Self Distraction
The full episode from The Lucy Show, first aired 12 December 1966 – 47 years, 5 months and 15 days ago – this is a Lucile Ball comedy about what happens when a Time and Motion kinda guy interferes at work.
Apparently it is now out of copyright – if you know that’s wrong for any reason, do tell me so I can remove this.
It was written by Ray Singer, Milt Josefberg and directed by Maury Thompson. Starring Lucille Ball and Phil Silvers.
Via Swiss Miss
SANTA BARBARA, CA—Offering advice to those who feel overwhelmed at the thought of becoming massive failures, a group of experts reported this week that the best way to approach a crippling defeat is to break it down into a set of smaller and more manageable setbacks. “The key to failing on a monumental scale is to take life one small misstep at a time,” life coach Jack V. Royce told reporters, emphasizing that people who hit absolute rock bottom seldom get there overnight.
Do read the whole thing, okay? Thanks.
My iPhone rings, I answer it. Other people, they turn it into art. This is the reason to tell you this today: a music producer named MetroGnome has released this:
He looks like he’s working an LCARS computer from Star Trek, but he also looks a bit talented. Nonetheless, I do prefer this slightly older piece by Mars Argo:
Writer Ken Armstrong's weekly blog this time covers the technological way to feel like you're not doing enough. Or anything. He has a Sky+ box and:
…now, alas, my beloved box seemed to have turned on me. It has become, for me at least, a whole new way to underachieve. It’s over there now, taunting me. I can feel its red eye upon me.
Just read it. And the go read the Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff every week. Like I do.
UNICEF – seriously, UNICEF? – has released an app called PlayTimer which is specifically built to make you put that bloody iPhone down and go play with your kid:
Together with your child you can set how long you are going to play for and then take your child’s photo to set the playtimer. This will then lock your phone and show a black screen. If the phone is touched in locked mode – say, by a parent checking their work email – an alarm will go off. You can only turn the alarm off by taking another picture of your child – proof that you’re still playing with them. (In case of emergency, you will still see incoming calls and can make emergency calls, as no app has the power to over-ride your phone lock settings.)
UNICEF’s new app lets your children confiscate your smartphone Katherine Crisp (15 May 2014)
Read more on the UNICEF blog here or go straight to downloading the free app from the App Store
Thinking about this morning’s story that Experts are wrong – says expert, I’m minded of a Self Distract post I wrote last year.
I wrote about how we naturally turn to our friends when we have something big to tell them like you’re starting a company and they cheer you on, yet:
Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one… who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.
Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.
You’re on Your Own and it’s Necessary – William Gallagher, Self Distract (December 2013)
If you can’t rely on your friends, who can you rely on? Sorry, did you really just say ‘family’? You might’ve said experts until you read this morning’s story. But there are other reasons to distrust experts. So, no friends, no family, no experts. You would think this piece would be a depressing read but I took some heart from writing it and I’ve had a lot of people tell me they found it encouraging.
Probably because it also includes the answer. You’ve got to look now, haven’t you? I hope you like it: that Self Distract piece meant much more to me than I realised before I wrote it. The act of writing it to you formed it better in my head, made me think more coherently. So ta for that.
Apple has released its iOS Human Interface Guidelines as a free iBook. And the thing of it is that even if you don’t like Apple, even if you’re looking at me like that because you can’t conceive of being interested in interfaces, the book is a good read. I think everything is interesting, except football, and behind anything is a lot of thought. Read this to see what lies behind the apps we use every day.
From iOS Human Interface Guidelines, free on the iBooks Store
That’s a page recommending that an app just gets on with it. No fancy startup screen, just wallop straight in there.
Startup screens, sometimes called splash screens, are where a company’s logo or the app’s name are displayed at the start. Lots of people hate these and argue that they’d rather get on with using the software but the splash is often there because it takes time for certain apps to load and the alternative is that you have nothing to look at. The alternative is that you wouldn’t be sure it had even started. So they can be necessary. But Apple is really keen on you making apps that load quickly enough that you don’t need them.
I read the old Mac Human Interface Guidelines in paperback a lot of years ago and I’ve never designed a Mac app. It’s still like getting a peek at a philosophy of craft. I don’t believe there’s a Microsoft or an Android equivalent book but I’d read it if there were. Mind you, Microsoft has done something similar in blogs and I did read those until they suddenly took a daft turn into being demonstrably ridiculous. That’s where I read about a redesign of Microsoft Word and its last blog post showed a final screenshot and you could see what huge flaws remained.
Penny Anne O’Donnell of Relaxation Direct came to one of my The Blank Screen workshops and in the Twitter nattering that’s followed since, we were in a conversation about the use of music while working. Her advice:
It depends on the music, learning style and ability to focus. Baroque and Mozart are conducive to focused attention
Right now I’m listening to Hallelujah by kd lang from Hymns of the 49th Parallel and – no, wait, now it’s Useless Desires by Patty Driffin. I have an iTunes playlist of music that I especially love. Just single tracks that have got in my head and stayed there, that I have played so often and so much on repeat that I can hear every instrument in my head. I call it Discoveries and there are current 146 songs in it, apparently the lot lasts me 9 hours 34 minutes. Very often now I will start that playlist on shuffle and get to work.
Sometimes it makes me concentrate tremendously, sometimes it doesn’t. (Like now when I’m very conscious of it all because I’ve said to you what’s on. Currently Four Leaf Clover by Abra Moore. Some years ago I discovered Lilith Fair and there is a lot, I mean a lot, of music from that in this playlist.)
When it stops me concentrating, I’ve recently turned to iTunes Radio. You can currently only get this in America but I have both a US and a UK iTunes account so I can swap to it and listen away. At first it was tremendous but lately there’s ever more ads in it and I could get those from commercial radio here. For some reason I can take spoken word, I just can’t work through an ad. I used to listen to BBC Radio 4 all day but it got strange. I’d not consciously realise I’d heard a minute of it but I’d go switch on the TV news and know every detail of every story.
I’d like to now take you through my every musical thought – I’ve started skipping just so I can tell you that next up is You, Me and the Bourgeoisie by The Submarines and then Monday Morning by Liz Lawrence and I Know I Know I Know by Tegan and Sara – but there has to be a better way. A more statistically useful way. And by chance, Lifehacker this week decided to look back into its archive for exactly this purpose:
This week, we’re reviving a particularly old post listing some of the best music and sounds for productivity, as crowdsourced by the Lifehacker commentariat of 2009.P
Does Music Really Make You More Productive? The answer falls somewhere between “Listening to Mozart makes you a genius” and “Just be quiet and work.”P
The most often cited study into the question of music’s effect on the mind involves the so-called Mozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of music—Amadeus Wolfgang’s classical works, in particular—impacts and boosts one’s spatial-temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long-term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise. The Mozart effect has been overblown and over-promised, and even outright refuted as having “bupkiss” effect, but that doesn’t mean a great mind-juicing playlist can’t be created.
Check out the full article because it might be a bit inconclusive about the answer to whether you can work better with music, but it does have a lot of links out to different types you can try.
I’m now on Mississippi by Sheryl Crow, incidentally. Want my complete Discoveries playlist? You’re mad. But here it is:
Across the Universe (Fiona Apple)
Afortunada (Francisca Valenzuela)
After All (Dar Williams)
Ageing Superhero (Newton Faulkner)
Another Green World (Brian Eno)
Answer Me (Barbara Dickson)
Backstreets (Bruce Springsteen)
Because the Night (Patti Smith)
Been It (Cardigans)
The Bell & the Anchor (Catherine Feeny)
Better Love Next Time (Caryl Mack Parker)
The Big Bang Theory theme (full)
Bitch (Meredith Brooks)
Boom Boom Boom (The Iguanas)
Born to Hum (Erin McKeown)
Brand New Day (Ryan Star)
Breathe (Alex Murdoch)
Brilliant Disguise (Bruce Springsteen)
Brimful of Asha (Cornershop)
Broadcast News
Building The Barn (Maurice Jarre)
By Way Of Sorrow (Cry Cry Cry)
Change of Time (Josh Ritter)
Dance Me To the End of Love (Live) (Leonard Cohen)
Dance The Night Away (The Mavericks)
Devils & Dust (Bruce Springsteen)
Don’t Come Around Here No More (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers)
Don’t Let Your Feet Touch Ground (Ash Koley)
Don’t Look Back (She & Him)
Dry the Rain (from High Fidelity) (Beta Band)
Dulce (Francisca Valenzuela)
The Enterprise (Star Trek) (Jerry Goldsmith)
Everywhere I Go (Lissie)
Fall At Your Feet (Crowded House)
Fall to Pieces (Avril Lavigne)
Find The River (R.E.M.)
Fine (Julia Fordham & Paul Reiser)
Fools Rush In (She & HIm)
Four Leaf Clover (Abra Moore)
Hallelujah (k.d. lang)
Handle With Care (Traveling Wilburys)
Handy Man (James Taylor)
He Thinks He’ll Keep Her (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
Hero (Regina Spektor)
Ho Hey (The Lumineers)
Hounds of Love (Kate Bush)
How Deep is Your Love (Sharleen Spiteri)
I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) (Stevie Wonder)
I Don’t Wanna Be The One (Patricia Conroy)
I Don’t Want A Lover (Texas)
I Know I Know I Know (Tegan And Sara)
I Turn My Camera On (Spoon)
If Anyone Falls (Stevie Nicks)
If I Can’t Have You (Sharleen Spiteri)
If You Could See (Lucy Kaplansky)
In Demand (Texas)
An Innocent Man (Billy Joel)
It’s Sonata Mozart (The Kids from Fame)
It’s Too Late (Carole King)
Jack and Diane (John Cougar Mellencamp)
Jive Talkin’ (Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately)
King Of The Mountain (Kate Bush)
Kiss Me (Sixpence None the Richer)
Let Loose the Horses (The Rescues)
Life Boat (Miranda Lee Richards)
Linger (The Cranberries)
Linus and Lucy (Vince Guaradli Trio)
Living Next Door to Alice (Smokie)
Love Is Everything (k.d. lang)
Mary’s Prayer (Danny Wilson)
Memories Of East Texas (Michelle Shocked)
The Men Below (Latin Quarter)
Michael And Hope’s New Baby (W.G. Snuffy Walden)
Mississippi (Sheryl Crow)
Monday Morning (Liz Lawrence)
Moonlighting Theme – Al Jarre (Al Jarreau)
Muredete la Lengua (Francisca Valenzuela)
My Freeze Ray (Neil Patrick Harris)
Never Coming Back (Lynn Miles)
New Soul (Yael Naim)
New Year’s Prayer (Jeff Buckley)
Ocean and a Rock (Lisa Hannigan)
One and Only (Mary Black)
One Small Day (Midge Ure)
Ordinary People (Chantal Kreviazuk)
People Have the Power (Patti Smith)
Queen of Hearts (Dave Edmunds)
Radio Radio (Elvis Costello and the Attractions)
Railroad Man (Eels)
Real Gone Kid (Deacon Blue)
Rise Again (The Rankin Family)
Runaway (The Corrs)
Runaway Train (Soul Asylum)
Rush Hour (Jane Wiedlin)
Sad Eyes (Bruce Springsteen)
Sanctuary (Donna De Lory)
Self Control (Laura Branigan)
She Will Have Her Way (Neil Finn)
Shine Silently (Nils Lofgren )
Simon & Simon (extended)
Simple Song (The Shins)
Sleep (Texas)
Soak Up The Sun (Sheryl Crow)
Soda Jerk (Buffalo Tom)
Somebody That I Used to Know (Gotye)
Somebody That I Used to Know (Parody) (Key of Awesome)
Someday We’ll Be Together (Vonda Shepard)
Something New (Tanita Tikaram)
Space 1999 Year Two extended
Speaking With The Angel (Cry Cry Cry)
St Elsewhere (full theme) (Dave Grusin)
Stargate Universe
Stay (Cyndi Lauper)
Stay (Lisa Loeb)
Steppin’ Out (Joe Jackson)
Stop! (Erasure)
Summer in the City (Aztec Camera)
Sweetest Decline (Beth Orton)
Theme from Mission: Impossible (Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen)
The Thief (Lucy Kaplansky)
Thieves (She & Him)
(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long (Weird Al Yankovic)
This Woman’s Work (Kate Bush)
Trouble in the Fields (Nanci Griffith)
Truly Madly Deeply (Savage Garden)
Underneath It All (No Doubt)
Undertow (Lynn Miles)
Unravel (Lynn Miles)
Useless Desires (Patty Griffin)
The Valley Road (Bruce Hornsby)
Voodoo Child (Rogue Traders)
Walk On By (Cyndi Lauper)
“Walk on By (Live (Revamped)” (Cyndi Lauper)
Walk on By (Tony Moran mix) (Cyndi Lauper)
Wander My Friends AAC (Bear McCreary)
We Didn’t Start The Fire (Billy Joel)
What About Us (Texas)
What I Am (Edie Brickell)
What’s Up (4 Non Blondes)
Who Let In The Rain (Cyndi Lauper)
Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? (She & Him)
The Worst Day Since Yesterday (Flogging Molly)
You Just May Be The One (The Monkees)
You, Me and the Bourgeoisie (The Submarines)
Zoo Gang (Paul McCartney & Wings)
Tell me you didn’t really read this far. Go make your own list. And stop looking at me like that for mine.