Productivity

Productivity

Have a coffee and tell me all about it

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Caffeine may give you the shakes but at least if it’s keeping you up at night, it’s because of its chemistry and not because you sleepily agreed to some really morally questionable ideas at the office today.

“When you’re sleep deprived at work, it’s much easier to simply go along with unethical suggestions from your boss because resistance takes effort and you’re already worn down,” said David Welsh, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Washington. “However, we found that caffeine can give sleep-deprived individuals the extra energy needed to resist unethical behavior.”

“Our research shows that sleep deprivation contributes to unethical behavior at work by making you more susceptible to social influences, such as a boss who tells you to do something deceptive or unethical,” said Michael Christian, an organizational behavior professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. “Caffeine can help you resist by strengthening your self-control and willpower when you’re exhausted.”

Coffee: Cup o’ ethics – UNC Kenan-Flagler News (2 April 2014)

Nod to Lifehacker for spotting this and making a more readable account than the official paper.

Get paid to quit your job

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I’ve worked with people for whom I would’ve chipped in a lot of money if it meant they’d leave. But it’s becoming a thing. If you can have a thing where only two firms do it.

Riot Games, the maker of the hugely popular PC game “League of Legends,” pays unhappy employees up to $25,000 to quit their jobs — even if they just joined the company. The company does this because it doesn’t want to keep staffers who are struggling or who aren’t a good fit with the company culture.
“Rather than allow mismatches to fester, we want to resolve them quickly. This is good for the company, and good for the professional. … we’ll learn from this and make better hiring decisions as a result,” the company said in a blog post announcing the program.

This Company Pays Employees $25,000 To Quit — No Strings Attached — Even If They Were Just Hired – Jim Edwards, Business Insider (20 June 2014)

I’ve not heard of Riot Games or of League of Legends but I have heard of a little startup company called Amazon:

The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.

Amazon Pays Its Staff Up To $5,000 If They Quit — No Strings Attached – Jim Edwards (10 April 2014)

You can see how either system might be abused but you can also see that you wouldn’t want to be offered the get-out money from Riot. Maybe if you qualified for the full $25,000 you might think about it some more, but even in computing, it doesn’t look great to have a two-month job on your CV and the explanation that they paid you to go away and never come back.

Someone else’s OmniFocus 2 for Mac review

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There is definitely an irony to how I keep not getting around to writing a review of OmniFocus, the software that keeps me on track with everything I have or want to do. I think it’s because the software is so important to me that I want to do it justice. Anyway, here’s a review from someone who wasn’t an existing user of the earlier version, isn’t that fussed about any To Do managers, and says up front that they came to OmniFocus as a skeptic.

Spoiler alert: they like it now.

I don’t agree with how it argues the iPhone version is too expensive, though, and they are mistaken about the iPad one:

This brings us to our one main criticism, though: Omni Group have chosen to make the iPhone (and forthcoming iPad) version of Omnifocus equal to the Mac version in virtually all respects, thus allowing mobile-centric users to buy and use just the mobile version alone if they choose. While we applaud this, it also means that Mac users who have paid $40 for the regular desktop version ($80 for the Pro version) will have to pay an additional $20 for the iPhone version, essentially just for syncing and quick-entry or editing in the case of some users. The company may want to consider also creating a more lightweight free or low-cost “companion version” for those who primarily use the Mac version and just want some basic on-the-go functions.

Hands on: Omnifocus 2 for Mac – MacNN (22 June 2014)

The iPad mistake first: there already is one and has been for some time. Their confusion is that it is on its first version and a second is currently being developed. Last September we got OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, now we have OmniFocus 2 for Mac, at some point soon we’ll have OmniFocus 2 for iPad.

It’s an interesting little dilemma for me as someone who recommends this software a lot. Rewind a beat to before the 2 versions began coming out: it was very easy to say you should buy the iPad edition. That was easily the best with a mix of OmniFocus’s powerful features and a particularly easy design. OmniFocus for iPhone was fine but you would struggle to use it without one of the other versions in your life. And OmniFocus 1 for Mac was this bionic behemoth that had more power than you’d need to crack a concrete slab but was extremely hard to use.

Now OmniFocus 2 for Mac is the easiest to use and, I think, the best version. I like the iPad one but it’s weird how old it seems compared to the new design. And where I used to always turn to my iPad when I was doing a lot of OmniFocus work like the recommended regular reviews, now I tend to save that up until I’m at my Mac.

Nonetheless, you can do everything most users would use most often usefully on the iPad version. If it weren’t that we know for certain that – and don’t know at all when – there will be an OmniFocus 2 for iPad, I would say the iPad is still the one to get when you can only get one. It’s portable, powerful and easy to use. OmniFocus 2 for iPhone is much improved on its previous version – I liked the previous version a lot, I just like this one more – but I still believe the iPhone version needs one of the others.

MacNN thinks this more strongly than I do. Its argument is that you shouldn’t have to pay so much for an iPhone OmniFocus app if you’re only going to use it to add the odd task in during the day. I’d say that’s fair enough, but there are other ways to add tasks. If you don’t have OmniFocus for iPhone, just email a task into OmniFocus. I do this a lot wherever I am because so much of my work comes through email. It’s just tap, forward, send, gone into my To Do list.

So I don’t agree that one has to use OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. But I suspect you will. I’m not certain now how I got into this but I’m pretty sure I bought the iPhone one first and tried to last with that for a while, tried to get used to it and to test it out. But caved within a day or two and bought the iPad one. Then, inexorably, I bought the Mac one.

That was all version 1 of the software and if you’re wondering, yes, I did. I bought version 2. Both OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, on the day it was released, and OmniFocus 2 for Mac, on the day it was released. Individually they are more expensive than many To Do applications and jointly they are a punch to the bank account – but only if they aren’t right for you. If they are, they are worth the cost and then some.

Wait, this is turning into my own review. I should really get on that.

Boredom is vital

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Seriously, the last time I was bored was in 1979. But I should take the time to get bored again, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

“Boredom … protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.”

Legendary Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Why the Capacity for Boredom Is Essential for a Full Life – Maria Popova, Brainpickings (19 June 2014)

Brainpickings writer Popova expands on this in her full feature:

When was the last time you were bored — truly bored — and didn’t instantly spring to fill your psychic emptiness by checking Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? The last time you stood in line at the store or the boarding gate or the theater and didn’t reach for your smartphone seeking deliverance from the dreary prospect of forced idleness? A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard argued that this impulse to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our greatest source of unhappiness. A century later, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary about the creative purpose of boredom. And yet ours is a culture that equates boredom with the opposite of creativity and goes to great lengths to offer us escape routes.

Learn more from Popova and follow her links through to Phillips’ book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (UK Edition, US Edition).

No Eureka moments

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Remember how Wuthering Heights has this weird structure where it’s really a story told to someone who tells it to someone who tells us? (I may have lost track there.) Here’s a story where I’m telling you something Time magazine says author Keith Sawyer recounts the story of researcher Vera John-Steiner who talked to creative geniuses.

She asked ’em “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“ and she expected some bits about eurekas. Instead:

Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.

Strokes of Genius: Here’s How the Most Creative People Get Their Ideas – Eric Barker, Time (21 June 2014)
http://time.com/2907776/strokes-of-genius-heres-how-the-most-creative-people-get-their-ideas/

Guy Kawasaki on innovation

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He’s an interesting guy. Kawasaki was originally best known for being an Apple Evangelist – official. That was his job title. He’s written a book called The Macintosh Way that’s still pretty good and another one I’ve forgotten that isn’t so great. But I like this talk. Kawasaki’s got this line that we should strive to change the world and there are plenty of people who say that. In fact, hang on…

Go change the world.

There you are, I’m another one. But Kawasaki does it alongside a pragmatism. Specifically this: he argues that changing the world is indeed a ideal goal but since we have to eat to survive, people who really do change the world tend to make some money.

He’s interesting, he’s funny, this is a TEDx talk, do take a look:

Amazon Fire Phone

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My considered opinion after Amazon finally unveiled its own smartphone is that I like the name.

Beyond that I do have a curiosity about exactly how easy this phone will make it for people to spend more money at Amazon. I am immune to this, I am above such trivialities as UNCONTROLLABLE BOOK BUYING ON IMPULSE, or at least I will be via this phone because I won’t get it.

I don’t know that I’ll buy the forthcoming iPhone 6 either – though as I’m now out of contract, I’ll certainly look at it – but there’s no way I’m chucking this for an Amazon Shopping Trollery. I mean, Amazon Fire.

But BBC News has done an interesting roundup of reactions across the web from people who know more than I do.

Watch Susan Kare talk about icon design

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Only this weekend, I wrote about the ⌘ symbol and that inevitably led to mentioning Susan Kare. And now she’s here on video, talking about the icons she designed for Apple and many more.

Susan Kare, Iconographer (EG8) from EG Conference on Vimeo.

Full disclosure. I swear I’m alert to Susan Kare in the news because I had a drama character I loved named Susan Hare. Complete coincidence, but.

Eating the dog food

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So I’m after telling you to work more, that you can work more. That you can create more time to write. I may rarely have been so annoying in my life. But, just because this has been an unusual day, I want to show you that I do this too.

You’re reading the fifth posting today on The Blank Screen and all five were written on buses or while waiting for buses. I can do this in part because I am in Birmingham which has a good transport system. (Didn’t stop me getting lost and late, but.)

And I can do it because I have my iPhone with me.

One of today’s stories, Coffee With(out) Me was borne of my own experience and an idea I had for a particular friend who has that problem. Once I knew I wanted you to have this solution too, it was a matter of writing it up.

I could’ve written in the WordPress iPhone app and without exception every one of the stories ended up there for posting. But I just more enjoy writing in the app Drafts. So I did. Drafts is comfortable and somehow relaxing so I write in that, then maybe tap a button.

If I tap a button, it is to squirt the text to somewhere specific like OmniFocus. But I just as often copy and paste the lot over into WordPress.

Once it gets there, I may edit but I really just set the tags and search keywords for when I might want to find a story again. Otherwise, it’s just copy and paste into WordPress, then, wallop, published.

Once published, the stories here get automatically promoted in various places but if I really like a piece, I’ll go promote it with love too.

That writing step, that publishing and that promotion are the same for every piece. The rest of today’s went through exactly that going from me to you. But they also had steps and apps before then

I read a lot of news on RSS through the app Reeder 2. I search around a lot as I think of areas of interest and that’s all done through Safari. Any time I find or I think of something that might be useful, it goes into Evernote. I have a notebook (actually a shared entire account) that I can email in to. That applies as much to the odd stray thought that I email in via Drafts as it does to whole websites in Safari or forwarding actual emails I receive.

I use Safari again when getting a link to a previous story of mine. I use Apple’s iTunes Link Maker website to get me links for apps that work internationally. One irritation is that Apple only shows you the price of an app before you buy it. If I buy a pile to test before recommending one to you, I can’t see its price. So I use the website Appshopper.com which tracks these things.

And – full, whispered disclosure – I use Amazon Associates for links to books or DVDs. If you buy those or take a look and then buy something else, some pennies come my way. I reckon it’s better that I get them than Amazon does, but.

To get iTunes or Associates links like that, you have to log in to your account on those services and I do that repeatedly via 1Password.

So that’s, what? At today’s prices, I’m using:

Drafts: £2.49, $3.99
Evernote: free to try up to a generous limit
1Password (£12.99, $17.99 universal version)
WordPress for iOS: free
Reeder 2: (£2.99, $4.99)
Safari: free and preinstalled on iOS

As ever with these things, if you were to set out doing it today perhaps you wouldn’t rush to buy three apps and use them alongside three others. Put like that, it does sound like overkill.

But these things grow. And then when you are on buses all day, you’re glad they did. Except for finding all the links, that’s five-biscuit job.

I should also say that my iPhone battery would’ve died from all this I’d it weren’t that I have a gorgeous Mophie Juice Pack recharger plugged into it right now. I bought mine at the Apple Store in Grand Central station but I reckon you can get a cheaper deal here in the UK or there in the States.

Coffee with[out] me

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Right. Your problem is that you don’t get enough time to write. And when you do, when you could devote a chunk of time to it, you either feel obligated to do something else – or you feel tempted.

So.

Put this in your diary. This coming Sunday 22 June, from noon to 2pm, you’re meeting me. Write it down: 12-2, coffee with William.

For this to work, the coffee must be at your place and I must not come. If you schedule this, I promise I won’t turn up.

So you might as well write for the two hours.

Deal?