Much more efficient in 1965

Posted by William Gallagher

Can’t resist one more British Pathé film – in part because this Business Efficiency Exhibition was in 1965, the year I was born. And partly because some of the whizzy new equipment looks a bit Professor Branestawm-like to me. But mostly because it tells me things are relative. Success and failure are relative.

You’ll hear the (still. terribly. formal. but. a. bit. more. chipper!) presenter say that the Post Office has to cope with 30 million letters per day. Right now we imagine the Royal Mail is dying – or at least I have imagined it since I’m email-obsessed – but the latest figures available show it’s carting around 46 million letters per day.

(‘Latest’ means 2010. You’d think there would be far more recent data given the recent sell-off of Royal Mail shares but seemingly, not so much. Read Letters Delivered 1920-2010, a PDF from the Postal Heritage website’s statistics page. I did not know there was such a thing until I wanted to tell you. Note that the PDF lists annual figures, not daily. British Pathé or its source clearly just took the annual figure for 1965 and divided by 365 because if you do that, you get a total of 30,684,931.51 letters per day. The 2010 equivalent is 45,613,698.63.)

We now return to your regularly-scheduled video from the Business Efficiency Exhibition 1965:

Efficiency is Their Business

It should be a verb – defuse your enemies by Ben Franklining them

Posted by William Gallagher

The trouble is, that looks like frank lining. Like you’re really serious about the inset seam on your jacket.

But Ben Franklin, as in this fella, had enemies and he defused them. Maybe not all, but certainly his greatest. There was this one guy and…

Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it without “paying any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s reputation as a book collector and library founder gave him a standing as a man of discerning literary tastes, so Franklin sent a letter to the hater asking if he could borrow a specific selection from his library, one that was a “very scarce and curious book.” The rival, flattered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank-you note. Mission accomplished. The next time the legislature met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in person for the first time. Franklin said the man “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”

The Benjamin Franklin Effect – BrainPickings.org

That quote is from David McRaney’s book You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself. Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.org article is, typically for that site, partly a review of the book but partly an examination of topics it raises. There’s a great deal more in the article and, natch, even more in the book. Here’s the article and here’s the UK edition of the book, here’s the US edition.

Going too far – Mac Desks website

Posted by William Gallagher

It is far too far. You can like Macs without going within a pixel of how far this site goes. But you’re going to look, aren’t you? There is a now a website that just features photographs of peoples’ desks with Macs on them. It’s – wait, where did you go?

I was going to show you an example! Fine. Run off to MacDesks.com, or run away to more sensible people than me. You’ll just never find out that I have mocked and scoffed Mac Desks – and also subscribed to it through RSS.

Here’s that example, since you weren’t asking, noooo:

Time and emotion

Posted by William Gallagher

I am behind on my work this week and it is officially because I had various meetings away from my office – but I think it’s more because I’ve worried about how far behind I am.

I knew Monday would be a write-off; I had things to do all day and all evening in London, forget getting much else done, much else written. Tuesday just had two chats but one was in Birmingham city centre so there’s travel time too. And today I went to a hospital with my wife Angela Gallagher where she was at very long last signed off for the end of her treatment for breast cancer.

Today I don’t care that I failed to get enough done. Not today. Today is fine, today is mighty fine.

But now we’re back and it’s around 6pm, far too late to make any calls for the day, I am slipping back into reviewing what I should’ve done instead of what I have done. Let me take that hospital appointment as a clue to how I should be looking at everything, at how I think we all should. There is no work that would’ve kept me from that appointment. Bollocks to everything else.

In a less dramatic, less bollocks, more I would reschedule if necessary kind of way, yesterday’s two chats were terribly entertaining and fun as well as getting things done. I enjoyed the nattering, I enjoyed the company. So what if I have to write this evening to make up for it?

And so what if I lost Monday?

‘Course, there are limits. You may not see me tomorrow because my head has got to be down, my fingers have to got be typing a lot. I mean, a lot.

But every once in a while, William, lighten up. Productivity is about the quality of work you do, not the quantity.

I’m having this – link Evernote to OmniFocus

Posted by William Gallagher

If you don’t already use Evernote then, fine, that’s your choice and maybe at some point you could check it out on the official site. It might be great for you.

If you don’t already use OmniFocus, proceed directly to The Omni Group and buy it now. It might be that you have to buy an iPad or an iPhone or Mac but it will be great for you.

But if you’re one of the many of us who use both – actually, use isn’t a strong enough word. Let me try again. But if you’re one of the many of us who live in both, then you want this:

Let’s talk about two popular programs: Evernote and Omnifocus. Omnifocus excels at managing tasks but it is weak in storing lots of information. Evernote is weak as a task manager but excels at storing lots of information. If you use them together, they should solve all your productivity problems… right? Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. You have two separate systems that do not automatically work together. It is up to you to figure out how to do that and this is usually causes problems for some.

For example, if you store something in Evernote, how do you make sure you will revisit that information at some point in time? The obvious answer would be during your weekly Omnifocus review. However, that means you need to create a task in Omnifocus to remind yourself to review that note in Evernote. This is where the hiccup is – that extra step that people tend to forget. Fortunately, we have a script that will automatically transfer notes to your Omnifocus inbox. You will never ever forget information in Evernote again.

How to Automatically Transfer Evernote Notes to OmniFocus – Asian Efficiency

It takes some setting up and the full article is very detailed but I’m off to use it now.

Go ahead, dabble

Posted by William Gallagher

Sure, you should be doing that thing you do. And sure, it's hard to take time away from it. But do. Take time. Spend it on something else, spend it on something unrelated to anything you know or already work at. In fact, go ahead and dabble:

Dabbling is cross-training for the brain. Pursuing interests in a variety of subjects stretches the mind and pushes the imagination, causing us to be more creative. Dabbling is simply a way of gathering new information and experimenting with new ways of doing something. It causes you to think differently about everything else that you do, a process which can lead to incredible innovation. “The best way to discover something is to take an existing concept in one discipline and apply it to another,” says Stibel. Hopmann says Dabble fields lots of fan mail from people who have felt inspired after taking their courses, showing inspiration can come from the most unexpected places – even a glassblowing class

Why Dabbling can Make you a Better Entrepreneur – Entrepreneur magazine 27 February 2014

Read the whole article for more of an explanation of why it works plus what you can do to make the most of it.

Hat tip to Lifehacker.com for finding this.

Recommendation – Mac Power Users podcast

Posted by William Gallagher

This is just a general recommendation for the whole series. Around a year ago, I was looking into whether it was worth my buying a Mac application called Hazel and my research led me to an edition of Mac Power Users. I remember listening to that on my way somewhere and learning that it was episode 79. They're now, today, on episode 187.

I'm sure I haven't listened to all of them but without doubt I've heard more than ninety of them.

Katie Floyd and David Sparks present this weekly show about Macs, iPads, iPhones and suchforth. Typically they'll take a topic – today it's a rather general one on word processing but it can concentrate on something more specific like Hazel or Evernote – and will bat through the basics and on to tips about it all. Even if you know the topic, they tend to have found new angels on it and it is a running joke that every listener ends up spending more money than they want because we've been convinced about some new software or hardware.

The topic interests me because I am pretty fully in the Apple scheme of working and if you aren't, there is nothing here for you.

But there are many podcasts about Mac things and I've tried a lot of them yet rarely got through an entire episode. Generally they are so poorly produced that the BBC Radio man in me starts twitching. Turn up that microphone. Stop leaving dead air. Bother to learn how to pronounce your guest's name. Things like that stop me listening and Mac Power Users is far more professional than that.

It also avoids the other main thing that stops me listening to various podcasts. Floyd and Sparks are equally knowledgeable and have similar experiences but they are sufficiently different that when one of them tells the other something, you believe that other one doesn't know it. I loathe the common format where one presenter tells another some amazing fact and the second one is appropriately amazed – but I can't help thinking they mustn't have read the script or paid attention during the rehearsals.

At least two presenters are better than many. There's a type of show that used to be known in UK radio as the zoo format: many presenters all together and chatting. Invariably, they sound like they're having a fantastic time. But we're not.

So considering that I used to produce a podcast, it became rare for me to listen to any. Mac Power Users is the only one I get regularly: every Monday morning, there's a new edition and I download it.

More useful than this new habit of mine, though, is the website catalogue of all the shows, all 187 editions so that you can look up any topic and leap right to it. Plus each edition has extensive notes online with links to the many products and other points brought up in the editions.

Try one. Here's the link to the official site though you can also subscribe through iTunes or every such route.

Birmingham Independent Book Fair

Posted by William Gallagher

I can’t count the number of events and book fairs I’ve been to but today was my first as a publisher. I had a table at the Birmingham Independent Book Fair. Hand on heart: I thought I would get to have a fine time nattering with interesting people and that was all. I’d been planning to go as a punter when I was offered a slot and I reckoned that meant I’d get in a bit early and be able to buy books before the doors opened.

Correct.

Very pleased about that.

But I was also wondering. At these many events and fairs I’ve been to, there have often been very many people sitting at their tables visibly bored. My impression was that this fair would be chiefly for fiction books and poetry, that therefore my non-fiction wouldn’t be of interest. The fair was at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery and that guaranteed that it would be an absorbing spot. But I did secretly prepare myself to be bored.

Not correct.

I didn’t get one single picosecond in which to be bored. I nattered pretty solidly for the entire time: met terrific publishers, terrific visitors and many of them – amazingly many of them – got me to shut up long enough that they could buy my book.

I was there promoting The Blank Screen and it is simply joyous to see someone pick up a copy, start to flick through, then get absorbed and suddenly start reaching for their wallet or purse.

Of course, you can save all that tedious reaching for anything and just buy your copy online. I like you. Here is The Blank Screen on Amazon UK and on Amazon US.

I hope you like it and that I get to see you at another fair some day.

Reeder for Mac now in public beta

Posted by William Gallagher

The short news for Reeder fans: download it right now from here.

The slightly longer news for anyone who isn’t a Reeder fan: it is terrific and you should download it right now from here.

Reeder is a news reading app, an RSS one where you tell it what websites you like and forever afterwards it gets news from all of those sites. Depending on the site, you can read the headline, the standfirst, an extract or the whole article and whichever you get, it looks gorgeous. One tap in the morning and I am reading news from BBC, New York Times, Lifehacker, The Onion and myriad more.

There are many RSS readers like Reeder but I don’t think there is another one that is really anything like Reeder. I’ve long loved its design – most of it, at least – and how well done its text was. Routinely, if I found an article on a site that was just too ugly to read, I’d either bung that piece into Pocket to read later or I’d subscribe to it in Reeder and read it there.

I still remember the instant when I learnt that Reeder for iOS was out. Last September, a new version was released partly to deal with how Google shut down its service that powered all RSS readers. It was a paid update and I paid instantaneously. That’s how much I liked the old one and now it’s how much I like the new.

Yet as good as Reeder is for RSS, I missed having it on my Mac too. That Google shutdown made the Mac one literally unusable and that is almost a year ago. Here’s how good Reeder is: I haven’t replaced it. Not on my Mac. I’ve tried others on iOS but as much as I used to use RSS on my Mac, I simply stopped reading any RSS there.

Until tonight.

What’s been released is a beta version of Reeder 2 for Mac and the final version will be a paid-for app. I don’t know the price yet and I don’t truly care: I have read many thousands of articles through the various versions of Reeder and I open it practically as often as I do my email.

So go download it now from here and be ready to pay whatever the maker demands when it’s out of beta.