Productivity

Productivity

Put the screen down and go to sleep

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You do this. I’ve seen how tired you are in the mornings so I know you do this. It’s pretty late at night, you’re walloped and you know you should go to bed. You know you want to. You also know that there is not one damn thing stopping you going. Yet you stay there.

You find something to read on your iPad, you check out something on your iPhone, maybe you use other devices and one doesn’t like to judge. But it’s bad and you should stop it and I don’t care that it’s hard or that you just want five more minutes:

Why it’s harmful: Anyone who’s missed out on sleep thanks to a deadline or bawling infant is familiar with the irritability, stress, and gloom that can set in the next day. If sleep deprivation and disturbances become chronic, they increase a person’s risk of developing depression or anxiety disorders.

What you can do: Prioritize sleep and practice healthy bedtime behaviors, such as limiting caffeine and alcohol in the hours before bed. It’s also important to curb your computer, tablet, and smartphone use late at night, Buse says; the blue light emitted by these devices suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin and can disrupt your circadian rhythm.

12 Ways We Sabotage Our Mental Health – Health.com

That quote is of the complete text to the 4th of the 12 Ways. I quote it so you don’t have to schlep through an irritating slideshow where every step is on a different page solely to build up the hit counts on the site. But actually, the other 11 are pretty good. If you have a minute, some patience and a steady hand, do take a quick glance through them on the full feature.

When you’ve got that new job, do this

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Last month, as you might have heard, I started a new job.

That’s Angela Ahrendts, previously world famous (in the retail and business world) for being the CEO of Burberry. I hadn’t even heard of Burberry. Now she’s world famous (in the computing world as well as retail and business) for being the new Senior Vice President of Apple Retail. If you don’t happen to know who runs what in Apple, I commend you on your excellent life choices. But this is an interesting position because it’s been done so extraordinarily well that it transformed Apple into the success it is – and it’s been done so badly that there were visible dents in that success.

Now Ahrendts is in charge and everything I read impresses me. But today what I read is nothing to do with Apple, it’s her writing on LinkedIn about what it is like taking a very big change in one’s employer or one’s career.

I am by no means an expert at these transitions, but I’ve always tried to be consistent in how I run, exit and begin in a new business. I thought I would share a few professional and personal insights which are helping me adapt to a new sector, culture and country. (Silicon Valley can feel like a country unto itself!)

…Also, trust your instincts and emotions. Let them guide you in every situation; they will not fail you. Never will your objectivity be as clear or your instincts sharper than in the first 30-90 days. Cherish this time and fight the urge to overthink. Real human dialogue and interaction where you can feel and be felt will be invaluable as your vision, enabled by your instincts, becomes clearer. In honor of the great American poet Maya Angelou, always remember, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I would argue this is even more important in the early days.

Starting Anew – Angela Ahrendts, LinkedIn (23 June 2014)

Her full piece isn’t a huge amount longer but it’s worth your time.

Searching job ads won’t cut it any more

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A decade ago, John Battelle stressed the importance of “search literacy.” What he meant was that people who were skilled at using Google to find information had an edge over those who had yet to acquire this aptitude. In the Information Age, if you couldn’t make sense of an increasingly information-rich world through effective search capabilities, you’d be culturally marginalized, just like a person who couldn’t read street signs.

Now, those who can conceptualize and understand networks – both online and off – have an edge in today’s fast-paced and hyper-competitive landscape, where the speed with which we can make informed decisions is critical. To wit, the subtitle of my forthcoming book is “Managing Talent in the Networked Age” — I think the networked age changes everything.

The Information Age to the Networked Age: Are You Network Literate? – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn (4 June 2014)

I could probably look up who in the world John Battelle is yet it would feel like giving in. This is a jargon-stuffed plug for a book yet it’s worth a skim because its central point is good. It is true that you don’t get work through job ads so much anymore. So many people apply for everything that it’s become a game instead of a strategy. And if all Hoffman’s article boils down to is “it’s who you know”, he has a point. Getting out there, making yourself known by doing something useful and meeting people along the way, it works.

And it’s a lot more fun meeting people than it is filling out online CVs that are only going to be read by software algorithms.

Via 99U

Want: Transporter drive

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I’m taking my time over this because I want to get a storage system that suits me best and that suits me enough that I can forget about it for years and years and years. Right now, I suspect that it’s going to involve a Transporter and I am so taken with this product range that I want you to know about them too.

Oh, does that not sound like a sales pitch? Seriously, I won’t get any money for you buying one – wait, hang on, I can change that just a teeny bit. If you bought a Transporter drive through these links to Amazon UK or Amazon US, I would be quids in. Or pennies, really. But pennies-in isn’t a phrase. And anyway, I think I’m more likely to directly profit from this if someone who really likes me sees this sometime nearer Christmas.

So.

Transporter by a firm called Connected Data (here’s the official site) is like having your own personal cloud. Just as an aside, isn’t that still a deeply strange kind of sentence? But it’s true. Where I currently use Backblaze to backup our Macs to their servers somewhere in the world and I currently use the hell out of Dropbox for getting me quick access to my files wherever I am, I could use a Transporter. It would work exactly the same. But instead of my documents being on Backblaze’s servers or on Dropbox’s servers, they’d be on mine.

And unlike Backblaze and Dropbox and all there rest, there wouldn’t be any monthly charges. Buy a Transporter and you’re done.

It’s not so much the lack of ongoing fees that I think is appealing, it’s the convenience and maybe the security of it all. Intellectually I do like that it’s got to be more secure having your own cloud than using everyone else’s but in practice I’m probably not that fussed. Since I do have our Macs backed up online all the time, the problem I really want to solve is that I have a lot of data. A lot. I’m writing to you from a 3Tb iMac and it is near-as-dammit full.

Computers slow down dramatically when the drive is full and I am seeing that even with this fairly new iMac. So the idea of having a Transporter in the loft or at my sister-in-law’s house and keeping all my films and music on there, that appeals. It appeals so much that I’m not sure why I haven’t already done it or at least tried out one Transporter.

I think you should try one. In the UK, you can buy a 1Tb Transporter today for £188.12 and in the States it’s $259.99. Spend that, plug it in somewhere, off you go to the races and back again.

I suspect my hesitation is that I would need a lot more than 1Tb to make this worthwhile. Connected Data sells a 2Tb version and it also sells a no-terabyte version: an empty Transporter shell into which you can add a drive of any capacity you can find, if it’ll fit. So the odds are that I could fit a 3Tb drive fairly easily. I’m just not sure that 3Tb is enough either.

Then the same firm does a device called a Transporter Sync which gives you all of this connected cloud lark but I believe does it to any drive you can connected to it by USB. I’m not very clear on the differences, but I’m pondering.

There. This started out sounding like a sales pitch and now it’s more of a sales plea: if you use one of these things, what do you think of it? And how useful is the 1Tb storage?

Zipping files doesn’t do what you think

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Yes, if you zip a file, you are compressing it. You are making it smaller for emailing to someone. So far, what you think is right.

But zipping does absolutely nothing – at least nothing useful – if what you’re sending is a JPEG image or an MP3 file. Because those are already compressed. If they could be compressed further, they would’ve been.

What you’re doing by zipping an image or a MP3 audio is making it tougher for the recipient to open. I just had a thing where I had to unpick why an audio file wouldn’t play on an iPhone: it was because it was sent zipped. All zipping did was make the audio unplayable until I’d unzipped it and resent.

So you are always better off sending JPEG images and MP3 files unzipped.

But.

There is one specific situation when you should zip anyway.

It’s when you’re sending many files to someone at once. Zipping produces one file and it does so regardless of how many things you’re trying to send. So, for instance, I just delivered 40 images to a client and did so by sending them one zip file containing the lot.

They get one file and it has everything.

Now, what I actually sent them was a Dropbox link to the zip file, I didn’t try to send 100Mb of zip to them over email. But the zipping part was the same.

So.

Zip to compress files like word processor documents and zip to gather up lots of files into one.

But don’t zip a JPEG or an MP3 because that’s just a chore.

Getting Things Done – book (half) recommendation

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It’s one of the strangest books I’ve ever read yet I can see, I can clearly see, how so many of the things I do to stay productive either came from this book or were confirmed for me, were oddly validated.

Getting Things Done (UK edition, US edition) is a self-help book by David Allen. The strange things first: it was written in 2001 and you will be amazed how long ago that seems. (Example: Allen talks a lot about how, for instance, you obviously can’t access the internet unless you’re in your office. It’s practically Victorian.) Also, it feels as if Allen is focusing on office workers and people who may do fantastic things but aren’t the kind of messy-minded creatives that writers are.

So I remember reading this and rather translating it on the fly. The very last thing he says is that you should wait three months and then re-read the book. He promises it will seem like a completely different thing. I did that. It did. The second time through, it was rubbish.

But the ideas. Next Action comes from David Allen: the idea that you can break down a mountain of a job by listing just what the one very next thing you can or you have to do is.

OmniFocus works with this Getting Things Done system – the cool kids call it GTD and it actually is a cult – though you don’t have to use Allen’s techniques to get a lot out of that software. David Allen doesn’t: I believe he prefers a paper-based system. Strange how I’m not surprised.

But if I can’t recommending it entirely, I do recommend it fairly wholeheartedly. How about this? Go to Amazon UK or Amazon US and use the Look Inside feature to read a few pages and see what you think.

There is also an official site for David Allen that you might like.

Don’t make life harder than it is

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You do this. You know you do. So do I:

Another driver cut you off. Your friend never texted you back. Your co-worker went to lunch without you. Everyone can find a reason to be offended on a steady basis. So what caused you to be offended? You assigned bad intent to these otherwise innocuous actions. You took it as a personal affront, a slap in the face.

Happy people do not do this. They don’t take things personally. They don’t ascribe intent to the unintentional actions of others.

10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be – Tim Hoch, Thought Catalog (17 June 2014)

That’s “You ascribe intent”, otherwise called number 1 in a series of 10. Some of the other 9 are pretty familiar too.

It’s all ultimately a plug for a book I haven’t read called The Truth About Everything (UK edition, US edition) but it’s a good plug. The ten points are well made and being aware of them, recognising them in yourself, isn’t a bad thing at all. Do have a read of the ten.

Shudder. Organise yourself by paper envelopes

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I need the 21st century. Couldn’t cope without technology. But I accept your mileage may vary so if you have a lot of paper or you really want to do things with paper, I’m not judging you. I don’t comment, I merely report:

I was reminded of this earlier when reminiscing about my old job and the Noguchi filing system. It was devised by Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio, and for about a year I used it extensively.

Instead of a filing cabinet or set of drawers, you’ll need an open shelf and several 9″ x 12″ (or larger) envelopes. Using scissors, cut the flap off the top of the envelope, as shown above. You cut the top off to make it super easy to get at the envelope’s contents. Next, write the date and title along the side of the envelope. Again, see the image at above for a reference. Make one envelope per project and place the envelopes next to each other on the shelf, with the date and title side facing outward.

In Practice

Don’t attempt to organize, classify, or otherwise sort the envelopes. It will be tempting to do so, but the beauty here is that the system takes care of organizing for you. As you take a folder off the shelf to use it, return it to the far left.

The Noguchi filing system – David Caolo (3 June 2014)

I can’t look. Is it over? Caolo’s full feature on Unclutterer details the idea complete with a diagram.

Via Lifehacker

Microsoft giveth

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From next month, users of Microsoft’s Dropbox-like OneDrive will get 15Gb free instead of the current 7Gb. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, that goes up to an is-this-a-misprint size of 1Tb.

Microsoft:

Our data tells us that 3 out of 4 people have less than 15 GB of files stored on their PC. Factoring in what they may also have stored on other devices, we believe providing 15 GB for free right out of the gate – with no hoops to jump through – will make it much easier for people to have their documents, videos, and photos available in one place.

Massive increase to OneDrive storage plans – Omar Shahine, OneDrive blog (23 June 2014)

Seriously? I think the 15Gb free space is tremendous but why claim 75% of all computer users have no more taken up than that? I don’t mean to be rude questioning “our data” but it is unsubstantiated. And this is Microsoft, the company whose user testing of Microsoft Word seemingly failed to include any tester trying to open an existing document or create a new one. Hmm. Everything makes sense now.

So does Microsoft making this generous deal and doing so now. OneDrive is Microsoft’s version of Dropbox and right from the start it has offered more space than that service. But now Apple is shuffling its iCloud service so that instead of only an invisible repository for documents, it’s going to be an actual space you can reach and add files to.

It’s not like I think Microsoft should say “hey, we’ve got this one rival we’re trying to unseat, right, and now there’s bleedin’ Apple coming along AGAIN, we’re going to shove some free space at you”. But the 15Gb is sufficiently generous that I think it could’ve just said that and not tried to claim that it can hold all the documents and images and music of all but 25% of computer users.

I don’t have a Microsoft OneDrive account and I do have a Dropbox one. To be honest, I do relish how useful Dropbox is and it would take work to switch away. You could and probably should have Dropbox and OneDrive, that would make a lot of sense for storing documents in places you could reach wherever you are.

But I have a low faff level. I already think it’s bad enough with iCloud that I have to think first, which application did I write that document in? And how I do sometimes have to stop to ponder, did I do that in Pages and store it in iCloud or did I do it in Evernote? I’m also an OmniOutliner user which comes with the Omni Group’s brilliantly-named OmniPresence.

Somehow without intending to, I’ve become fractured over several cloud services. I will get Apple’s iCloud Drive, as it’s going to be called, because it’ll just be here on my Macs and iOS. Maybe I can fold some things into that.

But isn’t the cloud supposed to make all this stuff transparently easy? If you’re in or you like the Microsoft environment, maybe this new OneDrive offer does.

Official OneDrive site