Self Distraction

Self Distraction

That was September 2014…

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Excuse me? That was September? Are we not halfway or more through October? We are and if you feel this is a bit late for my confession and atonement for what I did or didn’t do in September, you are right. If you are suspecting that this delay has been an avoiding tactic because I didn’t want to admit to you that September was poor, well, I don’t want to admit it to you.

I just looked up August’s entry and it warns that September is dire. Warnings are true.

Writing (total approximately 53,880)
Wrote 8,500 words in Droitwich. Blogging book.
500 words short story Time Gentlemen Please
Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society pitch (400 words) Wrote, illustrated and delivered guest blog to Coffee Birmingham (500 words)
Theatre programme copywriting for the Birmingham Rep (2 pieces, total 2,000 words) 4 The Blank Screen newsletters (3,800 words)
132 The Blank Screen blog posts (35,580 words)
4 Self Distract blog posts (2,600 words)

Room 204 Buddying
Took over the running of this and doubled the number of writers in it Produced buddying list and teased it out releasing news in episodes Organised a social event for Room 204 Buddies (7 people)
Facebook chats, emails and meetings

Events and meetings
Write On! Young Writers session in Burton (10 kids
The Blank Screen day-long workshop in Newcastle (13 people)
Depped for Polly Wright leading a reader/writer group (first of two) (7 people)
Produced Erica Whyman event at the Courtyard Theatre for Writers’ Guild (16 people) Chaired my last Screenwriters’ Forum meeting
Chaired my first Writers’ Guild meeting
Royal Television Society committee meeting
Ran one official mental health writing session and one unofficial (7 people) Ava/Soundscapes day meeting
Discussing Arts Council Funding application process with James Urquhart Discussing Arts Council Funding application with Jonathan Davidson Jeff Phelps River Passage and Room 204 Buddying system planning meeting Author visit to Bewdley school: (100 kids)
Met with Nick Fogg of Room 204

Attended
Kate Bush concert (called it a delicate shotgun)
Na Kingsley’s e x p a n d i n g
Birmingham Literature Festival Creative Launch preview
Peaky Blinders launch
Snippets

Pitches
2 (2 successful)

Other
Took over Mailchimp duties for Writers’ Guild
Set up Mailchimp and sent promos for Screenwriters’ Forum
Wrote Young Writers’ exercises for other groups
Paperback edition of Filling the Blank Screen published
One copy of The Blank Screen book on sale secondhand for over £4,000

Video: Forbes on the best productivity apps

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There’s a pile in here that I hadn’t heard of. I think the format of having two blokes stand there talking to each other is as irritating in this as it is on television – what, no, really, I am so surprised to learn of this app you’ve only mentioned in every rehearsal and while we were writing the script – but what they’ve got to say is useful.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

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So grab a bottle of whisky, put your feet up with a burger and read this:

Think back to your most productive workday in the past week. Now ask yourself: On that afternoon, what did you have for lunch?

When we think about the factors that contribute to workplace performance, we rarely give much consideration to food. For those of us battling to stay on top of emails, meetings, and deadlines, food is simply fuel.

But as it turns out, this analogy is misleading. The foods we eat affect us more than we realize. With fuel, you can reliably expect the same performance from your car no matter what brand of unleaded you put in your tank. Food is different. Imagine a world where filling up at Mobil meant avoiding all traffic and using BP meant driving no faster than 20 miles an hour. Would you then be so cavalier about where you purchased your gas?

Food has a direct impact on our cognitive performance, which is why a poor decision at lunch can derail an entire afternoon.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (17 October 2014

Read the full piece.

Priorities for people who disagree with me

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I think sorting things into priority order is a way of prevarication and it’s a stupid way, too: the time you spend doing that, you could be doing the stuff. And when you’ve got your rinky-dinky perfectly-prioritised list done just so, something else will come up.

But I stand alone on this, or at least in very little company. And others make much more of the issue. Much more:

But most of the time we can simply choose to not be busy. Yes, this means less important things won’t get done, gasp! But… if they’re less important, who cares? This isn’t lazy, this is smart.

Problems with busyness arise when we feel like victims. “Gawd, if only I wasn’t so busy I would do xyz instead.” But, if it’s actually more important, why not do that instead. And if it’s not as important, stop stressing over not doing it!

Would you rather complete less important things and be busy and stressed all the time, or would you rather focus on what’s important, not caring for the unimportant, and having a more relaxing and less stressed life?

A Lack of Time is a Lack of Priorities – ALex Vermeer, alexvermeer.com (April 2013)

Read the full piece if you want to think about urgent versus important – which is a fair point – and not a gigantic amount else.

RTFM – but what a beautiful manual to read

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I got my start writing computer manuals. Wait. I got my start in BBC local radio. I got a lot of starts. I’m still starting. But one of them was that I was employed writing computer manuals. It’s called being a technical author and I’m afraid there was a big part of me that always heard that as only technically being an author.

There was a woman – sorry, I’ve forgotten her name, this was a very long time ago – who I felt was a kind of technical author groupie. It’s probably good that I’ve forgotten her name, then. But I don’t mean she threw her FiloFax at me, she wasn’t a groupie of mine, she was of the industry. I remember a group of us talking about our writing ambitions and she was really clear about hers: she wanted to be a technical author. Yes, I said, and then? No. Technical Author. That’s it.

I’m afraid I felt that was a pretty severe lack of ambition. But I think I was also wrong. Computer manuals to me were, yes, a way to help people use these preposterously complex tools but there was an element of me feeling they shouldn’t be that preposterously complex. One local government official phoned in to the office to say thanks: finally he understood how a particular key feature worked. Do you feel good when you get that call or not?

But.

Hopefully for this woman and certainly for some technical authors, manuals have turned into something more. Something I think you would say is art.

When you invest seven figures in securing one of the most exotic, exclusive vehicles ever made, perhaps you just expect that the owner’s manual is going to be a work of art. I don’t know, I’ve never been in that position. Every owner’s manual I’ve ever had has ended up stuffed in a glovebox, pages greasy, creased, and torn.

With the McLaren F1, mishandling the owner’s manual would be a crime — doubly so after you hear the amount of thought and effort that went into it. Mark Roberts, the man who hand-sketched the artwork for the manual leading up to the supercar’s release over 20 years ago, describes the process in a video released by McLaren this week. “We were actively encouraged to make it more and more special,” he says.

This is the most beautiful owner’s manual you’ve ever seen – Chris Ziegler, The Verge (18 October 2014)

Read more about the video and the manual in full piece on The Verge.

Ironically, we miscounted and missed Spreadsheet Day

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Well, certainly I did. If you had a party and spent last Friday dancing on pivot tables, you are a far better spreadsheety kind of person than I am. But where it seems as if every day of the year is now a Day of Something, the fact is that you probably just thought yes, there’s bound to be a spreadsheet listing all those days.

Spreadsheets are used for lists, they are used for sorting, they are are used to create the most almighty huge cockups in history. But they are also used for numbers. There isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t have a spreadsheet. Microsoft used to run adverts for its spreadsheet with a strapline that went something like this: “Excel is used in 99% of companies. What are we doing wrong?”

Microsoft Excel is a weird one. Even though it has similar issues to Microsoft Word, it’s also clearly got different DNA. I think that it’s typical Microsoft that the company doesn’t care how one of its major apps works in a different way to another one – look at how you change size of the displayed page on screen – but it’s also a sign that the teams are different. Somehow I like that even as I don’t like it, it’s simultaneously sloppy and individual.

If you think that it’s ridiculous to project individuality and sloppiness onto a piece of software, well, there is nothing I can say to change your mind. Equally, if you’d told me 35 years ago that spreadsheets would become the power they are, it would’ve helped. I’d have invested in VisiCalc.

Sorry? Never heard of VisiCalc? You’ve seen its influence. You’ve felt its influence, both for good and bad.

On this day in 1979, a computer program called VisiCalc first shipped for the Apple II platform, marking the birth of the spreadsheet, a now-ubiquitous tool used to compile everything from grocery lists to Fortune-500 company accounts. And that’s why October 17th is Spreadsheet Day, celebrated by fans of the form.

Behold the awesome power of the spreadsheet, destroyer of worlds – Jason Karaian, Quartz (October 17, 2014)

As I say, before you celebrate by taking the rest of the day off, this 35th anniversary was last Friday. Look at the title of that piece celebrating it, though. Celebrating. With the words ‘destroyer of worlds’ in the title. It’s not as if Karaian is kidding, either. Read the full piece.

Weekend read: hiding through razzle dazzle

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You are reading the only sentence I may ever write about cars. That was it. Right there. You’re welcome to re-read it, but you’ve already got everything out of it about cars that I have ever or will know. It is for want of trying. But still, this fascinated me: new cars are being tested out in public and they are painted in the most astonishing crazy ways – in order to hide them:

It seems that the adoption of “dazzle” to hide car designs coincided with the explosion of consumer cameras, and more so with the ubiquity of smartphones. GM told me that the practice began in the late 1980s, but didn’t really explode until the 1990s. “In recent years with the rise of smartphones and mobile internet devices, the vehicle camouflaging technique has really escalated to a technique used for the entire lineup,” the company’s reps added.

So, how does it work? Dazzle camouflage sounds oxymoronic: Why would you cover something you want to disguise with vivid, contrast-heavy patterns? It’s actually one of the primary concepts of camo, found both in nature and manmade systems. Think of a white tiger with black stripes. Those stripes run perpendicular to the line of the lion’s limbs, and in this way, they break up the continuous form of the animal itself. Along the same lines, Army camouflage is designed to break up the lines of soldiers’ arms and legs.

How Automakers Use a WWI-Era Camo Technique to Disguise Prototype Cars – Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, Gizmodo (17 October 2014)

It’s a fascinating article that takes in the history of ships where camouflage was a bit more life-and-death than a car marker’s bottom line. Read the full piece.

Factoid: we’re allowed to make up words

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We’re writers. We can do this. There’s precedence. You already know that Shakespeare, when stuck for the right phrase, would sooner make it up than consult a thesaurus, but he wasn’t alone. And sometimes writers create words that then run away from them, that escape their writer and come to mean something else:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

The Origins of Writerly Words – Paul Dickson, Time (30 April 2014)

Read the full Time magazine piece.

Eat that

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Okay, so, there is no question but that the best food in the world is dark chocolate and that the best drink in the world is builders’-strength Yorkshire Tea. Easy. Some poor eejits don’t realise this, though, and have gone off on some damn fool idealistic crusade to find out what foods make you sleep well and which ones keep you up.

Tossing and turning. Long, sleepless nights. They’re draining, frustrating, and, well, exhausting—physically and mentally. And they’re usually unnecessary, experts say, but can be counteracted by minor dietary tweaks. Indeed, what you put in your mouth can directly affect how many ZZZs come out. “The majority of people with day-to-day insomnia could be sleeping like puppies if they made just a few changes,” says Jacob Teitelbaum, medical director of the Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers, which are located nationwide, and author of From Fatigued to Fantastic. “And if you know how to eat right? You’re going to be way ahead of the game.”

From cherries to almonds, consider these soothing, snooze-inducing foods:

Bananas. Make them a daily staple. They’re packed with potassium and magnesium, nutrients that double as natural muscle relaxants. Plus, they contain the sleep-inducing amino acid tryptophan, which ultimately turns into serotonin and melatonin in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation; melatonin is a chemical that promotes sleepiness. It takes about an hour for tryptophan to reach the brain, so plan your snack accordingly.

[See: Top-Rated Diets Overall]

Sleep-Promoting (and Sleep-Stealing) Foods – Angela Haupt, US News (19 July 2012)

Bananas are just the first of the good ones and there some bad boys in there too. Read the full piece.

Handiest. Thing. Ever. Make and take phone calls on your Mac

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If you’re the kind of person who leaves your iPhone in a pocket or purse placed inconveniently across the room, you’ll appreciate the ability to answer an incoming call with your Mac. You can also initiate calls from your Mac—to the other person, the call will look like it’s coming from your iPhone, but you’ll be chattering away with your Mac’s built-in microphone and speakers. For this to work you have to configure both your Mac and iPhone.

How to make and receive iPhone calls with your Mac – Christopher Breen, Macworld (17 October 2014)

This is the thing I think I am most looking forward to using now that I’ve moved from the OS X Yosemite beta to the final release. In theory it worked before but I had problems and put them down to the beta nature of it all. Plus I just put it down, decided to do it again some day.

That day is now. Or it would be if I were back at my office. I’m away with my iPad and I have already used that to make and receive calls. The audio quality is subtly different but receiving calls sounds great and making calls sounds fine. I love how it just happened, too. I’d left my iPhone in my office and was reading something on my iPad somewhere else in the house when the phone rang – and then so did my iPad. One tap and I was taking that call. Gorgeous.

So I know I’ll use that again and I know that I’ll use it when my Mac is doing it too. Maybe even more so: I do a lot of phone interviews so I’m assuming I will be able to use Audio Hijack Pro to record these. This could even transform my biggest problem of prevaricating before phoning people. When they are one tap away, I’m going to tap.

If you’re using iOS 8 on an iPhone and an iPad, those two already work together, you’re set. If you want to do it with your Mac too, you need to do a couple of things. Read this full piece on Macworld for exactly how to do it.