Microsoft releases new Outlook for Mac, says Office coming

I’m not very keen on Outlook but it is a gigantically popular app and it’s good to see it being updated:

Today we are announcing the new Outlook for the Mac, which delivers improved performance and reliability and a fresh look and feel that is unmistakably Microsoft Office. This release offers a more familiar and consistent experience between Outlook on the PC, Outlook on the web and Outlook Web App (OWA) for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

The new Outlook for Mac includes:

Better performance and reliability as a result of a new threading model and database improvements.
A new modern user interface with improved scrolling and agility when switching between Ribbon tabs.

New Outlook for Mac available to Office 365 customers – Office Blogs

Read the full piece for more about Outlook and the future of Office on the Mac.

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

I was saying this just last Thursday: if OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I go um.

Here’s a group that didn’t stop at um. This is Asian Efficiency:

A lot of OmniFocus Premium Posts customers and OmniFocus users have been emailing us with one of their biggest challenges: they love OmniFocus but are forced to use Windows at work. What to do?

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (25 October 2014)

Read the full piece. I like very much that they’re upfront with how there is no magic option, I like how this isn’t written as if they’ve found the solution. It’s written baldly and starkly: there is no great answer, there is just this way of coping when you have to.

Do read that full piece and check out Asian Efficiency. The site has various options for OmniFocus users where you can buy some of their help.

The case for ditching Microsoft Office if you have a Mac

Well, I think this is part of the case. It’s a fine enough argument but maybe it’s not stating anything new: Apple’s Pages, Numbers and especially Keynote are in many ways better than Microsoft Word, Excel and especially PowerPoint. For better, I don’t just mean free or that they are installed when you buy a new Mac, I mean actually better.

That’s an easy claim to make when one’s work is not stretching the limits of what word processing, spreadsheets or presentations are doing. Except Keynote vs PowerPoint. That’s a separate argument, less because Keynote is as good as it is and more because PowerPoint isn’t.

But it’s this kind of more-complex, depends-on-your-needs argument that maybe this article from Apple Gazette lacks. But for an otherwise good laying out of the situation, take a look:

For years, Microsoft Office has been the gold standard for productivity software for business. If you took an inventory of the applications on most computers used in the corporate environment, chances are you’d find some version of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel installed on the majority of hard drives. MS Office has gotten so ubiquitous in fact, that it is installed on more than 85% of business workstations worldwide, making it as dominant in the productivity software space as Window is amongst operating systems. Fortunately, Apple has created a viable alternative to Office in the form of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, collectively known as iWork. These apps provide most of the same functionality as Microsoft’s software, but with the simplicity and ease of use that we expect from an Apple product. Here’s iWork is the better software solution for Mac users.

Why Apple’s Productivity Apps Should Replace Microsoft Office for Mac Users – (no byline), Apple Gazette (24 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Five signs your office is creative

If you ask me, there is just one: you produce creative work creatively. Do that and you’re creative, QED. But when you’re looking at a particular office space, there are things you can tell immediately.

Such as this: if there are big, wall-sized decorations with words like “Imagination” then there will be creative people consciously ignoring them. That’s what non-creative people think these offices need and the real creatives are the ones who wouldn’t be seen dead being motivated by that.

Visual.ly believes there are more visible indicators of office creativity and, I suppose naturally, the site lists its top five visually. Have a look.

Apple campus: less a spaceship, more Moonbase Alpha

That’s what I thought at the top of this video, a flyby of a drone over the new Apple office buildings currently under construction.

And I would like to say now that no, I haven’t gone back on my word to not read Apple news stories – see The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read and, incidentally, the total a few days on is 947. I came across this while looking for productivity videos for you to watch.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

When we write we know to put characters in conflict but in real life, we avoid that all we can. And quite reasonably so. But sometimes, it might be worth a bit of a scrap:

While some people plow through conflict to get their way, a 2010 study by Provo, Utah-based leadership training firm VitalSmarts found that 95% of employees have trouble voicing differences of opinion, which results in a loss of roughly $1,500 per eight-hour workday in lost productivity, doing unnecessary work, and engaging in active avoidance of co-workers for every crucial conversation they avoid.

“We’re constantly faced with choices and conflicts. We work through the vast majority. The conflicts that get the most attention are the ones that go bad or go wrong,” says Peter T. Coleman, psychology and education professor at New York City’s Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement.

Somewhere between browbeating and caving in every time you’re faced with someone else’s preferences, there’s a middle ground out of which can spring innovation and ideas.

How to Use Conflict to Your Advantage at Work – Gwen Moran, Fast Company (31 July 2014)

Moran’s full piece goes on to give five pointers on how and when to do it, starting with choosing your battles wisely.

Do bring technology on holiday, but…

I once brought a typewriter on a romantic holiday. Bizarrely, we’re still married. But while I was undeniably stupid then, we are all now quite a bit stupid because we bring the modern equivalent with us everywhere. Plus, nobody tried to send me messages through my typewriter.

Well, Angela did lift it over my head one morning, but.

Along with our newish ability to bring our work with us everywhere has come an insistence that we shouldn’t. That this is all A Bad Thing. But the Harvard Business Review suggests that since we’re going to do it anyway, since we are going to bring this stuff with us and keep checking our screens, let’s at least be smart about it.

The biggest obstacle to disconnecting isn’t technology: it’s your own level of commitment or compulsion when it comes to work. If you work 80 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, you may find it pretty hard to get your head out of the office – and even harder to break the Pavlovian association between hearing the ping of an incoming email and immediately shifting into work brain.

That association is exactly why it’s so useful to develop strategies that put your devices in vacation mode. You probably don’t leave Oreos in the cupboard when you’re dieting; for the same reason, it’s best to put work out of arm’s reach when you’re on vacation. Instead of relying on sheer willpower to keep you from checking in on work, you can use your vacation tech setup – and a little up-front planning – to support your efforts to minimize work time.

With that setup in place, you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of online connectivity and digital tools, as well as the benefit of disconnecting from work. And instead of apologizing for bringing a phone on vacation, you’ll be able to relax even with your devices in tow.

The Right Way to Unplug When You’re on Vacation – Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review (15 July 2014)

I’m with Samuel on how it’s less a matter of technology per se and more how we think of this stuff. But she also has specific examples and suggestions in her full piece.

Two emails will save you hours every week

I’m convinced 95% of cubicle workers who work over 60 hours a week constantly can cut it down to 40-45 hours by sending 2 emails a week to their boss:

Email #1: What you plan on getting done this week

Email #2: What you actually got done this week

That’s it. These 2 emails will prevent you from working 60 hours a week, while improving your relationship with your boss and getting the best work you’ve ever done.

How to Go From Working 60 Hours a Week to 40 By Sending 2 Emails a Week – Robbie Abed, Fire Me I Beg You (25 June 2014)

Sold. Read the full piece for more and you will be too.

Via Lifehacker

Five ways to start your day right

The always excellent site Asian Efficiency – I've followed their OmniFocus advice before – has some pointers about getting started off well:

Picture this: you show up at the office and think, “now what?” Unless you have a meeting, are working towards a deadline, or have something on your mind that morning, your first inclination may be to peek into your email inbox and see what wonders (work!) they day might hold. This is perfectly normal.

Starting your morning with email however, is not how we start our workdays the right way.

Neuro-research shows that, for most people, the morning is the best time for creative thinking, learning, and comprehension.

If you want to make the most out of each morning’s peak brain power, you need to create and set a routine that will allow you to get your most important work done first.

5 Powerful Ways for Starting Your Workday Right – Asian Efficiency

I'm disappointed that they don't link to the research they mention but the full five things to do are all good. They include tackling your most difficult tasks first and planning breaks. For more detail and the three other thing so do read the full article.

To Not Do list

We've had To Do lists. A lot. We've come up with Done Lists which are very satisfying: you write down what you did as you finish it and then looking back later is immensely cheering. That's pretty much the entire purpose of my month reviews (see That Was March 2014…). But maybe we could take a further step and write ourselves a To Not Do List.

It feels risky. Like it could end up as a kind of new year's resolution fad: I will not drink so much tea, I will not keep putting off the gym.

But it could also be a good guide. I keep reading headlines lately about the first app that people use in their mornings and I've been stopping at the headline because I don't want to find out the detail. Chiefly because I want to avoid thinking about mine.

Since you're here, I'll face up to it. My first app is email. If you don't count Awesome Clock, which I use to give me an old-fashioned analogue clock face on my iPhone all night. If you don't count my iPhone's own alarm. Then it's email. As I lurch to the loo and on to the kitchen and into my office, I am checking both my main or personal email account and my public one, the wg@williamgallagher.com address that is your best route to talk to me about The Blank Screen.

I want to stop doing this. Funnily enough, I've been training myself to make sure I check my calendar every morning and that's going fine. (See I nearly missed an event today, though I suggest you bring a packed lunch with you because that is a long, long post.) So I want to keep that new habit going, I do want to reinforce my early OmniFocus use every day.

But I have to drop the email one.

Because too often now I've woken up at 5am to start writing and been derailed by a bad email. Usually a rejection. And at that time of the morning, most rejections matter. Later on, they wouldn't, but right there and then I am somehow more open to the slap.

I'm fine with being slapped. But it also saps. There are few things worse than getting up at 5am to write but one of them is getting up at 5am and not writing. I've seen this after big projects finish when the pressure is off and I have nothing that truly has to be done then. That's a horrible time. But yet worse is this paralysing that you can get from certain rejections, when they're strong enough, when they're important enough.

All this is on my mind now because I had a rejection that would've cut whenever I read it, but it did especially stop me one 5am start.

Or it should've done. It certainly did for a time. I certainly struggled to begin working. And I didn't do the thing I was intending to do that morning. Instead, though, I worked on fiction. You know how great it is when you are reading a book and you're completely into it. Writing fiction, at times, can be similar. For whatever reason, I hit that moment that day and by the end of 2,000 words on that project, I felt better.

And I had a solution to the rejection.

Without thinking about it, without brooding on it, my noggin' had found a way around the problem.

Now, that's good. And having been able to take my mind away for 90 minutes or whatever it was, that was also good. But the solution requires other people and it requires much planning, all stuff that I couldn't do anything about at 7am that morning.

So if I'd just put off reading the emails until, what, 9am, I'd have had four hours solid work done, I'd be far less prone to the rejection paralysis and when my head came up with a solution, I'd have been able to do something about it right there and then.

Top of my To Not Do List, then, is this: I will not check emails first thing in the morning.

Do we have a deal?