productivity

‘Mandatory’ applications from a decade ago

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I’ve just found a backup CD that looks like it’s from late 2002 and it’s like a time capsule. Then as now, I was devoted to software and I ran my life through various applications. Of course I mean my professional life as a writer but also, frankly, everything. Not a single day goes by that I don’t use a good half dozen applications and in every case they have earned that spot. They are so good or they are so right for what I need that I can neither comprehend how I worked without them nor conceive how I could ever work without them in the future.

But the future is a funny place. You only have to look to the past to find that out.

This CD is labelled Mac Apps. It’s a backup of my most precious and most used software in 2002. There’s folder of system bits I’ve not bothered to look into yet, there’s a folder I’ve called Nice for some reason. But then there is a folder called Mandatory. Wherever I go, whatever Mac I work on, these are the tools I have to have with me. There are eleven.

Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhanced

I’m astonished that this was there as late as 2002. I liked WordPerfect for Mac, I was in a minority there but I did, yet it ceased to exist such a long time ago. I think this was me hanging onto it to the bitter end but the bitter end must’ve come pretty soon afterwards because WordPerfect for Mac doesn’t run on Mac OS X.

Desktop Printer Utility

Not one single clue what this is for.

Disc Burner and Disk First Aid

Notice the c and the k endings. I’m just saying. I could work this pair out if I tried, but it’s not going to happen. Except that I did use a descendent of Disk First Aid just yesterday: Disk Utility. Was it truly ever mandatory, though?

DVD Region Switch Autolauncher

I don’t know what the autolauncher bit did now but region coding, I well remember region coding. This commercial decision to block people from buying DVDs outside their own home region. Even if the DVD they want has never and will never be released there. Nobody with any interest ever stood still for that decision, and I didn’t either.

Final Draft 4.1

I still use Final Draft today. I have version 8.0.3.1 but there is a version 9. I’m unlikely to buy that. But I did buy Final Draft for iPad, it’s still useful enough to me to be worth upgrading sometimes and the Mac one does stay in my dock.

Microsoft Outlook

There’s mandatory because I liked something and there’s mandatory because some firm or client demanded it. Surely this is the latter. I don’t remember there being an Outlook for OS 9, I thought the Mac version was called Entourage around this time. But here it is. And there it goes.

Now Up-to-Date and Contact

Oh, now, these I miss. These I’d be using today if I could. It was actually a pair of applications: Now Up-to-Date was a Calendar and Now Contact was an address book. I remember they worked together very well and that every time I’ve tried an calendar or address book since, I’ve been judging it against these two. If I imagine I would’ve held on to WordPerfect for as long as I could, I know I wouldn’t have given up NUDC willingly. But times move on, hardware and operating systems move on, you can neither buy NUDC now nor run it on any current machines. It’s a loss. Mind you, I’m no longer the power user I was for calendars so the one that comes on my Mac is fine enough for me. Especially as OmniFocus, my current beloved To Do manager shows you today’s tasks along with a peek at the calendar for today’s events. So useful. But I’ll raise a mug of tea to NUDC tonight.

OED

And I will sob about this. Weirdly, it’s not six hours since I told someone the tale. Back when I worked on computer magazines, journalists used to blag more than they blogged. Some people got press trips to Vegas, practically everyone got computers on short- and long-term loans. My biggest blah was this. The Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM. The original disc is still on my shelf. But neither it nor this backup copy has worked in a long time. I’d have said since the 1990s but presumably I’m wrong. Still, it’s another victim of changing and developing platforms and operating systems. I miss this more than I can say and I don’t believe you can buy an up to date version: you can only subscribe to an online one for more than I can afford or blag.

PageSpinner 4.1

Not a clue.

Virex

What? Anti-virus on a Mac in 2002 and I called it Mandatory? Let’s just walk away from that. I was young.

I wonder what hardware I was using then. I think it was a black PowerBook but I’m rubbish with computer names and models, I only remember what I do with them.

I’m feeling all nostalgic for a time not a heartbeat ago. I’m feeling as nostalgic for the OED on CD-ROM as you might be for whatever music was in the top twenty in your school days.

But I look at each of these applications, at least the ones I can remember what they did, and I can see how much better things are today. NUDC would look out of date, I know. Seriously, I know: there was a failed project to bring it back in the 2000s and I was right there using the betas and contributing. OmniFocus plus OS X’s address book and calendar together beat NUDC. I know.

Yet in another ten or twelve years, will I even remember what OmniFocus does? It’s not like there’s a huge clue in the title.

Thanks for letting me tell you all this. It’s been a buzz.

Very, very snap review: OmniDiskSweeper for Mac

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I tells you, right, I’ve got a 3Tb hard drive in this ‘ere iMac and it got down to just 15Gb free. Without my noticing. How dare it.

If you go below around ten percent free space on your hard drive, you pay for it in a dramatic slowness and that’s what I’ve had lately. This is the fastest machine I’ve ever owned, it is so much faster than my last Mac – a Mac Pro that officially ran for six years but actually I’m still using sometimes – that I could design books using the Adobe CC suite. But suddenly it was a molass at opening a folder.

OmniDiskSweeper saves the day. It’s a tool from the Omni Group and it chunders away across your drive, totting up the figures and tutting a bit, then showing you the lay of the land. You’re spending how much space on movies? Everything’s detailed and shown in such a way that you can quickly zero in on the – in this case – more than a terabyte of files to do with one old job. I am at this very moment copying that lot off to an external drive and intend to luxuriate in an iMac that is restored to life and which has enough room to paddle about in.

OmniDiskSweeper is free. Get it where many fine applications are sold, over at The Omni Group. It interests me, mind, that I would not have heard of or found or considered OmniDiskSweeper if I didn’t happen to be an ardent user of one of the firm’s other products and a pretty ardent user of a second. The Omni Group makes the To Do manager OmniFocus and the outlining software OmniOutliner. I am actually waiting for the chance to give them more money for the next versions of OmniFocus, I like it that much.

Pattern weeks part 6 – not so much

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Previously… in an attempt to get more done in huge week, I've scheduled some important slots. I'll do certain things for certain projects at certain times so that they are done and I know they are done and they are always progressing instead of ever coming to a pause. I call this schedule the pattern for the week and it's named after the term 'pattern budget'. That's the money you've got to spend on each one of many things, like episodes in a TV series. In practice, you shovel that cash around so your first episode can be really big. You just save the money later and it works out. Similarly, my pattern weeks get disrupted by other events: if I'm booked somewhere for a day, the people who booked me get me for the day. I don't go off taking meetings or phoning other people.

Sudden memory: Hays Galleria, London, by the Thames. I'm working on a magazine and every lunch time would go out to a nearby phone box with a pile of pound coins to make as many calls as I could. That would've been early 1990s and I wonder now if that's the last time I used a public phone box. The magazine was a technology one, long gone now, and I was one of the people reviewing the earliest of mobile phones. A brick with a handset. I can picture me standing by the Thames late one gorgeous evening, phoning people because I could.

Anyway.

I've been working away from my office a lot lately and that's disrupted the pattern twice over: I obviously lose the time I'm somewhere else but it also means getting ahead with some things before it, catching up with other things afterwards.

So the pattern has failed a bit since Part 5 when I said it was working. It still is, I think, and my only real grumble is that the chart I made of the pattern is so amateur that it hurts me. And it hurts me often. I replaced my beautiful iMac wallpaper with this horrible thing and it is also on my MacBook. Hate it. But for now and especially while I'm finding it hard to keep up because of disruptions, I'm going to keep it there.

More urgently for me, I think, is sorting out email. I have a follow-up mailbox that I bung in things I need to respond to and sometimes I also forward the mail right into OmniFocus, my To Do manager. Yet still, especially when weeks break apart, I let things go through cracks.

This week I'm using Polyfilla.

Two updates for Launch Centre Pro

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The new: Launch Centre Pro's iPhone version has some twiddles including a new keyboard – and there's now an iPad version.

The links: Launch Centre Pro for iPhone, Launch Centre Pro for iPad (they're not the same)

The cost: the new iPad version is £5.49 and the iPhone one is £2.99.

The rest: the point of LCP is that you can pile a bunch of buttons into one spot on your iOS device and with a tap at least open applications quickly. That's enough for many people but really it's not for launching apps per se, it's best for making those apps do something. So, for instance, I have long had a button that fires up OmniFocus and enters a task. Rather than find OmniFocus – though, look, it's right there on my front page, where else would I put it? – and then open it, then tap to add a task, I can be just right in there typing. In, out and gone faster than OmniFocus itself is.

Or rather, was. I've been noticing that OmniFocus 2 for iPhone running on iOS 7 is usually as quick to enter a task as Launch Centre Pro is. Enough so that I keep going straight to OmniFocus instead of LCP.

Right now I am havering over whether LCP earns its keep on the front page of my iPhone. Right now, probably not. But if I relegate it to any other page then I will simply never use it because it will never be quicker to go via LCP.

But if it's of use to you and if I regain my habit of using it myself, Launch Centre Pro is a good application. And now it has added a new keyboard designed to make typing faster. I've not tried it. I may be the only person in the world who can type just fine on the iPhone, but I can so I do and have never even looked into this one.

Whereas I did soon and fairly often look to see if there were an iPad version of Launch Centre Pro. I reckoned I could do something with that and TextExpander to create a quick way of logging sales. But I couldn't because there was no Launch Centre Pro for iPad.

And now there is.

Same idea, same use and for me the same question of whether I'd use it or not. So far while I'm thinking about the iPhone one, I haven't dropped six pounds on its iPad cousin. But I do go in cycles with this app, I may well be back.

Feel great about reading this

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Tell yourself you can have a treat afterwards. If I could get it to you, there is a biscuit here with your name on it. And doubtlessly you can find or think of many treats and rewards for yourself – and this is reportedly one way to get yourself to do stuff.

…my father created a system of small rewards to help me get through schoolwork. The fundamental basis of the system is counter-intuitive: If you want to get five tasks done, my father always said, first find five additional but enjoyable tasks to do.

Sidin Vadukut writing on Quartz. He makes it sound there as if you have to reward yourself with another task and I like the way that works but he's speaking more broadly than that. He's saying that you can, for instance, research something you're interested in buying. That could be your treat for doing the horrible thing. It doesn't have to be caffeine- or sugar-related.

You can read his whole piece with good and strong arguments here and I must also tip my hat to the 99U site which spotted this.

My only thing against it, really, is that I can see myself ballooning up under the amount of tea or chocolate biscuits I'd end up eating. Actually, that's one serious concern but my only other thing against this is that sometimes it's good to do lots of bad things. If I have a lot of calls to get out of the way, I will do them better and faster by just whacking through the lot one after another. If I stopped between them, for any reason, I would find it just a bit harder to pick up the phone again.

I have to fool myself into cold phone calls so perhaps that's just a weakness of mine. I'll think about this.

Elite Death Squirrels

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Sometimes… look, The Blank Screen is about being creative and productive, most especially for writers but also for normal people too. Consequently, you will always find something here that is meant to help you get more things out of the way so you can get on with writing.

But sometimes, you just have to say bollocks to productivity.

I'm having an odd day where I think I've got to go to a meeting later and I know I have to get through a lot of jobs before I can leave. So I sat down at 05:00 and I began doing Serious Jobs.

And at about 05:01 I wrote this: “I was forced to do it by Elite Death Squirrels”.

By 07:00 I had a thousand words of a story that I doubt I'll ever be able to use anywhere. It certainly doesn't fit any of the pitches I'm doing this month. But it's done, I like it, it's here, and if I now have to run out into the snow without everything else done, well, bollocks to productivity.

Sometimes.

Review everything so you don’t have to see it all

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Yesterday's post about reviewing one's Evernote notes each day got me a message about how OmniFocus rocks reviews. It does. I even said so. In fact, I said it was because I'd felt the huge benefit of reviews in OmniFocus that I was going to give this similar Evernote one a go. But I didn't say what OmniFocus's review is.

I'm not sure I've even said what OmniFocus is. That's rare. Usually you can't shut me up about this software. It even comes up in my otherwise application- and platform-agnostic book about productivity for creative writers, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition)

Songs will be sung of the day I finally shut up about it. OmniFocus is a To Do manager but as I'm sure I've said before, that's like saying War and Peace is a stack of paper with some ink on it.

So, you may guess, I'm a fan. Rather than fan on at you about it now, though, I want to make sure we're clear on what a review is in this context. If you have OmniFocus, great. If you can get it – it only runs on Macs and iOS so Windows and Android users are out of luck – well, that's great too. But if you don't have it, you can still do this part.

Maybe not so well.

Actually, no, there's not a maybe about it. OmniFocus does reviews really well, most especially in the iPad version.

But you can and even more than I would go on at you about OmniFocus, I would go on at you about reviews.

Here's the thing.

Right now I have several hundred tasks in my To Do manager, arranged in probably a couple of dozen different projects. Everything I ever have to do, everything I ever think of gets chucked into OmniFocus. Now, many of them never get done. If it occurs to me, I'll add it to OmniFocus and think about it later. When that time comes, often I've done the thing already. Very often I'll find it occurred to twice so it's in there twice. And fairly often I'll look at it and decide no, I'm not going to do that.

But otherwise, it's all in here and it's all live.

Except.

I have a busy day today and OmniFocus is showing me 24 things. Just 24. Actually, hang on… I see I've done four of them this morning. Okay, that's 20 left. But as much as 20 is, it's nowhere near as much as several hundred. I can completely forget all the rest of them, I can pretend they don't even exist and because I do that, I am doing these twenty – wait, just remembered another one I've done, it's now 19 left – I am doing these 19 at a clip.

That's nice for me.

But the reason I can do it all is that OmniFocus is hiding the rest until I need them. And the reason OmniFocus can do that is because I review regularly.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I open up OmniFocus and check every task in every project. If you think ticking one thing off as done is good, imagine how great it was just now ticking off five or doing a review and seeing you've already done thirty tasks. I look at every task and if it isn't done yet, I have a ponder about why. Do I need to do something else before I can get that done? Fine, add another task. I rattle through these remarkably quickly and at the end I still have the hundreds of tasks but I know what they all are.

And most importantly, I know they're being dealt with. Those things I have to wait for Bert to call me back, they'll wait there until he rings me or I chase him. Those things I know I have to do on Tuesday, I'll see the list on Tuesday and not before.

You end up trusting your system, whether it's OmniFocus or anything that works to David Allen's Getting Things Done ideas (UK edition, US edition). And that trust is amazingly liberating. Knowing that you list is only showing you what you need to know now, it means that the list is doable.

And that means you do it.

This is one of the key things that makes a To Do list something I use rather than hide away from. And it's just this simple idea of a review.

Seriously, you don't need OmniFocus to do this. But, seriously, OmniFocus could just be the finest piece of software I've ever used and it is certainly the one thing that has made me productive. You'd think they were paying me.

A good idea for Evernote users

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I'm going to be doing this from now on. Writer Jamie Rubin takes the idea of reviews from Getting Things Done and applies it to his use of Evernote:

I spend maybe 5 minutes on this a night and it helps ensure that I recall what came into Evernote that day, and gives me an opportunity to review it and process it in some tangible way.

The reason I'll do this now is that my Evernote inbox currently has 240 notes in it and while a lot are still in play, many can be squirrelled away and I want to. I'm not sure why I want to: there is no reason I can't just let the inbox fill up forever yet I am compelled to sort it out a little bit. Last night I had a look, saw this mass of notes, started dragging a few to notebooks, got very bored, gave up.

But just as I know I feel better when my email inbox is empty, I know I'll feel more in control if I do that with Evernote too. Plus, my beloved To Do manager OmniFocus has an inbox and you get into the habit of firstly chucking anything and everything in there, then later parcelling it out to different places. This task is one for the Writers' Guild, that one's for a particular project. This one has to be done on Wednesday but with that one it doesn't matter when I do it, it's just got to be done.

There is definitely a psychological aspect to this in that I feel better when the inbox is empty and all my tasks are off in their corners. But there is also a demonstrable practical effect in that it means on Wednesday I know I will see that task I need to do. I won't have to think about it at all on Monday or Tuesday, not even for the pixel of a second it would take to see it in the list and think no, that's not for today. It's gone until I need it. Equally, I have a project I've got to look at on Monday this week and I can just open up that project in OmniFocus and know that I'm seeing everything to do with it.

So keeping on top of stuff like this is demonstrably useful in OmniFocus, it feels psychologically useful in my Mail, I'm confident it'll work for me in Evernote too.

Read the whole of Jamie Rubin's piece here.

That was January 2014

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You don't need to read this but I need to write it. For about the last year, I've been on a Writing West Midlands programmed called Room 204 and through a misunderstanding, I got into the habit of sending them a monthly report of what I'd been up to. They were very patient with me. But I found that writing it all down and actually remembering to make the odd note during the month, meant I didn't forget things. And where I would naturally dismiss most things I do, forcing myself to put it in black and white truly helped me.

January, for instance. I'd walk away from January thinking I'd had a good time but hadn't really achieved anything. It's true. But I had a right good bash at things. While I need a practical benefit to writing it down – so I use these lists to check I'm not repeating a pitch or to see how long it's been when I want to chase one – the real benefit isn't practical at all. It's just that I feel better for doing it.

I'm about to leave Room 204, my year is up, and I need to continue this report for the sake of my very soul. I have to write it but, seriously, you don't need to read a word. If it's a choice between me and a biscuit, even I am already munching.

One thing. I have to summarise and edit this list because a lot of things are confidential. It would be nice if that were as dramatic as it sounds, but you know you can't name names when you're still negotiating and you definitely won't name names when they've said no.

With all that in mind, this was my January 2014:

Phone calls: set a target of 30, did 56

Writing: approximately 30,000 words
Radio proposals: 3
Television proposal: 1
Self Distract personal blog: 5 entries
The Blank Screen news blog: 63 entries
Guest blog on two sites
Assorted promotional material

Pitches: 25
Success: 7
Rejection: 4
Ongoing: 14

Workshops/schools/talks: 9

Attended:
Big Finish Day 4
Room 204 funding workshop
Rep Foundry Showcase day

Other:
Officially launched the new williamgallagher.com site
Wrote and shot “Ye Olde 3G” 30-second video promo: won an iPad Air
Edited gorgeous 40-second video
Begun issue three of Write On! magazine
Room 204 buddying with Sarah Leavesley
PR discussions with Gigi Blum Peterkin in US
Clipped my and friends' radio appearances
Liaising between RTS, Writers' Guild and Screenwriters' Forum continued
Planning poetry app for Jeff Phelps' River Passage and funding application
Read and edited more chapters from Catherine Schell
Quoted by online newspaper WriteSoFluid
Interviewed for Doctor Who Magazine
Novel discussion with my agent Paul Moreton
Devised a pattern week: a regular timetable for office days; made me more productive

ENDS

Stop churning and just do it

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Look, you're reading this but you know you should be doing that thing. Five minutes, you're giving yourself five minutes. And a mug of tea. Obviously you have to phone your accountant, that's not prevaricating. And if you don't plan the week's food shopping, nobody will.

Stop.

And start.

That's possibly a mixed signal there but you know what I mean and you also know it already. In your heart of hearts and your head of heads, you know you should be doing that thing right now.

All I'm adding to that is this single point: you didn't really enjoy that mug of tea, you didn't fully concentrate on that accountant phone call. If you could genuinely put something out of your mind then maybe you could really prevaricate, maybe it would even be a good thing to be able to clear your head like that. But you can't so you can't and it isn't. Add up all the time you spend churning over this thing and it is invariably far longer and more insiduously painful than just doing the bleedin' thing right now.

It won't be easier for doing it now. It won't magically be all okay and sunshine.

But it will be done.