Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Trello – visual To Dos for teams

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 There’s little getting away from the fact that a To Do list is a list. It’s a lot of words, ranged in a column, and if there is anything visual about it, it’s that together they look daunting. But there are things you can do and Trello is a free service that has a good stab at one of them.

Specifically this. You do end up with lists in Trello but each list is like a stack of little cards and you can drag them around. In an ideal, recommended, go-on-try-it Trello way, you might have one stack for all your tasks, then one very short stack for the thing you are doing now. You might also have a stack for the one thing you will do next. Also a stack for everything you’ve done.

When the time comes to railroad, you can look at your Next Thing To Do stack and slide the card over to the Look I’m Doing It Now stack. And then have a quick look through Everything On My Plate and drag out one card to be the Next Thing To Do.

The visual part is the dragging. It looks and feels like you’re doing this on paper on your desk and that may suit you amazingly well. I learnt of Trello from a friend for whom it works amazingly well: she can see what she’s got to do at all times.

Plus she works in a team and while they haven’t all adopted it yet – she’s the first one to try it out – they now have the option for the entire team to use the same free system and work together. 

It sounds ideal and it could be for them, it might be for you, right now it seems it definitely is for the friend who told me about it. 

It isn’t for me, though.

That’s for a lot of reasons and I think the first is down to how you spend that time picking the next thing to do. Time spent working on your list is time you could be spending on doing the tasks.

Next, the space you put these stacks of cards is called a board and not only can you have many boards, you are encouraged and expected to. Have one board for all the things that your colleagues are working on together but keep a separate, private board for all the secret trysts you get up. (I’m not judging.) 

That’s fine and my friend has many boards already, but for me it’s back down to the business of having one system for everything: how do you know you’re done when there are always other boards to check?

There is also the fact that Trello doesn’t have the oomph of something like OmniFocus. Plus it’s an online service. You use it via iOS apps on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s really an online service and you can’t use the apps when you don’t have an internet connection.

That’s bad. That’s the only thing I’d say is definitely bad: everything else I don’t like is personal preference, but the inability to use this when you’re away from a wifi hotspot is bad.

My friend tethers her wifi-only iPad to her iPhone to get it to work or sometimes she just uses it on her iPhone. So it’s not a dealbreaker for everyone and it does have this unusual visual aspect that is going to be worth a lot to many people.

So especially as it’s free, do go give Trello a spin, would you?

Habit maketh the man or woman

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There is something inescapably offensive about the idea of structure or keeping particular hours: if you’re a creative freelancer, the notion that you are tied to doing this work at that time just feels wrong.

Freelancing is about working through the night to meet one deadline, then taking an afternoon off for coffee because you can, so there.

But as unpalatable as it is, structure gets us where we’re going. I’m intrigued by how as writers we inherently grasp that for our work itself, for our fiction or our non-fiction, our books or our songs. Yet for writers as people, not so much.

Let us grasp together.

What if we don’t call it structure and instead call it habits? There’s an inevitable pairing where you have to put the word ‘bad’ next to ‘habit’, you have to. And I like that. Let’s get some bad habits.

Like I have a bad habit of a Friday when I always write a Self Distract personal blog. I have done that every Friday for something more than three years and so it’s a habit. I don’t get paid for it – though it’s led to paid work – and there are a million other things I should be doing that might get the mortgate sorted out, but Self Distract is what I do on Friday mornings.

It was an effort at first, then for the longest time it became a habit, now it’s a normality.

Self Distract is what I do on Friday mornings. No discussion, no debate, no postponement in favour of something more urgent.

Consequently I’ve written these, what, 150 or more blog posts and you have to think so what? But each one gives me some discipline, many have led to other things, some have been bought and then much later paid for. They’ve also taught me a lot. Plus the reason I did it, the reason for that initial effort, was that I knew what the benefits to my writing are when you have a deadline. I wrote columns for BBC News Online, I had a weekly thing in Radio Times for years, I know the benefit of sitting at the blank screen with no choice but to write something and write it good.

So I had practical reasons to do it and now I don’t need them, it is just what I do. I should say that I’ve written Self Distract for much, much, much longer than three years but it’s about three ago that I decided to emulate writer Ken Armstrong’s weekly pattern.

Three years in, I’ve also built on that habit. You’re reading a post from The Blank Screen website, a productivity site that ties in to my book wg and I’ll add you.

Every Friday I write this newsletter which is full of productivity advice that ranges from quite silly but excellent videos I’ve gathered to specific techniques and specific things to buy that will help you. I also have a thing where I confess to you exactly what I’ve done this week: I’m using you to make me do things so that I have something to tell you and I’m hoping to encourage you to write down or email me what you’ve done. So that you feel the weekly pressure too.

But here’s the thing. I baked a reference to Self Distract into The Blank Screen email newsletter. It is there every week, a specific link to the latest one so you can see what has to happen here. I have to write the new Self Distract first.

So I write that, publish it, then write the Blank Screen newsletter that links to it, then I publish that. That’s suddenly a couple of hours of a Friday morning and I suppose you can argue that it would be better spent earning some cash but it gives me a couple of important things.

It gives me a chance to natter with you, which is hugely important to me.

But it also gives me energy. Like going out for a walk when you’re tired can revive you, so I get to the keys early in the morning and having to write something makes me perform. I come away from the two pieces of writing feeling energetic and enthused.

It’s all artifice, it’s all contorted nonsense, but it’s a habit and it’s normal and it works well for me.

Happy Birthday Susan Hare – you don’t exist

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Facebook just sent me a notification that today is Susan Hare’s birthday. She isn’t real, I created her for some drama project. But she continues and it’s as if she has a life out there without me.

If I could remember the password to her Facebook account maybe I would delete her. But the last time I could recall it, I went in and discovered she had more friends than I do.

Well, okay, more friend requests than I’ve ever had. I wonder now whether I accepted any of them for her. I’ve got this idea now of her friends asking if she’s okay and why she isn’t posting much.

Or maybe she is posting a lot.

Maybe Susan is living the life. Got a brilliant job because her social media isn’t full of embarrassing photos. Met someone.

Maybe she’s far more productive than I am. When I work up the nerve, I’m going to search Amazon to see if she’s got a book out.

This post to you is really just a startled musing about things we create and if I were to try to bend it back to the topic of productivity, I think it would be bending. Contorting. Except, I am really taken with the notion that something I created many years ago is still going on. I can’t remember what I set up the Susan account for but the project is certainly gone yet she lives.

I’m not feeling parental, I’m not.

Author Tanith Lee dies

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This isn’t exactly productivity, though Tanith Lee was no shirker when it came to work: she reportedly wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories – and two television episodes. Guess which of that output I interviewed her for.

It was two years ago, I was researching a book on Blake’s 7 and because it was a phone interview I can do three things now: I can tell you it was 18:00 on 13 April 2013, I can tell you the call was 50’44” long and I can listen to her as I type. It is eerie and upsetting to listen to someone sounding so enthused and lively. I’ve learnt today that she died after a long illness; I don’t know if she were ill two years ago but she didn’t sound it. She sounded great and I was conscious that I felt lucky having an excuse to talk to her.

Her two television episodes were both in Blake’s 7 and they stand out. The first because it is mesmerising and the second because it was good when others around it were not.

But one of her 90+ novels is sort-of related to Blake’s 7: at least, she told me she is forever being told that she wrote a novel using characters from the show. She was entertaining about it and afterwards sent me a copy of the book so I could see for myself. I’m embarrassed to tell you that I haven’t read it yet.

You haven’t read my Blake’s 7 book because it isn’t out yet. The moment the publisher gets me a date I can tell you, I’ll tell you. But in the meantime, here’s just one tiny part of the interview. I mentioned that I thought ‘Tanith Lee’ was a fantastic name for a writer, it just felt right for one and she said:

When my mother was 15, she said when – when, not if – I have a daughter I’m going to call her Tanith. And so when she was 37 and had one, she did call her Tanith. It’s crazy, you probably know, but it’s the name of a lunar goddess. It was terrible for me when a child, it was wonderful for me as a young woman. As a middle-aged woman it was a bit worrying. But now I’m old, it’s great. It’s perfect, you know, the lunar goddess, absolutely.

Ugh. Post-It Notes work

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I’m not listening. I’m not. Don’t ever do this to me. Do Not Ever.

[Randy] Garner experimented to see how quickly people would return a follow-up survey if there was a sticky note attached and also measured how much information the person being surveyed returned if there was a sticky note attached vs. the group that received no sticky note.

Further experiments revealed that if a task is easy to perform or comply with, a simple sticky note request needs no further personalization. But, when the task is more involved, a more highly personalized sticky note was significantly more effective than a simple standard sticky note request. What makes it truly personal? Writing a brief message is effective, but adding the person’s first name at the top and your initials at the bottom causes significantly greater compliance.

I’ve used this personalization theory with business people around the world to great success. For example, a mortgage broker I worked with tested this approach in mailings, effectively doubling the number of phone calls from people pursuing a loan with the broker. And it’s not just effective at the office or with clients—the people you live with are going to respond to the sticky note model as well. (Try sticking one on the bathroom mirror and see what happens.)

The Surprising Persuasiveness of a Sticky Note – Kevin Hogan, Harvard Business Review (26 May 2015)

What would happen is that I would vomit. I’m papyrophobic. So here’s the link to read the full HBR article and here’s a link to read the entire research paper but I ain’t reading either.

Short answer: Lunch Bad, Chocolate Good

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Okay, that’s not really the finding of this video but it’s in there and I needed something to pick me up from the excessively jaunty music. Take one minute and one second to watch how eating the right thing in the right place, with chocolate and friends, is better for your afternoon’s productivity than a burrito at your desk. Not 100% sure what a burrito is.

UPDATE: the video isn’t displaying on all mobile devices. If you can’t see a cheery video below, try it on the original site.

Travel the world to become better at business. Okay.

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Putting aside that most of us will not have the ability to travel the world, there is a lot to like in this piece by Harvard Business Review writer Gillian Morris.

Except it’s also depressing. She’s positive and pragmatic, she criticises American attitudes to getting something done compared to other places where people just do it but there is something more. Her core argument is that in America, people think you apply for jobs or you hire people to do things for you whereas everywhere else you go, you have to hustle.

I’ve little against hustling. Finding a way to do something, learning it, looking for the people you need, that’s all normal and that’s even great. There’s just a line somewhere in here that bothers me. Morris speaks of the need to, for instance, give someone your leather jacket in order to get them to recommend you. There’s quite a bit about having to bribe your way along though she doesn’t use that word.

She’s been around the world and I haven’t. She’s seen extremes and I’ve worked almost exclusively in the UK and the US, nowhere else. But I come away from this feeling she thinks America’s way ought to be right, is somehow ideal, yet we’d better toughen up and learn what it’s really like out there in the world.

Go have a read yourself, would you? Gillian Morris: Travelling the World Made Me a Better Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, 26 May 2015.

Developer on why you should and how you can write in Evernote

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The Evernote blog is always very heavily pushing the use of this software – you’re understand but, still, it could lighten up once in a while – but amongst the sales talk there are good ideas. Here’s one on how this software is great for writers. I’m a writer and I use Evernote extensively. Can’t say it’s my favourite writing tool but the suggestions in this are good and also short.

In the late 1940s, Jack Kerouac wrote his iconic Beat-era novel “On the Road” in a series of notebooks. In 1951, he typed the manuscript out on a continuous 120-foot scroll of paper. It took him three weeks and, as legend has it, a friend’s dog ate the original ending.

More than six decades later, the laptop holds court where the typewriter once reigned. We still carry trusty notebooks, but now we can easily digitize the words within to keep them safe. The tools have evolved, but the need to turn ideas into written words is still vital to work and life.

Evernote is a boon for writers of every stripe. Even a few low-tech Luddites we know use it in tandem with their handwritten words. Here’s how it can support your writerly efforts…

Put it in Writing: Be a Better Writer With Evernote – Kristina Hjelsand, Evernote Blog (14 May 2015)

The first tip also links out to how Neil Gaiman uses Evernote so, okay, they’re not kidding.

Read the full piece.

New book on Blackberry is a lesson

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I’ve said this before: what really makes the technology industry interesting is that it is like every other business played in fast forward. You can see familiar rises and falls but so fast that you can genuinely see them: it’s no longer a business school exercise, it’s today’s news.

A new book concentrates on the fall of Blackberry and specifically how the iPhone effectively and dramatically ended what was the most beloved phone company in the world.

From Amazon and the publishers’ description, this is Losing the Signal:

In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong?

Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest growing company internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google’s entry in to mobile phones.

Expertly told by acclaimed journalists, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

Losing the Signal blurb on Amazon

The book is released 26 May and can be ordered now from Amazon.