Be elated and delighted or crushed and embarrassed and mortified at how Kids React to Typewriters in this week’s new edition.
Plus the pick of the very best productivity apps that have suddenly gone on sale – seriously, a flock of them, boom, on sale, wow, grab, detail, links, prices, go.
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There’s a new productivity tip you will use every hour of every day spent at your Mac or PC. This week’s free edition also has a sneaky way to find peoples’ email addresses, free downloadable planners for creatives – and the one and only time you should shoot video portrait-style.
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The Blank Screen email newsletter is sent free every Friday morning with a key productivity tip, a lot of news and advice, plus recommendations and deals of the week.
There’s also a bit where I own up to what I’ve been working on all week but that’s more my using you as an accountability partner, the way that I now know if I didn’t do anything, I wouldn’t have anything to say. So thank you for that.
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It used to be that if I wanted to tell you something, I’d wave my arms around a lot. Now I produced videos. So this week’s email newsletter includes one brand new, fresh baked this morning, video about a particularly good habit to get into with your own emails. If you don’t know this, you will now and you’ll use it every time.
And then there’s the equally freshly baked but made from six years of ingredients: how my own beloved iPhone home screen has changed over the years and as apps have become more ingrained in my life.
Plus remote control fertility – I don’t comment, I merely report – plus how exactly we writers should invoice for our work and I finally did some work this week.
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Via The Independent
Read all about it – not only productivity news including a video on how to handle your email so that you are less scared of opening it up. Plus news analysis, a buy of the week and more.
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This is an old talk but a good one. Merlin Mann is a compelling speaker with a good point about handling our emails.
Let me explain how I rate this fella: I do this Inbox Zero lark.
Take a look:
Read all about it – not only productivity news including the best/worst coffee date you can imagine plus biting news analysis, a buy of the week and more.
Read this week’s free newsletter now – and then go get it sent to you automatically every week.
Right. Your problem is that you don’t get enough time to write. And when you do, when you could devote a chunk of time to it, you either feel obligated to do something else – or you feel tempted.
So.
Put this in your diary. This coming Sunday 22 June, from noon to 2pm, you’re meeting me. Write it down: 12-2, coffee with William.
For this to work, the coffee must be at your place and I must not come. If you schedule this, I promise I won’t turn up.
So you might as well write for the two hours.
Deal?
It’s great that life can be expressed in hard and fast numbers, isn’t it? Whatever would we do if the world were a damn sight more difficult to fathom?
But recently we learnt that the best number of people to have in a meeting is seven. Specifically, that for contestant number 8 and each person thereafter, the group’s effectiveness is reduced by something like 10%. I am as wary of bandying numbers about as you are, so let me just point you at that story: Sorry, Snow White, You’re Out
Now there’s more. Specifically this: don’t hire anybody from the first 36.8% of candidates you interview. Seriously.
America’s National Public Radio (via Lifehacker) describes what’s reportedly known as either the Marriage Problem or the Secretary Problem. It’s a thing. It’s been a thing from sometime in the Stone Age where these two issues were considered to boil down to the same thing: how a man (always a man) should choose the perfect woman (always a girl) for him and nuts to whether she’s got her own sliderule equation about him.
NPR’s story is based on a tale told by author Alex Bellos in The Grapes of Math (UK edition, US edition) – his new and so-gorgeously-titled book that I’m going to buy it right after we’re done.
Alex writes: “Imagine that you are interviewing 20 people to be your secretary [or your spouse or your garage mechanic] with the rule that you must decide at the end of each interview whether or not to give that applicant the job.” If you offer the job to somebody, game’s up. You can’t go on and meet the others. “If you haven’t chosen anyone by the time you see the last candidate, you must offer the job to her,” Alex writes (not assuming that all secretaries are female — he’s just adapting the attitudes of the early ’60s).
So remember: At the end of each interview, you either make an offer or you move on.
If you don’t make an offer, no going back. Once you make an offer, the game stops.
According to Martin Gardner, who in 1960 described the formula (partly worked out earlier by others), the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don’t hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who’s better than the best of that first group — that’s the one you choose! Yes, the Very Best Candidate might show up in that first 36.8 percent — in which case you’ll be stuck with second best, but still, if you like favorable odds, this is the best way to go.
How To Marry The Right Girl: A Mathematical Solution – Robert Krulwich, NPR (15 May 2014)
It’s easy to mock the way men think there’s logic to dating, so let’s.
But the 36.8% figure has some solid reasoning and also an interesting mathematical history. So do read NPR’s article for more and then do buy Bellos’s book (UK edition, US edition).