tips

But I hate computers

Posted by

0

Writers tend to think I am very technical. Every technical person I know thinks I'm an idiot. I'd like to say that the truth is between the two, but that suggests it's in the middle whereas I suspect I'm only a pixel away from the idiot side. But it's a significant pixel to me because whatever I am capable of ever understanding technically, I did also choose to walk away. I chose to leave computing and go into first media, then journalism, then drama. And I wouldn't change that.

But you don't forget any dabbling you do in technology, just as you never really forget anything if you were raised Catholic. And it is certainly true that I spend my days surrounded by this stuff and might even be said to wallow in it all.

Except it's not technology. It's not computing. At least, it isn't to me.

There is a very easy way to say that, for instance, this morning I have been heavily using iTunes Radio, Pages, Numbers, Excel, Word, Mail, OmniFocus, Editorial, Final Cut Pro X, iMessages and possibly more. Reeder. That's another one. Pocket, a bit.

But I had to think about that. If you had asked me what I'd done so far today I'd have told you I cooked breakfasts, drafted a radio proposal, emailed a lot of people about a lot of things, done my regular financial stuff, got up to date with everything I'm supposed to be working on. I put the bins out and emptied the dishwasher. I would never imagine, never conceive of telling you the make and model number of my dishwasher. It's my dishwasher and I cannot remember what type it is, I just know dirty plates in, clean plates out.

When I like technology, it is enabling me to do something more interesting than play with technology. Yet telling you any of this always sounds like a list of software and hardware – usually iPads more than dishwashers, but there you go – and I'm thinking that's a barrier.

Yes, if you use all these tools they will help you stay creative yet become more productive. Guaranteed.

What I can't guarantee is which tools will help you: for something as abstract and technical as software, applications are vividly too personal to make grand recommendations or rules. I know this, you know this, but in the talking about it all and what might help you most with what, I end up sounding like a geek rather than a writer. I'd be okay with that if I thought I were and if I knew it would be of use to you, but I geek out and imagine every real technical person I know stepping away from me.

Use this stuff. Start with whatever you've already got: you're a writer, you write on a computer, there is no question but that it can do more for you than you realise or you let it. And when you've poked around a bit with that, then start looking into other applications and tools to help you more. You will find them, at some point you will become addicted to them, and you will find that they are not just useful, they are transforming.

I'm not kidding.

Pattern weeks – part 2

Posted by

0

I'm still fiddling. Previously on Pattern Weeks… I was working to bring some kind of structure to my typical or pattern week, chiefly because every week was changing and I knew I wasn't getting enough done. For a detailed previously and maybe reasons why you might like to think about it too, see Pattern Weeks.

Now I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote that and was planning all this back on 31 December and we're now a fortnight further on.

But I do have the plan, at last, sort of.

I ripped up lots of versions and settled for working out a list of things that I really have to get done. I used OmniOutliner for that; lots of bashing in things as I thought of them, as a search of my calendar and To Do list brought them up. And then lots of juggling around. A fair bit of realising that this bit or that was quite similar to something else on the list, I could save some time by doing them one after another.

I ended up with tent poles in the week: inviolate times when invoiolate things have to be done inviolately. They won't be. But they will be more than if I weren't looking out for them.

And that's nearly where I am now. I've got the list, the kind of super-list, the overall no-details-but-big-picture list and I have these tent poles. Certain few of these things have to happen at certain times and I know the things, I know the times.

The intention is to end up with wallpaper on my Mac with this pattern in my face. I'm about a quarter of the way through producing that image in Adobe Illustrator and it's a Tetris-like calendar kind of image with big red boxes, little green ones and some yellow 'uns too.

I'm trying to work out how I'll show that to you when it's done and all the boxes have all their text in – without you being able to see that the big red box that stripes across the whole week at the same time is really just breakfast.

But I'm getting there and it's proving useful plotting and pondering. So I wanted to share that with you, even as I can't yet share the plan.

Tag. You’re it

Posted by

0

In the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, you would save a document and never find it again. I used to spend a lot of time split between PCs and Macs and regularly I would struggle to understand where something had been saved. (Especially with downloads: where the hell did they go?) More recently, we've had Spotlight on Macs and Windows Something on Windows 7 that mean you can find anything you like pretty instantly.

I know the Spotlight stuff the best: I regularly use it to search for, say, the word “invoice” and tell it that I want to see only Word documents created between April 2012 and March 2013. (Can you guess what I was doing there?) Wallop, there they all are.

That one feature, which so many people simply do not know is right there on their 'puters, has undone two decades of how I work. And it's undone it for the better. I no longer spend time creating chains of folders so that I can find, say, all Acme invoices done for copywriting in February 2013. I just save all my invoices in one place and they're waiting for me. If I want a particular one, Spotlight finds it. If I need to compile something about them all, I just open that one folder.

I think that's probably saved me a gigantic amount of time and effort. So much so that I'm very glad I listened when I was told about it, I'm certain that I have no need for any other solution – but I am also willing to listen again if you've got something better.

And people are saying they have something better. Hand on heart, I do not know. And I have ignored it for years. But now this thing is built in to the OS X Mavericks that I use most days and it's right there. Doesn't make me use it. Doesn't require me to do anything. I can continue ignoring it. But it looks at me. It looks. Like that, that's what it looks like. And all the time I'm hearing people talk about how great this thing is. They say it's so great that it is about bleedin' time that Apple added it.

It is tags.

If I save that Acme invoice, I already have a habit now of calling it by a fairly descriptive name so that I can see what it is right away whenever I open the invoices folder. I stole this idea from David Sparks and his extremely good Paperless book wherein I learnt to name files like this: “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”. (To just nip off the subject of tags for a second, because this has proved so useful, Sparks also recommends using TextExpander to put that date in. So I go to save and instead of checking the date, I type the letters “;df” with the semi-colon and without the quote marks, and TextExpander pops in today's date for me. If, as usual, I'm playing catch up, I will then change that date but it's still faster. Now, carry on.)

So I've got Spotlight, I've got this descriptive filenaming system which without my doing anything is always sorted into date order. I don't know that I need anything else.

But still there are tags.

If I save my invoice “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”“ then before I hit the actual Save button, I can type in some tags. I can type a row of words like invoice, Acme, copywriting, difficult client, bad day, don't do this again, paid really well, used the word purple, invoiced, not paid yet. And on and on and on. I can type these, they are tags, and so far I have never done it.

Except I guess that's a lie. Tags are new to OS X Mavericks – they're already in Windows, at least since Vista, and that would be great except I read Microsoft's advice on how to use tags and I glaze myself over – but they've been in other things. There are tags in Evernote. And I have used them there.

Just inconsistently.

Hang on. Let me check. How do you check how many tags you've used in Evernote?

Apparently it's 316.

I truly do not remember typing more than one. I remember typing 'recipe'. And I remember that because I spent some time thinking, have I already typed 'recipes'? It turns out I had. So now I have two and I don't know which to use when I search for a recipe. Instead, I just go to my Food notebook or I use Evernote Food. Or I use Paprika, an entirely different recipe app altogether. ("An entirely different recipe app.”)

I told you I don't know. Hand on heart, I said. Are tags any use to me? If they're not, why have I written 316 of them in Evernote? If they are, why have written zero in OS X Mavericks?

I can tell you one reason for that: if you create a tag in OS X Mavericks then every folder you open includes that tag in a list on the side. Brilliant: tap or click on that tag and you only see the files that have it. Tap or click on several tags and you'll see all those files that have both. So with a couple of clicks I could see all invoices sent to the bad client who pays well. But I have 316 tags in Evernote, if I did that in OS X Mavericks, how long would the list of them be? It would be 316 long and by the time I've scrolled through, I could've found the documents.

Oh.

Consider this a live blog.

Because right now, this moment, exactly as I reached for an example to tell you and then wrote it out, I've just changed my mind.

I do think having 316 tags listed out on the screen is ugly and a chore to read through, but I do suddenly see that being able to pick out invoices from a bad client who pays well is something that I would like. And it is something I would use.

I may have to look into tags a bit more, then. I was telling you all this by way of showing that time spent knowing how you can find things on your computer will help you save a lot more time later. And recently I seem to have been in many conversations with fellow writers who complain they can't find anything. But now I'm thinking I should spend that time myself to understand more about tags.

Thanks.

Also, I was telling you this in order to then point you at someone who knows what they're talking about or at least doesn't write to you until they know what they're talking about. That won't catch on. But here's a particularly interesting take on it all from Lifehacker: I've Been Using Tags All Wrong.

Post-It Notes: yet another handy thing Evernote does for you

Posted by

0

I will never use this. I will so very never use it that I think my mind simply blocked its very existence: it's an Evernote feature that works rather smartly with real-life Post-It Notes. I hate Post-It Notes. I have a think about tiny scraps of paper, makes my skin crawl, and that is one big reason why I got into using Evernote and all things electronic. But it is smart. It is really smart.

Wade Roush is into this and says on Xconomy:

The Post-it Camera is a feature of Evernote’s iOS app (iPhone and iPad only so far) that accesses the device’s camera and helps you take a clear, evenly aligned picture of any Post-it note. It then creates a digital replica of the note—basically, it sharpens up whatever wording is on the note and cleans up the background color. What’s cool is that you can set Evernote to store these digitized notes in specific notebooks according to their color. It’s best at recognizing green, blue, pink, and yellow. (And yes, you’d better believe that this is all a big co-marketing operation: 3M sells Evernote-branded Post-it notes in the correct colors.)

Read his full article for details of how to use this, unless you're me in which case have a skim across the rather long piece for many other Evernote-y and organisation-y gems.

Why and how to lie about your email address

Posted by

1

You've done this: you've gone to a website because you fancied something there and the site required you to register before you get it. So you haver a bit but eventually figure that you want it enough that it's worth handing over your email address.

No more.

If I choose to give Tesco, say, my email address then what I'll do instead is claim that it is tesco@williamgallagher.com. You know how they always send you an email asking you to confirm your address? It works. I get that and I can reply.

Is there a need to sign in to NASA? Then I'd be nasa@williamgallagher.com. You can see a pattern here. And yes, it's because I own my domain name williamgallagher.com and yes, I can write anything. And yes, I have told a site that my address is bollocks@williamgallagher.com.

And yes, if you emailed bollocks@williamgallagher.com I would get it.

Except.

I wouldn't, actually. Anything at all @williamgallagher.com is routed out to my real email until it causes a problem. If I signed up for a shop with something like supermarket@williamgallagher.com and then, what do you know, look at that, my spam rate booms up, I'll look at the address that spam is sent to. If all the viagra adverts are going to supermarket@williamgallagher.com then, flicks a switch, that address is gone. Send anything and everything you like, it will never get through.

And that did happen with wherever it was I registered as bollocks@williamgallagher.com. So I switched that off.

All you need is your own domain name – which is great because it also means you're not tied to @hotmail or @aol or anywhere else – and the ability to fiddle with its email settings. That'll be part of your control panel wherever good domain names are sold.

One thing against all this. I have sometimes registered with a site I was certain I'd never come back to again – and I was wrong. I suppose I should change that registered address to my real one, but I can't even remember what it is because I log in to most things through 1Password or through Safari and they both pop the login details for me.

But come on, it's fun being able to look someone in the eye and say yes, my email address is dippydippygumdrops@williamgallagher.com. Wanna make something of it?

UPDATED WITH AUDIO: The Blank Screen on BBC Radio WM today

Posted by

0

15:48 Listen to the show here: 25 minutes, MP3 And the book we talk about is my The Blank Screen (UK edition)

12:17 GMT UPDATE I had a blast on BBC Radio WM. If the listeners who phoned in had half as good a time, then they were robbed. Audio to follow later UPDATE ENDS

Just a quick note to tell you that I'm going to be on BBC Radio WM's Adrian Goldberg show some time between 11am and noon talking about The Blank Screen book and how we writers can get going, can get off our backsides and write.

BBC Radio WM is the Corporation's local station for Birmingham and the West Midlands. I actually started my career there doing work experience in the 1980s so it's always a particular treat to be on it.

If you read this before 11am GMT then you can catch it streaming live and I'll update this with a link afterwards.

Always assuming I don't make an eejit of myself in it.

The Blank Screen book:
UK paperback
USA paperback

Today is the hardest day for keeping resolutions.

Posted by

0

I think it is, anyway. Sorry: no science or research here. Just a lot of years where some of it was in companies and the first Monday of the year was a hard one to ramp yourself up for. And for actually a lot more years when I've been working for myself and today is the day you feel you're starting over again from scratch.

That would be because you're starting over from scratch. All those books you wrote last year, you wrote them last year. Gone. What have you done this year? Bugger-all.

But don't think of today as a new working year. Don't think of it as a year at all. Think of it as exactly what it is: a day.

Today I'm working at a school for the day and part of me feels this is postponing all the freelancy getting-new-work stuff until tomorrow. But this is new work, this is a new school to me and it's working with the staff instead of with the kids and it's working with two other writers for the first time. So it's all new, it's all work, and it should be all great.

And I will worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. I will worry about it, but it will be tomorrow.

Location, location, location – in IFTTT

Posted by

0

Oh, I will never cease to be impressed by location stuff. You can’t believe the number of times I now use location-based reminders on my iPhone: “Remind me to phone Angela when I leave here”, “Remind me to buy milk at the supermarket”. On and on and on it goes. How did we get by without it?

And today IFTTT – don’t you always have to stop to count the Ts in that? I should set up a TextExpander snippet, hang on… right, I have now, thanks – where were were?

Yes, IFTTT (used my TextExpander snippet there, so I did) has added location features. You have to be using iOS but you can now have IFTTT see when you get somewhere and then make it do something. Their examples are:

“Nearly home? Direct Message the person who should know [via Twitter]”

“When you arrive in New York City, send yourself a map of the subway”

That first one reminds me of the days when so many of us believed we were alone in giving three rings and hanging up when we needed to tell someone that. And the second makes me shudder at the thought of the download cost. I’d want a “Before you leave the UK, send yourself all the big stuff like PDFs and images”.

But the idea is there and it’s a gorgeous addition to IFTTT.

Read some more here: https://ifttt.com/ios_location

Start here

Posted by

0

Okay, so things got in the way and you didn’t start the project over the summer like you planned. There’s Christmas: you can start it as soon as you get off work for Christmas. Easy. Come 1 January, it’ll all be done, you’ll see.

Well, okay, Christmas was a bit rough. But when you get through the year-end reports, you can start then. It’ll be easy.

Start now instead. Start here.

On your way to work, as you stand in the kitchen cooking, as you finally go to bed tonight, start here. Just start with one thing, possibly the smallest thing you can think of but definitely the first thing you can find. If you’re going to write a book about your family history, write down who the best relative to talk to is. Just their name.

If you want to produce an event, do a Googly search for any similar ones coming up this year and write down their dates so you know which ones to avoid.

Then carry on in to work, finish making the meals, turn out the light and sleep.

You can very easily keep putting projects off but they never get done. You can’t very easily get a project done – but you can get them started.

Just start now. Start here.

Email your To Do tasks right into OmniFocus

Posted by

0

I can’t tell you that I am obsessed with OmniFocus and then go away. Equally, I can’t ram a thousand enthusiasms down your throat. So let me compromise by giving you one reason, just one, that OmniFocus works for me.

Emailing tasks. 

There’s a feature called Maildrop and it is extremely simple yet transformative. Do I mean the word ‘yet’? Maybe it’s so useful, maybe it became so instantly part of my work specifically because it is simple.

Here’s the thing. I’m a writer so I spend a huge amount of time at the keyboard and easily the majority of things I have to deal with come via email. So I’ll read the email and if I can deal with it right then, I’ll deal with it right then. Otherwise, I forward it. 

To my secret OmniFocus email address.

I’ll tap or click the forward button, Mail will auto-complete the address as soon as I type the first couple of letters, and then wallop, sent.

And then the next time I look in my OmniFocus To Do list, there it is. The task is the subject heading of the email – so I might well change that to something more specific either when I’m forwarding it or now as I poke about in OmniFocus – and the body of the email is a note within the task.

Many, many times I will get one email that has several tasks in it. Highlight one of them, tap forward and Mail creates a new message that has only that text in it. Then whack it off to OmniFocus. Go back to the original email, highlight the next bit, whack and wallop.

You could also set rules to do this automatically: any email from your biggest client gets routed straight into OmniFocus for you. I have never once tried this. But you could.

What I have done very often is email in to OmniFocus from wherever I am. OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear but if you’re at a PC or you’re on someone’s Android phone and need to note down a task, email it to your secret address.

Last, if I’ve got an email where my reply is about the task, I’ll BCC it all to my secret OmniFocus address: in one go, my recipient gets his or her reply and I have that task in my ToDo list. 

Once I forgot to BCC it and the secret address showed up in the email I sent someone. Next time I went in to OmniFocus, there was a task waiting: “Pay Jason the £1 million you owe him”.

Harrumph.

I can’t remember a time when Maildrop wasn’t a feature in OmniFocus or when I wasn’t using it. I don’t just mean that as a way of saying cor, it’s great, it’s indispensable. I do think that, although I wish it could do more, but I also mean it literally: I’ve not a clue when I started using it. Which is a huge shame because if you can be bothered to poke about a bit, OmniFocus will tell you how much you use the feature.

I just went to check for you and it says: “Used 982 times, most recently 2 hours ago”.

And the very big surprise for me is that it’s a whole two hours since I last used it.

Learn more about OmniFocus Maildrop here and have a look at the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions here.