Self Distraction

Self Distraction

(Lots of) Music to Write By

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I do use music while I’m writing. If I’m doing something that needs pace and energy, I’ll play something loud and strong. If I just need to cut out the rest of the world, I used to often tell iTunes to give me an hour’s music and I’d just write until it stopped.

Not true.

I used to intend to do that but when the music would stop I regularly carried on because I didn’t notice.

One or twice I’ve sat with headphones on and nothing playing, again occasionally because I’ve forgot but sometimes to just cut out some sound, cut out some people.

Now I’ve got a newfound addiction to Apple Music and its 30 million tracks – just a moment ago, I called out to my iphone “Hey, Siri, play Eighties pop music” and that’s exactly what it’s doing.

What I have never done and can’t imagine ever doing is compiling a list of music to suit certain writing moods. But this is the age of the internet, if it can be imagined, it’s been imagined and it’s right here:

Within that little writerly brain of yours in incredible potential. So many ideas, so many intricate plots and mind-boggling character arcs. You’re amazing, really. Oh, consider the possibilities if you had the proper music selection to listen to for each and every scene?

Welcome to SoundFuel, the only writing music directory you’ll ever need!

Music is like a drug – a very powerful one. It stimulates our brains, pricks at our hearts and ignites in us a soaring range of emotions. Music is the fuel that every wordsmith needs to craft excellent works of literature. Whatever the mood, genre or theme you may be looking for, you’ll find scores of epic soundtracks to fuel your creativity and enhance your writing experience!

SoundFuel – Music You Can’t Write Without : The Directory

They’re right that this is a directory rather than a list: my calling it a list is like taking the old Yellow Pages phone books and calling them a leaflet. There is a lot of music here. A lot. In the time it will take you to just read the directory you could’ve actually written something.

But who wants to do that?

Read the full piece. And thanks to Alex Townley who found and shared with the same combination of who-would-do-this and secretly oooh-might-be-handy attitude that I’ve now got.

Not too hot, not too loud

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I may be addicted to Apple Music but there’s an argument that I should turn it down a bit. Also, in a week when it’s been bleedin’ hot, there’s a more obvious argument that cooler equals better.

This is an interesting piece about our whole working environment, from noise to temperature and how it affects our creativity. Here’s a bit about music:

Far from blasting music through out headphones, it turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity. Ambient noise gets our creative juices flowing unlike silence, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do.

Here’s how it works: moderate noise levels increase processing difficulty which promotes abstract processing, leading to higher creativity. Or, in other words, when we struggle just enough to process things as we normally would, we resort to more creative approaches.

In high noise levels, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently. I know I’ve felt this when it’s lunchtime in my co-working space, or my neighbors are renovating their apartment while I’m trying to work.

How to Optimize Your Environment for Creativity with The Perfect Temperature, Lighting and Noise Levels – Belle Beth Cooper, Bufferapp Blog (12 February 2014)

Read the full piece.

Via Lifehacker.

The Onion: Study: Majority Of Time Machine Owners Use Device Primarily To Get Couple More Hours Of Sleep

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EVANSTON, IL—In a study published Thursday that looked into the most prevalent uses of the groundbreaking technology, researchers from Northwestern University confirmed that the majority of time machine owners are primarily using their devices in order to get a couple more hours of sleep. “Among those individuals who have designed and assembled a fully operational machine that is capable of transporting them through the fabric of space and time, we found that most did so as a means of catching up on sleep,” lead researcher Jessica Farber told reporters, who noted that time travelers regularly forgo the exploration of historically significant or pivotal time periods in favor of conveying themselves back a few hours from the present so that they can curl up in their bed or futon and enjoy a little extra rest.

Study: Majority Of Time Machine Owners Use Device Primarily To Get Couple More Hours Of Sleep – News In Brief, The Onion (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Friday read: Wimbledon’s other servers

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LONDON—Outside, it’s about 35 degrees Celsius (95F) and close to 100 percent humidity. Hat-wearing tennis lovers fan themselves with genteelly flailing limbs, or whatever else they have to hand, while they sip on a cup of Pimm’s. Down here, though, away from the punishing sun and thronging crowds, I’m bathed in the soothing susurration of servers (of the computer variety), and—more importantly—some really powerful air conditioning.

At the heart of Wimbledon lies the IBM bunker – Sebastian Anthony, Ars Technica (2 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

How often should you breathe?

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You go right ahead and breathe all you like. You don’t need anyone’s permission. But a singer turned public speaking coach says:

How often should you breathe? At the very least, at the end of every sentence! If you are prone to rushing through your speech or presentation, then practice breathing at every punctuation mark — it will force you to slow down.

As a former opera singer, I know how much breathing affects how a voice sounds. Singers must use deep breathing in order to project a strong voice across a crowded auditorium to reach every single person in the audience. I never thought that this skill would help me once I left the field of opera — until I had to give my first speech. Then, I realized how much my operatic training made me a powerful public speaker.

Now, having taught public speaking and presentation skills for over a decade, I can say with confidence that the ability to harness your breath is one of the most important and least taught areas within public speaking. It’s critical when you’re speaking up in a meeting and it’s crucial when you’re giving a speech or presentation. It’s one of the key elements of executive presence.

Breathing Is the Key to Persuasive Public Speaking – Allison Shapira, Harvard Business Review (30 June 2015)

One of my problems is racing on to the next sentence and the next. It sometimes comes across as enthusiasm and that does get transmitted, but more often it’s just hard to hear what I said. Read the full piece.

Prepare yourself mentally for a holiday

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Not in the sense that you’ll feel good if you pretend you have a holiday coming. Rather in the sense that if you dread holidays or you dread how you feel at the start of them plus everybody around you can’t bear your company until halfway through the trip, you can do something about it in advance.

As you start your vacation, you’ll want to relax as quickly as possible. But a more effective approach is to transition slowly, allowing your mind and body to get used to the change, particularly if your prep time was very stressful. Research shows that stress can dampen our immune system. It’s true that stress hormones like cortisol prop us up for a time. But if we relax too quickly, letting go of that support before our immune system can recuperate, we can expose ourselves to illness. So maintain a similar level of mental and physical activity for the first few days of your holiday then ease into full relaxation.

Get in the Right State of Mind for Vacation – Alexander Caillet, Jeremy Hirshberg and Stefano Petti, Harvard Business Review (29 June 2015)

Read the full piece for a lot more advice on how to treat your holiday as a job.

Clickhole: How much of a grammar nerd are you?

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Fill out the Clickhole poll that includes options such as:

I disregard ransom notes if their punctuation is incorrect.
My father once split an infinitive, and I did not attend his funeral.
I know that there is only one sentence in the history of written language that requires an exclamation mark.

How much of a grammar nerd are you? – no author listed, Clickhole (15 April 2015)

Read the full piece because it is typically excellent and just cutting enough.

OmniFocus: save everything to it

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ofWhat do I mean by everything? EVERYTHING.

If it’s something you have to do, if it’s something you want to do, if it’s something that might turn into something that has to be done by somebody, save it in OmniFocus and worry about it later. Get it into OmniFocus’s inbox and get it out of your head.

When you get time, go through that inbox and have a think. You’ll find that you delete a lot, you mark many others as done, and the rest you have a proper ponder about. Slot this task into that project, add a date or don’t – preferably don’t – and do what’s called processing everything. When it’s all slotted away and your inbox is clear, everything is off your mind and it’s all in your one OmniFocus system.

This came up in a mentoring session I did earlier this week that, unusually, was dedicated solely to the use of OmniFocus. It was for a fella whose workload made me go pale and who has been handling it all on paper. Now he’s taken to OmniFocus like an evangelist in the making, but I think he has one issue left.

What I’ve said to him is that if he gets into the habit of saving everything to OmniFocus, he will come to know that everything is in there. No more wondering if there’s another list in another notebook. I’m lighter for knowing where I am with everything, even if right now I’m under the cosh with too much to do.

The thing for this fella is that he will have to work to make the habit of saving everything to OmniFocus and especially so because he uses a PC. There’s no OmniFocus for PC. Here on a Mac, even as I write to you, I can tap a couple of keys and add a task in to OmniFocus 2 for OS X while it crosses my mind, but he will in theory have to stop working and get out his iPad.

I’m advising him to instead use email a lot. I’ve already shown him how when somebody emails you with something you’ve got to do, you can forward it on to OmniFocus and it will land in your inbox. The subject of the message will be the name of the task and the content of the email will be in the task’s notes.

But you can also just email OmniFocus yourself. Got a stray thought? Email it in to OmniFocus.

It’s not the same as having the To Do app in front of you all day, every day, but that’s not a bad thing. Get used to checking it regularly and get very used to saving everything to OmniFocus and you can then spend the rest of your time actually working on all these things you’ve got to do.

Annie Lennox on staying creative and relevant

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It’s just one small part of an interview she did for Harvard Business Review back in 2010 but one small part is all the excuse I need to recommend you read the lot:

She was asked what the secret is staying relevant?

Curiosity, and not allowing yourself to be boxed in or easily categorized. In pop music you have to be prepared to take risks. Not everything is going to be to everyone’s taste. But you stay alive artistically.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Annie Lennox – Alison Beard, Harvard Business Review (October 2010)

Read the full piece.

Full screen mode on notebooks

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And the unexpected benefits of what seemed like a thing I’d never use.

So, previously: my gorgeous 27in iMac is away off with the faeries – i.e. being seen to by Apple – and while it’s gone, I’m working on my old and I had thought underpowered MacBook Pro. It’s not underpowered. For the most part it’s doing its job well, I am doing my job fine. It’s got a broken keyboard but I’ve plugged in my iMac’s one and that’s all tickety-boo fine.

What’s really changed is that I’ve started using the Mac’s Full Screen jobbie. In pretty much any software you use on a Mac, you can tap a button or press a key to make that app fill the screen – and hide everything else. I have never used it before. I don’t want 27 inches of white blazing out at me when I’m writing.

Plus, it’s a slightly clunky idea because of the way you get back from this full screen lark to regular larking. You mouse up a bit until the menu bar reappears, then you find the button. Somehow a bit ugly.

Yet with a much smaller screen, I tried using this in one app and I’ve liked it so much that I’m using it in every app. I find I can swap between these full screen applications like moving from Word to Safari without closing the full screen, moving to the other app and reopening the full screen. Just the usual Command-Tab takes me through full screens.

Not always very smoothly. I seem to end up paused, hovering over the desktop for a time while it all figures itself out. But usually, I’m in Safari now, I’m in Mail next, it’s a quick thing and not anywhere near as disruptive to concentration as I thought.

But here’s the thing. Concentration. What I didn’t appreciate was that full screen apps hide their menu bar and that means they hide the clock. Hiding the clock turns out to be excellent: I could focus on the thing I was doing and spend whatever time it took. Of course, I have to leave for a meeting in a while so I couldn’t ignore time altogether but for about 90 minutes, I could.

Time passed but I was entirely focused on the job and if I sometimes longed for a tea break, I didn’t once stop to think about whether I had enough time to carry on.

If you’re not on a Mac, thank you for reading this far, and go find a way to switch off that damn clock. It’ll help you.