Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Should we do this too? Recently Rejected opens up

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There’s a new website called Recently Rejected which has artists displaying the work that, yes, well, you got it. Sometimes very beautiful work tossed aside because the intern down the hall did something for half the price.

Do go take a look: I’m not a fan of all of it and you do always wonder what got chosen instead, but there are some absorbing designs in all manner of fields.

But should we do this as writers too? It has a certain appeal but then so does have an unseen bottom drawer of material that we get to drag out, blow the dust off and pretend to commissioners that it’s brand new and just for them.

Do get dressed in the morning, don’t get dressed in the morning

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Whatever. I give up. It’s as if we’ve reached saturation point on articles that say writers working from home should pretend they have a real 9-5 office job and instead now we’re embarking on a round of articles saying they shouldn’t. Here’s a shouldn’t:

I polled some of my freelance friends to find out what rules they commonly break. Here’s what came up again and again:

“Work on a schedule, just like you would at a regular job. ”

No thanks, said writer Christine Hennebury: “I don’t set regular hours. I don’t set aside chunks of time. And I don’t turn off my work at a specific time. The whole point of freelancing and working from home is to blend your work and home life together a bit better.” Instead, Hennebury plans her day using author Jennifer Louden’s “Conditions of Enoughness,” deciding what she needs to get done to be satisfied at the end of the day. Then when she’s done, she’s done.

Trying to stick to a “normal” nine-to-five workday can present logistical problems for freelancers, too, as former freelancer Holly Case pointed out. “I remember one big article I was working on required me to interview an important expert. I spent nearly a week trying to reach him and never could. He finally called me at eleven p.m., explaining that he was on his way to a party in a limo and wondered if I could do the interview then. I said yes because I didn’t know if I would get it otherwise

Always Get Dressed in the Morning, and 6 Other Rules Successful Freelancers Break – Meagan Francis, The Freelancer, by Contently (27 February 2015)

Read the full piece.

Weekend read: trying to kill GPS with an axe

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Nearly a quarter of a century ago, two men attempted to axe the GPS programme – entirely literally:

On May 10, 1992, the activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California. They used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the U.S. government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times.

They were arrested and faced up to 10 years in prison for destroying federal government property, causing an estimated $2 million in damage. Ultimately, Kjoller and Lumsdaine took guilty pleas and were sentenced to 18 months and two years in prison respectively for an act of civil disobedience they named “The Harriet Tubman-Sarah Connor Brigade.”

Acting in a tradition of civil disobedience established by the Plowshares movement while citing the leader of the Underground Railroad and the heroine of the Terminator series, the Brigade’s target was the Navigation Satellite Timing And Ranging (NAVSTAR) Program and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Back then, GPS was still a fairly obscure and incomplete military technology, used in some civilian applications (the first civilian GPS device, the Magellan NAV 1000, came on the market in 1988) but far from a mainstream resource. Today, GPS feels almost more intimate than industrial or weaponized.

The Failed Attempt to Destroy GPS – The Atlantic

Read the full piece to find out why they tried and why at least one of them doesn’t regret it.

Talk more – it helps your productivity

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Also, everybody is so interesting. But as well as that, nattering is a way of thinking and focusing and learning and listening. And this all helps us as people, it very helps us as writers despite this contorted sentence. It even helps our productivity:

Increase your social life by talking to everyone

It doesn’t take a group of scientists to explain that spending time with people is beneficial for our health. Our emotions alone remind us of how relaxing and joyful it was to spend quality time with someone. Psychologist John Cacioppo once mentioned in his book, Loneliness, that, “loneliness isn’t some personality defect or sign of weakness. It’s a survival impulse like hunger or thirst, a trigger pushing us toward the nourishment of human companionship.”

We’re not immune to the feelings of isolation and despite what we think, it’s necessary to speak to a variety of people throughout the day. (Even if it has to be the weird store clerk who gives us a blank stare).

If you have a hard time expressing your thoughts to people or experience shy behaviors, become interested in what they’re saying rather than focusing on being an interesting person. Don’t concentrate about impressing someone with your intellects and instead, listen to what they have to say. Most of the time, people will always prefer talking about themselves when given the chance and you can learn a lot about them by asking questions and being genuine.

12 ways to boost your productivity – Michael Gregory II, Self Development Workshop (4 March 2015)

This is actually number 1 in a series of 12 suggestions for being more productive. I don’t know what the other 11 are yet because I came straight here to talk to you about this one. Read the full piece for the rest.

Brilliant ide – no, backspace, delete – interesting idea

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There’s this fella, right, James Somers, and he’s found a way to show you all the steps you took in writing something. Every letter you typed even if you then deleted it. Every paragraph you wrote, even if you started at the end or just changed your mind and moved stuff around.

You have to write in Google Docs – which I don’t – and you have to have his special Chrome extension installed – which I don’t. But stunningly, this thing doesn’t just work on anything you write now. It works on anything you’ve written ever – since you started using Google Docs.

Only you can do this, only you or anyone you’ve given editing rights to. Your rewrites can’t be seen by anyone else. And this is a relief because as an editor I have had people send me work without deleting their notes. I’ve also read some interesting remarks that they believed they had deleted – there was a Word bug once that showed me.

So for me, notes and workings-out equal trouble. But I am also only interested in the final piece – insofar as the toying and changing goes. It is interesting how long we spend havering over whether to use the word ‘buy’ or ‘yet’ but this trick doesn’t show that. It will show us writing one, deleting it and writing the other. It won’t show the five hours walking around a park debating it in our heads.

Which I suspect you think is obvious but the creator of this doesn’t see it. He believes we can learn writing by seeing how others write. This is how that point is made in an article about him in FiveThirtyEight:

Somers started all this because he thinks the way we teach writing is broken. “We know how to make a violinist better. We know how to make a pitcher better. We do not know how to make a writer better,” Somers told me. In other disciplines, the teaching happens as the student performs. A music instructor may adjust a student’s finger placement, or a pitching coach may tweak a lefty’s mechanics. But there’s no good way to look over a writer’s shoulder as she’s writing; if anything, that’ll prevent good writing.

Watch Me Write This Article – Chadwick Matlin, FiveThirtyEight (4 March 2015)

Read the full piece for how to do this and if you become a better writer, let me know.

New edition of Getting Things Done out this month

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Just a provisional heads-up, a wary recommendation: a new edition of this productivity book is due out on 17 March. Getting Things Done was a giant success of a book that fostered a near-cult of GTD fans as they call themselves. It’s also directly helped me and I talk about it a lot in my own The Blank Screen. But in some ways it was rubbish.

Chiefly two ways. First, it was sometimes hard to get through the corporate-speak writing style. But, second, it was severely out of date. It was only written in 2001 but it’s Victorian with how it believes you can only do work emails at work. Was it ever thus? Really?

So I was excited when I heard a new edition is coming. That excitement has been tempered a bit by an interview I heard with author David Allen. I don’t know, but if he’s updated anything, it doesn’t sound like they are the core ideas. He spoke of a Palm Pilot as the ideal device for us, for instance. If you haven’t heard of that, take this as a sign that he’s talking rubbish. If you have heard of it, you know you’re not trading in your iPhone just yet.

However, a fuller blurb has been released on Amazon that says encouraging things like a claim that this is a total rewrite.

So fingers crossed I’ll be recommending the new Getting Things Done book. Right now the Kindle edition has been made available for pre-order at £6.99. Don’t accidentally order the paperback: the version of that online now is still the ancient first version.

In the meantime, here’s that Amazon publishers’ blurb:

Since it was first published in David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business titles of its era, and the book on personal organisation. ‘GTD’ has become shorthand for an entire way of approaching the professional and personal tasks everyone faces in life, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organisational tools, seminars, and offshoots.

For this revised and updated edition, David Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text with new tools and technologies, and adding material that will make the book evergreen for the coming decades. Also new is a glossary of GTD terms; The GTD Path of Mastership – a description of what Allen has learned and is now teaching regarding the lifelong craft of integrating these practices, to the end-game of the capability of dealing with anything in life, by getting control and focus; and a section on the cognitive science research that validates GTD principles

New edition of Getting Things Done – publishers’ blurb (2015)

Get back on Facebook, Twitter and the rest

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I’m not convinced by this. Here’s my take on social media: use it for fun and if anything else happens like work offers, great. If nothing else happens, you still had fun.

Plus, this stuff is fun. There is a reason why so many of us are drawn to it and then find it hard to break the habit and the reason is that is fun. If you haven’t used any social media then it seems daunting, but then the next thing you know you are watching for those Likes on Facebook or those retweets on Twitter.

Different social media networks suit different people and also we change. I lived in Twitter for a long time but now I’m more a Facebook user. No reason. Some people love LinkedIn though the rest of us wonder why.

So use it and don’t feel guilty about it. But writer Julie Schwietert Collazo argues that we should use it more and she gives several reasons. Here’s the one that leaps out the most:

I get work on social

If you’re still skeptical about spending more time on social, consider this: At least $12,000 of my 2014 income can be directly attributed to work I landed via social media contacts. And that work consists of a variety of assignments, from a translating project I got through a Facebook group that netted $8,000 to an $800 article for an in-flight magazine I was able to write after a friend who follows me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram made a referral.

I’ve found that finding work on social networks is relatively simple and doesn’t involve any of the “strategies” that make so many writers want to bail on social media. I follow and engage with editors on Twitter, join professional interests groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and generally just try to be transparent about my needs to followers and friends on all my platforms.

Spending time on social doesn’t mean you have to constantly “brand” yourself. If you make an effort to tune out some of that digital noise and focus on bring productive, social media won’t seem like a guilty pleasure or a time-suck. My life is enriched just as much by online relationships as it is by those offline. And for that reason, I’ll be spending as much time online in 2015 as I did in 2014.

Why Freelancers Should Spend More Time on Social Media in 2015 – Julie Schwietert Collazo, Contently (26 February 2015)

Read the full piece for more.

Honk if you want pizza

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What is this, bad-but-delicious food day? Completely unrelated to the pizza-ordering fridge magnet comes this: you ordering pizza via your car.

That’s not as in driving to the restaurant, that’s not as in asking KITT where the nearest takeaway is, that’s as in:

The pilot test will let some lucky car owners order a stuffed-crust gut-bomb from the comfort of their drivers’ seats. When the car arrives for pickup in a designated parking spot, bluetooth sensors will alert the Pizza Hut staff of its arrival so they can deliver the pizza to the car. A Visa exec said the company will soon announce the car manufacturers that are on board. It’s not yet clear how many locations will be part of the future pilot test, which will run for three months later this year in Northern California.

“It’s the start of what I hope will be a commercial rollout of not just a frictionless quick-serve restaurant experience but many other use cases,” said Bill Gajda, Visa’s senior vice president of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, noting pay-by-car opportunities at gas stations and parking meters, too.

Visa Seriously Wants You to Pay for Pizza and Gas With Your Car – Jason Del Rey, Re/code (2 March 2015)

One caveat. This is something announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. So it’s a trade show. Trade shows are where companies talk up products they haven’t made yet. And while I don’t know anything about MWC’s track record, I am a cynic over ones such as the Consumer Electronics Show where most products are fantasies. So maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, but if it does then it looks like it will save you the arduous walk from your car to the Pizza Hut counter. And back.

Ooops. Be careful what you say in front of your Mac

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I’m reviewing Dragon Dictate for MacNN.com and I’m spending a lot of time on it, really getting to know this dictation software. I’m especially interested because I didn’t believe it would work: I’ve seen voice recognition systems that promised the Earth and delivered maybe an allotment. Equally, while I am very much a fan of Siri, she does seem to have good and bad days so relying on that for writing work didn’t seem feasible.

Not to spoil the MacNN review as I’m not ready and still have much more to test but I have to tell you this.

I was writing a news article for The Blank Screen when the phone rang. It was one of those calls where they say they understand you used to work in industry with heavy machinery and did you know you could be eligible for compensation? (Wait. Do you get those or is it just me? They’re doing a punt in the dark just as much as the PPI callers or the “I understand you’ve been involved in an accident in the last three years” people are.)

I’m afraid I can tell you that I said “Am I bollocks, where do you get this information, do you actually pay for that database? Never mind, go on to your next one and have a nice day.” I have no idea why I said “have a nice day”.

But I know I did because Dragon Dictate wrote that whole line into the article. Actually, I don’t understand how I did this but it wrote all the way up to the word “bollocks” in the news article, then switched to an email I was drafting and wrote the rest there.

I’m mostly very impressed. I’m also aware that I could’ve click Post on the article or Send on the email and then where would we be?

Dragon Dictate 4 is available in various editions for Macs and PCs on its official site.

The very bad, very good pizza idea

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Ignore what I’m about to show you. Focus on how you should eat regularly and eat well. But since you work all the time and it’s common to find you looking in the fridge late in the evening, it’s possibly a public service to tell you about this. This is new. This requires you to close that refrigerator door and then tap your finger against a kind of fridge magnet.

This is why:

Say hello to the Click’N’Pizza. Invented by an Italian startup called La Comanda, the Click’N’Pizza is a big magnetic button that sits on your refrigerator. When you push it, your favorite pizza order is sent in to the local pizza place and a pizza is sent to your house.

That’s it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a glorious pizza future.

Carlo Brianza, the CEO and founder of La Comanda, is a pleasant Italian man with salt-and-pepper hair and a passion for both pizza and simplicity.

“I can order my favorite pizza with one click,” he said, holding down a big red button until an exuberant “Pizza is coming!” message appeared on the screen.

“This is the real one click,” he added. “Not the Web one click.”

Click’N’Pizza Is a Magic Button That Delivers Pizza to Your House in One Click – Jason O. Gilbert, Yahoo! Tech (2 March 2015)

You have been warned. For more details, read the full story.