Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Weekend read: How Film is Made Today

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Just absorbing.

Visiting the Eastman Kodak factory in Rochester, NY was the first visit in my month-long journey. I wanted to document how Kodak film, which starts as an acetate or polyester base and chemicals, reaches the movie theater screen in a digital era. That process today is quite different from 50 years ago when technicians developed camera negatives by hand and editors cut film with scissors. It’s one that blends the physical and the digital mediums. I interviewed Kodak factory workers, filmmakers, negative processing technicians and colorists, toured labs and offices, all the while witnessing firsthand film’s entire course. Even though the process does integrate digital technology today, I found there’s something special about shooting a movie on film, and part of my journey was to discover why that is.

How Motion Picture Film is Made – Ryan Cavataro, Gear Patrol (22 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Your ramshackle company may be just fine

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Harvard Business Review just shook down what it calls the myths of great companies: the things we all think the very best companies to work for do all the time. Curiously, none of the myths it examines include money. Hopefully this means it isn’t a myth that the best companies pay well – and hopefully you and I will find this out through personal experience.

If that’s an odd omission, the five points that are included are interesting. Here’s number 4, which is one I particularly want to talk to you about.

Myth 4: They Hire for Cultural Fit

Organizations no longer select job candidates solely on the basis of their skills or experience. They hire those whose personality and values are consistent with their company culture. Among the more vocal proponents of this approach is Zappos, the online shoe distributor. But lots of other companies have extoled the virtues of hiring for cultural fit.

The idea holds intuitive appeal: When employees share similar attitudes, they’re more likely to get along, and more likely they are to produce. Right?

Not necessarily. There’s a point at which too much similarity can stifle performance. For one, similarity fosters complacency. We get stuck doing things the way we’ve always done them because no one is challenging us to think differently. Similarity also breeds overconfidence. We overestimate the accuracy of our opinions and invest less effort in our decisions, making errors more common.

In a 2009 study teams of three were asked to solve a problem with the help of a new colleague who was either similar or dissimilar to the existing group. While homogenous teams felt more confident in their decisions, it was the diverse teams that performed best. The newcomers pushed veterans to reexamine their assumptions and process data more carefully—the very thing they neglected to do when everyone in their group was similar.

5 Myths of Great Workplaces – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (5 March 2015)

Read the full piece for a little more on that plus the other other apparent myths. But I’ve seen this business of cultural fit and it’s been less about slotting you in to a similar environment than it has been about bosses hiring people who are like themselves.

If they do that and their new recruits also only hire people like them, in ten minutes you’ve got a whole company of boring white middle-aged men.

Clever software gone stupid

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Stupid is a harsh word. But a thing happened today that tells me I shouldn’t rely on software as much as I do.

Last night I was at a party with Angela and at various points we were talking with a particularly funny, fine guy. He gave Angela his card and this morning she typed up his details into Contacts on her iPhone and sent him a nice note.

Aha, says I, there’s a way to save that typing. I gets out my iPhone, open Evernote, take a photo of the man’s business card and, wallop, it’s done. Every detail off that card read and popped into an Evernote document. Name, phone number, address, email, the lot. It is brilliant.

But not quite brilliant enough.

Much as I use Evernote all day long, it is a fat lot of good having someone’s details in there and not in my Contacts address book. Can you get that data out of Evernote? Presumably yes, apparently yes, but I couldn’t.

I found a button that seemed to suggest it would send the details off to my Contacts so I tapped on that.

And instead it sent my details off to my contacts.

This man who had talked more with Angela than he had with me, who had given her his card and not me, now got an extremely terse email from Evernote listing my contact details. Nothing else. No message. Just name, number, email.

Fortunately he used the email and replied or I wouldn’t have even noticed. I was able to send him a non-terse message even as I was saying something very terse to Evernote.

Weekend read: How ResearchKit was made and will transform our health

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Imagine ten trials, several thousand patients,” said Friend, the founder of Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that champions open science and data sharing. “Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries.” In this scenario, Friend said, patients would be able to control who could access their information, and for which purposes. But their health data would be effectively open-sourced.

The crowd was receptive. Several people looking to share their data with scientists stood up to ask what options they had. There were a few open-source health data projects in the works, Friend replied, but nothing fully-formed. “We’re pretty close,” he reassured them.

He was closer than he thought. Sitting in the audience that day was Mike O’Reilly, a newly minted vice president for medical technologies at Apple.

The inside story of how Apple’s new medical research platform was born – Daniela Hernandez, Fusion (17 March 2015)

Give Apple credit for having some class. In the middle of their big launch of the Apple Watch and new MacBook, they devoted equally as much time to a thing they won’t profit from and are even giving away so that other manufacturers can use it. It’s a medical tool called ResearchKit: specifically, it’s a tool to let medical professionals build applications that will use your iPhone. You know that thing you have with you constantly and which can now monitor how much exercise you take? That thing where you can fill out a medical questionnaire so quickly that you will actually do that instead of putting it off? That.

ResearchKit is going to be a boon for the type of medical research that needs trials and lots of data. Read the full piece for how it happened and what it’s going to do for us.

Weekend read: Swiss watchmakers have no chance against Apple

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If the Apple Watch is a hit, it won’t be because Apple is winning over would-be Tag Heuer or Rolex customers. It’ll be because Apple will have convinced tens of millions of people to wear tiny computers on their wrists. Those people will then have no need for “watches.” Apple has some work to do here—most people are still far from convinced that they need one of these things, and the design could be thinner and prettier. But it’s starting strong.

Meanwhile, there’s no reason to believe that the people who buy Tag Heuer watches for their craftsmanship have any interest in tracking their fitness or getting text message notifications on their horological heirlooms. And if you’re buying a classic mechanical watch, it’s supposed to last forever, to be passed down to your offspring—not to go obsolete after a couple of years.

Why Swiss smartwatches have no chance against the Apple Watch – Dan Frommer, Quartz (19 March 2015)

Right now I am wearing a wristwatch that has no hands and no digits: its face just has the word “now” written on it. By far the most accurate watch I’ve ever had, though lately I do think it’s been losing a few seconds. Still, much as I like and rely on it, it’s going. I will be buying an Apple watch because I already see how I’ll use it. At £300 it will be the most expensive watch I’ve ever bought yet I am persuaded, I see the value. I’ve never seen the value in expensive analogue watches – or rather, I’ve never seen the value to me. I definitely appreciate the artistry and engineering brilliance, but this is the first time I’ve recognised a specific worth to me of an expensive watch.

So I think Frommer may be right: Swiss watchmakers could even be wound up.

Read the full piece.

Weekend read: Why a lack of photography killed Google+

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It’s not as if Google+ is dead, but you log on there and it seems like it is. Here’s one idea of why:

The internet is not a place of fierce loyalty. Create a transformational product or build a better service and people will use it. Thus Hotmail gave way to Gmail, and MySpace to Facebook. So you can understand why Google thought it could build a better social network in Google+. But that’s not what happened. Or at least, it wasn’t able to build a more popular social network. But why not?

The answer to the question of why Google+ failed is simple. It’s the reason why any social network succeeds or fails. The answer is photos. Google+ now has one of the best photo management tools there is, period. It finds your best pictures for you, it’s amazingly searchable, it auto-generates highlight films and cool photos albums, and it even turns your burst shots into animated GIFs. Fancy! But all of that came far too late in its history. The big mistake Google+ made was in starting out as a place for people to have meaty in-depth discussions.

Why Photos Rule The Internet – Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed (19 March 2015)

It could be true. I’m not convinced because actually I like a meaty read and I’ve never had that from Google+. Still, read the full piece and see where he’s going with all this.

Thank you! “Positivity is the Worst Response to a Problem”

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Oh, it’s not that bad. You’re just too close to it, you can’t see the upside. Give it a day and you’ll see you were right all along. If you’ve heard things like that or if you’ve said things like that, it’s not helping. So says Fast Company writer Stephanie Vozza and she must be right because she’s saying what I think.

True, she’s saying it better than I am, but.

In math, multiplying a negative by a positive gives you a negative answer. Ever notice the same thing happens in life? When a coworker complains and you try to inject something positive, the outcome is usually more negativity.

“When we hear negativity, our instinct is to try and cheer up the other person,” says Peter Bregman, author of Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Stop Counter-Productive Habits and Get the Results You Want. “But often it’s the worst thing you can do.”

That’s because listening to negative conversations makes us uncomfortable, and saying something positive in response only serves as a way to make the listener feel better, not the person who is complaining. This reaction doesn’t help the person who is venting because the listener’s comments are perceived as being argumentative.

“You are basically disagreeing with the other person’s feelings,” says Bregman. “You’re saying that they’re wrong; things really aren’t that terrible. This just makes them entrench more deeply in their perspective.”

Why Positivity Is The Worst Response To A Problem – Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company (19 March 2015)

Read the full piece. Mind you, I’m intrigued by the book she refers to, the Four Seconds one. The cynic in me is thinking it might take more than four seconds to read the book, but.

Reclaim the day

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It kills me that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Then I work all the hours in the day and that kills me. Here’s an idea for getting back some of the time that otherwise fritters away on, you know, like relaxing and socialising and stuff.

Take Back Afternoons: Productivity After the Post-Lunch Slump

When lunchtime breaks up my day, I’m terrible at getting back into a productive flow. I’m not unique in struggling to work through the afternoons, though. Most of us tend to have a dip in energy in the early afternoon, often known as the “post-lunch slump”. Research suggests that our bodies are designed to have a short sleep around this time to complement our nighttime sleep.

This regular slump in energy is obviously bad news for anyone, but it’s especially bad when you work remotely (as I do) and need to discipline yourself to complete tasks.

The best way I’ve found for kicking myself into gear is to have a deadline to push up against. If you remember ever writing furiously at 11:45 p.m. to finish a school essay and submit it by midnight, you’ll know exactly what I mean. There’s something about deadlines that help us overcome our worst procrastination habits.

So I took this self knowledge and used it to hack my routine in such a way that I’m now getting significantly more done with less last-minute scrambling.

Experiments with Time: How to Take Back Your Day from the Grip of Procrastination – Belle Cooper, Zapier (17 March 2015)

Read the full piece for what she does with the rest of the day. I sound flippant here, I think, but she has good points to make and the topic occupies my head a lot.

Living with OmniFocus

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I’ve reviewed To Do apps for MacNN, and I’ve written books about creative productivity that recommend such apps. If it’s a To Do app that ran online or on Apple gear, it’s likely that I’ve at least tried it. Yet in November of 2011, I bought OmniFocus for iPhone, and while I have since bought five more To Do apps for myself, every one of them was OmniFocus.

There’s OmniFocus for Mac which I bought 21 days later. There’s OmniFocus for iPad, which I bought the day after that. This is not a casual investment: none of the three apps are exactly cheap, and while you don’t have to buy all three, you sort of do. Yet I used to often tell people in creative productivity workshops that OmniFocus is so good and so deeply, even profoundly, useful to me that I would pay that price all over again.

So I did.

Living with: OmniFocus – William Gallagher, MacNN (19 March 2015)

“Living With” is a series on MacNN.com that sees what you think after long-term testing of something. In my case, it’s over three years. That’s a bit more thorough, that’s a bit more time than you can get for any other review and time turns up things. In this case it did turn up some problems but then it turned up solutions and I turned out to be a fan of OmniFocus. Quite right too.

Do read the whole piece.

The Blank Screen newsletter is out…

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It’s out. If you’re on the mailing list, you got it HOURS ago. If you’re not on the mailing list, you can put that right by signing up here.

And you can read this week’s edition online right now.

This week we’ve got a very serious and accurate and useful video about handling your email, especially with OmniFocus, and a very un-serious but highly accurate video about group interviews.