Phone a friend. Randomly.

I have not one single idea whether this is productive but it is fun.

You know that after you’ve produced something, you go back to all those people you needed beforehand and you thank them. Of course you do: without them, it wouldn’t have happened.

But I was scrolling down my iPhone’s Contacts list to one of them and right underneath her was an old friend and colleague I haven’t spoken to in a year or more.

So I rang her. Nothing to say, nothing to ask, just a call in the dark.

I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did because I had a blast. So much so that I have actually considered doing this more deliberately, phoning more people randomly. Except if you do it deliberately, it isn’t so random, is it?

Not sure about that now. But I had a lot of calls to make that day, plenty of them fun like the post-event ones, enough of them tedious like chasing this or that, and this random one-off in the middle. I tell you, it made my day.

Add numbers to your phone as soon as you get them

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m not great at this but I try. If you give me your phone number or I’ve found you on some research thing, I will add you to my Contacts list. I don’t like the word Contacts, I’m not suddenly thinking of you as a contact instead of a human being. But I am adding and I will add you to my Contacts app. Whatever machine I’m near at the time – iPhone, iPad or Mac – I will try to enter your number right after we’ve spoken.

Given how easy it is to get photographs of people now too, I will often drag a photo to your contacts page too. That usually happens if I’m on my Mac and you’re not obscure. Or have the same name as someone who turns up a lot on Google. If all of this is true, one drag and you’re in my book.

Which is why today I got a call from a charmingly modest woman who wondered if I remembered her – and of course I did. She rang on my mobile, there was her name in big letters and there was her photo from her website. I hope that I would’ve remembered anyway but I’m suffering under a cold not terribly with it today, so this was a real boon.

All because when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I put her name and photo into my contacts app. Right away.

Fold-up phone concept

Posted by William Gallagher

I so clearly remember saying I would only ever buy flip phones. It’s not that I’m usually an angry kind of guy but it is that I so regret the fact how we have given up the ability to slam a phone down. At least with flip phones you can say “Here’s what I think of your idea” and scrunch the phone closed. What can you do with a non-flipping mobile? You can yell “Take that rejection and shove it, scum” but then you get your pinky out and tap a tiny button. If I have to have bleeps, I want it to be because this is a family show.

Nonetheless, I changed away from flip phones and have not once looked back since 2007. Can’t imagine why.

And now I think I would change to this. Or I’d change to what it’s going to become once manufacturers get to it, once designers take the raw idea and include it a complete system that works as well together as this concept does on its own. In other words, right now it looks awful – but it also looks fantastic.

Read more about it – quite a bit more – on the Human Media Lab website. And a nod of the hat to @GuyKawasaki for the link.

Productivity lessons from Blake’s 7

Posted by William Gallagher

In fact this came from Blake himself: Gareth Thomas suggested I do this when I was interviewing him for a forthcoming book about the BBC science fiction series.

Actually, full disclosure, it was more that he couldn’t fathom why I was such an eejit that I wasn’t already doing it.

It’s just this: put your phone calls on speakerphone and tape them.

For all that I said yesterday about finding it hard to make certain types of calls, I have made a fairly constant stream of them throughout my writing and especially journalism careers. With Gareth, I really wanted to phone him over Skype so that I could record the call on my Mac. But he wanted to phone me instead.

I do loathe costing my interviewees any money, I don’t see why they should pay for the call or go out of their way for me, but Gareth couldn’t do anything else. He was on tour in a play and fitting me in on a Saturday morning; he might be able to predict what town he’d be in but there was no way to give me a phone number to ring. I would of course have accepted a mobile number, very happily, but mobile to Skype to Mac has proved tricky before. More than one interviewee has said I sound like I’m in a barrel down a mineshaft.

So I’m genuinely mithered over what to do in order to record the interview. I have to record it. Have to. I’m not going to get a huge amount of time with him and he is somewhat vital to the book, I need to make the most of the chat.

I’ve never actually met Gareth Thomas, I’ve just now done two phoner interviews with him over the years. But even in those short times, I can tell you that he is as charming and funny and interesting as you would expect. Yet I swear I could feel him thinking the word ‘eejit’ before he explained to me that I didn’t need to route the call through my Mac to record it.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been doing something wrong for twenty years? So that happened.

I recorded that man three ways from hell. I rang him on my landline, had my iPhone and my iPad recording the sound from the speaker and I even got my Mac to do it too.

And that’s the productivity lesson: use your Mac or presumably your PC to record calls. You can’t just record anything, it has to be with permission and agreement like I had there with Gareth and a book interview, but you can record anything – in that anything that makes a sound, you can record.

Since that interview, I’ve recorded many calls. Lots of interviews, naturally, but also phone meetings or conversations where I’ve really needed to find out a lot of things and there isn’t much time.

I don’t know how you do this on a PC, though I imagine it’s part of Windows Media Player, but on a Mac you just launch QuickTime Player. Doubtlessly because of its name, few people realise that this Player also records. It can record anything that happens on your screen – so it’s ideal for showing someone how to do something – or it will record your face through your Mac’s camera. Or it will simply record audio.

Choose that, hit the record button. Here’s a second productivity tip, this time discovered by me without the aid of Roj Blake, fictional freedom fighter: identify yourself for the recording. I say my name, the date, the time and who I’ve agreed to record. You don’t think you’ll do this all that often but over the last six months I’ve gathered up a stock of maybe fifteen such calls and being able to identify them in the first few seconds of playback is a godsend.

Especially since QuickTime Player confuses me continually. Once you record something, it is there as an untitled document. Close it and it will ask you for a name to save it under. Or you can just save it and then close it. I say this to you and I cannot see what is so hard. Yet I regularly end up wondering whether I’m going to save or accidentally delete the recording. And I postpone worrying about it by leaving them all there.

So I’ve currently got about seven Untitled phone recordings on my Mac.

I promise to sort through them.

One more productivity tip, this time from my years producing UK DVD Review. That was a podcast from 2005-2010 which I’m proud to say peaked in the top ten of all podcasts, of all genres, across the entire world. I think there were only 11 podcasts then. But I learnt this. If you’re recording a lot, I mean for a long time and maybe just doing a few calls one after another, clap your hands.

I clap three times before the start of a long recording. Interviewees think I am strange. But they suspected that anyway.

This is pointless if it’s just a quick call and even with the much longer one I did with Gareth, it was straightforward: I just transcribed it afterwards from start to finish. Often, though, I will have such a long recording that I need to find parts of it quickly. Usually that’s the start of the next interview. When I was doing this for broadcast, it would be to find the next take or the next section.

These are all things that I would tend to listen to in a proper audio editor instead of just through QuickTime Player. (You don’t have to launch QuickTime Player to listen back to a recording: just find it on your Mac and tap your spacebar. It’s gorgeous how fast that is when you have a lot to look through.) With a proper audio editor, you get wave forms.

And with waveforms, the clap is really distinctive. You get three massive spikes in a row and you can just skip straight to that.

So. With permission, record your interviews or other detailed calls. Do it simply on your computer, label everything, and clap yourself if you’ve done a good job.