Give yourself a “should-less” day

Posted by William Gallagher

Even I read that and think it says “shoulderless”, as in strap, but it’s a day in which you do not do things that you should. That’s not to say you need to spend it robbing a bank or having a tryst but all that stuff on your plate, all those bloody tasks you should be doing, don’t do them. Just for a day. Just for a single should-less day.

This isn’t my idea, though I love it. Instead, it’s actor Ellen Burstyn who originally said it on the WNYC’s Death, Sex and Money show. It was picked up by Science of Us in New York Magazine like this:

I have what I call should-less days. Today is a day where there’s nothing I should do. So I only do what I want to do. And if it’s nap in the afternoon or watch TV and eat ice cream, I get to do it. I had that kind of day yesterday.

Should-less days, I recommend them. Because what I figured out, is we have wiring, I have wiring in my brain that calls me lazy if I’m not doing something. God, you’re so lazy. … And that wiring is there. I haven’t been able to get rid of it.

But what I can do is I can put in another wiring. I can put in should-less days. So when that voice goes off and says, You’re being lazy, I turn to the other wiring in my brain that says, No, this is a should-less day, and I’m doing what I want.

Give Yourself a ‘Should-less’ Day — Melissa Dahl, Science of Us, New York Magazine (undated, probably 31 October 2014)

Read the full piece. Also, hat tip as ever to Lifehacker for finding it.

National Clean off Your Desk Day

Posted by William Gallagher

I kid you not. Next Monday is the National Clean Off Your Desk Day. I might as well be kidding as it’s definitely solely an American idea and certainly not officially adopted by whoever adopts these things, plus you’re not going to do it anyway.

But the second Monday in January is, seriously, National Clean Off Your Desk Day and what the hell? Why not? I usually only clean off my desk when I’ve been fired but I’m going to fight those bad memories and do it. Wait. I’ve a meeting next Monday. Okay, next Tuesday. National Clean Off Your Desk Day +1.

Actually, I’m sitting here now in a pit of 2014’s work and papers and electronics. I suddenly really get why this is a good idea and I know that it will help me get on more with work as soon as it’s done.

Though I am obliged, I feel, to tell you that Monday 12 January 2015 is also National Pharmacist Day. And National Marzipan Day. And National Curried Chicken Day.

And Tuesday 13 January is National Rubber Duckie Day.

National Clean off Your Desk Day

Posted by William Gallagher

Though I am obliged, I feel, to tell you that Monday 12 January 2015 is also National Pharmacist Day. And National Marzipan Day. And National Curried Chicken Day.

And Tuesday 13 January is National Rubber Duckie Day.

Excellent new app: Evernote Scannable

Posted by William Gallagher

Seriously, if this had come out a few hours earlier I’d have made it the buy of the week on The Blank Screen newsletter – and it’s free, that’s a great buy of the week. I wonder if I can make it buy of next week?

This is all Evernote Scannable does: it scans business cards – or receipts or anything, really. But it’s how it does it and what it does then, that’s what is so good.

It’s good enough that I bid to be the one to review it on MacNN and this is part of what I’ve just said there now:

It’s not often that software makes you laugh, at least not for good reasons. But the new Evernote Scannable is so fast at scanning documents that on our very first go we failed to get our thumb out of the way quick enough and it scanned that. We really did laugh at this big, fuzzy thumb – and were then delighted and surprised and genuinely impressed with what happened next. Evernote Scannable removed our thumb from the image. Automatically. The final result has it replaced by the same white as the document we were aiming at.

In this case, the effort was fairly pointless as our thumb obscured half the planet and we had to redo it. But you’re going to use Evernote Scannable a lot for business cards and this means you don’t need to put them on a table before scanning. Just hold them toward the camera, try to cover up anything important with your fingers, and the app will scan what you want it to scan.

Hands On: Evernote Scannable – William Gallagher, MacNN (9 January 2015)

It is very fast at scanning, it’s not really scanning as I think of the word. Just wave your phone at something and, wallop, scanned in, where’s the next one? You can zoom through getting receipts – I detest receipts but you have to have ’em – and once you’ve said that yep, this is what you want to happen, a single tap sends the scans off to Evernote.

Meet someone, see their business card, snap and it’s in your Evernote account. Without a thumb.

Read the whole piece, go on. I get really enthusiastic in it.

There’s more than Google out there

Posted by William Gallagher

You used Google today. Certainly you used it yesterday. Right? If you’re looking for something online, that’s what you do. But there are other options and some of them are so much better at certain types of search that they are extraordinarily useful to have.

Lifehacker has half a dozen suggestions, including somewhere you just ask people – that seems so quaint – and it’s first one is a favourite of mine:

Wolfram Alpha Crunches Big Numbers and Statistics

Wolfram Alpha is to Google’s answer cards as movies are to paper flip books. Google will tell you everyday things like how many ounces are in a cup. Wolfram Alpha can tell you about median salaries in a given field, or perform key financial calculations. You can even estimate your blood alcohol content. The site is excellent at in-depth research and calculations that go beyond web search results.

The Best Tools for Finding Information When Google Isn’t Enough – Eric Ravenscraft, Lifehacker (6 January 2015)

Take a look at Wolfram Alpha yourself: it’s a website but there’s also an app for it that’s rather useful. And read Lifehacker’s full piece for the rest.

Use trickery to get better willpower

Posted by William Gallagher

I need this today. And yesterday. I’m hoping soon I’ll recover the usual urgent mad dash rush-ery but I’m still practically concussed from relaxing over Christmas. This fella from Inc.com has suggestions. Five, in fact. Here’s one.

1. Eliminate as many choices as possible. We all have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self-control.

The more choices we make during the day, the harder each one is on our brain–and the more we start to look for shortcuts. (Call it the “Oh, screw it,” syndrome.) Then we get impulsive. Then we get reckless. Then we make decisions we know we shouldn’t make, but it’s as if we can’t help ourselves.

In fact, we can’t help ourselves: We’ve run out of the mental energy we need to make smart choices.

That’s why the fewer choices we have to make, the smarter choices we can make when we do need to make a decision.

Say you want to drink more water and less soda. Easy. Keep three water bottles on your desk at all times. Then you won’t need to go to the refrigerator and need to make a choice.

Or say you struggle to keep from constantly checking your email. Easy. Turn off all your alerts. Or shut down your email and open it only once an hour. Or take your mail program off your desktop and keep it on a laptop across the room. Make it hard to check–then you’re more likely not to.

Or say you want to make smarter financial choices. Easy. Keep your credit card in a drawer; then you can’t make an impulse buy. Or require two sign-offs for all purchases over a certain amount; then you will have to run those decisions by someone else (which probably means you’ll think twice and won’t even bother).

Choices are the enemy of willpower. So are ease and convenience. Think of decisions that require willpower, and then take willpower totally out of the equation.

5 Habits of People with Remarkable Willpower – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (19 May 2014)

Read the full piece.

Send the Buggers Off

Posted by William Gallagher

Poet Jo Bell has today written a blog about how to submit poems to journals. It’s very specifically about poetry but the principles and the techniques apply to all writing, I think, so I want to be sure you see it. Plus, it made me laugh. Primarily because of this:

What follows is the Jo Bell Method; the method of an immensely, award-winningly disorganised poet who nonetheless has managed to win awards. My vast and lofty experience teaches me that the key part of winning any prize or getting into a journal is this:

SEND THE BUGGERS OFF.

This is the only area of my life where such a streamlined system exists, but it has helped me to keep sending work out. It is Ever So Simple and it works for me. If you want to get into the habit of submitting to journals, it’s not too late to make this a New Year’s Resolution and start doing this in 2015.

Submitting to Journals: the Jo Bell Method – Jo Bell, The Bell Jar (8 January 2015)

Read the whole piece.

Review feature coming to OmniFocus for iPhone

Posted by William Gallagher

This made me sit up. The Omni Group is revamping its productivity apps and bringing ones to the iPhone that have only ever been on the iPad – and that now includes OmniFocus.

OmniFocus is a To Do app that has long, long, long been on iPhone and I’ve used it pretty much hourly for the past three years. But when there were three versions of the app – one for iPhone, one for iPad and one for Mac – it used to be that they each had differences. Each were best for certain things. The iPhone one, for instance, was best for adding new tasks on the go and looking up the next thing you needed to do.

It specifically lacked a feature called Review where you go through every task in every job and make decisions about whether to keep them, whether to do them, whether you need to do anything else. This is a fairly quick thing to do but you tend to do it when you’re in a fairly reflective mood and don’t have new tasks flying at you from everywhere. So the Review feature was on the iPad and the Mac versions of OmniFocus and it didn’t exist at all on the iPhone one.

“That’s a really important feature and I think a big omission from the iPhone OmniFocus” I said back in September 2014’s If you can buy only one OmniFocus, get the iPad version. Not anymore.

The Omni Group recently announced that it was bringing all its iPad apps to the iPhone and like anyone else, I didn’t think of OmniFocus because it was already there. I am keen to see OmniOutliner, that’s the one I was looking forward to and in fact I am beta testing it right now. But otherwise there is the project planning app OmniPlan and a diagramming tool called OmniGraffle, that’s what I assumed was coming to iPhone.

Today the company announced that OmniFocus is coming too. All of the company’s apps are coming to iPhone and they’re coming in Universal versions which means:

Since all of the apps in the Omni Productivity Pack will run on both iPad and iPhone, there will no longer be any need to purchase a separate app just to run OmniFocus on iPhone. The price for the new Universal app will be just $39.99 (a savings of $9.99 compared to the current two-app pricing for customers using OmniFocus on both devices)—and it will be a free upgrade for anyone currently using OmniFocus 2 for iPad.

Omni Productivity Pack coming to iPhone in Q1, 2015 – blog post by by Ken Case, Omni Group (8 January 2015)

I’m not honestly fussed about the pricing because this stuff is so useful to me that it’s now just a mandatory purchase. But:

Customers who want to upgrade from the iPhone app to the Universal one can simply pay the difference in the prices by taking advantage of a $20 Complete My Bundle option we’ll make available. Of course, we’ll continue to update OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, but Pro features such as custom perspectives will only be available in the Universal app.

I have all three versions of OmniFocus available today and I use them all, all of them, constantly. So for me I’ll just be using a new version of OmniFocus for iPhone some day shortly. Which I realise means I will actually delete the old iPhone-only edition. That’s not something I thought I’d be saying to you: I’m actually going to delete a version of OmniFocus.

That’s practically a Dear Diary moment. Not sure when it will be but as I say, I am on the beta test for OmniOutliner for iPhone so it’s well along and I’m expecting the shipping products to be out in the next couple of months.

How do you even pronounce ‘productivity’?

Posted by William Gallagher

There’s a new podcast from the productivity site Asian Efficiency which I had a listen to on my morning walk. (This is a new thing. A morning walk at 5am. This is a new stupid thing.) And the podcast is fine, I’ll listen to more before I know whether I want to urge you to try it, but the very first sentence made me stop in my tracks.

Frankly, anything can stop me in my tracks when I’m walking at that time of day.

But it was how they introduced the topic of productivity and pronounced the word as if it were pro-ductivity. And I realised then that I always say it as prod-uctivity.

Maybe that means they’re more professional about it and I’m the type who needs a good shove to get going. I’m okay with that.

Important presenting tip: don’t press buttons

Posted by William Gallagher

If it’s a speech or a story, I like to memorise what I’m going to say so that I can look at the audience and perform rather than just read. Fine. But I do bring the speech and I bring it on my iPad where I will have been making changes along the way. Also fine.

Just be careful, okay?

I gave a performance last night reading from a script I had in Drafts 4 on my iPad. I’d changed the settings so that the text was extra large and that it was white text on a black background so that I didn’t have an unearthly glow about my chin.

All very, very fine.

But Drafts 4 is for writing and doing things with text, it isn’t for reading. And at one point, about a third of the way through, I smoothly scrolled down to the next paragraph – and my finger caught an on-screen button.

With two hundred people staring at me, this button highlighted half the script, ran a macro over it all, inserted URL links and pasted whatever in the hell I last had on the clipboard. I watched this thing doing rapid-fire editing changes in front of me and saw my script reduced to unreadable rubble.

I realise now that I could’ve picked up the iPad and shook it to undo but have you ever done that in front of a capacity crowd in a theatre? I’d look like I was twitching.

I’ve listened to the recording and I can tell you the moment it happened. But I did have the speech memorised enough that I could carry on. And it worked out. One woman from the audience told me afterwards that my speech had made her cry. I thanked her but I was actually thinking “yeah, me too”, though probably for different reasons.

Lesson: don’t press buttons. More practical lesson: lock your script early and save it as PDF rather than keeping it as editable text.