Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Inkspill Writing Retreat – intro video and exercise

Posted by

0

Listen, we talk all the time about productivity but we are writers, we need to write. Last weekend I contributed a series of writing blogs and suchforth to Inkspill, an online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. You can still see and even take part in the entire weekend just by going to her official site. And I’d recommend that for seeing the work of my colleagues on the retreat, Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie.

But let me bring you what I bought to the table. Today, a video introduction that I grant you makes little sense out of context and within which I do look half-dead with sleep. But it also includes a writing exercise that I especially like doing with people. Plus, it’ll tell you what’s coming up over the rest of this week: each day I’ll post one of the writing exercise blogs I did for Inkspill.

I hope you like them and that when you’ve seen this video, you rush me caffeine.

Assistant for hire – virtually

Posted by

0

Naturally you and I need full-time assistants, perhaps even a whole team of them based in our plush offices and working 24/7/365 right beside us. But some writers don’t have our needs or our lofty incomes, yet they also sometimes need the benefit of an assistant:

Whether you’re an executive flying all over the world or you’re a stay-at-home mom overwhelmed with too many tasks, Zirtual, a virtual personal assistant, aims to take some of the administrative and organizational tasks off of your plate, to make your day-to-day a little easier.

Zirtual assistants can respond to emails on your behalf, coordinate travel plans, manage your calendar, create itineraries and much more. Zirtual is also a great if you don’t need a full-time assistant, but you still need some help coordinating your hectic schedule. So instead of getting bogged down with all of the small administrative tasks that can suck hours out of your day, you can focus on the important tasks at hand.

8 Apps to Help You Get More Done in Less Time – Elisha Hartwig, Mashable (25 October 2014)

That’s all Hartwig says about Zirtual: it is only one of eight pieces of advice or services or software applications that she is recommending. Do read her piece for the others but also take a look at Zirtual’s own pages for details of this service. Zitual is an American company but it works with people in the UK, so long as they have from $399 per month to spend.

Depression, the freelance life and how to cope with both

Posted by

0

Following today’s earlier post about how the internet can spot when we’re depressed – though that’s not the same as it doing anything about it – the mental health issue continues with this more active article. Always and forever, remember this: depression is not the same as sadness. If you’re dep ressed and someone tells you it might never happen then you are fully and legally entitled to ram their tick ling stick up into intensive care.

But.

It is true that if you are prone to depression, there are things that make it worse or rather that make the experience worse. Bad things are always bad. Bad things do not cause depression. But a bad thing when you are depressed is crippling. I think of it this way: when you’re up and happy and excited, it only takes a pinprick to bring you back down into the mire of misery. Whereas if you’re down, it’s going to take one hell of a boost to make you even suspect that there are or there can ever be good times.

Fortunately, freelance life has a lot of boosts even though it also has a lot of pricks.

Jenni Miller writes here in Contently about the twin issues of being freelance and of being depressed: the two don’t go together, but when they meet, it’s murder:

The freelance lifestyle is incredibly tough, and managing mental health on top of everyday concerns like invoices and deadlines can feel overwhelming. As someone who’s lived with anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive order since I was a child, I’ve found that working as a freelancer has an equal amount of benefits and drawbacks when it comes to self-care and mental health. On one hand, it’s extraordinarily helpful to be able to make my own hours. If I am having a really bad day, I know I can take a few hours off and finish up a project later that night or over the weekend. At the same time, the isolation of working by myself and for myself can push all of my most vulnerable buttons.

Dealing with those drawbacks can be challenging, but over the years, I’ve relied on a few tactics that keep me healthy and productive even as the ebb and flow of freelance work swirls around me.

6 Important Mental Health Tips That Will Help Freelancers Stay – Jenni Miller, The Freelancer, by Contently (24 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Constraints and limitations make us creative

Posted by

0

Perhaps I mean they make us more creative. The Atlantic has a good three-biscuit read of a feature about Abbey Road studios and – in part, in the part that interests me the most – the Beatles music was made there without anything approaching today’s technology.

limitations of Beatles-era technology were substantial by comparison, and they forced a commitment to creative choices at earlier stages of the recording process. If, for example, an engineer wanted to exceed the number of recorded tracks that their tape machine allowed, two or more tracks had to be mixed together and “bounced” to an open track elsewhere. Cuts were physical, done with razor blades and tape. Mixes were performed by engineers in real time. Big mistakes at any point in the process could force an entire recording to be scrapped.

It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them. Once while recording a Beatles song called “Glass Onion” Scott accidentally erased a large number of drum parts that had been painstakingly overdubbed. Certain that he’d be fired, he played the tape to John Lennon. To Scott’s surprise, Lennon said that he liked the unexpected effect created by the glitch—and both the track and Scott stayed.

The Technical Constraints That Made Abbey Road So Good – Justin Lancy, Atlantic (23 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Sunday read: the Internet knows when you’re depressed

Posted by

0

How do depressed people behave online? According to a new study of college students with depressive symptoms — recently described by its authors in the New York Times — they compulsively check email, watch many videos, spend a lot of time playing games and chatting, and frequently switch back and forth between applications.

The Internet Knows You’re Depressed, but Can It Help You? – Maia Szalavitz, TIME.com (22 June 2012)

It’s not at all clear whether you do these things because you’re depressed or whether doing this makes you depressed or whether you’re really just trying to get those crumbs out of your keyboard. And I have to think that chatting is a good thing. But read the full piece, would you?

Do women learn differently from men online?

Posted by

0

It’s not like I’d even thought of this but if you had asked me what online learning meant for women and men, I’m sure we’d have had a good natter about how great it is that all this stuff is out there for everyone. Unless you already knew access for all hasn’t meant women accessing all, I doubt we’d have mentioned it. But it’s true.

If it’s on a website or iTunes U or any digital spot, there is zero difference between a man”/ ability to access online learning and a woman’s. Yet there is difference. Great difference:

…dismally low numbers provide a reminder that “access” to education is more complicated than simply throwing open the digital doors to whoever wants to sign up. So how can we turn the mere availability of online instruction in STEM into true access for female students?

One potential solution to this information-age problem comes from an old-fashioned source: single-sex education. The Online School for Girls, founded in 2009, provides an all-female e-learning experience. (A companion institution, the Online School for Boys, is opening this fall.) It appears to be doing an especially good job of educating girls in STEM: Last year, 21 of its approximately 1,000 students were recognized by the National Center for Women in Technology “for their aspirations and achievements in computing and technology.” And over the course of the 2013-2014 academic year, the Online School for Girls prepared 30 female students to take the Advanced Placement exam in computer science. To put that number in perspective: 25 American states each prepared fewer than 30 girls to take the AP computer science exam.

Do Girls Learn Differently Online? – Annie Murphy Paul, The Creativity Post (20 October 2914)

I went to a comprehensive school and I’d say its sole value to me – no, wait that was where I learnt authority could be having a nervous breakdown and I had to fight, both of which helped me later in journalism – but otherwise its sole value was that it was a mixed school. I loathe the idea of single-sex education because I think it damages your education about two sexes. Men, at least, can end up as permanent schoolboys unable to talk to women. Look at the UK government.

Yet Annie Murphy Paul’s piece does make compelling arguments. I’d rather we didn’t have single-sex education but we’ve got to have education that works. Read the full piece. And take a look at the Online a School for Girls, well, online.

Sunday read: Design is Eating the World

Posted by

0

The industrial revolution democratized consumption. By rationalizing the production process, things were made vastly cheaper and more plentiful. The average person living in a developed country today has access to more products and services than even royalty did a century ago.

Yet there have been some trade offs. In earlier days, craftsmen created products from start to finish, but now each part of the value chain is now highly specialized. As Leonard Read so aptly pointed out in his 1966 essay, I, Pencil, even the manufacture of a simple writing implement is beyond the reach of a single person.

This has been especially true of design. In the days of craftsmen, each product was a singular event. In an industrial environment, however, a design is repeated thousands or even millions of times. That leaves no room for whim or fancy, because each element is tightly integrated into a massive industrial complex. Errors are profoundly expensive.

Design Is Eating The World – Greg Satell, The Creativity Post (21 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Short weekend read: Twitter ‘source of all evil’ says Saudi Arabia cleric

Posted by

0

What’s the saying? Guns don’t kill people, bullets do?

according to Saudi Arabia’s top Muslim cleric, Twitter is “the source of all evil and devastation”.
Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, made the comments on his Fatwa television show earlier this week.

“If it were used correctly, it could be of real benefit, but unfortunately it’s exploited for trivial matters,” he said about the social networking site.

Twitter ‘source of all evil’ says Saudi Arabia cleric – Felicity Morse, BBC Newsbeat (22 October 2014)

Whenever someone wants twitter to say just what they want it to say, well, that doesn’t work and they end up calling it trivial.

Read the full piece but you’ve basically got the gist now.

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

Posted by

0

I was saying this just last Thursday: if OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I go um.

Here’s a group that didn’t stop at um. This is Asian Efficiency:

A lot of OmniFocus Premium Posts customers and OmniFocus users have been emailing us with one of their biggest challenges: they love OmniFocus but are forced to use Windows at work. What to do?

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (25 October 2014)

Read the full piece. I like very much that they’re upfront with how there is no magic option, I like how this isn’t written as if they’ve found the solution. It’s written baldly and starkly: there is no great answer, there is just this way of coping when you have to.

Do read that full piece and check out Asian Efficiency. The site has various options for OmniFocus users where you can buy some of their help.

What customers? US store chain fights Apple Pay

Posted by

0

I’m not that interested in Apple Pay – a system by which you wave your iPhone at a cash register and have paid for your goods and services – because it isn’t in the UK yet. And also this is the latest of several so-called contactless payment systems and I’m just used to standing in queues behind people making rather a lot of contact as they bang their devices onto shops’ own devices. I mean bang. Loud enough to cover the swearing.

But Apple Pay went live recently in the States and it has two advantages. First, there are a lot of iPhones, this isn’t like trying to light a revolution with an Amazon Fire phone.

Second, it’s got Apple. And the company’s stated aim was to start with the idea of what makes this useful for customers rather than businesses. That sounds like bollocks: this is a gigantic company claiming to be on the side of the individual, the little person, yeah. Only, this is the firm that did the iTunes Store. Now, not everyone likes that but it was so easy to use for customers that it more-or-less, near-as-dammit killed off pirate stores for most people. There is still piracy and still people finding ways to get music that hurts artists and is a bag of spanners over the head to morality, but before iTunes, it was all you could do.

Come iTunes, come a lot of people paying a lot of money. And yes, Apple gets a massive cut. So you can easily, readily see why other firms are unhappy about this. But you can also see the result. Many film studios got together to make a rival to your buying films off the iTunes Store. It’s called Ultraviolet, which is just a meaningless name and it’d be great if that were the only problem.

The only real problem is that these firms aren’t even pretending to be in it for us. For a group with a completely legitimate reason to want to do without Apple, they don’t even seem to be able to get along with each other. This varies and in small ways improves, but it has been the case that to watch a film on Ultraviolet, you had to sign up to an Ultraviolet account. So far, so familiar and so identical to Apple and its iTunes Store. But remember that you go to this to buy a film, one film, and typically you get there because the shiny disc version you bought comes with a redemption code. Okay, so you expect to enter that code and you expect to sign up to the service but you don’t expect to have to sign up again. And, the first time I tried this some years ago, again. There were three separate signups in the process.

Translation: these firms won’t even share their sodding databases.

That’s a group that gets along, that’s a group that is going to stay together. And that’s not a group that is going to agree on anything technical like the ability to get the films to work.

Seriously. You start this process, you begin thinking you’re doing something wrong, you eventually twig how stupid it is yet you’re invested now, you’ve spent a lot of time logging on and it becomes like a crossword puzzle where sheer determination to finish gets you to the end. The first time I did this, I got there, I got it working, and I couldn’t watch my film. Physically could not get it to play.

The second time, I couldn’t even find my film.

All that effort for one movie and when I got to it, it was hidden. As a customer, what I want when I go to buy a specific movie is to see all other films but that one first.

This was the Veronica Mars movie and if you’re not feeling the rant yet, let me give you three facts. The day I heard Veronica Mars would be distributed on Ultraviolet, I knew I’d buy it off iTunes instead. I backed Veronica Mars on Kickstarter so I got a free copy of the film on Ultraviolet and I still bought it off iTunes. Spent money again because I could not get Ultraviolet to work.

And here’s fact number three: Warner Bros, distributors of Veronica Mars, sent me a refund for my iTunes purchase.

So they spent all that effort, all that money, setting up an online store and because it fails to work, they end up spending more money to pay customers for the inconvenience.

Here’s the thing.

We’re going to get it again.

With Apple Pay.

There are companies in the States do not want to work with Apple and, as ever, that makes total sense. But it already looks likely that they’re going to cock it up because they already have. If you were in the States and had an Apple Pay iPhone, you’ve been able to pay for your shopping at CVS, a pharmacy chain. You’ve been able to not because CVS decided to support Apple Pay but because it long ago decided to support Google’s fairly failed rival, Google Wallet.

Both systems use technology called Near Field Communications (NFC): the phone and the cash register have to be near to each other. CVS has the equipment and now they have two phone systems that will work with it, but it looks like this phone-based payment thing is taking off, it looks like customers are taking to it.

So CVS appears to have shut it down for them.

It now appears that fellow major pharmacy chain CVS is… shutting down the NFC functionality of its payment terminals entirely, a move presumably intended to thwart Apple Pay. Google Wallet services are obviously also being affected by the move.

Multiple reports on Twitter and the MacRumors forums have indicated that CVS has sent an email to its stores indicating that NFC support is to be turned off. It is still relatively early in the day in the U.S., but we are now starting to see reports of NFC indeed being turned off at CVS stores.

The reason behind Rite Aid’s and CVS’s moves to disable unofficial Apple Pay support in their stores is presumably related to their participation in Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer group developing its own mobile payments system known as CurrentC. A claimed internal Rite Aid message shared with SlashGear supports this notion, instructing cashiers to explain to customers that Apple Pay is not supported but that MCX’s solution will be available next year.

CVS Stores Reportedly Disabling NFC to Shut Down Apple Pay and Google Wallet – Eric Slivka, MacRumours (25 October 2014)

They haven’t even got their alternative working.

I like Apple and at least in part because they make things that work. I’d rather a world where there were many companies doing things that work, I’m strange like that, but for God’s sake, choosing to stop your customers paying you money is a bit thick.