Self Distraction
Self Distraction
Recommended: Drafts 4 for iPhone and iPad
I keep mentioning this software Drafts 4 and often it’s entirely unconscious, more a consequence of how I write so much in it than through any deliberate plan to sell it to you. But I got the chance to expand on exactly why I like it so much when MacNN made it the topic of a Living With column. These are pieces about what something is like after a lot of use, after a long time. It’s interesting because most technology pieces are about today’s new releases and there is only so much you can possibly learn in a short review.
Whereas with a long process of reflection like this, there’s time to have discovered:
It is just a place to write. More than a text editor, less than a word processor, I have been opening it up to write down the odd stray thought for a couple of years. I’ve been opening it up to write the minutes of a meeting. To write a short story. To prepare a script for a presentation. If my brain isn’t somehow befuddled into believing I must open some other writing tool, I automatically open Drafts.
If that were all I did — open, write, rinse, repeat — then I’d be more than happy. I cannot, cannot define or explain this, but there is something pleasurable about writing in Drafts, about the physical typing of words into it, that I don’t get in Word or Pages.
Living With: Drafts 4 (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (27 May 2015)
It isn’t all I do in Drafts 4. Read the full piece for more detail, more explanation and even more enthusing.
Drafts 4 is available for iOS and costs £7.99 in the App Store.
Expand your comfort zone
I’m a big fan of doing the unusual thing. Sometimes in big ways. Often in small and daily ways to mix things up. Why? Because this habit is a simple and relatively easy way to… expand your comfort zone. And if you change your perspective on yourself from someone who sticks to the old and comfortable all the time to someone who likes to mix things up then it will feel more natural and easier to break out of your comfort zone when comes to bigger things too. Because this habit makes the inner resistance and the fear that may hold you back smaller.
Read the full piece though myself, I can only take a certain amount of positivity per day so I’m reading this 20-strong list over the next couple of weeks.
How Email became the Most Reviled Communication Experience Ever
Am I the only person who actually likes email? Apparently so.
It wasn’t until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and ripping the cord out of the wall. (He couldn’t do the same at work, but I suspect he wanted to.) This abject fear and loathing of a telecommunications technology, and the radical step Honan took to escape it—not mitigate, not reframe, not “fix,” but escape—got me curious about how we got to this point. What are the actual, fundamental design flaws—if any—with email? What makes it such a huge target for “fixing,” yet so resistant to it?
Read the full piece for advice on coping with email plus a little history of it. I enjoyed the history more but seemingly I’m a freak. I’m okay with that.
I Am Living List
Writer Lindsey Bailey’s new blog includes one of the most inspiring and definitely the bravest thing I’ve seen online: a list of what she wants to do. That’s it, just a list. But there are entire worlds in some of the briefest entries and as you read on, you actually start to cheer as you reach ones she’s crossed off.
So here is my declaration; a list filled with big and little things that I dream of doing. Inspired by Sean Ogle’s idea that publishing this list makes you more accountable… below is my ‘I am living’ list.
I Am Living List – Lindsey Bailey, lindseybaileywrites.com (June 2015)
Have a read of it on her site.
Then when you have done, you can do what I did and prevaricate about doing the same thing yourself by instead going on to read Alex Townley’s response:
It’s more like free writing or word vomit, or possibly therapy, so I apologise in advance, but I’m blaming this on a friend and colleague of mine Lindsey Bailey, who has just launched her own website you can visit here (and very fine it is too). She has a section devoted to what she calls her ‘I am Living List’. A sort of fancy to do list of big and small things she’d like to do at some point. It made me start pondering, which led to thinking, which led to endless adding, first of things for my own ‘To Do’ list and secondly for those things which missed that list, those things which should have been on it, but never made it, because they’d already been done. So this is two lists, one of things I’d like to do, and a second, below it, of the surprising (to me at least) amount of vaguely noteworthy things I’m really glad I’ve done. Both lists I suspect are endless, but posting this will hopefully make me draw a mental line under them both in my head, and get on with something useful…. To Do List
This is not (really) a blog post – Alex Townley, love.bake.learn.make.laugh (11 June 2015)
So what are you waiting for? I can tell you that I personally am waiting for you to write a list like this so that I can read it to postpone writing mine.
The Onion: New App Lets You Work for your Company Even While You Sleep
The Secret Life of Word Processors
Half of the fun of this is how old it is – it was first aired 22 years ago – but it’s also a bit of a historical document about how our favourite tool began.
The straightforward and the scary of text editors
Listen, text editor or word processor: they’re both ugly terms and you can probably marshal brilliantly incisive definitions for what they are and why they are different but they both things you can write in. I think of a word processor as being something capable of handling complex books and a text editor as something for notes. But I have written – hang on, let me check, – just shy of 300 articles for MacNN.com this year and every one of them was in a text editor.
Some of them have been about text editors and I want to show you two that I think represent extremes of this market plus a third I say lies in the middle but which I adore. The first is Simplenote, which was recommended to me by MacNN’s Charles Martin and after a couple of months using it I wrote:
Start quick, get on with writing, finish and move on. There isn’t a Save button in Simplenote, and we just had to look to find that out: it never occurs to us to save, we just know everything always is saved. Compare that to Pages, where Apple tells us it is constantly saving yet we can’t shake that command-s keystroke twitch. One reason we trust Simplenote so readily is that we can see the result: write something on the Mac version, and it’s right there on the iOS one immediately.
We also like the fact that we often compile pieces we’ve written in a dozen different places, and can just paste them all in. No remembering to find some Paste As Special tick box, no reformatting, no format painter, just text right in. That suits us well for weblinks, too, as they just go in as text the way we intended.
Hands On: Simplenote 4.1.1 (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (16 June 2015)
Simplenote is simple but not all that powerful and nor does it need to be. At the other end, though, you get Editorial. While Simplenote is across Mac, iOS, Android and – via the web – also PCs, Editorial is only for iPad and iPhone. It is so powerful that it honestly frightens me:
Look at the improvements in version 1.2, a more significant update from 1.1 than it sounds. It adds folding for Markdown and TaskPaper, it’s got new bundled workflows, and behind that blank screen, it has new modules for its native programming language, called Python.
If you don’t know what all this means, then in theory you never have to. You can ignore every bit of it, and just write in Editorial whatever you need to write. Yet that would be like buying one of those pens where you have to click to get the ballpoint nib out — and then never clicking it. You could make marks on the paper, but you’d know you were denying yourself the ink and color this app is capable of.
It’s capable of so much that Editorial has fans. Microsoft Word doesn’t, but Editorial so definitely does. Nobody’s actually called it life-changing yet, but they have called it worklife-changing, and they weren’t kidding.
Hands On: Editorial 1.2 (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (17 June 2015)
Since I wrote that review I’ve kept Editorial on my iPad but I can’t help myself, I keep turning to Drafts 4 to write. I love that app and I love that while for some indefinable reason I just enjoy writing in it, it also has some welly.
I’ll open it in a flash, write something immediately and only then think about where I’m going to use it. I’ll write down a stray thought and maybe seeing it there on the screen I’ll think yes, that’s something I should definitely do – so I’ll tap one button and the text goes off to my To Do app, OmniFocus. Maybe I think that’s something I should tell Angela – so I’ll tap one button and it’s sent to her by text message. And on and on and on. As many things as I can need or think of, and all with one button. Sometimes that button takes a lot of setting up, but once it’s done, I can tap away at will.
I think what’s significant is that there is such a range now of software you can write in. So much so that I can spend happy hours trying them all out instead of actually writing anything. Excellent.
Stop waiting
There are limits here: if you want to quit your job then you should indeed wait until you can do it but what you shouldn’t is wait to begin. Start doing the thing that will get you out. Start now. Stop waiting.
Productive people sometimes confuse the difference between reasonable delay and true procrastination. The former can be useful (“I’ll respond to this email when I have more time to write it”). The latter is, by definition, self-defeating (“I should respond to this email right now, and I have time, and my fingers are on the keys, and the Internet connection is perfectly strong, and nobody is asking me to do anything else, but I just … don’t … feel like it.”).
When scientists have studied procrastination, they’ve typically focused on how people are miserable at weighing costs and benefits across time. For example, everybody recognizes, in the abstract, that it’s important to go to the dentist every few months. The pain is upfront and obvious—dental work is torture—and the rewards of cleaner teeth are often remote, so we allow the appointment to slip through our minds and off our calendars. Across several categories including dieting, saving money, and sending important emails, we constantly choose short and small rewards (whose benefits are dubious, but immediate) over longer and larger payouts (whose benefits are obvious, but distant).
In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion. Procrastination “really has nothing to do with time-management,” Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told Psychological Science. “To tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”
The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It – Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (26 August 2015)
Read the full piece. Via Inc.com and Lifehacker.
Writing as a career – in 1940s America
Say, are you a young boy looking to make a career in hard news journalism or a young girl who wants to write about cake decorations? Never fear: Arthur P. Twogood tells you all you need to know in this instructional careers video from around the 1940s. Apart from a so-painful-it’s-funny segment about women journalists, it is rather fist-on-your-chin fascinating to see how news writing used to be. If you redid this video today, we’d see someone receive a PR email, copy and paste it into a website and go home.