Alan Plater used to read my scripts and you know that he was tremendously useful, you know he was kind. But let me say it anyway: he was terrifically useful and he was really kind, most especially on the very first one. The Strawberry Thief – I still like the title – got the full Plater treatment in the 1990s and I’ve remembered every word he wrote me.

The key part, I think, was what you’d now call a praise sandwich or at least a criticism with a bit of a praise topping. He told me that my stage directions had regularly made him laugh aloud, but that my job was to get that life and humour into the dialogue instead. Because, after all, the audience never sees the stage descriptions.

I also remember that when I next did a script, his key comment was that I’d done this, I’d got the energy into where it could be seen. He said it was “a great step for writer-kind”.

I’ve only recently realised quite how much he shaped me in how I write descriptions in scripts. I’m a dialogue man, I’m a dialogue fan, that’s where I would’ve said I put my attention and effort and – however much it is – my talent. No, I’m hesitating over that word. Can I go again? I’m a dialogue fan, that’s where I would’ve said I put my attention and effort and – however fast it is – my typing.

But I wrote a book about Alan’s The Beiderbecke Affair and he has great descriptions in there. What’s more, he wrote them with a very canny eye toward getting cast and crew to read them where usually they, well, don’t.

“That’s right, actors don’t,” said James Bolam in my book. “You go yeah, yeah, but his you read. I mean, his stage directions are worth a read in themselves. They’re so funny, some of them, and they’re so evocative. They create the mood that he wants, that he feels, that he thinks. They’re all done in the same way, not sort of stuck in there but part of the narrative.”

He also had a way of writing just the right amount. He’d conjure that mood in a very short line and sometimes they’d be funny, always they’d be efficient: you’d get his point immediately and you’d enjoy getting it. So – again, I’m ripping off my own book here, but – take this for an example of apparently simple, short, description. It’s from The Beiderbecke Affair:

SC. 11 EXT. TREVOR’S FLAT – NIGHT

Establishing shot of Trevor’s flat. The cityscape of Leeds, lights shining like it was LA.

(You can see it for yourself in episode 1, What I Don’t Understand is This… which is on a really good Beiderbecke DVD set from Network DVD.)

But can you believe that description was one reason I wanted to write about the show? There were myriad reasons but I knew that if I included that scene description, I could also include one of my favourite Alan Plater passages: the equivalent description from his Beiderbecke Affair novel. The story is that an editor from Methuen was on location, had read the Affair script and specifically because of those descriptions asked Alan if he’d like to try writing a novel. He did and this is what he did with that same moment, translated to a novel:

A panoramic sweep across the urban landscape of the mighty Leeds conurbation at night could easily lead to confusion with San Francisco, if there were a bridge, Rome, if there were a Vatican, or Athens, given an Acropolis and a whiff of lapsed glory. In the blackness, the sub-standard housing and empty factories disappear, and the lights shining out, from street lamps and buses, public houses and filling-stations, police cars and off-licences, seem like beacons of hope in a hostile world. They are not, but they look like it.

I love that because of its way of getting you to picture a beautiful camera move, because of its Plateresque wry way of appearing to say very little and to say it with humour while it’s really undercut with a vivid example of his worldview. That last “They are not, but they look like it” seems to me to be final, closed, decisive and firmly bleak yet still open and hopeful. It’s someone who sees the world as it is but also as it could be, as perhaps it should be and is neither ashamed of being cynical nor makes any effort to hide idealism. If you want to get really, really, pixel-picky, it’s the comma. The entire description has stayed in my mind for three decades in part because of that rolling series of city names but mostly because of that comma in the last line. It’s a beat, a breath, a voice.

Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

But listen, this is all on my mind because the other day I co-presented a talk on descriptions at South & City College here in Birmingham. Novelist Robin Sidwell is writer in residence there and runs a regular writing group session. I talked at one about scriptwriting and rejections, and judged a short contest with him. It was a script contest but we both separately remarked that it was unusual how long the descriptions were. He’s a novelist, I thought he’d like longer, richer, fuller scene descriptions but we talked about this and turned out to agree on everything. I mean, everything. He had this idea that we could present a talk on descriptions in script versus those in novels and part of me leapt to the Plater example, part of me enjoyed the idea that Robin and I could presumably spar: he’d be the real lecturer, he’d be the good cop championing novel-like long descriptions, I’d be the bad copy.

It didn’t work out like that. Apart from the, you know, small issue that he knows novels infinitely better than I do, we could’ve given each other’s side of the talk. We did do one swap: he gave me a novel to dramatise in script and I gave him a script to novelise. The bastard improved my story.

So I really wanted to spar.

But he had another reason for this talk. He’s got some students who are unsure whether they want to write novels or scripts so they’re really doing both. At the same time. In the same piece. I think this is common. I read a script once that had got someone a 2:1 degree in screenwriting and I would’ve handed it back to them after page 1 because, I believe, it was unreadable. Because of the descriptions. There were technical issues to do with the scene slugs, but it was just stuff that made it really slow to read and I maintain that if a script is slow to read, it doesn’t get read.

You can argue that producers and script editors should read on whether something is slow and hard or not. You can also argue that I’m in no position to talk about going on at length.

But working with Robin and remembering Alan, I realised that you can summarise my entire view on script description with that note that the audience never sees the stage directions.

So if you find yourself writing something like, I don’t know:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – AROUND DUSK, THE CITY LIGHTS JUST COMING ON, THIEVES AND MUGGERS JUST STARTING TO SET UP STALL

Brad Chap sits on a park bench. He’s 20s, a little the worse for wear, maybe still carrying some scars from when Take That broke up, maybe the wounds of disappointment are still bleeding from when Take That reunited, and if he were a car, he’d be a Renault Megane with hatchback and a decent sound system that he routinely connects his iPhone to with Bluetooth. Brad could have been a lawyer, he could’ve been doctor, but instead he’s an international jewel thief and sometimes – usually when another woman has broken up with him because of his nervous, twitchy behaviour whenever police go by – he regrets his life choices. But not today. Today he’s just heard a good joke and it’s lifted him, it’s made him think that perhaps, just perhaps, life is actually worth living and if it’s raining now, it will clear up later and there’s a chance of sunshine. Not much of a chance, but enough for Brad. He is the world’s greatest optimist. He doesn’t look like it, but he is.

What will the audience actually see? If you think they’ll just see a man in his twenties sitting on a bench then, no, sorry, you’re wrong. They won’t even see that much. Because no producer would’ve read to the end, no producer would buy that script.

Nor would you. Because that description of Brad might as well be a description of the writer: not that the writer is a little worse for wear and all that, but descriptions can describe more than they appear to and in this case what I’d take away from reading this is that the writer is an amateur. It tells me that the writer doesn’t understand film. It’s not as if there are rules and it’s not as if we aren’t all amateurs until we’ve been blooded, but a writer doing that description will not have written an interesting drama.

I keep saying that the audience doesn’t see a word of your stage description but actually that’s only true of your ultimate audience. Your first one is the producer, the director, the cast and they do. They all see every single word.

They just don’t read any of it.

But when something is described the way Brad Chap was, there is no need to read it. Simply registering the length and the type of description it is, you know to reject the whole script.

There’s another difference with this first type of audience. The ultimate audience turns up to enjoy the movie, the first audience of these cast and crew are turning up to make the film with you. They are your collaborators. So your script is a working tool for you and them to work together, it is a blueprint for a drama that you will all make.

I put all this effort and energy into dialogue but I will also be as quick and precise and straightforward as I can be with stage directions. So if I were really writing the adventures of Brad Chap, that scene would run:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – EVENING

BRAD CHAP (20s, optimist in a bad world) waits on a park bench.

That’s it. Do you need anything else? If you do, put it in the dialogue. It’s harder to put it in dialogue because that’s not dramatic, it’s just telling people the plot or the backstory or the description but that’s why dialogue is wonderful. It carries all this exposition, it propels all of the action, it is the characters. You do it so that nobody notices that the dialogue is even written, you do it so that it is as if these characters had just thought of these words. And you do it so that what they actually say is nowhere near what they really mean and yet the audience gets it. God, dialogue is a reason to live.

Description isn’t, not for me. If you want to write descriptions, write a novel. Or a blog. Cough.

To sell me a script, make it quick to read the descriptions and make the dialogue wonderful. I want to enjoy reading the script. I want scripts to get me engrossed and involved and I want them to regularly make me laugh aloud.

And I consider it a great step for writer-kind when they do.

I offer that the best thing any writer can do is get someone else to do the writing. You’re thinking they might do my blogs shorter and let you get a word in. You’re thinking Dan Brown could retain his apparently gripping stories but that you and I might be able to read beyond chapter one. (Didn’t you say you’d managed more than me?)

But I mean it and I wish it were something you could very readily do. Commission other writers and it will change the way you write. It will change how you see the whole process. And it will mean fully half the rejections you get won’t trouble you.

Best of all, you’ll no longer take it personally when an editor phones you up, skips all the polite stuff about how great your typing is and just comes straight in laughing about the very worst bit of your script. It’s happened to me and I admit I wish I hadn’t written that scene, whichever it was, but I laughed along with that editor because he was funny, he was right, it was a dreadful scene – and because I knew we’d fix it. I can’t remember the scene and I’m struggling to remember which script it was but I can tell you the editor: Alan Barnes at Doctor Who.

You want to write the best drama you can and that’s what he and all the Big Finish people want too. It’s not what every editor, producer or director I’ve worked for wants but usually it is. (I once had a director whose chief dramatic aim, I am certain, was to make sure he could catch his last bus home after the play. I never knew a human being could make me as angry but now, when I can instantly recall the bile but cannot draw his name to mind, I’m glad it happened. Because I wonder if I’d appreciate the directors I’ve worked with since. Ken Bentley, Nick Briggs and Barnaby Edwards at Big Finish; Polly Tisdall, Tessa Walker and Tom Saunders at the Birmingham Rep. I imagine I would, I imagine I must, but I really do because of this fella.)

This is going to sound all idealistic and happy-clappy but everyone wants the best show they can make. I found plenty of jaded people in journalism, maybe I’ve just been lucky in drama so far. But if the ideal is that this is what we want, the harsh practicality is that there is never any time to piddle about.

And this is one reason for rejections. Nobody wants to reject anyone, everyone wants the material to be great, everyone needs the material to be great right now or sooner, please. If your piece isn’t what that person or people need at this moment, they’re off looking for the one that is and you’re rejected.

I feel I’m telling you something you think is obvious and yet it keeps coming up. Rejection isn’t personal, it just feels as I it is because we’re writers and we are required to dig very deep and scrape very personally to make drama. Even though you know, intellectually, that it isn’t personal, it feels it. When it’s your innards on the page, it’s hard not to take a rejection as being a rejection of you.

So commission someone else and see what it’s like. I’m not sure how you can do that very easily, I’m afraid. But I’ve done it on magazines and quickly got to the stage where I had no ruth at all. You need this or that piece and you need it by a certain date: you don’t care who writes it, you just have these pages to fill and fill well.

It kills me to say this, as a writer, but we’re not the most reliable people. After my first month on a magazine, every deadline I ever gave anyone was a lie. It had to be. I had to have time for them to be late, I had to have time for me to cope if they failed to deliver at all and I had to have time to handle it if their writing wasn’t good enough.

You can of course argue that it was only my opinion whether their writing was good enough or not, but that was my job. And if I didn’t do it or I wasn’t good enough at it, I’d be rejected and replaced.

I found that there were a few writers who I could really rely on. I’d know they’d write well and I’d know they would deliver on time. I used them over and over again – and so would you. From the outside, it looked like I’d got myself a stable of writers and that it was a pretty closed bunch. On the inside, it was that I was trying to get a stable of writers and unfortunately it was a pretty closed group because I couldn’t find many more to add to it.

Getting into my stable was hard. I don’t say this to make out that anyone would want to, that it was in someway a special set, but genuinely, really, practically: it was hard to get in. I had this many pages to fill with this many articles and I had this long in which to do it. It was easier to hand over a feature to one of these writers I knew would do it. I could hand that off and forget about it for a few weeks. As those weeks ticked by, it became less that it was easy to hand it over to them, more that it was essential.

Taking on someone new is a risk and a risk that takes a lot of time. And this was just on a magazine: drama is so much bigger, so much more complex and so much more pressured. So taking on someone new is so much more of a risk and takes so much more time – that you don’t have.

I’ve never commissioned drama. I’m new to writing it. But because I have commissioned writers, I believe I get it. People can tell you rejection isn’t personal but I think you really only get it when you’ve been even briefly on the other side.

It doesn’t absolve you from trying to write better but it does stop you wanting to give up.

Even when a guy phones you and laughs down the line.

I’ve a couple of events coming up that I really want to tell you about. If you’re anywhere near them here in the Midlands, it would be a treat to see you.

June 1, 2013: Gillian Bailey at Kaleidoscope

Whether you only know her for this or you’re well aware of her huge acting career, you know that Gillian Bailey was in Here Come the Double Deckers. I’m interviewing her on stage about that show and this career plus what she’s doing now.

It’ll be at the Kaleidoscope event at the Talbot Hotel, Stourbridge, (map) from 3pm. Admission free but donations to RNLI encouraged. Add to Calendar

I met Gilli for the first time last year while researching a book about a show she only briefly appears in. So briefly that I nearly didn’t contact her. But I’m so pleased I did because she is funny and fascinating and her academic career is so interesting that sometimes we both had to promise to get back to the subject of the book. I still can’t tell you what the book is but to save you scouring Gilli’s ridiculously long list of credits on IMDb, let me say that this one begins with “B” and ends “lake’s 7”.

Dr Gilli Bush-Bailey is a professor of women’s theatre and this is a rare chance to hear her talk about her work and her acting. I think it’s a bit of a tribute to Kaleidoscope that they managed to get her and I am chuffed that I’m the one who gets to natter with her on stage.

If you’ve ever heard of a lost TV show being miraculously recovered, the odds are that Kaleidoscope was involved. It is a non-profit organisation that preserves and catalogues and archives British television. This is its 25th anniversary year and I think I’ve been using their books for most of that time.

I used to write a thing in Radio Times called On This Day – it was easily my favourite gig of all my favourite gigs at RT – and it involved a lot of studying back issues of the magazine. Actually, it shouldn’t have been quite such a lot but it’s impossible not to get absorbed by the job. It was an immense benefit to me that Birmingham Central Library had a set of Radio Times issues and I would spend a long and delicious time there, eventually coming to notice that so were some other people.

I remember struggling to find a fact I was after and becoming very aware that there must’ve been five people with their laptops out on the desks near me, all using RT back issues and all typing very fast. I promise you, I looked at them and I knew. Kaleidoscope, I said. Yes, they said – and here’s that fact you were after.

Tremendous people, doing an overwhelming job and making my research work infinitely easier. Have a look at their event site for details of everything at the 1 June event and their books for the reference works they have for sale. When I met them that time, I had a couple of their spiral bound drama books. A couple of years ago I bought the ten-volume perfect-bound set. And last year I bought the new PDF version of this stuff. It is ferociously annoying: I put the PDFs on my Dropbox folder and so now there is nowhere I can go that I can’t just take a little peek and end up spending hours entirely absorbed.

Kaleidoscope was also a great help with my book, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and it’s funny that I should mention that to you because that’s what the other June event is about.

June 13, 2013: Meet local author William Gallagher

I’ve been invited to speak at the Jewellery Quarter Bookwormers Group about The Beiderbecke Affair. It’s at the Drop Forge pub, 6-10 Hockley Street, Birmingham, B18 6LB (map) from 7:30pm to around 9pm ish. Admission free. Add to calendar.

The group meets monthly or so for a drink in this most gorgeous pub which has these nooks and crannies dotted around. It’s all very informal and you get to talk properly: I’ve been to a couple of events just to see what it was like and have been thoroughly entertained by speakers like novelist Anna Laurence Pietroni, organiser Simon Stokes and everyone I happened to sit next to.

Have a look at Simon’s Meetup page for details of the group and the other speakers coming up, would you?

Which reminds me, I’ve got a new website as of today and it even plays nice with mobile phones. It doesn’t mention any events. I’ve just realised that now. Um.

So I had this small play on earlier in the week. Very small. Closed performance, script-in-hand, you know the thing. It was done as the culmination of a writing programme at the Birmingham Rep that saw fifteen of us writers working toward this week’s performances. Now, it wasn’t a competition but we didn’t collaborate either: these were fifteen separate short plays and you know every one of us secretly feared our one would be the worst and secretly hoped that our one would be the best.

For all that I talk to you ceaselessly about my work, I’m usually actually very modest about it – if for ‘modest’ you read ‘has no clue whether it’s any good or not so had best keep quiet’.

But not this time.

This time I’m telling you the truth. My play, Fat Priests, was excellent.

Easily in the top fifteen.

The truth that I do know and that I am rushing to say to you is that Fat Priests was new. I mean that literally, it was written for this event – though I so clearly remember in the 1990s telling a friend named Peter Guttridge that I had this great title and not one clue what to do with it – but it’s new in more senses than that.

I was very aware of this Birmingham Rep programme, Write Away, because my wife Angela Gallagher got on it last year. That was so exciting: every Monday for ten weeks I’d wave her off and really just spend the evening waiting for her to come back to tell me all about it. She would come home elated and it was wonderful. And she wrote a final piece called Fun-Packed Flat Pack – about a woman living in Ikea – that was marvellous. Really flew high on its performance night and she was being back-slapped about it for the rest of the run. And then when I got on this year’s one, it was delicious just how many times her play was mentioned. Usually it would be in a sentence that would suddenly take a left turn and become “- and of course that’s William’s wife Angela”. So she wasn’t being mentioned because I was there, but because I was there, I was gobbling up every mention.

And, I’ll admit this, I was also thinking I can’t let her down and do a rubbish piece for myself. She’s got a reputation here, she’s got form.

I got really worked up about that. And, stupid William, I also did the journalist thing: I looked up everybody else on the programme before it started. You just don’t walk into a room cold if you can help it. It’s not as if I was going to interview anybody, but we all have big social media footprints these days, for the five seconds it takes to see what someone’s done, I will spend those five seconds. The trouble is, this bunch was a bit startling. Poets, playwrights, performers, professionals: not everyone had written before but every one made me wonder how I’d managed to get in.

So I’m walking into that first session with the memory of Angela’s great group in my mind and the image of this year’s great group in my face. They were all instantly terrific, I mean all of them. I really liked these people and – flash forward to today – I’m going to miss the Monday night nattering.

But – flash right back to then, you, come on, we’re not done yet – I was thoroughly scared I would not be able to write something new. It had to be new. They’d never know if it came from my teetering pile of old ideas or old scripts. But I would. This had to be new: by the end of ten weeks, I had to have written a new short play.

We met on that first Monday night and I wrote my play on that first Tuesday morning.

Well, actually, I wrote a play. It was a short piece called Entrenched and it was fairly typical me: a nice enough idea, good enough characters, good dialogue – I do write good dialogue, that’s about the only thing I will say and I say it because dialogue is so important to me in drama – but, you know, meh. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t good, it didn’t matter.

But it was written. And that got me over the scare at the start of the programme: even if it wasn’t good, that play was done and could be handed in if necessary.

Somewhere along the ten weeks, though, I think I had the things I care most about in drama be pulled out, examined, scrubbed up and, mostly, put back. And somewhere along the ten weeks, I wrote Fat Priests.

I should really tell you about it but I’m hesitant. I want you to see it. I’ve no idea whether you’ll ever even be able to, there is no plan to stage it publicly. And short plays are fine for events like this but they’re not so hot for yer ackshual going-to-the-theatre evenings. I think that on the night Fat Priests came in around 20 minutes: in my mind I can easily expand it to 21. I don’t know how to make it longer.

But one of the reasons for that is a good ‘un: it works at 20 minutes. It’s tight and though you could drop in a line or two, though you could take out a line or three, you’d have to do some serious restitching of the whole piece to make that change work. Everything leads to everything else, that kind of thing. I like that. Especially if you can’t tell it’s the case until you try poking about under the hood.

I’m surprised that I managed to cover an issue, a subject that matters very much to me – I was going to say, I was typing the words that I’m surprised I managed to do this in such a tight, short length but actually I’m just surprised to say I did it at all. I’d like to be surprised to say that I managed it successfully, but that’s too far: I don’t know.

Except I do know that at the end of rehearsals, I explained to my cast and my director that I have no faith in my writing yet I felt what the four of us had created that afternoon was special.

Fat Priests was directed by Polly Tisdall and it starred Rochi Rampal and Laurence Saunders. Very powerful actors. Rochi brought more venom and just a greater mess of conflicts inside her character than I think I wrote. Even on the first read through, Laurence delivered a huge line and froze the room in the silence that followed. In that silence, I could hear a ticking clock. Hadn’t noticed it before, not even when we had happened to be silent. But it was like he made the silence more silent.

There was a lot I didn’t think I’d written. Polly saw a parallel between my setting and the deeper themes of the piece and – I warned her I would do this – I am now telling you that this was all my idea, it was a piece of brilliance and it was all me. Not her. Me. And it’s my name on the script, QED.

I’ve never watched an actor work to get into a character before. Watched them discuss it and debate it, reaching for what makes a character be that character. They’d get to a realisation about it and, inside, I’d be going “Yes!” It was thrilling to see them get a subtext or an undertow that I’d worked to provide yet also worked to keep as a hidden subtext. But then they kept on going further and finding more and I’m thinking, jaysis, they must be right. My script must be fantastic. Got to be.

Drama is collaboration, that’s one of the myriad things I love about it. But one of the things about collaboration is that while, yes, you have to work with other people and not be all precious about your writing, you also have to step up to their level. And this was the Birmingham Rep. It’s in its centenary year, it’s been a part of my life as an audience member, it’s been the subject of my ambition, it has a gigantic and impressive history – it was the first theatre in the world to stage Shakespeare in modern dress – and did I mention that this was the Birmingham Rep? I look back at the other shorts and plays I’ve done and, fun as most were, this was like when I got that first Doctor Who contract: it was real.

You can’t go back from real. I’m conscious that on the one hand I am making the Alps out of a snowball here and on the other that I’m pratting about like anything. Don’t mention to anyone I’ve said all this, would you? I can tell you because you’ve got that kind of face. And as small as this is, as little as Fat Priests is, it was very big to me.

Fat Priests was first performed at the Birmingham Rep’s offices on Wednesday 8 May, 2013. Oh! It was the very first one staged of all the fifteen this year so for twenty minutes, it was the best!

I’ve only just thought of that. Fantastic.

What I thought at the time was that I can relax now, I can just enjoy all fourteen of the rest. And, my lights, it’s fascinating to see where all these writers went. Writing is always a peek into someone’s soul and a glimpse of their worldview, even if they don’t realise it, certainly even if they deny it. Though clearly that’s not the case with my writing. No. Noooooo.

Listen, the Rep is moving back into its main offices and so I don’t think there’ll be another Write Away group before next year. But keep an eye on the Birmingham Rep website and apply for it when you can. Just remember to invite me to your play or I won’t be able to get in.

If you haven’t done this, you would do it: yesterday I stood at a bus stop, leaning against the printed timetable and using an app on my iPhone to find out when the next bus was due. Anyone who doesn’t have a smart phone might mock me, but you know it’s the truth, you know that you are so dependent on the information you can get on your mobile that this wasn’t silly of me, it was a profound statement about the world we now live in.

But the NextBuses app on my phone was wrong. It was the kind of wrong you only come to realise after you’ve been waiting ten minutes for the bus it said was due in seconds. Ten minutes of increasing cold, rain and the sense of having been conned. Never fear, though, there was that other timetable… app. There’s a fairly new one for my region called NetNav which is ace at planning bus routes for you and ridiculously good at listing the departure times of every bus within a mile of you. And sure enough, the times it gave me were only in the most generous sense even similar to the ones NextBuses listed.

After about five more minutes, I started to get suspicious.

So, trying to look nonchalant, I turned around and read the printed timetable on the bus shelter. I’m not certain why it’s called a shelter when that is one of the many things it doesn’t do, but as a housing for a timetable, it could do no wrong. And sure enough, the times it gave me weren’t even similar to NextBuses or NetNav.

You’re starting to think I was at a stop that had been abandoned, aren’t you? A stop that had stopped. (There are two bus stops near where Angela works that have never had any buses, not one. It’s as if they were put there in the hope that if you build bus shelters, buses will come. It’s a sound theory with plenty of precedent and if it had worked for them, by now I might’ve started building a shelter myself.)

The bus came in its own sweet time.

And when I’d got on, it waited at the stop for the correct time to depart. Which appeared to be as wrong as all the others but had the benefit of being when the bus actually departed.

I don’t expect you to happen to know the methodology of the West Midlands bus transport system, but I would like you to tell me why I carry on using these apps on my phone. This is far from the first time that everything has disagreed and everything has been wrong. In my office, I’ve also used the online bus planner and got times from it that were only accurate to the nearest day. But I keep using all of this.

I have become so dependent on my phone that I keep using this stuff and I keep forgetting the equivalents of the printed timetable behind me. I know I’m not alone in this. And you’re smart but I can see it in your eyes, you do this kind of thing too.

Do you also swear when it goes wrong? No, me neither.

I’ve told you before that I don’t tend to swear. No reason, I just don’t tend to. But there was a time when I didn’t at all. Again, no especial reason not to, just no especial to. But I learned. I learned to swear during the three evenings it took to fit a hard drive into my PC. This was a long time ago, back when there were PCs, and it wasn’t difficult, it was just stunningly tedious: I can’t remember all the steps now but it even included twiddling with the jumpers on the computer’s motherboard. If you don’t know what a motherboard jumper is, you’re looking at the wrong guy for the answers.

I promise you that I knew then and that I got it right then. First time.

It didn’t work. There were just enough permutations and I still had just enough interest in computing that I was willing to keep going and then there was just enough boiling rage that I wasn’t going to be beaten by this sodding thing. On the third night, I took everything apart, breathed deeply, and started again from the very start. I did each step perfectly and I did each step exactly the way I had done it the first time.

It worked.

I had a huge new hard disk and I had learnt the language that makes mothers blush.

I can’t remember what huge meant then, I know it was not a fraction of what you’d call huge now, and I also can’t remember having either that patience or the time to be that patient in. Strangely, as well as the swearing, I also learned this day that computers are alchemy and that knowledge has helped me through turbulent times when, lo, one’s faith in the cheapest equipment slapped together without being tested, was tested.

I trusted that the computer must be right and that I must be doing something wrong with fitting this thing. Trusted is too active a word, I just knew it was right and I was wrong. And you would think that having this dented would stop me believing the machines whether they are cheap PCs or, to be honest, gorgeous phones.

But no. I obviously still assume my phone knows more than me but I promise that’s less my bowing to the great electronic gods and more that I’ve twigged how everybody knows more than me. Yet the Hard Disc Debacle isn’t what showed me the truth, the closest I’ve come to Damascus was with what used to be called a Turbo Button.

If you know about turbo buttons, you’ve forgotten them. They used to make your PC run slower. You read that right: turbo means slower. When PCs came out, they ran at some certain processor speed, God and many people know what speed but nobody cares. Then when PCs reached their tricky second album stage, they were faster and, gasp, it was so fast! It was so fast that people thought software might not be able to run properly at this heady speed. Again, I can’t remember the numbers but think of the way people believed you wouldn’t be able to breathe in a car that went faster than walking pace.

No software had any problem whatsoever. But in that very Microsofty kind of way, PC manufacturers added a feature that you didn’t need. It was a button to slow the PC down. You’re wrong to think that calling a slowing-down button Turbo is the reverse of all sense. You’re just not thinking computing. Remember the Start button in Windows 95 and how that’s where you go to switch the thing off. Remember Microsoft Word which doesn’t have a New or Open Document button at all.

Turbo buttons always had LCD displays above them that said what the speed was. It was always a two-digit display and it only ever showed one speed or the other. If your software was collapsing at the wicked fast high speed, you press the button and all is well again.

I was okay with turbo buttons and even then I wasn’t all that fussed when reviews – I worked on a computer magazine – would mention it as a feature.

Except, one day, myself and a colleague did a feature together where we learnt how to build PCs. ‘Build’ is a joke. Assemble. It was like those How Do They Do It shows on digital TV where they promise to explain exactly how a car works and begin by saying “And when the engine has been placed in the chassis…” before going on to detail the method of paint spraying used.

Building a PC meant doing what a million PC firms did: take this motherboard, which is effectively the entire computer already built for you, and add in a few other components such as a hard disc. I promise I didn’t swear. But I came close with the only fiddly bit in the whole thing: the turbo button. It had a button, obviously, but that was already built into the casing. It had some fiddly wires, that was the thing. Wires that ran from the button directly to the LED display above it. Directly and solely.

I can’t speak for all PCs, but in this one, the turbo button only controlled the display that said it was a turbo button. Someone had designed, engineered and manufactured a button whose sole purpose was to tell you that you had pressed it. In my mind, that was suddenly just like the way that Microsoft Word is fantastic, truly fantastic at recovering documents that have gone wrong and how I deeply wish they’d just put a fraction of that talent and effort into not losing the bloody documents in the first place.

That button may have been the day that I lost interest in what had to then been my career. It was possibly the day that I got more interested in the mind of someone who’d put that effort into lying with electronics than I ever really was in electronics.

It was probably the day that I realised I was relieved to go back to my desk and write on the review Mac I was using.

But it was definitely not the day that I learned to distrust computers and stop relying on them because that day has yet to come. It wasn’t yesterday with the cascade of instant but wrong information.

And it wasn’t today when my 5am alarm went off yet didn’t sound.

Today is the 76th weekday that I’ve been getting up at 5am to work, the 76th day that I have put a £1 coin in a pot, and the 76th day that I have risked losing all that. I’ve said this to you in surprisingly enormous detail before but if I ever fail to get up at 5am then I take out every coin that is in that pot and I start again.

This morning I was just thinking that surely it was 5am when I turned to the phone and saw the alarm button was on – the one that says Snooze or Cancel – and that it was 5:31am. The alarm had been on for over half an hour but it hadn’t made a whisper.

I made more than a whisper, I can tell you. And as I continue to prevaricate about emptying that pot, I’m whispering quite a bit.

Tell me you don’t lie awake all day thinking of exactly these:

Where does all the dirt come from? Archaeologists keep finding bones and pots and cities under the soil. I’m afraid to sit down.

How does my iTunes library have music I’ve never heard of?

Why won’t voice recognition take ‘yes’ for an answer?

Was Del Boy based on Steve Ballmer or is it the other way around?

How lazy do you have to be to have invented fractions in maths? Someone asks you what half of something is and you say it’s 1/2. “Take one of it and divide it by two, that’s a half. You’re welcome.” Fractions are the maths equivalent of ikea instructions for solving a problem.

Why do television news channels still preview tomorrow’s newspapers?

Is it really worth strip-mining the Earth and creating a multi-billion-pound industry just so I can wrap my sandwiches in tin foil?

When you book a coach with National Express, why doesn’t it check if there’s a seat until after it’s taken your credit card details? If there isn’t a seat, why doesn’t it tell you which part of your journey is full?

Why are people so critical of the Conservatives when all they’ve really done wrong for the country is be in power?

Why do online train booking websites ask if you’d also like to see prices and availability? Is it because trains are so expensive that the site is surprised you’re looking?

Why do tea bags come in pairs?

If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it swear?

In the next few days I will finish writing an enormous book, a new two-hour Doctor Who audio and a short Birmingham Rep stage play. These have occupied my life, mind and breathing totally for the year so far. What do I do now?

You have so much to do that you don’t know where to start. Or often, you know exactly where you ought to start but, grief, no, please, anything but that. And some of this stuff is so small and fiddly that it’s irritating. And some of it is so big that it doesn’t seem worth starting because you’ll never make the slightest dent in it.

I’ve told you before about how I put a £1 coin in a pot every time I get up to work at 5am – and how I don’t remove a £1 coin if I fail one day, I remove every one of them and start again. But now I’m 67 unbroken weekdays into this and it means not only am I unbearable, not only can I reasonably say it’s a successful productivity technique, but I also have enough coins in the pot to spell out actual words.

Actually, there is software you can use for this and I have tried but it was just too much piddling about. One tremendous thing about OmniFocus as a To Do manager is that you tend to use it first and last thing in the day; you come back to it and go yep, yep, yep, done those. Rather than constantly ticking off things, it’s there when you want it and gone when you don’t. Similarly, Evernote stays under your fingers but it doesn’t get in the way or need you to fiddle. And the only software I found that helps with my other productivity gig turned out to be very pretty but require a lot of work.

The whole point here is to put your work into your work. So let me tell you about the thing I sometimes do that always helps when I do: it’s called Shape of the Day.

Two things to note:

– things are pretty bad when I use this

– I’m using it today

And I should probably also tell you that:

– it doesn’t work

But it helps. It also helped me sleep last night instead of churning over the To Do list and my calendar into the small hours. When you get up at the time I do, there aren’t many small hours to go into. Yesterday evening, I checked my calendar for today and I went over the various tasks I have outstanding. And I shaped the day around them.

Follow. My calendar says I’m doing one phone interview at 10am and another at 5pm. They may move around, one of them has shuffled about a little bit already, but they’re set and in the calendar. That means a certain amount of time is set before them. It will vary but it’s rarely less than an hour so now I know I have prep work at 9am and 4pm.

Since I know when I’ll start and I’ll know how I can typically last until I’m useless for anything, I could go on to plot out every hour of the day. It would be a stupid thing to do.

I plot out every hour of the day.

Only on days like this, you understand. Only on days when there is so much to do that you can’t see when you’ll be able to stop, to eat, to breathe out, or to write a blog post.

That doesn’t stop it being stupid. What makes it irrevocably silly is that you cannot plan out your day like this unless you somehow plan out everyone else’s too. And they stuck to it. And nothing else ever comes up in the middle of the day. And the phones wait until you were done. And everyone you need to email replies immediately with exactly what you need to know.

That’s why the Shape of the Day does not and cannot work. But it also can’t work because what I do is divide the 12/13 hours or whatever it is into hourly chunks. I’ll throw in the odd half hour, the odd ninety minutes, just to keep it varied. But chiefly it’s in hour blocks like we were back at school and working to a timetable. Hand on heart, swear to god, I’ve only this second thought of the timetable analogy. I may have to abandon this entire plan right now.

Anyway.

The reason dividing the day like this can’t work is that there is nothing you do, no task you have, no duty you need to perform, that happens to exactly fit sixty minutes. Plus, you will need the loo from time to time. (Caution: take regular screen breaks. I don’t do this, if there were time to do that I wouldn’t be using this stupid Shape of the Day idea, but I feel honour bound and legally advised to recommend you do.)

You could do what I do every time and that’s make the hour slot broad enough to cover lots of tasks but narrow enough that I get down to it. I can’t give you today’s example shape of the day because most of it is contractually required to be quiet for the moment and some of it is a thing I should’ve done for a friend about ten days ago and haven’t yet. (Pardon? This is all supposed to make us productive? I’ve gone off you now.)

But 06:00-07:00, for instance, was “Write plan for [redacted] project”. Maybe a bit too broad, but it did the job. I stopped the script I was on at 06:00 and I wrote for that hour on that project.

Here’s the last reason why the Shape of the Day is stupid and why I tell you it doesn’t work. I did not finish that [redacted] project plan by 07:00.

But here’s why it does work and why I do keep coming back to it at key moments: I now have a lot of the plan written and I didn’t have that before. If I’d sat here paralysed by having to choose what to do next, I wouldn’t choose and I would be paralysed.

Plus, at 07:00 the next slot in the day was a big current project that actually I returned to many, many hours today. But first I did 07:00-08:00 on it and I was significantly further into it by 08:00 than I was at the start. It was also fresh to me, it was so different from the development stuff I was doing right before it. And when I go back to that development stuff, it will seem fresh, I left it at a good spot, I know what the very next thing I want to do with it is, I will start its next hour at a clip. If I’d spent two hours on it instead, I’d be waning before I finished the second hour.

Sometimes you don’t have a choice, you’ve just got to press on. But there are two major and two comparatively minor projects I have got to deal with today and while the ideal is that I would finish some or all of them, the ideal is not going to happen.

So while I end up with a series of unfinished pieces today, they are all much further ahead than they would be if I’d just panicked, they are all high-energy because I broke them off before I went stale on them, they are all fresh because I came to them from somewhere completely different. Plus, there’s little to no paralysis of indecision because the decision has been made: in this hour I am working on this, next hour it’s that and so on. You can concentrate on the job at hand knowing consciously and unconsciously that you are doing what needs to be done. That is a strange one because it’s a lie: you’ve just made up this plan but you’re sticking with it as if it’s real. But it works and it helps enormously, it is perhaps the strongest part of this Shape of the Day notion because what it does is remove the flapping time: you don’t ever lose time thinking oooh, should I do this bit next or that?

You’re working the plan instead of flapping about trying to triage everything every time.

I have sketched out a shape of the day on paper before. Couldn’t read it. Now I tend to write it as a single task in OmniFocus or part of the day’s notes in Evernote. But you don’t have to use software. I’m not pushing an app on you. Not this week.

The software I tried was an iPhone app called Daily Routine and I’ve just seen, getting this screengrab (right) for you – and getting that screengrab right for you too – that despite my not using it at all this year, it has continued to chug away popping my calendar items into a kind of shape of the day.

And waiting hopelessly for me to go fiddle and add more.

You may like it a lot, I certainly enjoyed using it at first, but even this bare routine-less day looks too complicated for me.

I don’t do complicated. I’m the sort who has to pay himself to get up in the morning.

I’m not criticising, you understand, but I do note that you haven’t told me how you cope with paper notebooks. Last week – no, wait, let me say this, I like saying this – Previously On Self Distract: I told you all about this business that my handwriting doesn’t look human. So I don’t handwrite, I type. And while I can understand that people deeply love their Moleskin notebooks, they’re no use to me unless they somehow decipher scrawling.

But this does leave me with a big mystery. I seriously wonder and have fruitlessly asked many people over the years: how do you find everything? You have this great big notebook, or this tiny wee thing, and you jot down everything in it, but how you do find anything? I’ve worked with people who were fantastically well organised and they seemed unable to forget a single thing, they were instantly able to pick up where they left off in the last meeting notes.

And the spookiest thing of all, for me watching them, was that no matter what the meeting or how many years it had been since the last one, they still had the notes with them. Don’t these things ever run out? I’ve got this image of you as a notebook demon who every morning picks out these stylish outfits you wear and then goes to some strange machine where all your notebooks are kept and it trundles through all of them until it reaches the one you’ll need today. I picture you with the pods that used to slide under Thunderbird 2 until it reached exactly the one with what today’s rescue mission needs.

Granted, I felt sure I was over-thinking all this and that there would be a simpler answer like “I just bluff well” but I thought you might tell me. I thought you might break ranks, break out from this Magician’s Circle of notebook users and tell me how in the name of God you can always have the right bloody notebook with you and it never fills up and you never lose anything and what great alchemy do you have that means you can read your own writing?

Instead, I got asked about Evernote.

I always have this thing that if I know something, everybody else knows it. And that everybody else knew it sooner than I did. This doesn’t stop me rushing up to you like a puppy when I’ve found out something, but it does mean that I’m used to you going yeah? So? And? Seriously? You just got this?

Prepare to do the same now, but it’d be nice if you did it nicely. If you’re an old hand at Evernote, we’re going to have words about why you didn’t tell me this thing existed. If you’re an old hand at paper notebooks, I’m going to try to recruit you to my side. Especially since it’s a series of revisions and improvements to Evernote these past few months that have turned it from nice yet a bit ugly into something I use near constantly.

You can keep your handwriting. But paper notebooks must go.

Join me.

(Please picture me slowly beckoning you and imagine I have wide eyes like a cult leader. It’s my new look.)

Join us.

Join us.

Evernote is free software and a service that you can use for no money, nowt, none up to a certain generous point that I never came close to exceeding. It can be a paid-for service if you want more features, and I do, so I subscribe. Angela bought me a year’s subscription for Christmas and I’m not going back.

Evernote is a service that runs on just about anything I’ve ever heard of anyone using: iPhones, iPad, Macs, any web browser you’re passing, everything. (Okay, also Android and Windows. I think Linux. Not sure there.)

And Evernote is just a service for making notes in. There are a million apps for writing notes in. And it’s not like we were lacking for ways to type notes before apps came along. I used to write articles in Word and when the phone rang I’d just carry on typing. I became known for my surreal writing style because I cannot tell you how many features nearly went to press with a paragraph in the middle saying “Burt rang, needs spanner back”.

That doesn’t happen now because wherever I am, Evernote is a flick or a tap or a keystroke away and if I’ve got that phone crooked under my aching neck, I’m typing a little jotted note. When I hang up, maybe I’ll chuck the note away, maybe I’ll pass it off to my OmniFocus task list to work on later, most likely I’ll save it in Evernote knowing that this means I will always be able to find it again.

I make notes in Evernote. I don’t lose anything. I have every note I’ve ever written and I have them all wherever I am. I can find it all instantly. Surprise me with a board meeting and I’ll surprise you with last month’s minutes and the fact that I’ve done everything I said I would. (Though, to be fair, I’ll have leaned on OmniFocus more than Evernote for that.) But then when we’re in a shop, ask me what recipe your third-aunt-twice-removed said could use Oregano. If I’m on the phone with Eon yet again, then here’s what exciting adventures I had with you the last five times I rang.

(Just an aside: Eon plays the same music every time I phone up and am put on hold. Not the same type of music, not the same artist, not the same album, but the exact same track on a loop. It got so I was singing along with it. And eventually I told the Eon operator to shush, put me back on hold, because I wanted to Shazam the music. And I did. Bought it off iTunes. It’s Ho Hey by The Lumineers. Here it is on iTunes US and here on iTunes UK. I’m linking a lot here today, aren’t I? There’s one in a mo that I could conceivably get tuppence for if you clicked it and followed through with an order on Amazon. Please buy a car in the same Amazon session. Or a house. Otherwise, none of these links do anything for me except send you bounding off away when I’m trying to have a chat with you.)

I could’ve chucked those iTunes links into Evernote. I could drag the MP3s in there too. A screengrab of the band’s website. A photo montage. Maps. Word documents, Pages documents. They all just go in and then they go whizzing around every copy of Evernote that you have.

This month I am mainly writing on two big projects and all my notes for both are in Evernote. A guy phoned me out of the blue yesterday and I was able to bring up all the questions I’d prepared for him, I was able to check a fact in a script PDF. Quite slowly, actually, but that was because my brain was mush more than that Evernote was hiding the note from me. Thinking about it, I could’ve put him on speakerphone and used Evernote to record the conversation if we’d needed me to.

Glasses ready. Pick up 10am.

The other month I lost some pension documents. Now when something comes in the post, I do file it away better but I also pop it through my Doxie scanner while I’m watching the telly and later on add the scanned copy to Evernote. You can organise all these notes, if you want, and one day I might put some thought into it all but for now I just bung ’em in and trust, correctly, that I’ll be able to retrieve any or all whenever I want. That’s just astonishingly useful for me.

There is one thing that is freakily useful. I’m writing a book that requires a huge amount of research through fairly old documents. I scan those in, they become PDFs in Evernote and then without my doing anything, they become searchable. These are old letters and scripts and treatments but I can type, say, “casting” into Evernote and it will show me every document that has that word in it. It OCRs the PDFs you put into it.

It’s freaky but also a bit inconsistent: I can’t tell you when it OCRs or how fast, it just does it when it does it. And I have some documents that I’d quite like it to OCR and it doesn’t. No idea why.

Other than that, I realise I’m talking like a convert and an evangelist but it’s because I’m a convert and I’m an evangelist.

Or I am now.

Previously on Evernote… I understood what it did but I found it a bit creaky and I just didn’t like the look of it. I know that sounds feeble, but this thing is in your face all the time and I even found bits of it irritating to look at: it used to do more to look like a paper notebook. Not much more, I think, I can’t remember now, but enough that I’d look at it and think, enough.

Talking to you today, I realise I cannot picture what it used to look like. There was this huge revision of it last year with massively updated versions for web browsers, iOS and Macs, I think also for Windows. The old one had the same features, more or less, but you can find them now and it just doesn’t look irritating to me. I tried the new iPhone version, then pretty quickly tried the iPad one, then it was the decision of an instant to get it on my Mac and then that was me done. All three versions of the software free and I used them more and more. It’s when you use Evernote a lot that you get it – actually, when you use it for everything. That’s when you start wowing.

So the software is free and the service is free up to a point. That point is to do with how much you can save to Evernote in any one month and it’s do with how big any one note you make can be. For a free account, the biggest single note you can have is 25Mb. You’re not going to hit that unless you’re saving audio files or images. A lot. You’ll get an hour’s audio in that, easy. Premium users, for comparison, can have notes that are up to 100Mb. I am a Premium user. I have no idea how big any of my notes are but nothing’s fallen over yet.

If you use the free version – and you should, try it out like mad before you get hooked and wanna upgrade; I must’ve spent six months or more on the free one – then you also have a limit that you can only upload a total of 60Mb of notes each month. Again, never hit it. Until I went Premium, which ups that to 1Gb per month, and I started filing away a thousand scripts PDFs or more.

These limits are only to do with how much you save in Evernote in any one month: there is no practical limit on how much stuff you can have on it. Again, I have no clue how much stuff I’ve got in mine, but it’s a sight more than 1Gb, I can tell you. Just keep shovelling the stuff up there.

Hand on heart, I went Premium because I like the software so much and I was depending on it so much that I wanted to contribute – and because Angela bought me the first year’s subscription. I did also believe that the freaky thing with documents being OCRd was a Premium feature but I’m sure now that some of mine were done when I was a Free one. Not sure. Sorry about that.

But Premium costs around £35/year and, like I would with OmniFocus, I’d pay that over and over.

Because I use Evernote every day. I’ll start a note on my iMac when I get up to work at 5am every day, then I’ll refer to it on my iPhone when I’m on a train, and I’ll maybe finish it later on my iPad when I think of something else. I don’t have to do anything to get these things to work together and I usually forget that this is remarkable. It feels normal. So much so that when someone at the Birmingham Rep was asking me that thing I mentioned last week, that thing about losing my iPad, I forgot. They wondered why I risked making notes on my iPad when a mugger is always going to take that and never going to take a paper notebook. And I am so used to this feature that I forgot that whatever I’ve written on there is already on my iPhone and my iMac. After I’ve written it, while I’m writing it, I dunno, it just is.

If a mugger took my iPhone too and worked out from it where I lived, coordinated a flashmob-like raiding party on my home office and took my Mac, I’d be somewhat bummed but I’d still have every single one of every single note I’ve ever written. And that includes all my scripts, all my writing archive, all those bleedin’ pension documents.

Did I mention that you can password-protect Evernote?

One more thing? I’m really not sure why I forgot this because I find it a delight: Atlas view shows you where you were when you made a note.

Something else non-evangelisty. There is a rare bug in the iPhone/iPad version of Evernote that isn’t quite rare enough for me: I got it and it took weeks to sort out. (A note made with an audio recording added started to duplicate itself. I had around 170 copies of this same note and it Kept Popping Up until Evernote support fixed it.) All the way through those weeks, though, I would be alternating between shaking a fist at the screen and going ooooh, that’s good, I didn’t know I could do that, I’m going to do it.

So far as I know, that bug has not been fixed yet. It’s been sorted out for me but I could get it back and it’s only okay that I now know the steps to repair it.

And yet even with that and even with how annoying it was – tell me you get annoyed by software too, tell me – I’m still using Evernote every day and I’m still recommending it to you.

This is all true. It is all genuine. There isn’t an ounce of my being envious of your ability to handle paper notebooks and, sheesh, handwrite in them. I mean, who wants legible handwriting? Come on.

I’m doing this thing with the Birmingham Rep and twice now, as I’ve sat there with my iPad out, people have commented on my typing speed, the fact that I can type at all on the glass. And one woman, Liz, even said she admired that I was able to use this stuff when she can’t, when she has to stick with paper notebooks.

I truly have no idea if she was serious. She was very nice, but I’ve seen her using notebooks, I’ve seen many people use them at the BBC, and I envy them. Mostly because they’re legible and I can’t handwrite. Seriously, if I write something down on paper then when I take the pen away at the end, I can’t read what I’ve just written.

There’s also the fact that these notebook-wielding folk are, it seems to me, exceptionally organised. How do you find anything? What happens when you fill that notebook, do you have a shelf full of them somewhere?

It’s become a thing. Recently I worked with someone who brought out a hardbound notebook that filled me with utter glorious nostalgia: though I had entirely forgotten it, the old beeb.com online service – the BBC’s first attempt at commercial websites and the place where Radio Times first began on the internet – had produced a beeb.com-branded A4 notebook for staff. It was very distinctive. I’m sure it was also as cheap as possible, as this was the BBC, but everyone had one in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I had one. Never used it. Couldn’t. But this fella still had one. He says that there were a lot left over when beeb.com closed and he’s just been slowly using the ones up that he’d been given. So in a week or a month or a year or however long it takes him to fill a notebook, they’d be gone and I would never have seen it.

This nostalgic rush came in the same week Liz said that about admiring my use of my iPad. And it happened in the same month that someone at the Birmingham Rep lost their paper notebook.

It was found in a meeting room and by the time I was asked if it were mine, many people had been on the hunt for its owner. I was convinced it was Liz’s. I took it away to bring to her at the next meeting, and I was wrong. Never seen it in her life.

There were these many people involved in searching for the owner but I ended up with this notebook for the best part of a week and it came just as I was really focused on this whole issue of paper notebooks and, I’ll tell you, it got into me. I thought and thought and thought about who could have lost it, about how they use it. I resisted reading any of the notes because that would be like going through someone’s pockets or a woman’s handbag, but eventually I had to in order to find any clues to the owner.

No clues.

Plenty of writing.

I could read all of the writing, at least as I skimmed over it.

But no clues.

Eventually, it looked like I was just going to have to bring this back to the Rep and hope that someone would remember whose it was, to hope that the owner realised where he or she had left it and would come back.

It was a fairly new notebook; the owner hadn’t written very many pages. And it was A4, it was blue, I was conscious of all the Paul Auster stuff about blue notebooks in his novel Oracle Night, I was very conscious of this business of my having the notebook and the owner not, of how I would have to accept that I’d probably never know whose it was and that the owner would probably have to accept that it was lost forever.

I wrote in it.

I put a message in one of the pages toward the back of the book. If he or she ever found the notebook, then someday in the future they would also find that message.

You can’t believe how carefully I wrote. I drew each letter in pencil.

And it was awful.

I turned that pencil on its end and used the eraser.

It was worse.

Seriously? They put rubbers on the end of pencils and they don’t work? Remember, I don’t handwrite anything so this was news to me. I don’t know how you put up with this without marching on the pencil manufacturers of the world.

The note was quite nice, textually, but most of it was unreadable in pencil and the rest, where I’d tried to rub it out and start again, was a mess of graphite that had been shoved about the page instead of erased. It just looked like I’d been out mining for graphite, got it all over my hands and clothes, and happened to lean on a page. Nothing of it looked like writing, nothing of it was presentable to any human being. And rather than being a nice message, I had fouled the notebook.

I looked at the binding of the notebook: no way to unstitch it and remove the one leaf. I searched my office for the razor blades I used to use cutting tape in radio, figuring if I could find it and if I could have a steady enough hand I would be able to slice so finely close to the spine that the owner would never know.

But I couldn’t find those razors. I’d break apart my shaving razor but those blades aren’t as sharp – I have very sensitive skin, you know – and the odds were great that I’d slice apart my fingers in the attempt. I was willing to do it, I was that into this notebook by then, I would do anything to get rid of this abominable mess I’d made in this person’s notebook.

Only, the tiny remaining piece of rationality in my head did twig that my bleeding over the paper might not be the full and complete improvement I would hope for.

Angela had a proper pencil eraser.

Breathe out.

I managed to properly erase the pencil writing I’d made and I even managed to rub out the mess of graphite that I’d smudged all over the page.

Maybe you had to be kind, but if you were, then you’d look at this page and you wouldn’t see a trace of the mess. Or maybe if you looked at the notebook, you wouldn’t very quickly find the messed up page.

But I still had to write in it.

I don’t know why.

I didn’t really still have to write in it but, you know, I still had to write in it.

Did I mention that I can’t write? I do all this iPad stuff, I live in Evernote on my Mac, I swear I got into computing so soon because I needed to get away from handwriting. And I do type very, very quickly. I love typing. It’s one thing I’m good at and typing equals writing to me.I can’t compose on paper, obviously, and I can’t really noodle in my head, I need to knead the keys.

So when I’m writing you a birthday card, I draft out the message on the keyboard. With some people very close to me, I’ll send you the card and then when I figure you must’ve had it, I email you the original text. I’m not proud of this, you understand, I’m not thinking it’s something anyone could admire, it’s just sometimes – often – essential.

Consequently, on the morning of my next Birmingham Rep meeting, I drafted a message. And then I did it.

I did it in pen.

I drew each individual letter. On the page. In this man or woman’s notebook.

Last time I checked, some years ago now, I used to type at about 120 words per minute. It took me an hour to write this short note by hand. I worked this out: I wrote at 1.58 words per minute.

And it wasn’t great. It was better than the pencil, the ink was clearer and narrower than the point of the pencil had been, and I had both my usual careful slowness and the extra added fear of having already cocked it up once.

I think it worked.

Certainly it’s the clearest, most legible thing I’ve ever written by hand. Seriously. Ever. It is in fact the finest penmanship of my life.

I should show it to you now so you can see and maybe reassure me a little. But I wrote in one of the back pages of the blue notebook, I returned it to the Birmingham Rep –

– and an hour later this guy comes looking for it. He’s in the same meeting, I know him, I see him come asking people whether they’d seen his missing blue notebook. I have to feel terribly relieved that the mystery is over.

But there is a part of me that is just a tiny bit disappointed. Yes, he got his notebook back and I know how important that is, I have seen how important that is to people. I’ve had the mystery solved and I really, really, really need my mysteries solved. Only, I’d come to accept that I’d never know. And that’s why I’d written the note. I’d written it so that if the notebook were ever found, if the owner ever filled all the pages before it and came to those back pages, he or she would see a hello there. I would never know if it happened, I would never know whether it happened.

Now I do know the owner but I’m hanging on to one part of all this. I didn’t sign the note, I haven’t told him about it and I’m not going to tell you his name in case he has a Google Alert or something set up for himself.

But I am going to tell you what the note says.

Here’s the draft I typed in Evernote before so very painstakingly destroying his pristine white page with the scrawl of a one-year-old:

Hello. 

Forgive my writing in your book but right now, March 1, 2013, it doesn’t look as if I’ll find you, that you’ll ever get this back. I hope you do, whoever you are.

I like that you’re a mystery to me and how if you do get this back and if you do come across this note, I’ll then be a mystery to you. Perhaps we know each other. It’s more probable that we don’t, it’s most likely that we will never meet.

So let this be just a wave hello between fellow mysteries.

You don’t see this but I get eleventy-billion spam messages per minute on this blog. I don’t see them either: the blog gods let you through and shove the rest into a penalty box until I have chance to review them. I never review them.

Except, I did.

And I’ve had two genuine, non-spam comments from people saddled with the unfortunate name of Anonymous. It’s the parents I blame. One of them wanted to know about a Lark Rise to Candleford film I shot untold years ago. We’ve nattered now and I’ve told her all I can.

The other Anonymous – apparently no relation, though you’re suspicious, aren’t you? – wanted to take me to task about a blog I wrote in January 2012. That feels like the eleventh century, but datestamping doesn’t lie: Done To-Do, What’s Next? was January last year. And I tells you, I thought it was the definitive rave about OmniFocus, a to-do tasky manager thing that runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad. (No PC version.)

But Anonymous wasn’t happy. He or she uses another app I mentioned, Appigo’s ToDo, and is looking at me.

What is it about Omni Focus, $$ that it is, that makes it work for you?
It wasn’t clear from the column! You mentioned one view, Forecast that shows today, but I’m not sure why that’s anything better than ToDo. 

Perhaps you can write another column to help those of us who are using ToDo , but frustrated with it (and Appigo’s repeated upgrades that duplicate, destroy, or otherwise create headaches for the user).

If I could find a way to contact Anonymous the way I did Anonymous, I’d contact Anonymous. But I can’t so I haven’t so I shall tell you too. But by marvellous coincidence – have you got a cup of tea yet? sit yourself down – OmniFocus this week released something that makes me happy. Lots of things make me happy. You do, actually, though I also worry about you. Are you still getting those pains?

It’s the concept of OmniFocus that’s the tricky part. It’s not the same.

Previously on To Do apps

With all To Do apps, you make a note of what’s on your plate and then a man’s gotta do what a man’s got on his To Do list. You do it and then tick, it’s gone.

Only, you don’t do it. It’s the end of the day, you’re outta time, it ain’t getting done. So you go through your list and think about it all, deciding what you have to do first thing tomorrow, what can wait a bit, what you can delete forever because nobody’s looking.

All To Do apps have tools to help you. You can set this task to be Priority Level: Shrug while this next one is Priority: Eeek. You can use tags – I’m going to have to guess a bit here as I never got around to tags – where, I don’t know, this task has something to do with when you’re wearing your Rudolph the Whisky-Drinking Reindeer jumper on.

It is immensely satisfying to open your To Do app and tick done. Cor.

Except, you find you keep coming back to the app: do something, tick it off. And then there’s the next thought where you go, er, right, what’s next? Pick something at the top of your list: is it Priority: Eeek? Can you actually do it now or do you need something first? Do you need someone else first? Has Bert finished his bit so you can do yours? Do you need a spanner and if so, why didn’t you look at this when you were at the bleedin’ hardware store picking up replacement light bulbs for your Christmas tree?

Is the task something like “Write a book” where that’s all very nice but, seriously, are you going to get around to it and will you really be able to tick done by 6pm tonight?

OmniFocus

Anonymous mentions the Forecast view in OmniFocus for iPhone and iPad. It is very good. Anon’s point is that it sounds like every other To Do app’s daily list of things.

It isn’t.

It’s what has to get done today. Plus what you have to start doing today. That’s all. But in doing that, in nudging you to use it like that, you slowly transform how you even see To Do lists. When you start using OmniFocus, it is like every other To Do app with its badge of many tasks whose number never goes down. After a little while, you stop having a thousand tasks today, you have maybe four. And you can do four. You will do four.

Instead of chipping away at the ice, you’re knocking blocks off your To Do list and you’re coming out at the end of the week with a substantial amount done. And it’s at least a big way down to how OmniFocus doesn’t show you the thousand tasks you’ve got left on your list, it shows you the ones you can do now.

Follow. I have to deliver a series of radio interviews to a client tomorrow. I’ve known that for a month so in the old way of things, I’d have put that on the list and it would’ve sat there for a month. Every time I opened the list, there it would be, lost in a sea of tasks but still there and part of me would see it and actually think for a beat, is it the end of the month yet? That task is not on my OmniFocus list.

But it will be tomorrow.

OmniFocus will automatically put it there for me tomorrow.

Now, I can do that because I also put in tasks for each of the interviews and I’ve ticked those off as I went, but right at the start I said no. As I popped in the task Deliver Audio, I set the due date for tomorrow – and that’s where it stayed. In tomorrow. I could look ahead in the forecast and see it, and I did do that each time something came up and I wanted to judge how busy I was going to be on Saturday, but it wasn’t on my list each day.

Every task manager does something of this sort but then there’s also this little companion feature: as well as due dates, OmniFocus gives you start dates. So, strictly speaking, I didn’t get this radio job a month ago, I got it about five weeks ago with the knowledge that I couldn’t start it for a few days. So I put the due date in for Saturday 30 March and I put the start date in for Friday 1 March.

So all that week at the end of February, I didn’t give these interviews a thought. I didn’t have to, and my To Do list didn’t make me. It gets it out of your head and you know that you won’t miss anything because there it will be when you need it.

Now, I don’t always do that. You don’t have to do start dates. I’ve come to do a lot of start dates and actually very few due dates: unless it really is due on a day, I don’t go making up deadlines anymore.

If that’s all you do in OmniFocus, that’s cool. But you can add more and more and more. It’s really handy to say that a task is to do with, say, the book I’m writing. So then when I’m working on the book, I don’t have to see all the Doctor Who tasks I’ve got, I can just check off book bits. And you can bother to say that the task is, I don’t know, a phone call or an email. I’ve spent a lot of time waiting on platforms for trains this month and I’ve been able to say go on then, just show me what phone calls I’ve got to make. And there they are. Phone. Speak. Tick.

But speaking of phones and speaking of speaking… I spend most of my time with the iPhone version of OmniFocus and it is fantastic to be stepping onto a train and saying to it – I mean actually saying, talking, speaking – things like “Remind me to phone Angela when I get back home”. And sure enough, as I walk up our drive, ping, there’s my reminder.

Similarly, if I’m walking through a new area, I can look at the map in OmniFocus and it’ll show me which of my tasks I can do wherever I am. I’ve used that for when I needed to get to a cashpoint and when I’ve known I’ll be passing a supermarket.

You can do more and many people do, but I think this is already sounding a mountain to you. It really isn’t as you work away and it’s specifically designed to stop ever being a mountain because it just shows you what you can do now, not this giant thousand-long list.

It’s not a To Do list, it’s a Can Be Done Now list.

I’m not even as wedded to OmniFocus as I sound: with previous task managers I’d open them up, pick a task, go do it, come back, tick that off, pick the next. With OmniFocus, I see my list for the day and I just go do them. Might check back, will almost certainly add more, but when I go to tick things off as done, it tends to be in huge batches. And, wow, that is satisfying.

It’s also supremely satisfying to review everything you’ve got to do. Once a week or so, get OmniFocus to show you its review of all your tasks. Do this in the iPad version: it’s gorgeous. And you just skip through everything. I’m always surprised how many things I’ve already done and can tick off, but then you look at this job and work out why you haven’t moved it forward, you look at that job and think actually, I’m not that fussed. And by the end of the review, you’ve still got everything in OmniFocus and out of your head but you feel so utterly in control of what you’re done.

I never got a fraction of that with other To Do apps.

And I need it now. Since that January 2012 blog, there’s been a storm in my work and writing and life. Yet Angela tells me I seem lighter. It’s because I finally know what I’m doing and I can shove all the things into OmniFocus that I have previously struggled to balance and get on with the work that I am good at, knowing that OmniFocus won’t let me forget things. It’s got my back, that really is how it feels.

So the short fact is that – to answer Anonymous’s key question – OmniFocus fits me. It won’t fit everybody and I tell you now as I told you before, the Mac version of it is hard to use and the concept of it is surprisingly difficult to quickly grasp. And yes, it does cost $$.

The iPhone one is good, the iPad one is tremendous, the Mac one is hard but extraordinarily powerful.

And this is what the makers, the Omni Group, have done this week to make me happy: I’ve now got an alpha copy of the next version of OmniFocus for Mac.

You know what beta software is, this is worse. Alpha software is where all the bits have come together, kinda, and probably do most of what they eventually will, but definitely won’t play nice together. So it’s got functions that don’t do anything yet and it is crashing exactly as often as the Omni Group said. You would be mad to use any company’s alpha software and you actually have to convince Omni Group that you get it before you get it: that you understand what’s really happening. If you’re an alpha tester, you are insane.

I’m an alpha tester. And I can tell you after two days and maybe twenty minutes active use of this new version that it is really good. It’s going to be really good.

Next week, I evangelise 2B pencils.