Productivity

Productivity

Don’t bother looking for writing work via LinkedIn

Posted by

0

Well, sort of.

But this time, I just couldn’t get the words of a friend out of my head: “Haven’t you ever used LinkedIn to get work?” he’d said. “I just bang out a few mails to connections and—boom!—something always comes up.”

I’ll be honest: I was baffled. Don’t get me wrong—when it comes to LinkedIn, I was a pretty early adopter and trundled past the all-important 500+ connections barrier a while ago. But for me, LinkedIn has only ever been an accessory, a place for potential clients to see I really exist and then, bowled over by the riotous trumpetings of my gold-plated CV, hire me for assignments. Could LinkedIn be more than just a fancy shop window for freelancers?

This Is What Happens When You Spend a Full Day on LinkedIn Looking for Freelance Writing Work – Mike Peake, The Freelancer, by Contently (15 January 2015)

Short answer no with a but, long answer yes with an if. Read the full piece.

Women are the reason some teams are more productive than others

Posted by

0

Part of me doesn’t like this. I believe that the differences between us as individuals is more important than the differences between our genders. That I am me and you are you regardless of our sex. But then as a writer and hopefully decent human being, I am also conscious that women are preposterously badly treated in the workplace. Don’t believe me? You’re probably a man. Not going to complain about it to me? You’ve noticed I’m not a woman.

Seriously: a woman writing what I just did would on average get more criticism than I’ll see. And if you genuinely doubt the maltreatment of women in business, go compare some salaries.

So there is a great part of me that rather likes research saying women make teams smarter. This research is saying that, while there are some other factors that come in to play, those are not the ones you’d predict about charismatic leaders or high bonus pays:

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others – Anita Woolley, Thomas W Malone and Christopher Chabris, NYTimes.com (19 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Remote control Macs and PCs from your phone

Posted by

0

This is Chrome Remote Desktop and it’s fiddly to set up unless you’re already in to the Chrome browser. But once it’s running, it’s remarkable how well it works and what it does:

Imagine squeezing your retina iMac screen down onto an iPhone 5. You can do it. It might look a bit silly, and initially you might wonder why you’d bother, but it has long been possible to see and remotely control your Macs and PCs on even your iPhone. Now that Google has released Chrome Remote Desktop for iOS, you can do it for free. You’ll do it, too: try this once, and you will forever keep finding other reasons why it’s incredibly useful.
It’s fantastic when you forget a file, for instance, and can now just find and email it to yourself from afar — and it will save your soul, your sanity, and your gas money when you are supporting several family members who live halfway across the country. Just open up your or their Mac’s screen on your iOS device and work as if you were right there in front of it.

Hands On: Chrome Remote Desktop (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, Electronista (19 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Essentials: TextExpander

Posted by

0

I just wrote this on MacNN.com:

Get this essential Mac tool for speeding up your typing

Here’s the thing: yes, TextExpander speeds up your typing, but some of us like typing — and some of us are 120 words per minute. If you’re one of the latter, that doesn’t automatically rule out that you wouldn’t be interested in the venerable TextExpander’s speed, but we figured it wouldn’t be that much use to us; or so we thought. Doubtlessly, if you are a slower typist, then the speed is the key reason to buy TextExpander — but it does so much else, it is so useful in other ways, that we are now dependent on it, and wish we’d bought it ten years ago.

Hands On: TextExpander 4 for OS X, TextExpander 3 for iOS – William Gallagher, Electronista (18 January 2015

Well, I wrote that and then I wrote a lot more, almost every bit of it finding new ways to enthuse about this software. It is that good, seriously. I found out while writing this review that I’ve been using TextExpander for 10 months. Can’t believe it – and yet I find that easier to comprehend than the fact that there was ever a time I wasn’t.

Read the full piece.

Not that this matters, but today’s my 300th

Posted by

0

The 300th time I’ve got up and gone to work for 5am. I am not and will never recommend that you do the same thing but I have to tell you that if it works for you, it really works.

Right now, I confess it doesn’t feel like it’s working. It’s only just after 8pm and I am jiggered to the point of feeling like I could faint. So, you know, that’s not wonderful. But it has been an unusual time, I have worked straight through and I’d say for 290 of these 300 days I’ve stopped late afternoon at worst.

It’s not 300 days in a row, by the way. It sort-of is. The ideal is that I do the 5am start Monday to Friday every week. But if I have a late night working somewhere or I’m going to be speaking the next evening, I skip the 5am to protect my voice. Plus there are holidays. Plus often with travelling I have to be up earlier or it’s going to be longer. Once or twice I was ill. So the 300st is today but the 1st was Wednesday 2 January 2013.

Suddenly seems a bit crap, doesn’t it?

Let’s please not forget that I mean to do this on working days, the working week, Monday to Friday, so that’s already a bit of a difference from every day. Wolfram Alpha tells me that 2 January 2013 was 747 days ago. Count working days alone and it’s 533 weekdays since then.

So of the 533 days I could’ve got up at 5am, I only got up 300 times.

That means I got up a mere 56.29% of the times I could’ve done.

At least that’s more than half.

Just about.

A bit.

I think I’l shut up until 1,000 or 301, whichever comes first.

Airbnb’s Co-Founder on productivity

Posted by

0

I’ve used Airbnb many times and it is as good as they say. Here’s one thing that its co-creator says about handling his workload:

I try to fill my calendar in reverse, from the end-of-day to earlier; I try to reserve the morning for doing “real work.” I find I can focus more in the morning whereas it’s harder to get focused after having been bombarded by meetings, so I try to save meetings for later in the day.

I’m Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder Of Airbnb, And This Is How I Work | Lifehacker Australia

Read the full piece.

Launchbar review

Posted by

0

Just published on MacNN: my review of a superb utility for OS X:

Get it. Here it is on its official site. Go get it now: LaunchBar is that good. There are alternatives, that’s about the only thing that should give you pause, but the most obvious rival to LaunchBar is OS X’s own Spotlight and that is no competition at all. Sure, both let you tap a couple of keys and begin typing things like application names or search terms, but as excellent as Spotlight is, LaunchBar crams more power into the same space. With a couple of keystrokes you can be entering an event into your calendar, you can be sending files to someone, you can be pasting something from the clipboard that you copied yesterday.

Hands On: LaunchBar 6 (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (15 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Though just between ourselves, I’m currently looking at Alfred, a big rival to Launchbar and it has a lot going for it. I shall return.

Open the doors

Posted by

0

It worked. Previously…

I’m closing the doors for one day.

For Wednesday 14 January 2015 I am working on only one project. Nothing else allowed, not even emails, not even phone calls. We’ll see how I get on but even now, writing to you late the night before, I’m feeling a bit liberated. I was looking at a project plan just now, the very barest skeleton project management jobs and realised I was sighing as I went to add in some detail. As I went to colour it all in. And that realisation, plus the clear fact that I can’t finish it tonight, led me to this relief. I will not look at it tomorrow. I cannot.

Close the doors – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (14 January 2015)

It’s true that today I am in a flat-spin panic about everything I’m behind on but the main project from yesterday is far, far and three times far further along. Still not as far as I need it to be but so much further that it’s about the only thing I’m not panicking about right now.

So I’ll do this again.

When I can possibly fit it in.

Close the doors

Posted by

0

Right now I have ten major projects on and all need tending to. Now, I don’t expect you to be interested in this but I do want you to help me come to a realisation.

Ten is too many.

I know I should shed some. I can think of one that will go away in a month; another that will be done in three months. That’s down to eight already, come on.

A third needs about five more days work and it’s gone completely. Seven.

Still too many, especially as I can casually say that about the project that needs five more days, that doesn’t change that fact that it has needed five more days for about four months now.

But if I’m not ready to shed anything yet and actually I am very ready to add things if you’ve got an interesting idea, I am trying something new tomorrow. Or rather today, by the time this first appears on The Blank Screen website.

I’m closing the doors for one day.

For Wednesday 14 January 2015 I am working on only one project. Nothing else allowed, not even emails, not even phone calls. We’ll see how I get on but even now, writing to you late the night before, I’m feeling a bit liberated. I was looking at a project plan just now, the very barest skeleton project management jobs and realised I was sighing as I went to add in some detail. As I went to colour it all in. And that realisation, plus the clear fact that I can’t finish it tonight, led me to this relief. I will not look at it tomorrow. I cannot.

If this works out, I may do what US writer David E Kelley used to do: he’d spend half the week writing crime series The Practice and half writing Ally McBeal. Ask him a Practice question on a McBeal day and he could not answer you. That was just not in his head.

I like the idea of nine projects being out of my head.

I just hope I do spend the day on the tenth and don’t just eat toast and watch TV.