Productivity

Productivity

Don’t spend your time, produce it

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I did this thing today. Give me a pixel's worth of an excuse and I'll bend your ear off about it, but the important thing is that it was an hour and a half at the Birmingham Rep. Ninety minutes. And I have no idea how many hours it took me to produce it, but I've been talking about it since December so the odds are that I have spent a wee bit more than 90 minutes on the job.

But all the time I spent producing it is why it was produced. Is why it happened. And, fortunately, why it went well. You can't put months into every ninety minute slot in your day, but an hour that works well for you needs more than sixty minutes.

Same thing, different example. I was just asked how long a particular script had taken me to write and the honest answer is that there are two honest answers. I can truthfully tell you that it took me an hour. And I can truthfully tell you that it took me three weeks.

The lesson I'm taking away from myself and what I've ended up doing is that in both cases, I got the time ready in advance. Planned what I wanted in both cases. I got the venue and the guests for the Rep, I got a lot of contributing material for the script. The only real difference is that then when it came down to the time that this had to happen, I was alone with the script and had to get it done. And with the Rep thing, I was far from alone and all I had to do then was watch as really interesting people did their thing for me and the rest of the audience.

I have a proposal to write on Monday. When I'm done talking with you, I'm going to make sure I've got everything I need ready for it. I'm going to produce the hour it'll take me to do the work. I'm going to produce the work.

Six months with iTunes Radio

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It’s still not available in the UK but it’s coming and what we’ll get here is a tried-and-tested version. I’ve been listening here in the UK since about December – I have both US and UK iTunes accounts so I can legally tune in – and the service has developed even in that short time.

Primarily, it’s added more ads.

You know that it’s an ad-supported service. Every few tracks, you get an ad. Interestingly, they’re usually video ads so while I often have iTunes way in the background behind a lot of other documents, there’ll be a corner visible and suddenly it’ll start moving. Very distracting.

But it’s become more distracting because at first there were so few ads that you noticed how few there were. Now you notice how many – and at times you notice how often the same ones are played. For a while there I could tell you every line of a Macy’s advert.

We can expect that the same thing will happen in the UK: it feels less that Apple has a plan for how many ads it will ramp up, more that it depends how many it gets. A few firms will try it out at first and then it’ll take off it won’t.

But now it also looks as if there will be more programmes, more actual non-music programmes. Right now it has none whatsoever. But US sources – you think that means rumour sites and it does, but – say that Apple is going to stream the World Cup over iTunes Radio.

Exit William.

I do recommend iTunes Radio but it depends on your starting choice. The way it works is that you type in the name of a song, an artist, a genre or perhaps a decade and you get a station. That station might start with the particular song, it might start with that particular artist, or it might not.

After very, very many different stations, I plucked “4 Non Blondes” out of the air because I like What’s Up. And it’s been a great find: I’m sure I must’ve heard What’s Up on it some time but generally I love everything it’s played me as well.

Sometimes I’m iTunes Radioed out and in principle I like the idea of spoken-word shows but I keep coming back. I just want to see what happens when Apple absorbed its new purchase, the Beats subscription service.

Read more about iTunes Radio on Apple’s site

Reeder for Mac now available

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This week’s updates to the iOS versions of Reeder have been followed by the first full release of Reeder 2 for Mac. It’s now out of beta and available to buy from the Mac App Store for £2.99 UK, $4.99 US.

It’s an RSS reader: it brings you all the news from any number of websites who have these RSS feeds and that you chuck into Reeder. There are many such services and if they’ve stuck around for any length of time at all, they each have their fans. I’m sufficiently a fan of Reeder, though, that when it was pulled from the App Store last year because Google changes stopped it working, I stopped reading RSS.

Only on my Mac. I couldn’t stop reading it on iOS and I’m not sure now what the chain of events was. I think Reeder lasted longer on iOS but anyway, the iPhone one was updated last September and I so very clearly remember the delight at that coming out while I was on holiday. Learnt about it, bought it, had a really good time getting reacquainted with an old friend in a new design.

Similarly, the iPad version is a pretty constant friend.

But I did miss reading news on my Mac, most especially on those days when I’m here for twelve or fifteen hours. Maybe I should go take screen breaks, but I just used to really enjoy spending a few moments downtime catching up with news. Today, after so very many months without Reeder being available on the Mac, it is again and I’m enjoying it again.

Here’s me enjoying it.

Screen Shot 2014-05-29 at 21.06.48

I’m not going to claim that Reeder is the very best RSS software, I am just going to say that it is the very best for me. And along with OmniFocus, Evernote and Mail, it’s got to be on my machine for it to feel like my machine.

 

Tweet in your sleep

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This came up at a couple of recent The Blank Screen workshops: how to send tweets or Facebook messages when you’re not around. Both times it came up, it was evil people who’d just learnt I start work at 5am and they wanted to send me a tweet to check. But weren’t so keen or so evil that they wanted to be up at that time.

If you have nicer reasons to do it, try one of these two possibilities:

HootSuite
Free for personal use hootsuite.com
Log in once to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and/or Foursquare and write a message for it to send to any or all of them whenever you tell it to.

Buffer
A free iOS app and a free website – buffer.com – doesn’t have Foursquare, so far as I can tell, but does the others easily and reliably.

I use Buffer for my personal Self Distract blogs that I write and publish on Friday mornings. The first tweet is live but then I always intend to send another one around lunchtime. And then that evening. And a last one the following Monday. Buffer lets me write the lot one after another and know that it is being sent for me at the time I say.

I do this because I regularly forget to send the tweets live. Now I regularly forget that they are going to be sent live and I suddenly get a unexpected notifications of retweets from the various tweets Buffer has sent for me.

Add numbers to your phone as soon as you get them

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I’m not great at this but I try. If you give me your phone number or I’ve found you on some research thing, I will add you to my Contacts list. I don’t like the word Contacts, I’m not suddenly thinking of you as a contact instead of a human being. But I am adding and I will add you to my Contacts app. Whatever machine I’m near at the time – iPhone, iPad or Mac – I will try to enter your number right after we’ve spoken.

Given how easy it is to get photographs of people now too, I will often drag a photo to your contacts page too. That usually happens if I’m on my Mac and you’re not obscure. Or have the same name as someone who turns up a lot on Google. If all of this is true, one drag and you’re in my book.

Which is why today I got a call from a charmingly modest woman who wondered if I remembered her – and of course I did. She rang on my mobile, there was her name in big letters and there was her photo from her website. I hope that I would’ve remembered anyway but I’m suffering under a cold not terribly with it today, so this was a real boon.

All because when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I put her name and photo into my contacts app. Right away.

Free OmniFocus tutorial video from Screencasts Online

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I’m working on my own review for the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac – quick prom ahead, I’ve found two and a half things I don’t like about it and around eleventy-billion I do – but others are way ahead of me. And one, Screencasts Online, isn’t reviewing the To Do software per se, it’s just showing us how to use it.

Screencasts Online is usually a subscription service and joining it gets you an enormous and growing number of very good video tutorials. If there’s some software you’re using or you’re just considering, join Screencasts Online and learn all about it very quickly. Very easily and very thoroughly.

Just sometimes, though, the service will make one video free. Yes, I agree, it’s an advertising promotion but they do it with integrity: the last one they did was 1Password and it was made free because of the Heartbleed servility problem. The software 1Password is particularly good at security so their releasing the video free felt to me like a service to the community. Now they’ve done this one about OmniFocus 2 for Mac and I think it’s practically a kindness: showing us how it works and what we can do with it is better than a straight review.

Get more from Screencasts Online and, now you’ve seen it in action, get OmniFocus 2 for Mac.

Free OmniFocus iBook

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Maybe it's because I used to write manuals for a living – you cannot conceive how long ago that was – but I do like a good manual. This is a good one: if you are havering over buying the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac, take a look at the free manual.

OmniFocus is the personal task management tool that helps you keep track of all the goals, plans, errands, and aspirations that come up in your life. Whether the task at hand is something small, such as setting a reminder to swing by the bike shop after work, or the tasks are part of a bigger goal, such as making plans for that long overdue vacation, OmniFocus helps you keep track of everything you need to do throughout your day.

Available on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone, OmniFocus is packed full of tools to help you prioritize steps within complex projects or simply jot a quick to-do list for a weekly meeting. OmniFocus works great as a standalone productivity aid or in conjunction with whatever time- and task-management scheme suits your personal style.

Excerpt From: The Omni Group. OmniFocus 2 for Mac User Manual

By the way, that last sentence is a coded reference to GTD, Getting Things Done (UK editions, US editions). OmniFocus works superbly with GTD but has no official connection with that system by David Allen.

More importantly, this smartly, clearly written manual is on iBooks and joins a growing set of free books from the Omni Group.

It’s about time

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If you possibly can, get some work in radio. What you learn – it doesn’t teach you this yet you inescapably accrue the knowledge and the experience and the feeling – will change how you approach time.

I recently spent time at a BBC radio station and all this came back to me. One of my uttermost favourite things in the world is how radio splits time in your head. Part of you is seeing the minutes of a show roar by so fast yet part of you is also crunched up in panic over how you will fill the next twenty seconds.

You cannot have dead air. I’m not sure if this is still the case but at one point if you were silent for long enough on a radio station, the transmitters switched off. And it takes a long time to get them back on.

Whatever the technical issues, though, you cannot have dead air. Think of all the times television tries to cover up a swearword by dipping the sound. Usually the bleep, sometimes they dip the sound to silent for a second. And when they do, the entire room notices and reacts.

The driving need to keep the show going and to fill the gaps that are coming up ahead of you like Gromit adding train tracks as he goes, it is beyond overwhelming, it is inside you. It is you. I’m sure it’s the same in television and actually it was in my first TV job that I learnt the average speaking rate is three words per second. (In those days video machines needed time to get up to speed so you’d make a mark on the script so many words, therefore so many seconds, before the vision mixer needed to cut to it.)

But I got it from radio so radio is special to me. And alongside that parallel track of slow and fast time, you also get the shape of time.

I do this now in workshops. I think of things like the top and bottom of the hour. I know this is a hard item – hard as in inflexible, it’s a certain length like a video package – and that I need a couple of soft items – live interviews or discussions that you can just end when you need.

What’s more, seeing time this way helps you with everything: you look for the thing you can do now rather than have dead air. You look for the shape of the hour and of the day. Time runs away from us, time catches up with us, but it is our chief resource and we benefit from using it more.

Seriously, it’s the small moves that work

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Seven weeks ago I decided I wanted to try creating an email newsletter for The Blank Screen. Six weeks ago, the first one went out to about ten people. Today the sixth went out to forty.

I’m not saying anything about the quality of the work – though that people are adding themselves to the newsletter is enormously gratifying – but I am saying that it was an idea that became a thing.

It’s now a normal thing. I knew this morning that my day would begin with writing a Self Distract blog as ever, then that I would do the newsletter. Then I’d be off writing an article for someone else and a script for someone else, but the newsletter is a regular, locked-in part of my week now.

There was a moment when I was first bringing The Blank Screen book to the web as this news site that I thought about an email newsletter. But I thought it would be a lot to take on atop everything else. Now it’s just here and it’s normal, it’s what I do.

It’s fun and it’s hard and to make it worthwhile anyone reading it takes planning and writing effort but I know I will do it every week. I suppose it takes discipline but it doesn’t seem that way now I’ve started and it’s running. It feels more like momentum.

I think creating new things is often like an engine: it takes a huge amount of energy to start – it literally takes an explosion – but then once it’s running, it keeps on going very easily.

I thought about this today just because I mentioned to someone that this morning’s newsletter was the sixth and I stopped mid-syllable. It can’t be six weeks, can it? Six editions? Already?

The thing I’m taking away from this is that you can do new things and you can enjoy them, you just have to start.