Productivity

Productivity

Inkspill Writing Retreat: What We Get from Writing

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Previously… last weekend I contributed to the Inkspill online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. All this week I’m running the sessions I wrote for them. Here’s today’s.

What We Get From Writing

Hand on heart, this is a tough one. I was very flattered that Nina Lewis asked me to talk to you for this Inkspill Writing Retreat but I was aware that my first thoughts to talk to you about were all about things that I do constantly. Things I know and care about and practice. I think the point of a writing retreat is to stretch you and I feel I ought to be stretched too.

This is me stretching. I’m not sure how much value that has for you, it feels like I’m doing calisthenics and you’re waiting there in your smart leotard waiting for me to get off the mat. You’ll be waiting a while. I’m very unfit.

And I don’t know what I get from writing.

I know that if you or I had any sense at all, we would have normal jobs and proper careers and we might even find a way to make that not feel ditchwater-dull and boring. I know that when we do have to juggle those normal jobs with a writing life, we are split between having to deep-mine our selves and our very souls on our own – and then bound off into social occasions with colleagues. Colleagues who we work with but who probably don’t get writing.

I was at a thing recently where some smart and charming writers were talking about why they write and a fella in the audience told them that it was because they wanted to make a bestseller. They wanted to make money. It took the speakers a beat to find a way to politely say no, that’s not it at all.

Bestsellers are great and the idea that I can reach out not only to you but to oodles of people is simultaneously exciting and terrifying. I prefer it when it’s just us, but if oodles of others come, well, you put the kettle on. I’ll get the extra biscuits.

It is possible to make a living from writing and I do, but the aim and what I think I actually get from this life is the opportunity to write better. Paying the mortgage and feeding myself is important, but the longer I can do that, the more I can do that, the greater my chance of becoming the writer I long to be.

So what I get from writing is writing. I feel I’m short-changing you there. I live for the moments – and it is only moments – when the world is forgotten and I am in my writing, I am working at my best and hopefully making that best become better.

There are only two things that improve my writing and the biggest one is time. Making more time to write and then spending that time writing, it’s crucial.

But the other is using writing to head out into unsafe waters. I interviewed a poet the other day and as delightful as she was, she also goaded and challenged me into writing a poem. It was dreadful. But the experience of writing in a new area, reaching for something new in me, that was electrifying.

So there’s the exercise. I am okay with writing you this personal blog chiefly because it’s you and you’ve got that kind of face, I feel I can tell you anything. But let me turn it into a writing exercise: I need to feel I’m giving you something practical that you can actually use. And I know this is practical, I know you can use this: write something new.

Really new. If you’re a poet, write a short story. If you’re a novelist, write a radio play. Go somewhere new in topic and in form.

There is nothing else that can stretch you like writing in new directions and that stretching, that’s it, that’s what I get from writing.

William

See William Gallagher’s scribbles – books, Doctor Who radio dramas and the rest – on Amazon.

Use an email client instead of the web

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I’m prompted to say this to you because of an short article about Gmail whose writer says:

I’ve been using Gmail since 2003 exclusively. It’s awesome. And when I learned the keyboard shortcuts in 2006, it vastly increased my email productivity. I highly recommend taking the time to learn them.

Yesterday I discovered the biggest boon to my email productivity since shortcuts: Gmail Offline, a Google Chrome app that does just what it says: Allows you to read and write email (in the browser) when you’re not connected to the Internet. But that’s not the key point. I haven’t even been offline since I started using it.

Do Your Email Faster by Getting Offline – Ev Williams, Medium (13 May 2014)

He sounds so surprised. Here’s the thing. If you get to your email by firing up Firefox or Safari or Chrome or (twitch) Internet Explorer, then logging on to a site like outlook.com (hotmail.com as was) or laposte.net, you’re reading your email online. (* See that asterisk? It’s important. But shush, I didn’t say it yet.) You’re reading your email online. That’s nice. You can do that from anywhere, absolutely anywhere that you can get an internet connection and it’s fine.

So long as you have an internet connection. You are bollixed if you don’t. And so long as your email provider remains your email provider. A friend recently moved from one broadband supplier to another and in the process was told she would lose her old email address. You know that’s a problem: if there are any statistics into why so many people remain subscribers to AOL then they probably conclude that it is solely to keep that familiar @aol.com address. Same with Hotmail. You keep putting up with the crap because you’ve given everybody that bleedin’ email address and there is nothing you can do about it.

Until forced. Then you change to something good and that may well be Gmail but this is another story.

Back to the online versus offline stuff.

If you work in an office and your PC or Mac there includes Microsoft Outlook, you’re getting your email offline. It might be stored on your company’s network servers but it’s not sitting out there on the internet waiting for you to login or for Microsoft to switch you off.

Back when this used to be an either/or kind of situation, there were advantages and disadvantages to online and offline email. I have always used offline, though, and I’ve done so because it means I have all the email right here. It’s mine and on my Mac and on my backups, you can’t take it away from me without theft and some serious effort.

It’s called using an email client: Apple’s OS X Mail is a client, Microsoft Outlook is a client and email is served to them. Your computer goes off to get email for you and brings it back, you don’t have to keep going to a website or leaving a website tab open.

Also back in the day, leaving that connection open cost you money. I knew someone who stay online while slowly peck-typing her emails, not appreciating that it was only when she hit Send that she needed to be online. I did tell her that and her internet connection did keep dropping the line because, as far as it was concerned, she wasn’t using it for a very long time. But I have no doubt that she persisted until whenever she got broadband.

These days we can have both worlds. I have all the advantages of having my emails on my Mac but they are also on my iPad and iPhone, moreover they are also also on any computer I chose to login to. Where you might have to go to hotmail.com to get your email, I can elect to go to iCloud.com to get mine. I did this most recently at a secure mental health establishment where I wasn’t allowed my iPad or iPhone but could use their office computers.

So that’s all good, then. You can get your email online or offline, whatever what you like, and so long as your supplier doesn’t stiff you, you’re so good to go that you never even realise there’s any choice to be made. Until you do what this Williams writer did and move to an email client, then you find out the other big benefit. The benefit so big that it surprised him and it now surprises me that not everybody knew this:

The reason Gmail Offline makes you faster at your email is because:

It’s freaking fast. Gmail proper is fast, most of the time. But sometimes it takes a second or two (or three or…) to archive or reload your inbox. When you’re plowing through email — especially with shortcuts — that seems like an eternity. Gmail Offline removes those waits, pretty much completely.

Yep. That would do it.

If you’re on Gmail, Williams is enthusing about Gmail Offline, and here’s where we:

*throw in an asterisk.

Purely and entirely to be awkward and not because Google wants to take over the world, Gmail Offline uses your web browser. It has to be Google Chrome with extensions so it’s really turning your browser into something that uses local storage like a regular document-creating application. But it’s your browser. So all that stuff I said about how you can tell you’re reading email online because you use a web browser, not so much.

But offline is faster? Very much.

Using OmniFocus for meeting agendas

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This is entirely stolen from Asian Efficiency: I just read this on there and it’s like they knew what I needed. I now run a particular regular meeting for the Writers’ Guild. More than other meetings, this one seems to have tasks that keep coming up: generally things I have to tell the committee, things they’ve asked me to discuss, that kind of thing. And I’ve struggled a bit because I have an OmniFocus project devoted to the Guild and it’s already pretty long and big and messy. I was thinking of turning that into  folder with some kind of General Writers’ Guild Bits project and a Things for the Meetings kind of project.

But that idea is about as ugly as the names I was giving them. And as I pondered ugliness versus efficiency, I read this:

The easiest way is to set up a single action list called “Agenda” and you dump all discussion items in there. So whenever you have an idea, you can either dump it into your inbox or immediately move it to your “Agenda” single action list.

If you want to elaborate a little, use the notes section of the task where you can freeflow and type all your thoughts about a particular agenda point (on desktop, click on the paperclip icon on the right or press CMD+’ (apostrophe)).

The next time you have a meeting, pull up the “Agenda” list and simply go through each point you have in there and check things off. It’s that simple!

How to Setup and Use OmniFocus as an Agenda for Meetings – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (26 March 2014)

Do read the whole thing, would you? It’s written in a way that’s hard to usefully quote but easy to read: it’s an article based on a discussion that took place in Asian Efficiency’s paid-for premium service. What’s convinced me is the Socratic way it builds up into a picture.

How to stop feeling overwhelmed

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Caught:

You might even be reading this in procrastination, facing that sliding mountain of work without the energy to scale it.

6 Steps to Stop Feeling So Overwhelmed – Samantha Cole, Fast Company (28 October 2014)

That quote from Cole comes at the end of her introduction to the piece and while that one sentence is what made me want to show you – and also admit she’s caught me out – I think the rest of her intro says it better than I would:

Becoming overwhelmed is a slow avalanche.

At first, agreeing to an extra project or starting a new class feels exciting. Sure, one more deadline is doable. Then you end up with three more meetings a week on your calendar. Before long, the moments that used to be reprieve become stressful, too–your friend’s in town and wants to catch up over drinks, but you’ve got that yoga class you already paid for, so you’ll have to leave work by 6 p.m. even though you haven’t started what’s due in the morning, and your emails aren’t going to reply to themselves. Work quality slips. Sleep, what’s that?

You might even be reading this in procrastination, facing that sliding mountain of work without the energy to scale it. Here’s your six-step climbing plan.

Go read her six steps, would you? I’m on her page, ahead of you. Or will be after I’ve made this tea.

“To Do lists are evil, use your calendar”

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To say I don’t agree with this is to emphasise how I put the advice in speech marks. Tasks and events are different and if you try mixing them you are screwed. For instance, say you have to phone the Mormon Tabernacle Choir – wait, that’s exactly the example that popped into my head when writing the book of The Blank Screen:

…you can be tempted to start putting some tasks in your calendar and some in a To Do app and that way begins with a certain amount of sanity but ends in an overwhelming amount of madness. You start putting things in that are really obvious like that phone call to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that you said you’d do on Thursday, that’d go in to your calendar easily. But the MTC is a busy bunch, if you’re not to waste the call, you need to plan what you’re going to ask them and when exactly do you put that in your calendar?

Maybe you pick a date for that and go into this cycle of moving the task to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until you end up doing it right before the call. Or you put the planning into your To Do app and then you are stuffed. If you look at the To Do app, it doesn’t tell you when the call is due. If you look in your calendar, it doesn’t tell you whether or not you’ve finished the planning. Sooner or even sooner, you end up having to look in both and you end up having to keep looking in both. Over and over. And each time you think about whether this task in your calendar has an associated task in your To Do app, or vice versa, you’re wasting time you could spend on doing this stuff. I’m more okay with wasting time than I sound but I’d rather waste it doing something I like.

Now, a To Do application that includes a calendar: that’s different. Those I love. It seems such a simple thing, but to have my list of things I’ve got to do today followed by a stolen peek at my calendar is just great. It’s everything I need to know in one glance.

The Blank Screen – William Gallagher (2013)

But just because I believe this, it only means I’m right for me. Your mileage may vary and since I want you to be more productive more than I want you to say nice things about agreeing with me all the time because I’m a special little snowflake, I’d like you to take a look at someone who disagrees with me. They have many points. But they boil down to this one plus a lot of justification:

To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.

To-do lists by themselves are useless. They’re just the first step. You have to assign them time on your schedule. Why?
It makes you be realistic about what you can get done. It allows you to do tasks when it’s efficient, not just because it’s #4.
Until it’s on your calendar and assigned an hour, it’s just a list of wishful thinking.

How to Stop Being Lazy and Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips – Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree ( 10 August 2014)

Do read the full feature: I usually think Barker has a lot of good things to say.

Inkspill Writing Retreat: Writing Doctor Who

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Previously… last weekend I contributed to the Inkspill online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. All this week I’m running the sessions I wrote for them. Here’s today’s.

Writing Doctor Who

Do be careful what you wish for: it can be bloody hard work. I write Doctor Who radio dramas for Big Finish and you can’t just swan in and cook this stuff up. Doctor Who has to be inside you: I don’t believe you can write for a show or a book range or a magazine if you don’t already read it and love it. Plus, the producers at Big Finish do know and love Doctor Who, you have to step up to their level in the quality of your writing and it’s not easy.

Still, I hope that I will continue to write them forever. That is partly because I was a Doctor Who fan growing up – and it never leaves you, especially not when the TV show is back and is capable of such great drama – but also because it is radio drama and also because it stretches me tremendously.

Whatever type of writing you do, have a think about radio drama. I don’t mean that you should definitely take it up, I’ve got enough competition without you coming along and blowing me out of the water, but think about the form. I love radio drama because I feel it’s very intimate and personal, plus it is life-support dependent upon dialogue.

I am a dialogue man. I’ve a friend who insists dialogue is the nice tasty little extra that you add at the end of a story and I’m surprised we’re still friends. If I don’t believe what your characters are saying, I don’t believe them and I don’t care about them. Let them be exterminated, so what?

Radio focuses you on dialogue like nothing else. It’s exciting creating an entire new world, both metaphorically in your writing and pretty literally in that this is Doctor Who and you’re making up a planet. But you have to convey that it’s, I don’t know, a desert planet with oases of Apple Stores and a great big, green, smelly monster. You could have the Doctor step out of the TARDIS and say “Oh, it’s Theta Beta Five, the famous desert planet – oh, no! A Smellosaurus! Quick, let’s buy an iPad”.

But nobody would be listening any more.

I’ve tried recently to explain why I love scriptwriting above all things and at first I thought it came down to this. You have to conjure characters, a story, a world and all the drama using only what people say. (Plus a few sound effects. Do listen to a Big Finish Doctor Who some time: the sound design is simply a marvel.)

But actually, I’ve come to realise that it’s much harder than that. And much more satisfying.

You can’t say it’s a desert planet. You can’t have villains saying what their dastardly plan is.

Russell T Davies, who with Julie Gardner brought Doctor Who back to TV in 2005, wrote once about a huge problem he had when moving on from writing soaps to writing drama. I’m paraphrasing but broadly what he said was: “In soaps, everybody says what they mean. In drama, they don’t even know what they mean.”

That’s a Damascus-level thought for me. I love and adore scriptwriting not because you’re telling stories using only what people say, you’re telling them only using what people do not.

Try it. Write me a scene with two characters and only dialogue, no settings, no description. One character wants something from the other – and for some reason, that you have to think of – he or she cannot tell that other person.

William

See William Gallagher’s scribbles – books, Doctor Who radio dramas and the rest – on Amazon.

Microsoft updates OneNote for iOS

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I’m an Evernote user so I have little experience of Microsoft’s equivalent but I did work with a guy last week who has the most impressive use of it I’ve seen. And he uses it on a Surface, so it took some impressing. If I weren’t so comfortably settled into Evernote with several gigabytes of data in it, I’d look at OneNote, especially as Microsoft seems to be updating for iOS pretty promptly these days.

Since I don’t use it, here’s someone who knows it better enough to tell you what’s new:

Microsoft has pushed out updates for its OneNote client on both iPhone and iPad, adding support for new features added in iOS 8 and a design that’s optimized for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Users can now password protect sections of documents directly from mobile devices (a feature that used to require a Windows PC). Those with an iPhone 5s or newer will also find that they can now unlock password-protected sections of documents using Touch ID. That feature isn’t mentioned in the iPad change log, so users on the iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 3 might need to wait for a future update to enable it.

Microsoft OneNote for iPhone and iPad updated with iOS 8 support, iPhone 6 design, and more –Mike Beasley, 9to5Mac (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Thirty productivity tips you might not have heard

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If I weren’t such a nice guy, I’d steal each one of these thirty and claim them as my own, once a day for the next month. And actually many of them are ones that I do so, you know, if they pop up again from time to time, it’s coincidence. But this collection of short tips is a smart read and it’s also got several tips that I did not know before and fancy using now.

Such as the very first two of the thirty:

1) Buy an hourglass.

Lots of us use timers to break up our tasks into manageable chunks. But how many times have you turned over your cell phone to panic about how little time you have yet? Invest in a couple of hourglasses that measure different times. You can see immediately how much time you have left, without having to calculate what you can get done.

2) Get a clock.

Did you know that the subtle sound of a ticking clock could make you more productive? The tick-tock gives your subconscious a sense of urgency so you work faster. If you don’t want a clock, there are plenty of timer apps that allow you to turn the tick-tock sound on.

30 Productivity Tips You Might Not Have Heard Before – Sasha Graffagna, SuperheroYou (20 August 2014)

I’ve got a ticking clock and it isn’t ticking so much for some reason, but I’ll look into that. I’ll also look into the hourglass, maybe as a Christmas present to myself, as asking Siri to set a timer on my iPhone for an hour is so passé. I’m looking at that Koch 11000 1-Hour Hourglass Renaissance, pictured above. I’m just looking.

Read the full piece.

Video: the most productive computer you can buy

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I think that’s a fair summary, if you rule out that it’s rather costly. And if it isn’t a fair summary, this is: the new iMac has the best display it is physically possible to purchase.

Two years ago I was havering over moving to an iMac and one thing that held me back was that a version with the so-called Retina display was coming. A Retina display, as defined by the iMac’s maker Apple, is one where someone with normal vision, sitting at a normal distance from the screen, can no longer distinguish individual pixels.

I reckon aging does the same job but, still, you see a Retina screen iPhone and you ain’t going back to a non-Retina one. Or at least I haven’t and won’t, so the iMac getting such a screen was a big deal. It didn’t happen then and I bought a 27in iMac that I suppose one must now call non-Retina. It is still the most beautiful display I’ve ever owned and that I get to work on this machine every day is pretty much a treat.

If I am more productive now than ever then I would put it down to OmniFocus and my iMac. That computer has let me get on with things more than ever before, and I’ve owned Macs since the 1990s.

I’m not going to own this one. I’m not. I’m not. I don’t want to see it. Keep it away. But The Verge has done a video review of it and I think convey everything very well. It’s like whenever you see an ad on TV for a new TV, they can go on all they like about the picture being better but you’re still looking at it on your old rubbish screen. There’s an element of that here but I think it’s really protecting me from a purchasing decision I do not need, I do not, I do not, I do not.

Oh! Here’s a fact for you. You know the new 4K TV sets with utterly where’s-my-jaw screens? The new iMac is 5K. Carry on.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…

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But apparently I might get more done:

When you’re all riled up, you tend to focus on only the source of your anger. You want to get to the core of the problem. In this case, your anger allows you to zero in on the most important task for the day. You want to eliminate the problem right away, so you don’t bother with multitasking.

Additionally, the adrenaline that rushes through your body allows you to become uninhibited. It produces confidence that allows you to do things that you normally wouldn’t do, but within reason.

So you see, anger is not a bad thing after all—if you know how to use it properly. That begs the question, “How exactly can you use anger to become more productive?”

Feeling Stuck? Make Your Anger Work for You – Cecille Doroja, Pick the Brain (15 October 2014)

Read the full piece.