes in cycles, though.

There were patches even during the 20s and 30s where I would bound upright and not think about all this. There were times somewhere around 80 mornings in that I would come close to turning over.

I don’t think you need my sleep diary, if I had one, but the 5am start idea was difficult for me and I don’t think that even I can find a way to say I’ve failed at it. So there is discipline, there is effort, there are lessons.

But most of all there are results.

That’s why I do this thing. I’m not advocating getting up early as some kind of health advice. Look at me: I don’t know from health advice. And I’m not even recommending that you get up at 5am per se. What I did before all this began was to experiment with looking for when I wrote the best. Also the most, I was on various deadlines so most was an important issue, but chiefly the best. When did I write the best and preferably not have to rewrite quite so much.

It’s just an astonishingly awful thing that the answer is 5am.

But, okay, at least I know.

And now, 250 mornings in, I know these things too:

1) Bribery and threats
For the first 180 days I used my own Brutal £1 Pot Trick (as covered in my book, The Blank Screen, UK edition, US edition) to trick me into getting up. (The short summary is that I did bribe myself each morning but I also threatened. There was a treat for doing it but also a very big penalty for not.) I’d probably carry on using this, I had intended to and lately I’ve wondered whether it would help to try again, but it’s an expensive kind of thing and I wanted an iPad.

2) Alarms
I love my iPhone but there are times I hate my iPhone. Specifically at 5am. Or rather at about 6:30am when I’d wake up feeling great, feeling refreshed, feeling amazed that I could be so renewed and reinvigorated by a night’s sleep that was ending at 5am. And then seeing that my iPhone’s alarm was going off.

The alarm has to be very quiet so that I’m the only one it wakes, being right on top of it and able to switch it off quickly, but it does have to make a noise and sometimes it doesn’t. Not because I’d turned the volume down too low, not because I’d switched some setting.

Just because.

Yes, I had a moment of worrying about deafness. There was the screen with its Snooze button on that white alarm banner, but no sound.

After this had happened a few times – I have no idea what caused it, there’s no pattern I could see – I gave up setting an alarm for 5am.

Instead, when I’m going to bed, I ask Siri to wake me at 4:59am. And then to wake me at 5:01am. Two alarms. Many days they both work, just once or twice neither has. And for the rest of the time, one of them has and that’s enough.

kount3) It’s worth counting
I often forget until hours later, but just tapping a + on a counter app is a little bit satisfying. If it’s a choice between the satisfaction of a tap and the joy of another hour in bed, the bed wins. Let’s be clear there. But as it’s really a choice between bed and all the benefits that getting up early bring, the counter wins.

4) Do something. Have something to do
It’s like laying out your clothes the night before. Have something that you are going to do first. You won’t always do it. Right now, I’m not doing it. I had a plan for what I need to do and instead I’ve come to you. But this isn’t about the discipline of making plans and sticking to them. I get up at 5am, that’s discipline enough for anybody. It’s about using this Stupid O’Clock time and making it count.

Doing anything is fine. But it must be done. Easily the worst mornings of this whole 250 run are the couple where I had nothing to do. I had plenty I could do but nothing that was vital, nothing that made me ill with worry.

It was truly, deeply, insanely awful.

There is just little so stupid as wasting time at your desk at 5am. You don’t even spend some time deciding what to work on, you start checking emails and reading news.

So if there is not a particularly pressing deadline already, I will choose something the night before and make it the thing I will work on first. The aim is to get straight to the keys, to do the fastest shower in Christendom (I often re-shower later), get some tea (I definitely re-tea later) and start writing.

Today for example, I made a note in OmniFocus that I would finish a short story I’ve been commissioned to do. Hello. This is not a short story. This is you and I talking. But it is me writing and that is the sole aim of getting up at this time.

It’s a simple aim but it works for me and I find it very difficult. So, nuts to it: today is my 250th day of getting up at 5am to write and I’m proud of myself.