What would you do if Microsoft paid you to blog?

Posted by William Gallagher

I mean, as a freelance writer rather than some Microsoft employee, what would you do if you got the reported/alleged #IEbloggers email?

Or put it this way, put it in a murkier and less immediately risible way: what would I do if Apple rang up offering me cash to keep going on about them?

It wouldn’t happen. You know Apple wouldn’t do that, not with me and not with anyone. If you like the company, you know they have more class than that. If you don’t like them, you know they think they have more class than that.

It also wouldn’t happen because I wouldn’t take the money. I know I wouldn’t take payment for promoting things here because I haven’t: I had a little spate of offers a few months ago and automatically rejected them all. So automatically that I can’t even tell you what they were supposed to be promoting. I think one was a bed. But I’m guessing, I didn’t read all the way through all of them.

But hypothetically, what would I do if Apple paid me money to endorse something – and I already wanted to endorse it? If I really like my iPhone, is there anything wrong in saying so for cash?

Yes.

The dilemma for me would not be over taking cash because I just wouldn’t. The dilemma would be over whether to stop saying I liked something. And I wouldn’t. If I think you’ll like something as much as I do, if I think it will be useful to you, I will and I do say so.

If Apple did this then I would feel that the firm was tarnished. I would wonder why they felt they needed to do it. I think I would even reevaluate what I thought of the product. Hopefully if I liked it before, I’d still like it but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t wonder.

So. This is what I would do. First, reject the money. Second, reevaluate the product. Third, report on how naff Apple has become.

But fourth, I would say if I really did like something.

Just wanted you to know. Listen, I‘ve got this great bed , did I mention that?

There’s more to negotiation than money

Posted by William Gallagher

If you’ve got a meeting with someone, they want to work with you. Or at least they want to want to work with you. Make the most of that meeting, get what you can and remember that the ideal is that you will be working with these people so let’s leave everyone happy. And at some point money is going to come into it but money is not all.

It’s a lot. Let’s not be daft.

But:

Have more items than they have. Let’s say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance and they can’t budge higher.

That’s fine. Now make your list of other things: how much social media marketing will they do, what bookstores will they get you into, who has control over book design, what percentage of foreign rights, of digital rights, you can get. Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies are sold, will they pay for better book placement in key stores, will they hire a publicist? And so on.

Before every negotiation. Make a list. Make the list as long as possible. If your list is bigger than theirs (size matters) then you can give up “the nickels for the dimes”.

This is not just about negotiation. This is to make sure that later you are not disappointed because there is something you forgot. Always prepare. Then you can have faith that because you prepared well, the outcome will also go well.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Become a Great Negotiator – The Altucher Confidential

But then when you’ve got a raise…

Posted by William Gallagher

You’ve negotiated for a raise, you’ve got some extra cash, all is well and right or at least better with the world. And then it goes wrong:

It seems like common sense: a larger reward encourages a greater effort. So if you need to inspire a person or team to strive harder, an obvious tactic is to offer more money. Reality, however, is not that simple.

Even the mere mention of money can be enough to change our mindset: It has the power to make us more selfish and competitive, while also putting some useful social contracts on hold. Meanwhile, large financial rewards transfer challenges that would have been pursued for passion or creativity’s sake into emotionless financial exchanges.

The Unpredictable Consequences of Using Money as an Incentive – 99U

Recently I’ve seen several times when an article has been published under one title and then changed – but either they forget to change the web address or their system won’t let them. Here’s the address in full for that article:

http://99u.com/articles/26185/how-money-makes-us-lazy

So the original headline was How Money Makes Us Lazy and I think that’s a better one.

The rest of the piece goes into specifics and is interesting.

Pssst… how to make millions. Yeah. Right.

Posted by William Gallagher

SECRET! The TRUTH that Wall Street/Any Government/Somebody With Money DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW.

And yet here it is. Somehow you have been chosen to get this hot tip that nobody knows about and of course it’s yours for just $99.99 or something. Always and 99c.

You get these emails, I get these emails, I’m sure we’ve both thought phrases containing words similar to ‘bollocks’ yet still they come.

Trent Hamm has a good piece on The Simple Dollar about why we keep being drawn to these – and knowing something about that helps us avoid them.

Use location reminders for work you don’t like

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s not that I don’t like invoicing. It’s that I don’t do it. I’m far more interested in doing the work. Today, for example, I am infinitely more interested in the fact that I’m working with a group of young writers as we create a play. Infinitely.

But it is an unfortunate fact that if one does’t get paid, one stops being able to eat and that stops one being able to do this work. I really want to survive to the play’s performance, so I have to get paid. And being freelance, that means I have to invoice.

I am full of good intentions to do with everything financial. Fortunately, I don’t have to be. I’ve set a location reminder.

I’m working in a library today. When I leave that library, my iPhone will bleep with a reminder that I need to invoice for this work.

That’s all. I may not do it right there and then, but I have a train ride after it so I probably will. I think I may come across as very mercenary, invoicing within ten minutes of finishing a job, but if I don’t do that, I don’t invoice at all, so.

If you have an iPhone, you have location reminders. They are in – and they were introduced to the world in – Apple’s free Reminders app. Every good To Do app since then has taken that idea and so I use the one in my beloved OmniFocus.

Go Fucking Do It

Posted by William Gallagher

What it is this, Nike on a bad day? Go Fucking Do It is a new productivity – well, I don’t know what to call it. There’s definitely a website but it’s more an ethos. More a gorgeous slice of wickedness. Sign up to this and state what you’re going to do: you’ll write that book, you’ll run this marathon – and then you put a price on it. A forfeit.

Here’s a real example:

I will surprise my girlfriend every day or pay $100

That’s live on the site right now, as are these:

I will run a marathon or pay $50

I will organise my life or pay $50

The key thing, is where the money goes if you fail to do what you vow and instead have to pay up. There is a debate going on about this but I am fully in favour of the cash going to the people who run the website. Some argue that it should go to a charity but that’s nice and this is about making you do your task. If you fail knowing Macmillan Cancer Research is going to get your money, you’re far more likely to fail than you are if it goes to some stranger running a website somewhere.

Despite the ongoing debate, currently 153 people have gone ahead and registered. They have pledge-vowed a total of $14,718

And it is a great idea with one massive flaw.

The people who are signing up for it don’t appear to be as smart as the website owners.

Take those three examples above.

I will organise my life

When? How exactly will your life be organised? If it’s by buying The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) today, you go right ahead.

I will run a marathon

When?

I will surprise my girlfriend every day

Really? Every day? How long before the surprise is that there is no surprise? Who adjudicates over whether she is actually surprised or not? If you get married, do you have to find a new girlfriend to surprise?

The principle of having to pay money if you fail is like my own Brutal £1 Pot Trick where I made myself get up at 5am by rewarding myself with a pound coin – and throwing away all the pound coins so far if I failed. I never failed.

Take a look at the Go Fucking Do It website to see what you think and if you want to despair about humanity, go check out that debate about where the money should go.

Also, half a hat tip to Lifehacker as that found this for me, though it loses a bit of a tip for spelling it “Go F***ing Do It”.

sfds

What to buy the man or woman who has everything

Posted by William Gallagher

A book on humility. Or a pair of $350 sunglasses that go beep when you leave them behind. From the makers – who handbuild each set so give them a break over that price – comes this explanation:

Never lose your eyewear, or your phone. We embedded custom designed beacons into every pair of Tzukuris. This means your iPhone will alert you if you leave them behind and the app can show you where you left them. Using the iPhone’s motion sensor, the app recognizes if your phone is left behind and will ring extra loudly to alert you.

They’re called Tzukuri sunglasses. Read more on the official website and also at Time magazine which has more to say about them.

Make it worse for yourself

Posted by William Gallagher

There are jobs I don’t like doing.

Wait.

That’s not actually true. There isn’t a single thing I’m working on that I don’t relish. That’s nice for me, isn’t it? But nonetheless, there are always elements of most jobs that I really just don’t enjoy doing. Things that I put off for one reason or another. You’re the same, I can see it in you, so let me suggest something to help.

Find a thing you hate even more.

If that’s hard for you, bugger. I mean, it’s good that you can’t find bad things, but it’s a bugger because I need you to. For me, for instance, I don’t like invoicing and I don’t enjoy cold-calling. (I’m not a salesman who relies on cold calls but so many successful pitches and projects have come from my just ringing up a firm that I am compelled to keep doing it. Compelled. But still, I don’t like it.)

So I try to rig my time such that my choice is between doing an invoice or making a call.

Invoicing wins.

More than that, invoicing becomes the lesser evil at first, then it’s a near-as-dammit a pleasure because it’s the thing that means I don’t have to do this horrible other thing. I start looking for more invoicing to do so that I can postpone phoning people.

You may think I’m stupid and I will not disagree with you. But at the start of this, I hated invoicing enough that I wasn’t doing it, I was at best postponing it for as long as I could. And now at the end I’m looking for invoicing to do.

On balance

Posted by William Gallagher

Here’s a secret. I just checked all my various bank accounts – business, personal, tax, savings, all that stuff – and I needn’t have bothered because it’s Saturday.

My bank’s computer system doesn’t bother to register most changes over the weekend. It does some, but not most. Couldn’t tell you why. Not a clue. I think it’s feeble and I think it’s amateur, most especially when it does register a payment made on Saturday but then afterwards changes its date to the Monday.

But I know it does this and I know it’s pointless checking anything on Saturdays or Sundays and yet I continue to check because that’s what I do. I check all my accounts every day.

You may call this excessive. But it is a direct response to a problem of mine. I write for a living but it is the writing that I want: writing for a living is being able to live while writing. Money isn’t the focus, money isn’t the objective. It’s working out nicely, thank you for asking, but my head is always over here in the writing instead of on the bank accounts and the invoices. And there have been times that has caused me problems.

Now that I talk about writers being productive, I have learnt a recurring truth: all this felgercarb about accounts and pitches and calls and the sheer volume of things writers have to do that is not writing may be a burden but it is also easier than writing. And if you get it done, it is done. Done and gone. It isn’t weighing on your mind and affecting your work.

So I tell people to get this stuff done now and what I’m telling you is how I do that. I check the balances every day. It means I know the moment a client has paid, it means I know the moment I’d paid off my iMac. (When I bought a 27in iMac, Apple was offering interest-free repayments and I knew – I knew – exactly what difference that would make to my balances and my cash flow. It was the right way to buy at that moment and I did it without hesitation, yet I was also glad when the last payment was done.)

All of which means there is a specific and positive reason to stay on top of these things. But because I know it is an issue with me, I also check the balances every day in order to check the balances every day. In order to make sure that I don’t slip back into any problems.

And I’d like to tell you this is a nice round number but actually, today was the 918th day in a row.

Doing anything 918 times is going to take you a while. So over that time, I have learnt various ways of checking extremely quickly and I keep looking for faster ones too. So I can tell you, for instance, that if you’re the UK you shouldn’t with systems that display all your accounts in one dashboard-like screen: every time I’ve tried every one, they’ve proved impossibly slower than doing it all one at a time through my bank’s own website. If you’re the States, it’s completely different: take a long, hard look at Mint.com. I wish that were available here. And I can also tell you that 1Password is a godsend for this: one click on my Mac or one tap on my iOS devices and it has gone to the bank sites, entered a lot of the security details (but not all, I’m not that stupid) and I can be entering those last details, seeing the accounts and getting out again in seconds.

Today was the 918th time in a row that I checked my balances and yesterday was the 211th day working day I’d got up to write at 5am. I am a writer, I do not like constraints and I do not function at my best in 9-5 office hours, yet I apply these daily responsibilities to myself and they work for me.

They work one day at a time. We can all do one day of something. I just advocate doing one day tomorrow too.

Actually, this has just popped into my head. I’m very much a Suzanne Vega fan, I think she is an astonishing writer, but her first album and its first side and its first song begins with a first line that goes: “It’s a one-time thing. It just happens a lot.”

I can’t believe that got into my DNA. But I just check the balances once. I just get up at 5am once. And then it just happens a lot.