Productivity

Productivity

I didn’t see your message, sorry

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It is handy when you know that someone has seen your email or your text or your update or your anything, but actually it is never handy. You’re a writer, you know they’ve seen it, why aren’t they saying anything?

Worse, you’re wrong. They haven’t seen it. They really haven’t seen it. I’ve had this come up with people who tell me they know so-and-so read their email DAYS AGO and so is being rude not replying. Or they NEVER OPENED IT ONCE, same thing. In each case, you don’t know. Maybe they saw the three-line preview on their iPhone and didn’t bother to open the message. Maybe they got eleventy-billion emails that morning and simply didn’t see yours in there.

But none of that matters when the person in question is you. And when the question in question is whether you have read something or you haven’t. You could just let the online world go on its little way, sending out read receipt acknowledgements wherever it may, or you could fight back. Stop it happening.

Lifehacker’s got your back. Read its full feature on how to switch off bleedin’ read receipts in the most popular software around.

Metaphors are like, um, er

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Metaphors can help by tapping what learning theorists call prior knowledge to make a connection between what people already understand through experience and what they have yet to discover. We do this naturally in conversation — for instance, “The news hit her like a freight train.” By comparing the situation to something people already know or can at least imagine, we convey its intensity and urgency. But when explaining our ideas in presentations, we’re sometimes reluctant to use verbal or visual metaphors to relate to audiences. I’ve heard people say that metaphors are “off topic,” or worse, “cheap.” Though using a cheesy one can elicit groans, more often than not, metaphors offer a shortcut to understanding.

Finding the Right Metaphor for Your Presentation

Read the full piece. Its specifically about searching for the right metaphor in a presentation but so long as you don’t lurch into cliché, it’s surely going to be valid until the cows come home.

Avoiding seasonal depression when you work alone

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There’s no doubt that life as a freelancer has its perks. We get to structure our days as we wish, work with clients we like, and don’t have to sell eight-hour blocks of our day to an employer. But when working from home or at the local coffee shop, we face social isolation, which puts us at risk for anxiety and depression. And as winter approaches, it comes with a heightened risk of seasonal depression.

3 Ways Freelancers Can Avoid Isolation—and the Seasonal Depression That Comes With It – Michael Tunney, Contently (19 November 2014)

Read the full piece for advice.

Ten Rules for the Creative Sandbox

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10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox
1. There is no “wrong.”
Which also means there is no “right.” This is play, remember. The point is simply that you’re having fun. 2. Think process, not product.
In other words, It doesn’t matter if you like or hate the product; all that matters is that you’re having fun.
There’s time enough later for editing and crafting. Creative Sandbox time is all about letting your 4-year-old out, and 4-year-olds are much more interested in the experience of creating than in what they make.

How to Bust a Creative Block: Rules for the Creative Sandbox – Melissa Dinwiddie (undated)

Read the full piece for the other eight and rather a lot more.

“Why I Left iCloud Reminders for Todoist”

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I’m just after telling you that Things is briefly free now on iOS and I was thinking of saying it’s the second-best To Do app on Apple gear. But there is this: Todoist. I’ve used it and haven’t in fact got one single pixel of a memory of what I thought about it. But MacStories writer Federico Viticci is a fan and a compellingly persuasive one.

In a three-biscuit long article, he talks about how Apple’s Reminders turned out to be much better than he’d expected yet eventually he had to move on:

Reminders isn’t built to scale for people who manage dozens of projects and collaborate with others to assign tasks and keep track of due dates. It’s not Apple’s fault – it’s right there in the name: Reminders. It’s not called “Projects” or “Todo Pro”: Reminders is a lightweight list system with support for dates, alerts, and lists shared with others.

I guess it was naive of me to think that, with a growing business and changes to my personal life, I wouldn’t face an increased amount of responsibilities. Reminders couldn’t keep track of the new complexities and people in my life. I started forgetting about things I needed to do; sometimes I forgot to mark tasks as done so other people wouldn’t know what my status was; and, other times Reminders wasn’t working for them but I was forcing them to use it because “iCloud never had issues for me”. Both the Reminders app for Mac and Fantastical for iOS were overflowing with assignements and notes that were hard to find and that just kept piling on each other day after day.

Why I Left iCloud Reminders for Todoist – Federico Viticci, MacStories (19 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Very important: Things for iOS is briefly free

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Stop reading this and go get both the iPad and the separate iPhone version of Things on the App Store.

Are you back? Things is important because it’s a very good To Do manager and I don’t believe it’s ever gone free before. I could be wrong, but To Do apps fall into four tiers that they generally stay in. There’s your free ones, your low-price, your higher price and your OmniFocus.

To my mind OmniFocus is the best by far and what it does for me is worth an awful lot more than its asking price. I used to say that I relied on OmniFocus so much that if I had to pay the money again, I would. I don’t say that any more – because I did pay the money again. New versions came out and I bought them faster than you can read this sentence.

But.

Before I found OmniFocus, I very strongly considered Things.

In its favour, it has a great name. I’ve got Things to do. Sold. I am a sucker for a good name and this is a good name. Then it seemed to me that it was more powerful than anything else I’d tried up to then and at the time I was moving to needing something with much, much more oomph. I had so much more to do at that point and actually it’s only got worse.

Also, Things looks great. Today I’d say OmniFocus looks very good and even if it didn’t, the look wouldn’t be enough to make me switch. Right now, this minute, nothing is enough to make me switch. But you spend a hell of a lot of time in your To Do app so the look – both in terms of its aesthetics and in how it works for, what you press and what you tap – that’s important. You can’t quantify it but you also can’t deny it.

In the end, I think I tried the Mac version and it just didn’t take. Not for me. I wish I could tell you why, I wish I could point to something. I can with the iPad version that I’ve just downloaded and played with: there doesn’t appear to be a way to set a start date for a task. A deadline, sure, but not a start date. I regularly now have work that is scheduled months out and while I need to plan for them, it’s unproductive of me to plan now, to plan the day before, or to have a reminder every day in between. So I tell OmniFocus that my planning task should first show up on my list about a week or a fortnight before the due date. Can’t see a way to do that with Things.

Sometimes this stuff can be a bit buried under preferences and suchforth so I could be wrong.

And I told you I just downloaded this to play with. I did that to get you the screenshot above and to see what Things looks like now, a few years down the road. Why not? It’s free.

Until 28 November.

Because the reason for this rare free-dom is that Apple has chosen Things as its app of the week. Come next week, something else will go free.

So go grab Things right now. Remember that the iPhone and iPad ones are separate, they’re not universal. So grab them both right now. Even if you haven’t the time to play with them, grab now and you can use them tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever you have a minute or a need.

Try the 60-60-30 rule

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Well, it’s not a rule. Not even really a guideline. More a suggestion from writer Mosse Rodbay:

I’m personally using the simple 60-60-30 rule which means I work in two highly focused 60 minute blocks of time without any interruptions where I simply turn them all off. Then I relax for 30 minutes and check e-mail and social media which I must admit is highly addictive. I hope this post will help you as much as it has helped me getting more work done while also having more fun!

How to Have More Fun and Get More Work Done – Mosse Rodbay, Get Verified (undated but November 2014).

Read the full piece.

How to switch off Evernote’s Contexts feature

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I was going to call this How and Why to do it, but you don’t need the why. Context is a new feature in Evernote that completely unhelpfully recommends Wall Street Journal articles that are not in any way related to your note.

Okay, that’s not how Evernote would describe it. But, hey, I’m in an Evernote note where I keep my invoice details and popping up in my way is a notification that “UK Police Drop Begg Charges” and that the WSJ wrote about this on 1 October 2014. I’m sure the case is riveting, but I don’t know who Begg is and he (there’s a photo too, it’s a he, whoever he is) doesn’t get a mention in my list of invoice numbers.

But on the Mac and I presume PC versions of Evernote, go to Evernote/Preferences, find Context, uptick Show Context.

Done.

So far I’ve not been so interrupted by Context on my iPhone or iPad so it’ll be interesting to see if the preference carries over to it.

Want. NYC to bring fast public WiFi

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Finally, a use for those strange kiosks with payphones in. They’re going to be converted to be wifi stations – and not just any old slow wifi, but gigabit wifi. For gigabit read fast and for fast read when will it be done here too?

New York City today unveiled an ambitious plan to roll out a free city-wide municipal Wi-Fi network that officials say will be the fastest and most wide-reaching network of its kind in the world.

At a press conference at City Hall, the city unveiled LinkNYC, which will rely on thousands of kiosks that will be deployed at locations currently occupied by pay phones. The kiosks will be installed in as many as 10,000 locations throughout the five boroughs and will offer Wi-Fi service of one gigabit per second within a radius of 150 feet. They’ll also offer free domestic voice calls to all 50 states. The first of the kiosks is expected to begin service in late 2015.

New York City to Offer Free Gigabit Wi-Fi in 2015 – Arik Hesseldahl, Re/code (17 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Sort of a good deal: iA Writer down to 69p

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I say this is sort-of a good deal because I learnt of the price drop, remembered how enthusiastically people had recommended this app to me and I bought it on the spot. And it was only as I tried writing in it that I looked through the controls and found a line saying “Buy the Pro version”.

The Pro version is only £2.99 but you just know that all the enthusiasts were enthusing about that edition so the one I’ve got isn’t the one they meant. It’s only 69p but I was on the fence about trying to take on another word processor so I find I’m unwilling to go plop down £2.99 until I know what the differences are.

But whether you look at the 69p one or the Pro £2.99, go take a look in the App Store. You can’t believe how much praise I’ve heard for iA Writer.