There’s a new section on the site called – wait for this – Video/Audio. Isn’t that a cracking name? Honestly, if you can think of a better one, I am all ears. I won’t pay you. Let’s just be clear on that.

But the new excitingly named section is an already-growing one with – wait for this – video and audio. Mostly video at the moment, to be honest. You’ll hear a selection of my radio interviews over time but today there are three videos. I might not like my Video/Audio name, but I love these.

There’s an hour interview with me talking to Gillian Bailey at Kaleidoscope, there’s a package from BBC Breakfast with me lamenting the end of BBC Ceefax, and there’s a short showreel featuring familiar faces from Doctor Who, Torchwood and BBC Weather. You know it makes sense.

Have a look at the lot on the new – wait for it – Video/Audio section.

I’ve never been in a writing group that actually worked for me. Lots of nice people, often lots of interesting writing, but somehow, no. I did once suggest to a fella that rather than a group per se we should just set a challenge to write this or that by some time. That fella was Piers Beckley and, wow, did he take that on. For years, he would set a month’s challenge whereby an increasing number of us would agree to write a TV script, a play, all sorts of things, and we’d do it by a certain date.

No discussions of the work, unless you particularly wanted to. No notes, no plans, no debates. You wrote it and you delivered it to the group purely to prove that you had done the work. It really was quantity rather than quality in that the sole thing measured was whether you delivered on time. But it didn’t half work for me. Committing to something, knowing other people were waiting, it was an impetus to get writing. It was also liberating: worry about the details later, get the idea written down and finished first.

Ten or more years on from this, I’ve finally twigged that it was the accountability that I needed most. Obviously I need help with my writing – maybe I’m thinking professional help by people with earnest expressions and white coats, maybe I’m not – but that’s not what I need from a group. And it is usually all that a group can offer.

But I earned a place on Room 204, a Writing West Midlands programme, and one of its members, Jeff Phelps, set up a buddying system. A self-selecting subset of Room 204 people got writing buddies. Just a few of us. And I contributed one thing: my wife Angela Gallagher‘s recommendation that we try monthly buddying. Go around the whole group, one month at a time. It’s a shame when you get someone good and then have to leave them but it’s a huge relief if you get someone you can’t bear and yet know you’ve not got long to wait for freedom.

I think we’re almost through the first round of month buddying. And one good outcome for me is that I haven’t hated anyone, I’ve either been very fortunate in who I’ve paired up with or Writing West Midlands is very canny with who it selects for Room 204. The only bad outcome for me is that the month isn’t as long as you’d like. Christmas nobbled one month down to two weeks, too.

So we’re going to move to a two-month cycle shortly but otherwise everything’s the same and I recommend everything.

Particularly this. At the start of each month, I now send my new writing buddy a list of the three things I really need to work on during our time together. That’s it. The idea is Yasmin Ali‘s and she was my first writing buddy so I stole it from her and use it every time. And every time I’ve used it, I’ve said it’s Yasmin’s idea and every one of my subsequent writing buddies has said yes, they know, they’ve stolen it too, isn’t it great?

You get the focus of picking three things and then you get the accountability that the buddy on the end of that email or Skype or FaceTime or phone or across the coffeeshop table knows what you should be doing and you have to tell the bastard when you’re not.

Accountability. When you work for yourself, it can be hard to do. And it can become contrived if you force it. But find the right group of writing buddies and I’m finding it works a huge and enormous treat.

You’re going to be asked for a bio or the cover image from your book. Or a link to where people can read your work. Every time anyone asks you, they will ask for those same things. So keep them ready.

Spend the time now to write a bio and get your best photo of yourself. Get the cover JPEG from your publisher – or just than it from Amazon. The publisher will have the kind of high resolution images needed for magazine printing but most of the time it’s going to be a website who is asking you and a grab from Amazon is fine. If you don’t grab it from there, they will.

But it’s better if you do it. It is always better. You know you can’t get the wrong image and you know they could. It’s the same with links, it’s even the same with bios: you are only dealing with you but they might be featuring ten people and mistakes happen.

They’re less likely to happen if both you and the magazine or website are organised. You can’t do anything to make them be better prepared but you can do everything to make sure you are.

So schlep through all this writing of bios, select an extract from your writing, get all the right links for your work (remember to get both US and UK links at least), prepare the images and then keep them all in one place.

Specifically Dropbox.

If you sign up for a free Dropbox account you get 2Gb of space to store files in and the ability to send anyone a link to any of them. They get the link and they can click or tap on it to download the lot: it’s not only handy, it’s essential because images can be too big to email directly.

I keep a folder on Dropbox with all my cover images in high and low res versions, copies of my CV tweaked for different markets and some short and long bios plus headshot photos of me.

I tell you, I look at that folder now and I looked at it a lot when I was making it and I fair blush with embarrassment at being so egotistical.

But then I’ll be asked for a bio to go in an event brochure and I’ve sent back exactly what they need before they even noticed they’d hit send. Obviously I like that and obviously it’s useful for them to have this stuff right there.

But there is another reason to do it. Like anything else in my Blank Screen book, I am very much an advocate of spending a little time now to save a lot of it later. You’d think that it would take the same time to write a bio when asked for it as it is to write up one early, but that’s not the time saving.

This is. Last year I did a thing as part of a group and we were all required to provide various bio details and headshots. I replied with it all immediately – and never had to think about it again. Some of my colleagues took days, a fair few took weeks and at least one took months to do the same thing. And you can bet that all the way through those months they were thinking about it. Putting it off, wishing they had done it, telling themselves they’d definitely do it this weekend.

That’s the time you save: all that thinking and procrastinating. That’s why you should do all this now and get it done.

But it is also fun to be able to zap the stuff back to someone when they ask. Bless them for asking, too.

Yesterday Evernote user Jason Kincaid posted a piece that maybe most of us Evernote obsessives recognised to be true about its shortcomings and bugs. It had one bright spot: an update that the chief exec of Evernote, Phil Libin, responded to Jason directly. Now he’s also responded to us all via the Evernote company blog and says in part:

Thanks to Jason and to the millions of Evernote users who depend on us every day and who go through the effort of fighting for a better Evernote. Our goal isn’t to have a product that’s just good enough that users rely on it despite its warts, it’s to have a world class product, built with solid technology and with a fit and finish worthy of our users’ love and loyalty. We’re the biggest Evernote users around, and it’s important to be in love with what you build.

That’s the last section of his blog entry and by the time you reach that, I think you’ve been reassured that Evernote is improving, that it has improved and that it will get better still. But I do want to stress that even with bugs, Evernote has become so useful that there are people like me who live in it.

Here’s Libin’s full piece about all this.

It’s fair enough: they want to be as productive you, I expect you’d quite like their money, it could all work out brilliantly. I always think of you as you, the individual you, being as creative and productive as you are, but whether you’re on your own or whether you spend 40-80 hours a week working in a massive international corporation, the things that my Blank Screen book tell you will help. The ideas scale up for you because they’re all really about getting through lots of work and clearing time for you to write. What corporations reportedly want is a way for that to scale up for everyone in their business too.

You’ve heard this before. I worked in the BBC and heard it a lot in myriad different yet also identical ways: lots of talk about the values of our corporations and our companies, the need to work together, the way that we should be open with one another. You even hear this from companies who implement the Bell Curve idea. This is where managers are required, actually required, to grade one third of their staff as brilliant over-achievers, one third as okay and one third as so bad that they should be fired. Required. If you had a team where everyone was a complete no-hoper who spent their days playing Candy Crush and applying for jobs on Craigslist, one third would be reported as brilliant over-achievers.

And equally, if you got together a team of the most fantastic people in the world and together they defeated cancer, one third of them would be reported as so bad that they should be fired. If you’ve never heard of this Bell Curve idea before, you have still immediately seen one problem: you keep losing staff and your team keeps getting smaller, which puts more people in the danger third. Eventually you only have one member of staff and then what do you do?

You sort-of, kind-of, a bit ignore this whole thing. It’s never a tremendous idea to adopt a policy knowing you will ignore it but companies do. And they shed staff by this system mostly when they need to shed staff.

But you’ve also instantaneously seen another problem: if a completely brilliant team is still going to be chopped up into brill, meh and out-the-door, no brilliant person will ever join that team. If they’re forced into it in any way, any smart brilliant person will devote their career to staying in the top third. This is what the idiots who invented the Bell Curve system must have thought of first: everyone competes to be in the top third. Yay! More productive!

I’m told privately that some British banks do this Bell Curve system. I know Microsoft did it for a long time and proved itself a model for why it shouldn’t be used. And I know that Yahoo took it on when Microsoft dropped it.

Maybe it’s because you’re smart, maybe it’s because even if you’re in a massive international firm, you’re still you working as you, being you and being creative, but you are performing better than any brilliant person on a Bell Curve system. Because you are working at your work, not at staying in the job. And corporations want that.

You can see their point very easily. Giant companies become slow. If everyone was a creative and productive person, the whole company would benefit hugely. But you’ve seen what really happens: you have worked with people who coast on through and make you wonder how they ever got employed and whether they will ever do any work. I think this is less true today as we’re all that much more aware of the fragility of our working lives, but maybe that just means it’s been pushed up to only happen in the very biggest companies.

The New York Times just did a long piece – excerpted from a presumably longer book – about how corporations are working hard to become as quick and nimble as a small startup firm or a creative individual. The piece talks a lot about how naff the kind of corporate values bollocks is and then proposes what mostly sounds like a lot more coporate bollocks. But there are nuggets in here, especially about the use of email.

Take a look at the NY Times Business Day article in full.

And the next time you have a corporate meeting or you’re pitching to a company, be nimble and quick. Apparently that’s what they want. But ask if they use the Bell Curve too.

Brain Pickings has a smart piece about research into how long it takes us to form a habit:

When he became interested in how long it takes for us to form or change a habit, psychologist Jeremy Dean found himself bombarded with the same magic answer from popular psychology websites and advice columns: 21 days. And yet, strangely — or perhaps predictably, for the internet — this one-size-fits-all number was being applied to everything from starting a running regimen to keeping a diary, but wasn’t backed by any concrete data.

I’ve now got up to write at 5am about, roughly speaking, approximately, 187 bastard times, give or take, and it is a habit but I don’t know when it stuck. There are definitely harder days even now, as I think you may have suspected from the subtext there. But it is a habit and it was worth getting, so.

Here’s Brain Pickings’ article and it includes details of the book it all comes from too.

I’d like you to see a Can Do vs Can’t Do article. At heart it is a bit happy-clappy about how we can do anything if we just put the show on right here. But there’s also a lot of truth about how we simply never know when something will work out.

Ben Horowitz, writing in Re/Code (the new venture formed by ex-AllThingsD folk), says in part:

As a venture capitalist, people often ask me why big companies have trouble innovating while small companies seem to be able to do it so easily. My answer is generally unexpected. Big companies have plenty of great ideas, but they do not innovate because they need a whole hierarchy of people to agree that a new idea is good in order to pursue it. If one smart person figures out something wrong with an idea — often to show off or to consolidate power — that’s usually enough to kill it.

Nobody knows anything. That could be the short summary of this but it also fits in with my own You’re on your own and it’s necessary point about how we have to press on ourselves. Full disclosure: that link is to a version I wrote of that post for my personal Self Distract blog rather than here on The Blank Screen. I did it first on The Blank Screen but then realised why I was really writing it, realised that it went a bit deeper into a personal thing and wrote a much improved version for Self Distract.

That’s my one and here’s Re/Code’s piece.

I live in Evernote and usually it’s in the county of Brightsiding, Idyllicshire but it has problems. Most of the time I just wish it were a tiny bit faster. But sometimes it goes wrong and when it does, it feels like a betrayal because you have come to trust this software and service so very much.

With me, it was an audio recording that began syncing copies of itself. I stopped counting when it had exceeded 120 identical copies across all the versions of Evernote that I use (iPad, iPhone and Mac). You can guess how irritating it was to have to wade through those, you can guess how infuriating it was to painstakingly delete all-but-one and then have another dozen appear a moment later. But add this to your irritation: it was an audio file so it was bigger than just a little jotted-down note. Those 120+ copies ate through the limit of how much data you can upload in a month. I complained and Evernote gave me an extra allowance – which that same bleedin’ note immediately ate up. I complained again and this time they gave me the allowance plus a kind of workaround to protect the note and stop the duplication.

It did work, but I had to use the same fudge again a few weeks later. It’s happened since and this time I just though bollocks to this and deleted the note entirely. Let it go.

But it does seem that audio may be a problem for Evernote as there is this one fella who has this week come out against the software’s problems and details how it went wrong with his audio – and how Evernote the company failed to deal with his issue. That sounds petulant when I summarise it in a thrice but the (quite long) post is written with patience and with so much angst that it is instead reasonable and even thoughtful about the situation.

And it does have a happyish ending:

Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts. In the short-term the company will be implementing fixes for the issues above, with plans to focus on general quality improvements in the months ahead.

Read the full story and see whether this explains any problems you’ve been having with Evernote over at Jason Kincaid’s blog.

Via Lifehacker

There’s a reason why you find certain words are like long jumps where even though you take a mental run up at them, you’re not confident you’ll land at the other end. Antidisestablishmentariaism is a long jump word. But supercalifragilisiticexpalidocious is a doddle. It’s a doddle to say and it’s even a doddle to spell whereas I hesitated in the middle of antidis antedesish thingy. The difference is that nobody ever says the anti word and nobody ever says supercalifragilisiticexpalidocious either – they always sing it.

The Wall Street Journal says:

The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two areas in the brain associated with memory and they process millions of pieces of information every day. Getting the information into those areas is relatively easy, says Dr. [Henry L.] Roediger [III, professor of psychology at the Washington University Memory Lab, St. Louis]. What is difficult is pulling data out efficiently. Music, he says, provides a rhythm, a rhyme and often, alliteration. All that structure is the key to unlocking information stored in the brain—with music acting as a cue, he says.

I’m off to make up a ditty about completing my tax return. Read more – about the idea, not my taxes – at the WSJ.

via Lifehacker