Take notes on paper instead of laptops

But iPads are okay, right? Right?

This final test clarified that the simple act of verbatim note taking encouraged by laptops could ultimately result in impaired learning. “Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears,” said Mueller and Oppenheimer.

What You Miss When You Take Notes on Your Laptop – Maggy McGloin, Harvard Business Review (31 July 2015)

Read the full piece for exactly what was tested and the – to me – rather distressing reasons for the conclusions.

The Great Experiment: getting up at 4am

Posted by William Gallagher

Don’t do it.

I’ve now got up to work at 5am on weekdays exactly 350 times and yesterday I tried 4am instead. It was brilliant until about 1pm when I struggled, then 4pm when I was underwater. Grabbed thirty minutes nap somewhere around 5pm when I got home and the day was done.

That feels like such a waste: finishing my day by, what, 5:30pm. I know I can argue that I did a lot from 4am to 1pm and that this is officially the length of a working day.

But now this morning I am struggling again, the 5am lurch was harder than ever and I’m somehow feeling it all in my stomach.

I’ll try it again and I’ll have to try it again sometime soon but for now, I think I’ve found my limit. It’s 5am and no earlier.

How do people manage any earlier?

You must, must, must use outlines

Posted by William Gallagher

Must you bollocks. Fast Company has a good feature on creative discipline, this business of creating things in the haphazard crazy way we do but simultaneously being focused and actually finishing things. I like a huge amount of the piece but its thing about must, must, must outline is making me twitch.

I do use outlines on certain jobs – I’m contractually required to often enough and there are times when it is definitely a quick route to a goal, just not necessarily the best one. I’m pretty much as addicted to OmniOutliner as I am to its sister app OmniFocus but I use it with care, I use it with wariness. Because exploring on the page, writing something to see where it goes and being willing to throw it away afterwards is still what I believe to be right for me.

See what you think:

Outlines are the tool of fast and productive writers. They help you say what you want to say, before you’ve figured out what it’s going to sound like or you’ve wasted time and energy writing about the wrong things. Outlines help you see if your plot makes sense, if your arguments stand up, or if your blog post is going in the right direction.

Before you start your next writing project, take five minutes to create a writing outline. For example, if you’re writing a blog post, break it into five or six sections and an introduction and a conclusion. Each section should contain three to five bullet points corresponding to a point you want to make. If you’re writing a book, write an outline for each chapter using headings and bullet points. For larger projects, write your outline on index cards. Laying these out on your desk or on a wall will give you a visual overview of your work that you can rearrange.

8 Essential Lessons in Creative Discipline – Bryan Collins, Fast Company (11 June 2015)

I like that he’s clear about what it does, I’m not keen on the certainty behind it. But he has other advice that I’m less precious or prejudiced against, so do read the full piece.

Reading on paper versus reading on screens

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m a screen kinda guy but even I’ve noticed that there is a difference, most particularly in my comprehension and retention of what I read. I get more from novels printed in paper- or hardback but I’m surprised to say I enjoy reading them more on my iPad. That is a hard thing to admit, feels like I’m going against what I’ve believed all my life. but it’s true.

It just might also be bad.

Of course, there’s no clear-cut answer to the paper vs. screen question—it’s tangled with variables, like what kind of medium we’re talking about (paper, e-book, laptop, iPhone), the type of text (Fifty Shades of Grey or War and Peace), who’s reading and their preference, whether they’re a digital native, and many other factors. But many researchers say that reading onscreen encourages a particular style of reading called “nonlinear” reading—basically, skimming.

In a 2005 study out of San Jose University, Ziming Liu looked at how reading behavior changed over the past decade, and found exactly this pattern. “The screen-based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively,” Liu wrote. In the face of endless information, links, videos, and images demanding our attention, we’ve adapted our reading to fit our screens.

Everything Science Knows about Reading on Screens – (no author listed) Fast Company Design (8 July 2015)

Now here’s an interesting thing: I copied and pasted that quote out of the Fast Company’s Design section and it looked fine there but I felt compelled to break it up into two paragraphs. I just added a return, I wouldn’t alter the quote, but on this screen at this time, it looked like an impenetrable wall of letters. On the original site, it looked fine.

So I’m looking at it on the same screen but the font choice, the layout, the spacing make giant differences. Read the full piece

Take a break even in the worst times

Posted by William Gallagher

A break isn’t something you win for having finished, it is a necessary tool to get things done. The site 99U has a lot to say about this and a lot of quotes from psychologists and business types.

If you start with the notion that having a quick sandwich at your lunch is productive in the sense that it takes less time, that’s true,” the author says. “But we don’t want a hard and fast rule—we want a functional rule.” The desk-lunch efficiency might not be worth it, he says, if you could gain more from stepping away.

Extreme Productivity author Robert Pozen quoted in 6 Ways to Quickly Restore Sanity to your Day – Sasha VanHoven, 99U (undated)

It even includes an acronym. I hate acronyms.

Stop what you are doing, move to a place where this state or emotion is not dominating you and THEN make a decision:

H: When you are hungry, your mind and metabolism do not work well.
A: When you are angry, your mind is reactive, clouded with irrational emotions.
L: When you are lonely, you are needy and vulnerable.
T: When you are tired, everything doesn’t work well – often coupled with hungry

All of these variables can interconnect to create a danger zone for capable decision making.

Read the full piece for this plus five more tips for remaining sane or regaining sanity in busy times.

There’s no shame in jumping from job to job now

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, there probably still is somewhere. If you’re in the legal profession, maybe it’s still frowned on. If you’re a footballer, maybe – no, I can’t even think of an example, I know that little about sport. If you’re a writer who can’t think of football analogies, though, then it’s fine to get out of that sport website and go somewhere else.

We all used to be told we had to stay in jobs for a decent amount of time. I did it myself. I stayed with one terrible job for exactly a year because I thought less looked bad and would hurt my career chances. It was a bad year. But it had the benefit that I then appreciated every good job I got and ultimately it probably helped me down the line toward going freelance.

There’s just no way to know whether I was right to stay or should’ve got out of Dodge the first chance I got. There’s no way unless I am a carefully-chosen representative sample of many people in many jobs across many careers.

Everyone from your mother to your mentor has advice about the best way to switch jobs. But how can you know whom to trust? Especially since what was true in the job market 20 years ago — even two years ago — is not necessarily gospel now. And the market is constantly changing.

Consider the power dynamic between candidates and employers, for example. Though it differs across industries and regions, and is dependent on the health of the economy, in the past few years, experts have described the current labor market as “candidate-driven.” Job seekers hold more power than employers, a trend that seems to be deepening.

Setting the Record Straight on Switching Jobs – Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review (10 July 2015)

That graphic was created by Harvard Business Review and you can see it embiggened along with other data in the original article. Read the full piece for this plus an interesting examination of the age-old certainty that you should never tell your current boss that you’re looking to leave.

Good interviewing techniques

Posted by William Gallagher

That’s interviewing as in when you want a job, not when you want to screw the truth out of the lying bastards and get it on tape. Also, that’s good techniques as in pretty obvious stuff but people must get this wrong, so.

One more thing. I think this is a completely unnecessary video in that it takes one minute to show me words I could’ve read in about eleven seconds. I won’t be running any more Fast Company videos like this but if you like it more than I do, their site is doing a lot of them.

Handwritten notes and never-ending paper notebooks

Posted by William Gallagher

Even I like having a new, empty paper notebook. I just can’t read my handwriting. Also, I know I’ll lose it and that irritates me when everything I ever type is saved safely all over the place. Plus, how do people use paper notebooks? How fast do they fill them and then what happens? Have they shelves of these things?

Rocketbook says hang on there, William, enough. Rocketbook is a paper notebook that you scribble away on and its pages are saved to the cloud. Dropbox. Evernote. Google Docs. You snap a photograph of the page with your phone and what is written on the page determines where it’s saved. So handwrite during a meeting, then take a mo to photograph the page and before you’ve put your phone away, the Rocketbook has saved that note to, say, an email that it is even now sending someone.

That covers my problem with potentially losing the book but there is also that business of filling up all the pages. Honestly, this sounds like a joke but it’s serious: put your Rocketbook in the microwave oven and wait for a bit. Every note on every page is erased and you have a crisp, new notebook.

I read that and think you must need special paper: yes, but that’s what the Rocketbook is made of. I read this and think you must need special pens: sort-of. The have to be FriXion pens by Pilot which I’ve never heard of but apparently are common.

There is nothing here to help with my handwriting but that’s my problem. Your pen work is much better than mine, you might love this.

One thing. This is an Indiegogo crowd-funded idea except it’s no longer an idea: it’s achieved its target by more than 3,500%.

Rash Recommendation: Sleep Cycle Power Nap

Posted by William Gallagher

Okay, yesterday I got up to work at 5am; around 6pm I had to sleep. At about 7:15pm I was back up, the went to bed at 11pm, got up this morning at 4:45am, contributed to the MacNN podcast that’s recorded at that time of the morning, then back to bed at 7:10am until 8am.

This is typical and this is a bit stupid. But during the podcast, my colleagues Charles Martin and Michelle Hermark both happened to recommend an iPhone app that helps with sleep. They rate Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and Power Nap – actually two apps that I bought before they’d finished speaking.

I’ve tried the Power Nap one twice now, starting with that 07:10 nap. You leave the phone on the bed near you and it does some monitoring, I’m not sure how much, and around 45 minutes later it wakes you up quite softly. Each time it’s a curious surprise to find myself awake and each time I’ve benefited from it.

Whereas when I’ve given in and napped before, I’ve struggled because it’s hard to wake up promptly or anywhere approaching an actual nap time. It’s been more a couple of hours or so. Which is a problem and contributes to how napping makes me feel like an old man.

If I can do this 45 minute lark, that will help me and I hope I can get beyond feeling ancient. Go take a look at the app for yourself, will you?

Weekend Read – but not on laptops

Posted by William Gallagher

Last week, at the Aspen Ideas festival, there came an interesting little moment between Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist, and Jim Steyer, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Both declared that they’d banned laptops and other electronic devices in their lecture halls.

“Many of the students actually appreciate that,” said Toyama, who teaches at the University of Michigan, “because it encourages real discussion, and they know that as soon as there’s a laptop in front of them, they’re going to start Facebooking each other, and that means that they’re not present for the class.”

Steyer jumped right in. “You should know that in my Stanford classes five years ago, I started banning laptops,” he said. “There was no way they were paying attention. They all whined about it constantly for the first three weeks.” He added that his colleague, with whom he co-taught the course, was terrified they’d made the wrong choice. “She was like, They’re gonna just kill us on the reviews!” he said. But by the end, their students, too, expressed gratitude.

The Case Against Laptops in the Classroom — Science of Us

Read the full piece but please print it out first. Concentrate. There will be questions.