Productivity

Productivity

Productivity lessons from Strictly Come Dancing

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You’re thinking oh yes, really, there is productivity to be learnt from the UK’s version of Dancing with the Stars? Yes.

Such as this. Right now as we speak, it’s the gap between the two episodes making up this year’s final. It’s about an hour, just shy of an hour, and it’s short enough and the timing is awkward enough that there isn’t a whole lot you can usefully go do before the show’s back.

But you could write.

I would be writing if I weren’t talking to you. So this is definitely a case of very specifically do what I say rather than what I do.

And this is what put the idea in my head. But once it was there in my noggin, I realised that there are productivity lessons aplenty.

Maybe it’s not a shock. Strictly runs for, what, 16 weeks? Once it starts, it is a train and there must be hundreds of people working flat-out on it. Every person vital – this is the BBC, they ain’t paying for people they don’t need – and that means everything they each do is crucial. Vital, crucial and time-dependent. Tina Fey has a great line that I remember a lot when I’m vacillating over projects I’m writing:

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”

Tina Fey, Bossypants

We spend a lot of time as writers going around in circles over whether something is ready and whether something is good. Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. Sometimes that is what makes us writers and makes our material sing. But sometimes: let it go. It is done, get it gone.

I believe in debating what needs to be debated and finishing what needs to be finished. And the deadline of a live show every week is like cement-lined evidence to me.

But do you follow Strictly? I don’t watch The X-Factor because it seems the same every week to me. Someone comes on and they can sing or they can’t. Next week, they can sing or they can’t. No difference. With Strictly, people are visibly transformed. They’re transformed by many things but one is confidence: facing up to dancing in front of millions changes them. And always, always, when a celebrity’s personality comes out, they dance better.

Drama writing requires us to dig deep. Dancing requires letting go. But both require us to listen to the music and that’s productivity to me. Hear the rhythm, the beat and get going.

Recommended: Snapselect for OS X

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This week I began writing software reviews for MacNN.com and as I was doing this one, I thought of you. While we’re writers, we do have to be so conscious of images and graphics now plus we can’t help but have a great camera in our pockets – because our phones all have them. I think one consequence from this is that we get eleventy-billion images.

I know I did.

Years ago I was enough into photography – I’ve had some published in US books – that I invested in Apple’s professional image application, Aperture. I’d have to check this, don’t make me swear to it, but when Aperture came out, it was so new and in such a new field that nobody quite knew what to make of it. They tried comparing it to Photoshop, where it failed because its image editing is much more basic. They tried comparing it to iPhoto and it failed because it isn’t as easy as iPhoto.

Yet I believe Adobe got it, they understood. Or maybe more likely they were eying up the same issues that Aperture was intended to solve. Adobe Lightroom became the other application in this new genre of serious photo management.

I was a bit fascinated by this because it reminded me of TV drama reviews where at first everyone is criticising a show and then later they’re adoring it. In this case they were poo-pooing an entire form of software and very quickly they were using it. But then I was also a lot fascinated by how they used it and how these two applications did the same thing in different ways.

Very broadly, very crudely, Aperture was a smash-and-grab do-anything kind of application where you bunged in your photos and then you worried about them later. Whereas Lightroom required you to add them in a certain way, process them in certain steps and really go through a particular workflow. I’m not that disciplined and Aperture just seemed to suit me better, so I bought Aperture.

Unfortunately maybe I needed a touch more discipline than I have. Or perhaps Aperture did. Because I added a lot of photos and then by mistake added them again. And again. Over time there are up to five duplicates of some shots and one thing Aperture is bad at is helping you spot those and delete them.

Flashforward a few years. I’ve pretty much stopped using Aperture because it was full brimwards with these duplicates and near-duplicates from when I would over-shoot events. Also, Apple abandoned Aperture. That was a big surprise to me and I think it was a big mistake. As ever with software, you can carry on using something. Nobody comes and switches off Aperture just because Apple doesn’t sell it any more. But there will come a time when they might as well have. There will be some moment in the future when you have to choose between getting some Apple OS X upgrade and sticking with an old one to keep Aperture alive.

I will upgrade. I say this not just because I know myself but because I know that I’ll upgrade before I notice that it kills Aperture.

So I have been mentally preparing to move my images out of it and I haven’t because I’m not mentally prepared to slog through all those bloody shots. Which is where Snapselect came in. Do you remember reading the word Snapselect about five miles up above this line? I reviewed Snapselect and it did – it is doing – the job I need. It’s taking me a time to work through everything because it is slow and I am busy but every few hours I take a minute to schlep through a few images and kill off the duplicates and the bad ones.

And my telling you that tells you the story behind this paragraph from my review:

We imported a fairly disastrous Aperture library that had over 30,000 images, and took up around 300Gb. It took Snapselect 11 minutes to load it, and then not far shy of 150 minutes to produce the thumbnails — which then took over two hours to analyze. Be smarter than us: bring in a few folders at a time. Snapselect makes that easy, but we just wanted to show off.

Hands On: Snapselect photo management app (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece to get some screenshots – watch for my finger in frame in one – and details of how to get it. If you don’t need it, you may not even see the point. But if you do, go buy Snapselect because it solves the day.

Best new app in ages: Workflow for iOS

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I’ve been holed away in an apartment in Paris, as you do, with only barebones internet connection and a lot of gorgeous city to look around. It was meant to be a working break and some work was done but, between us, it worked more as a break. A stillness, a bubble. And I thought I’d be recommending that to you.

I may yet.

But the last thing I downloaded as the Eurostar train went under the Channel was the newly released Workflow for iPhone and iPad.

Wait. This is more relevant than you’re thinking. If I hadn’t gone off for these days, I would’ve downloaded Workflow and I would’ve fully reviewed it but there’s a difference between fully and fully. The fully reviewed review I would’ve written you would doubtlessly have been praising and it would’ve begun:

Workflow lets you automate various things your iPad software can do. So things that take you several steps and need several of the regular iPad apps can be turned into one.

This is true. I’d have sounded enthused too, because I am, but I think you’d have got that more from the tone than from anything specific. Automate. Great. I’d have given you an example, too, but while I got the concept and I’ve been looking forward to this app, I wouldn’t have done you a great example. I couldn’t have done you a great example because I couldn’t think of one.

But being away, having the time to play, I’ve got one. Full disclosure: it may not seem that great to you. But, grief, it’s great for me and this is what’s so good about Workflow: it lets you create tools that are great for you.

Previously on this… In one of my freelance jobs it helps me to keep an eye on various news outlets and when I see something that could be useful, I save it to Evernote. Now, I’ve got an Evernote notebook for it and I could copy the text from an article and paste it there. I’ve done that. I can also email the article from the web straight into Evernote. I do that a lot. What I don’t do is remember how.

I can remember how to email into Evernote, that’s fine. But saying which notebook gives me pause because I can never remember its name. And I’d like to add tags, things to help me find articles later, but I can never remember how to do that.

And now I don’t have to.

With Workflow, when I spot an article online that I want to save, I tap Safari’s Share button. There’s a Run Workflow button that appears. Tap that and I get all my Workflows. Pick one I’ve called Research and, wallop.

Workflow takes the article, the web address, pops it into an email, does the trickery to say what notebook and what tags there are, and it’s gone. Sent. Saved.

It doesn’t actually save me a lot of time but it saves me enough that I do it more often. And that’s the thing about automation; it makes things easier as well as quicker.

Workflow is on sale at £1.99 but the price goes up soon. Get it on the App Store.

The password is dead – ish

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There’s a new move to get rid of the password. I think I’d rather miss them but it is a bit 11th Century, isn’t it? Halt! Who goes there? Are you fr1n3d or f03?

We have already reduced them a lot with apps like 1Password – you just remember one password, it remembers all the rest securely and also creates very strong new ones when you want – and then there are tools like Touch ID on iPhones. I don’t have an iPhone with this but I’ve used them and it is nothing short of spookily handy to be able to pick a phone up and have it already know it’s you.

Still, back to the news. Passwords are under threat and it’s about time too:

Passwords are a pain. They’re incredibly important for the security of our data, and yet they’re hard to remember and keep track of. Plus, it seems like we constantly have to change them as the result of some new hack or security breach. But the password’s days may be numbered: the FIDO Alliance—a non-profit composed of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and more—has published its final specification for a system to kill the password, hopefully for good.
The specification is a bit technical, but what it boils down to is fewer passwords, hopefully. FIDO offers two options: a password-less login method, and a two-factor login method. In the former case, when you register with a new service, app, or site that uses FIDO’s technology, you choose how you want to authenticate that account (just as you would currently specify a username and password). But instead of a password, that method can be a PIN or a biometric factor—such as a fingerprint, a spoken passphrase, or facial recognition.

The Death Of The Password Starts Today (Maybe) – Dan Moran, Popular Science (10 December 2014)

Read the full piece. And while we wait for all this to happen, get yourself secure with 1Password. I’ve used 1Password 17 times this morning.

Email is great, now leave it alone

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There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that email addiction leads to stress and unhappiness. Now, for the first time, researchers have tested this idea directly and found that, yep, there are probably positive psychological benefits to intentionally ignoring your email whenever possible. In a new study in Computers in Human Behavior, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia took a group of workers and, over the course of two weeks, assigned each to one of two conditions: One group was told to keep their email program closed, turn notifications off, and check their email only three times a day, and the other was told to leave notifications on and check their email as often as possible. After the first week, each group switched into the other condition, and each group was regularly surveyed about how often they were checking their email, how stressed they were, and how productive they felt.

To De-Stress, Check Your Email Less – Jesse Singal, Science of Us (December 4, 2014)

Read the full piece. Via New Republic.

Got it: an iPad app for transcribing interview recordings

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Excuse me while I do a spot of SEO: interview, interviewee, interviewing, interviewer, journalist, ipad, audio, sound, recording, transcribe, transcription.

There. Hopefully this means the next poor sod searching for this type of app can avoid spending the ENTIRE EVENING on the hunt. Here’s the thing. I have to be away from my office tomorrow but I have a very pressing job where I need to transcribe an interview I recorded some weeks ago. I hate transcribing with the same passion that EVERY SINGLE WRITER EVER does and I just wanted some help.

Specifically, I wanted an iPad version of Transcriptions, a freeware app for Mac that simply lets you play back audio while you type out what you hear. Missed a bit? Tap a keystroke and the audio scrubs back 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds. Nothing in all this land will make transcription fun but this helps. My great regret is that I didn’t discover it until I’d transcribed fully two thirds of the interviews I’d done for a Blake’s 7 book.

Now I just need that on iPad, please. You quickly start throwing your hopes out of the window when you can’t find something so I was reduced to thinking I’d have a notetaking app that just played back audio. A bit. Enough to save me having to skip back and forth between two apps.

It turns out that there are three types of application that get returned when you search for terms like “best ipad audio transcription” or “best iOS apps for journalists”. The first and most common search result is the transcription service. For various prices and with various different trial periods, you can record audio in the app and send it off to a human being somewhere to do your transcription job for you, for a fee.

Fine. Not what I want, but fine.

The second type of app does what I want but only to audio that you record with the app. Nice, fine, but useless to me with my existing recording.

How long has it taken you to read this far? Did you skim? Good for you. The answer is that the best option available is Notability for iPad. It costs £1.99 for iPad and iPhone together. It’s only £1.99 but it’s also a lesson to get good apps when they fall free, even if you don’t want them. I got Notability last May when Apple made it App of the Week. I downloaded it, tried it, saw why people liked it so but felt it wasn’t for me and I deleted it.

Now all these months on, I can just re-download it. And I did so after a couple of hours of trying everything else.

Notability is not perfect. But I can import the audio from Dropbox, I can play it back and there is a 10-second rewind button. I would like a way to skip back 10 seconds from the keyboard as reaching up to tap that button does break the flow of my typing.

But tomorrow I will be sitting in coffee houses alternating between transcribing interviews for a book and writing a script. I could do without the hell that is transcription but otherwise that sounds like a pretty good day to me.

The truth you get when you drive 7 million miles

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Google Maps is surely the most accurate mapping service on sale now or ever made – even if I find its iPhone app palpably annoying to figure out – but as well as all its technology, it has people. Some drive those dinky cars you’ve seen. Others change the maps under their fingers.

It’s an example of just how much you can do when you have a lot, I mean a lot, of data gathered from everyone and everywhere around you.

The maps we use to navigate have come a long way in a short time. Since the ’90s we’ve gone from glove boxes stuffed with paper maps to floorboards littered with Mapquest printouts to mindlessly obeying Siri or her nameless Google counterpart.

The maps behind those voices are packed with far more data than most people realize. On a recent visit to Mountain View, I got a peek at how the Google Maps team assembles their maps and refines them with a combination of algorithms and meticulous manual labor—an effort they call Ground Truth. The project launched in 2008, but it was mostly kept under wraps until just a couple years ago. It continues to grow, now covering 51 countries, and algorithms are playing a bigger role in extracting information from satellite, aerial, and Street View imagery.

The Huge, Unseen Operation Behind the Accuracy of Google Maps – Greg Miller, Wired (8 December 2014)

Read the full piece for more.

Droptask comes to Android

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It’s a To Do manager especially for visual thinkers – and as of today it is on Android as well as iOS and the web. Droptask does this:

DropTask is a powerful productivity tool enabling you to visualize your workload in a unique and engaging way. Simply drag and drop tasks for all your essential to-dos, and organize them within larger colorful circles to truly see the bigger picture. With powerful functionality delivered intuitively to the user, DropTask adds simplicity to even the most complex projects and provides effortless task management for teams and individuals alike.

Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 17.18.39

Take a look at the official site or go straight to the Google store for the new Android version.

Alternatively, wait for me to get my finger out and review the iOS version like I’ve been trying to do for two months. There is an irony in how I fail to do a review of a To Do app, but it’s not an irony that helps you much. But if you like Droptask on Android or the web, do take a lookout it on iPhone and iPad too.

That was November 2014

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It’s taking me longer and longer to do these, even though the fact that I tell you I’ll do them is a big driver to making me, well, do things. So thank you for that. Your work here is done and you needn’t read on nor nip back to That Was October 2014.

But committing to telling you this really helps me. Give it a go yourself, okay?

Writing approximately 60,310 words:
The Blank Screen Guide: Blogging book (approximately 15,000 words)
Writers’ Guild West Midlands email newsletter 821 words
4 x The Blank Screen email newsletter (6,776 words)
2x Ava and Soundscapes draft script (approx 6,000 words total)
97x The Blank Screen news articles (25,265 words)
4x Self Distract blog posts (6,415 words)
3x Radio Times reviews (approximately 300 words)

Events:
Seven Minute Stories – performed The Book Groups to 80 people
Lead Burton Young Writers’ group
Lead Rugby Young Writers’ group
Guest at Polesworth Young Writers’ group
The Blank Screen workshop for Room 204
The Writers’ Toolkit: produced one panel, spoke on a second, chaired a third
3x coaching and mentoring sessions
4x Ormiston Academy scriptwriting workshops
Speaking engagement at Fircroft College

Pitches and bookings:
Got Arts Council England funding for project
Workshop one-off proposal (pending)
Workshop series proposal (successful)
College workshop proposal (abandoned)
University talk commission
Scripts: The Lift and Mags pitched to director
Theatre series proposal (to meeting stage)
The Writers’ Bursary application

Commissioned:
(First time I’ve hired people)
2x workshop leaders
1x actor

Attended:
Royal Television Society committee meeting
Dangerous Corner at the Birmingham Rep
Soundscapes meeting
Next Generation Poets
Writers’ Guild Executive Council meeting
Roz Goddard coffee

Other:
Coached by Rivka Fine
Arranged Beiderbecke meeting work