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Ignore emails that don’t ask you a question

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I’m a writer, I think questions can be implied but it is true that I often get emails that lack a clear question mark. I tend to reply anyway, if I’ve got something to say or particularly if I want to keep talking with the sender for some other reason. But Kristin Muhlner, CEO of NewBrand Analytics, disagrees. Fast Company interviewed her about getting work done and among the many interesting answers there was this:

“I love email. I’m probably a rare breed in that regard. I love it because it allows me to work asynchronously and to consume vast amounts of information rapidly across the business. But unless I’m specifically asked a question, I don’t respond. If a CEO responds, everyone thinks they need to respond back, and that kicks up a lot of dust.”

The Many, Many, Many Things You Should Say “No” To At Work – David Zax, Fast Company (1 October 2014)

I can’t say I’d ever heard of NewBrand Analytics before I read this (and before 99U pointed me at it) and as I say, I don’t necessarily agree with Muhlner, but she’s very interesting. Read the full piece.

A better review of Drafts 4

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Much as I liked Drafts 3 and much as I am becoming infatuated with Drafts 4 this morning, this fella knows it better. Alex Guyot, writing for MacStories, has the full skinny on what Drafts 4 does and why it’s rather hot. Guyot begins:

Drafts is one of my all-time favorite apps on iOS, not only for its amazing utility, but also because it was the app that got me started writing about technology, so it has a special place in my heart. However, surveying what the app has looked like since its last big update over a year ago, it’s been clear to me that an unchanged Drafts would stagnate in the post-iOS 8 world. In the face of new methods of inter-app communication such as extensions, documents pickers, and widgets, surviving on URL scheme-based utilities alone would likely not be enough to keep Drafts relevant.

This is Drafts though, an app that has been at the forefront of iOS automation since the field began. I should not have been worried. Released today on the App Store as a new, iOS 8-only, and Universal app, Drafts 4 is an evolution which boasts a huge number of improvements and represents a much needed shift in direction. With a UI refresh, a smarter and more accessible interface for building actions, a fantastic Share extension, a customizable extended keyboard, an enhanced URL scheme, and the intriguing introduction of JavaScript scripts for text manipulation, Drafts 4 is Agile Tortoise’s statement that they are ready for the challenges of a modern iOS.

Drafts 4 Review – Alex Guyot, MacStories (15 October 2014)

Read the full piece which includes screenshots and much more detail.

Real-life Pomodoro techniques

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Lately I’ve been swapping the standard timer for “real life Pomodoros”: limited-time events I have to wait for anyway, like waiting for my washing machine to finish so I can hang up the clothes. I start working knowing I can stop as soon as the washing machine is done. Using real life Pomodoros means I get extra benefits like doing something fun when I’m done working or keeping up with my housework.

Real life Pomodoro – Belle, Exist (3 July 2014)

I’ve recommended the same thing to parents who have to do school runs: tell yourself you will write for the ten minutes before you have to leave. Belle (I can’t see a surname) has more examples but also more of a rationale for how it works for her. Read the full piece.

Drafts 4 for iOS now available

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And it looks like this is what I will swap to writing in for everything, especially when I’m writing to you here on The Blank Screen.

I’ve always liked Drafts’ feel, there is something more pleasant about writing in it than there is in, say, the WordPress app. That’s hard to quantify or even rationalise but it’s also hard to deny. I enjoy writing in this just as I enjoy writing in Pages, just as I’m a little less enamoured of writing in Word. I’m fairly fine with not being able to articulate this except for how I want to impress on you that it’s important and I don’t know how. I also cannot tell whether it’s likely to be something that works for you or even matters for you if you do.

But, nebulous intangibles, aside, this is what Drafts does: it’s a very fast writing tool. Tap the icon, start writing. No setting up, no creating new documents, just tap and go. Write anything you like, anything that’s on your mind and then when it’s done, that’s when you decide what to do with it. Email the text to someone. Send it as a message. Save it to Evernote. I’ve done all of these and I’ve sent a piece of text as a message to one person then an email to someone else.

What Drafts 4 does is simplify some rough edges, adds in a huge amount of ways to send out the text to other services like Evernote, adds more ways for you to build up a series of actions: tap one button and have Drafts do a lot of work for you. Drafts 4 also includes iOS 8 extensions.

Now, the more technical you are, the more you may find that I’ve left out or simply not noticed very good features in Drafts 4. But at my semi-technical level, it’s already a gem because of that sharing via email and those iOS 8 extension.

Let me give you an example of what I’ve been able to easily do since installing Drafts 4 about 30 minutes ago. If you read The Blank Screen site much, you’ll be consciously or unconsciously used to the way that I quote and cite people. Not that you need to know this, but it is always the quote followed by the title of the original article, the author’s name, the journal or website and then the date. That takes about four steps per quote. First I copy and paste the quote, then I copy and paste the URL, then I probably copy and paste the title, and I regularly copy and paste the bit where it says the author name and the date. Dates are important to me and spelling the writers’ name correctly is vital to me too.

Drafts 4 does not remove all this. But oh, it makes it so much easier. I’ve just tried it:

It’s hard to believe now but Apple was once within 90 days of going bankrupt. Samsung isn’t in as bad a way as that but it has just announced that its profits are down. A lot. Seriously, a lot. They’ve dropped 60%.

Now Samsung copies Apple’s near-death experience – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (14 October 2014)

To do that quote, I went to the story on The Blank Screen on my iPad and selected/copied the block that had my author name in. Then I selected the paragraph I wanted, tapped on the iOS 8 Share button, chose Drafts. I’ve already told Drafts (through a very simple process) that I always want to grab the quote, the title of the page and the URL of it, so one tap gets me all that.

It presents the lot to me in a window that I can edit. So I paste in the author name. Juggle a couple of bits about and hit a button marked Capture. That saves the lot into Drafts and I just copied all of that out of its own Drafts document and into this.

There is a bit of horse-trading: WordPress makes adding the links a bit easier, here I had to write in the HTML code. I’ll look into whether I can automate that more – I suspect I can – but for the moment the convenience of only going to the website once is really good.

Up to now I’ve avoided using Drafts because posting from the WordPress app is easier. Actually, I’ve often written The Blank Screen articles in Drafts and then copied them over to the WordPress app. That’s been purely because I’ve liked the writing of it in here more than I have there.

But in exploring the new features of Drafts 4, I think I’ve discovered an old one: I can send this post from Drafts 4 on my iPad directly onto our Blank Screen website through an email.

If you’re reading this, it worked. And I am now pottering about thinking how to add HTML and graphics automatically.

Drafts 4 is now available on the App Store. It costs £2.99 and is a new app: not an upgrade from Drafts 3. But on the other hand, Drafts 4 is now a universal app so you buy it once and get to use it on both your iPhone and iPad. I’m starting to wish there were a Mac version too.

It’s so easy to break habits

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Well, I could do with fixing my tea drinking habit. And my Pepsi Max addition. I could lighten up on the curries too, or at least if I stopped having so many I could perhaps lighten up.

But about six months ago I made a plan – and put it in OmniFocus – that every day I would post one article to this Blank Screen news site. Just one. After a while, it became a habit. And there was certainly never a shortage of material.

After a spell, that became frustrating: there was always more that I wanted to say.

So I worked out timings and figured out the average time per article – it’s ridiculously variable – and also reckoned that doing two together would take less time than doing one then coming back later for the next.

In my head I was about to change the repeating daily OmniFocus task to “Post three new articles” and I began typing exactly that. But somehow the word ‘three’ changed itself to ‘five’. A slip of the mind.

But I tried it. And for at least five months, I did five stories a day. It got so doing the five was a normal part of my day. Until the end of September.

Then various events I’ve been producing all year came along and last preparation, new marketing and new research followed by the performance, it clobbered me and I failed.

I failed to post at all one day.

I remember sitting by the bed, iPad in hand, not really able to focus my eyes let alone my head. It was probably a sensible decision to fall asleep, even if my body made that choice for me.

But.

Having broken the chain once, that chain became china: it shattered at the break. It became very easy to not post at all.

Now, I don’t think you were waiting for me every day. But I was. And I’m jolted by how hard it was to break the pattern the first time yet how very, very easy it was to break it the second.

So I’m back. I promise myself and you that I’m back. But do please take a telling from my admitting to having been poor like this. You can do more than you expect with a habit and if you don’t break it, you feel great.

Launching today: OmniGraffle 2 for iPad

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Seriously, every time I see the name I wonder what Graffle means. I’m not certain I can really explain what the app does, I think it’s the kind of software that you know when you need it – and then when you use it, you understand why it’s so acclaimed. But here’s the official description:

OmniGraffle can help you build anything — from a rough draft of a new app idea to a gorgeous presentation for executives’ eyes. Create impressive, best-in-show Graffle documents with mounds of useful gizmos and gadgets inside the app. Use layers and canvases, shapes, lines, pictures; anything to get your point across.

OmniGraffle. Diagramming worth a thousand words – The Omni Group

I don’t have it and I’ve not used it.

I just tend to be rather pro Omni apps because of how extremely good OmniOutliner and superbly extremely good OmniFocus is. I also like their OmniPresence, though partly just because I love the name.

Take a look at The Omni Blog, though, for details of the new OmniGraffle 2 for iPad which launches as soon as iOS 8 does. If it is to diagramming what OmniOutliner is to outlining and especially that OmniFocus is to task management – and if you need to make diagrams – then it’s probably right up there in the must-buy category.

Eh? Get my book for £4,307.56 off

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Friend of the blog John Soanes sent me this on Amazon. It’s my first The Blank Screen book going for £4,319.19 secondhand.

Now, I’ve seen it go for around the £60 mark and I liked that. I don’t see that cash but I was terribly chuffed that it was going up.

But it’s still on sale brand new so before you gawp like I did at the £4,319.19 price tag, click here to get it for £4,307.56 less.

And now, drum roll…

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From today’s The Blank Screen workshop in Newcastle

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I do this Blank Screen productivity workshop a lot but I particularly enjoy doing it for the Federation of Entertainment Unions. They hire me occasionally to speak to members from their four associated unions: the Writers’ Guild, the Musician’s Guild, the National Union of Journalists and Equity.

It’s very special talking with these because all of us in the room are working full time in our creative fields. It’s especially exciting for me because actors and musicians have different needs to writers, journalists and authors so I work to find out what they need and how to help them.

I should say: to help them with this business I do of remaining the creative person we are, yet becoming a lot more productive. It’s not about knocking out work faster, it is about handling your time so well that you can do much more. That’s a subtle but an important difference.

But whatever group I talk to, there seems to be a collective mood. There’s so much in the workshop, especially the full-day version like today’s, that I spend some time at the end getting the attendees to recap. I think it helps them focus on what they’re going to take away but I know it helps me see what’s worked best.

Today what went down the best was a thing called Bad Days.

This is all about the worst times you get in our work, the time when are overwhelmed. That can be because you have too much to do, it can be exactly the opposite: you have nothing going on and have to pick which project to kickstart.

I actually have a solution. I’m proud of this and I’m proud of how the Bad Days chapter has been the most popular one in that first book. I’m fascinated by how I wrote that chapter right there during a really bad day. It was like I was writing live from the scene. The text is a little painful for me to read now: it’s clear and makes sense and does its job but I can feel the undertow.

But, hey, I’m a writer: nuts to my being uncomfortable, I’m simultaneously proud that there is an undertow.

I don’t want you to have bad days. But I do want you to have Bad Days, the chapter. Everyone I worked with today will get a copy of that via the FEU and I want you to have it too. It’s a single, blunt chapter from The Blank Screen and a PDF of it is all yours. Have it for free, use it, share it around if you think it will help people, and you’ll make me very happy.

Download it here.

I would be happier still if you fancied getting it in the book as I hope there is a huge amount of other advice in there that will help you. But the Bad Days PDF is the thing.