I’m trying to squeeze something extra into my book about The Beiderbecke Affair. But that comes out 28 September and so things are a little far along and I may not be able to. Just in case, let me share it with you here instead.

As all enterprising writers would, I did include my email address in the book’s acknowledgements. But I’m trying to change that from an email to a new website URL and so I’ve asked that we add a line that goes this away:

It really does. You won’t find much there today but it works and by publication there’ll be some extras like unused extracts from interviews with Barbara Flynn and more. Not a great deal, to be honest, because I managed to pack a huge amount of that in. But everyone I talked to for the book was so interesting and Barbara gave me an utterly golden trove of photographs and cuttings. I scanned everything and handed this giant parcel back with all the scans on the teeniest of USB sticks. I’m sure she’ll be fine with me showing you some of the material.

But the reason there’s not much of it on there today is that I only just got the idea this week while producing a new website for myself. That was partly prompted by the book, partly by people asking where they could get it, partly by my finding out that it’s even going on sale in Japan and so mostly and consequently because my ego is currently overwhelming.

Plus Apple kicked me out.

I’ve been a MobileMe user since before it was MobileMe and that Apple service hosted my website but they’re taking it down and they were gonna take me with it if I didn’t do something. It’s all because MobileMe has been replaced by iCloud and that’s fine because iCloud is rather spectacularly great – when it works.

Nonetheless, this ‘ere iCloud don’t take kindly to strangers, you hear, so my site and everyone else’s sites on there had to move.

I’m still on www.williamgallagher.com but that tent is now pitched on A Small Orange. I’d never heard of this hosting site before but I can’t stop talking about them now: a real human being from their support team replied with a solution to a problem less than 90 seconds after I sent it. Love ’em.

With a need to move comes a desire to spring clean. Besides, my mother has never understood what I do for a living and now I can just point here to the site. Once I convince her to get online.

When she does, you can bet the first thing she’ll say to me is that oi, those scoundrels at 123-reg sell you subdomains like scandal.williamgallagher.com for a tenner but you can get them for free. And do you know, she’s right? Over the years I have paid for subdomains to stand up particular projects. Most of them I can’t tell you because they’re still in play but, for instance, I did once have a radio.williamgallagher.com. I liked that. Radio William Gallagher.

What was I saying about my ego?

As part of the process of pulling up sticks and headin’ on outta town to A Small Orange, I learned this about free subdomains and that’s when the penny dropped about having beiderbecke.williamgallagher.com.

I am sure that by 28 September that and its easier-to-spell counterpart jazz.williamgallagher.com are going to be well worth you having a look.

But for today, I’m rather pleased with how my own main site has turned out. Do please have a look at www.williamgallagher.com when you can. Right now I think it is just the way I want it, I think it has just the things I need.

Except I’ll tell you the truth: I had a problem with an image on the front page. It’s supposed to change randomly between me looking serious, me looking sexy* (*delete as wishful thinking) and my very most embarrassing photo ever.

Other pages have these rotating images but I’m plainly getting something wrong so you only get the serious one. There is no sexy one. You knew that. But fortunately the embarrassing one will never accidentally make it onto this blog.

William

Angela Gallagher, my wife, has earned herself a place on a Birmingham Rep theatre writing programme. I am beside myself with excitement: I get nervous when she goes to it, I watch the clock until she’s back, I gobble up everything she can tell me about it. And at the moment, we’re talkin’ character.

We’ve always talked drama but somehow it feels richer at the moment because she’s devoting all this time to pursuing her ideas while I’m over here in the corner pursuing mine. Feels all the more active. And we get into right debates.

Which is where character comes in. Or where character will. Character is the next subject in the Rep’s programme and I will earwig everything I can from what Angela gets to discuss with them. But until then, we sit here, she and I, with a different volume of opinions. I have a lot to say about character. She could say a lot but she’s waiting to talk about it at the Rep.

I really, really don’t want to pummel my opinions away at her: I like it best when she disagrees and can change my mind. This is especially true right now because I am about to pontificate on a certain issue to do with characters and I know I am wrong.

I also know I am very serious and that I have benefited from this opinion. But it is wrong. Probably.

Follow.

I have a friend who loves creating characters in her scripts. I’ve pointed out to her that if her lead character needs to know the time, she will for preference have him meet a blind dwarf watchmaker with 11 sons, 8 daughters and sure an’ they’ll all have a tale to tell. Whereas I’ll give him a bloody watch.

Her way is perhaps more filmic. Certainly more imaginative. My way is very cost-conscious and practical. I think the right thing is probably somewhere in the middle. Don’t be daft with characters but don’t limit yourself either.

With her approach, I’d argue that the characters are so many that they must remain ciphers. But with my approach, you know every character is extremely important. If they appear to pop into a scene and vanish again, you know dollars to doughnuts that they’re coming back later. I don’t like this in me.

But let me tell you a Doctor Who story. There’s a character in the last one I wrote, Wirrn Isle, called Dare. In the first draft, she was the best character you never saw. She was so vivid that you reached the end of the draft script and were certain that she’d been in it. Yet she hadn’t.

Dare – a quick aside; the names in Wirrn Isle were all generational things, it was a whole socio-economic thing, I can bore you on demand – and where was I? Dare. Dare was a throwaway line, she was a character who ran something or other and had said this or that. I can’t remember now but whatever it was, it began as an unimportant aside. And it just grew and grew in the not-telling.

Alan Barnes at Big Finish read this and pointed out that Dare was a little bit too interesting to not even feature in the drama. Between him and Dare herself, I was convinced. She boomed into the second draft and became not just important, but one of my favourites of my own characters.

Partly for this reason. There’s a little exchange in Wirrn Isle and I liked it so much on hearing the final audio that I wondered whether I’d written it or if it had been an edit. I so wanted it to be mine that I wouldn’t look up the script, just in case. But even if I can lie to myself, I can’t lie to you. So just in order to give you the right credit, I have now read the draft script.

And the line is mine.

I love you.

It’s just this: Dare’s boss asks her how she can possibly be so stupid as to believe a particular thing and she replies:

DARE: I started with the evidence and worked backwards, sir.

Call me daft, but I like that line (of mine) and actor Helen Goldwyn delivered it just so. But here’s a thing. I’ve never met Helen Goldwyn. I actually had no clue what she even looked like until right now, at this point in this sentence, when I broke off to go find a photo for us.

Now that I have, I also see that she has credits as long as you like, both for acting and writing. I’m not sure how I can be daunted after the fact, but I am.

The reason I didn’t meet her, though, is because I was doing this thing that meant I could only get to one of the studio days for Wirrn Isle. As a writer, I don’t have to think about who gets booked to do what role when: that’s the producer and the director. I know David Richardson cast at least most of Wirrn Isle because I thanked him for it on my studio day: this whole set of actors were terrific and made me sound great.

Nonetheless, I’ve got a point lurking here somewhere and it is this. Even though I didn’t have to think about whose scenes could be recorded on which day, I did have to think about how many people I used. How many characters in total.

Of course there’s a budget issue: I don’t know the figures for Wirrn Isle but no radio production can keep adding actors on a whim. But budget is just one of many practical concerns with characters: I only had two hours of story and I have to juggle so that everybody always had something to do. In radio, especially, if a character doesn’t speak for a page or two, they are effectively gone. Vanished from the listeners’ mind.

Which happens to fit my natural approach of writing as few characters as conceivably possible.

Characters are a right bugger to create. You come up with one and the next thing you know, you have to create another one just so the first has someone to talk to. Bastards.

If the Birmingham Rep gives Angela any insights into character, I will steal them for myself and never tell you. It’s not personal.

It’s in my character.

This is a complicated thing to explain to you just to stand up the image there, but follow.

I am a freelance writer. However, through a budget requirement and/or a clerical error years ago, I went on staff for a couple of days a week at at Radio Times. I shrugged: what difference did it make?

It made a lot of difference to my accountant who had to periodically phone me up to ask why this bit of work was staff and taxed but this bit wasn’t.

He’s happier now because I am back to being entirely freelance. But this time, I didn’t shrug. Instead, I crossed my fingers.

Because I’ve been there long enough to know that some people, some times, get a remarkable gift when they come off the books at Radio Times.

You’re looking at it. I mean, they gave me a terrific send off in every way but the bit I want to tell you about, the bit I really hoped would happen, is this cover.

I can’t tell you that it’s a Radio Times tradition, because I don’t think it is. Not everyone gets it or the art department wouldn’t have time to do the real magazine cover. I really don’t know how they had time to do this one.

I feel honoured. Seriously: this is Radio Times, the only magazine I know whose covers are so famous that they get republished in books, that have had art exhibitions devoted to them, and which each year are the excuse for the all-star celebrity Radio Times Covers party.

But I don’t think these fake covers are well known outside the magazine so I wanted to tell you about it. And to boast, frankly to preen a bit here as there is no measure to how big my head is today, but also just to tell you.

If you can’t guess and you don’t happen to have an instant-recall memory of every Radio Times cover, what happens is that they take a genuine old cover, Photoshop you into it and then rewrite all the cover lines to chide/mock/belittle/kid* you (*delete as applicable).

You’ve got three questions now, I can tell. The answer to the first is yes, I’m getting this framed for my office. The second is that, go on then, here’s the original version of that cover.

It’s from 2008’s cover for the Doctor Who special, The Next Doctor, starring David Tennant and me. I mean, David Morrissey.

As to your third question, well, I don’t know, it’s a very good point. A very good question. Hard to say. Very hard to say.

But I wondered too. Does this mean I’ll be invited to next year’s Covers Party?

I’ve just this minute discovered that my iPad knows the word Wirrn. It’s obviously learnt this from the number of times I’ve written it, unless my iPad is sneaking off to watch Doctor Who without telling me. But from now on, whenever I’m asked how I wrote Wirrn Isle, I will tell the truth: my iPad autocompleted it for me.

Doctor Who: Wirrn Isle came out over a month ago now and at first it was a right treat reading reviews and online chatter. Writers often say they don’t read reviews of their work: I thought it was through some arty reasoning, or maybe just fear, but it’s possible that it’s only because there are so many. I set a Google Alert on the word Wirrn and got swamped with references to my work, with one-liners, with full-blown reviews, criticism, praise…

…and with pirated versions. Hmm.

You know people download films, I just never knew how many pirate sites there are. Some pirate users appeared to be eagerly waiting for Wirrn Isle, so I suppose that’s a good thing.

If you want to be on the legal side of the angels, here’s where you can get it properly on CD and online. You can also get it through some outfit that seems to be doing well; a place called Amazon. Wirrn Isle is on both Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Oh! Can I tell you this? Just between us? The other week, I went to Amazon UK to order a couple of copies to send to some radio producers and I got what is now my absolute favourite warning to read online anywhere: “Only 1 left in stock”.

I needed two, actually, so I was fully justified in buying that last one. I didn’t have to wait long before they restocked and I could buy for the second producer, but this means I was officially and certainly sold out at Amazon.

I’ve been called a sell-out before, but never in a good way.

Right, I’m off to see what other Doctor Who-y words my iPad knows.

(Cough. My new Doctor Who, Wirrn Isle, came out today but I’m not ready: I was planning a proper piece about that for its official release date at the end of the month. I’m new at this. But while I go off pondering that, I have been writing the following and wanted to share it with you.

That’s all. Carry on.)

When I went freelance as a writer, people said the reality of it all would hit me on that first day I would be my own boss and would no longer have to go into an office. Nope. I sat there in my own office, fielding calls from six bosses instead. But it hit me last week as I did some drama work in New York and some business in Florida.

This is the first time I’ve worked in the States and I know that’s not actually a big deal but it feels it to me. On the one hand, I feel great that I’m doing something that requires me to be thousands of miles from home and which just happens to include New York. But on the other, I don’t half feel the pressure that the trip has to fund itself.

I don’t know what it is in me that prefers working: it is better to be crew than passenger, I deeply feel that. So despite spending some days entirely in my motel working, and maybe because I’ve not even glanced at Disneyworld or Legoland or Harry Potter Country or Kennedy Space Planet, this trip feels very new and quite odd. Enough so that I’ve noticed what a difference it makes not being a tourist.

Follow:

You just don’t look like a tourist

Everybody knows. Everybody knows you’re not a tourist. I got some time off in New York and went to a museum where on the way in, the staff were greeting everyone with “Hi! Welcome to New York! And where are you folks from?”. Until I reached the desk and they just said “What’s your ZIP code?”

(Since you ask, I said it’s 10017. That’s where my US iTunes account is registered.)

The museum exhibit was about the street grid plan of Manhattan. I’ve written about this before, I’ve written drama about it, and a few months ago I heard a exhibition was opening. I preordered the accompanying book on Amazon. And then thought, sod it, why not just go to the museum? It’s the Museum of the City of New York and the exhibition is The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. Runs until July 15.

Anyway, so, one thing that I’d written about was how the streets were planned long before there were enough people in Manhattan to live on them. Long before they were as flat as they are now. I specifically wrote about John Randel Jr marking out the streets and avenues with wooden posts. Now I learn that he did that at first but people kept pulling them out. So instead, he began using heavy masonry. And one was found just a few years ago.

Picture New York as hilly terrain – Manhattan means “Island of Many Hills” – with just a few streets down near the harbour where the Hudson and East rivers cross. Less than a fifth of the island had streets then but it’s a small island, it was filling up. So the council divided the rest of the land into what then became 12 avenues and 155 streets: getting the maximum room possible for the most number of people.

Rocky, wild, hilly countryside and then these stone markers, spaced out at precisely calculated points. That photo at the top of this is of the marker post that was found. The very post that John Randel Jr banged into place to mark the crossing of 4th Avenue and 26th Street, back in the 1810s and 1820s when there just wasn’t a 3rd Avenue or a 25th Street. There wasn’t anything.

And just to show you, here’s what that spot looks like now. 

It’s now 26th and Lexington: the 4th Avenue is now broken up into chunks with names like this one, Lexington. Just as the 6th is officially the Avenue of the Americas, even if nobody calls it that unless it’s their address.

It was very strange and personal seeing that marker post. It felt like the last time I was in the States and I saw a bit of the Titanic’s hull in an exhibition. I was naughty then and touched it but I was good now and didn’t press on the post.

Made me think. And I’m not even sure what it made me think. But may I throw some thoughts at you?

After New York I went to do some work in Florida and the car rental firm says I drove around the state for 730 miles. Normally that means I haven’t found a car park.

But this time it meant I had quite a lot of time to think. And because I was in Florida, there wasn’t a lot to distract me. New York feels real and dirty and kind of like it was built on purpose. Florida towns feel like they were just spilt there.

So.

Collected thoughts from a travelling bloke

Man cannot live by Domino’s Pizza. But it’s only a two-minute drive.

In New York, the kindest thing you could say about me is that I look very English. But in Florida, I look slim. Now trying to work out where I could go to look hot.

Speaking of hot, it is a rule: you cannot switch on air conditioning too quickly.

Just got served by a guy whose tag says his name is Ishmael. “Call me,” I said. On the good side, he actually had not heard that before. On the bad, I appear to have a date for the evening.

The poorer an area, the more churches it has.

E Street Radio really does not play anything except Bruce Springsteen music. He’s done some tremendous stuff. But he’s not half done some duffers too. Enough duffers are on his new album, Wrecking Ball, that I wasn’t going to buy it. But it became the accidental soundtrack to my driving on this trip, so I did. Rocky Ground is a good song. I keep calling it Rocky Road.

Sirius XM, the satellite radio service that includes E Street Radio and The Coffeehouse, sounds fantastic. It plays tracks I’ve owned for years and makes me wonder if they are new recordings, sometimes even new arrangements.

At my sleazy Florida motel where I was to be for most of a week, the desk clerk looked me over and asked: “Will one key be enough, sir?” I promise you he winked.  In New York, the desk clerk looked at me too. I was one man, staying one night, in one room. He didn’t ask. Just gave me two keys.

Just one more thing


Everything is easier once you’ve done it.  So why do we ever wait?

Back in June 2010, I really wanted to know whether Apple’s then-new iPad was genuinely useful for writers or whether I just fancied getting one. Nobody seemed to have written about exactly the things I wanted to know, so I selflessly bought one to find out and tell you.

Now I’m bemused that it was only June 2010. Just as with my iPhone, this iPad has become so much a part of my every day work that I don’t understand that I’ve only had it a short time.

But about two or three weeks ago when I was booking flights for a trip, I really wanted to know whether I could get by only taking my iPad. This time there are many articles out there about replacing your MacBook or your PC with an iPad but that’s not quite what I was thinking. Forget what I would normally have used or normally would’ve taken, given the jobs I needed to do, could my iPad cut it?

I have selflessly gone on a ten-day trip the States to find out for you. I’m about halfway through and writing to you from a film noir-style motel that looks right out of Veronica Mars to me. It’s all business in Florida with a completely accidental stopover in New York. Both ways. And within which I’ve managed to arrange some drama meetings.

So there are two things for you right there: Florida business and New York drama. It was impossible to do the work without taking something, and I gambled on taking just my iPad. Ten days is right on the edge of how much clothing you can pack, even though I could cut that down because I knew I’d have washing facilities. If I added my MacBook Pro then as small as it is, that’s another chunk of packing and then there’s the mains cable. There is no possibility that I’m going to let my MacBook Pro get chucked in the hold so adding that one thing would automatically mean two bags instead of one.

Which means everything taking longer. And since my time in New York, especially, is very tight, it made a difference. With multiple bags, I’d have taken a cab from JFK. With only carry-on luggage, I skipped baggage reclaim and was on the New York City subway system at lightspeed.

All of which is great if my iPad did what I needed.

Pretty much, yes. There’ve been some problems. Yesterday I thought I needed to print out some legal documents and I was able to use my iPad to connect remotely to my office Mac in England and email myself the forms, but there proved no way to print them out here. If I were staying in a fancier hotel, it might be different.

Oddly, this blog has been the hardest part to write: for some reason Google insists I want to write it in HTML and never want, for instance, to press Return when I could type me some line break tag instead.

And I did hit a Flash problem. If you know what Flash is, you know that it’s a problem. Even when it works, it’s a problem. But it was flavour of the minute once and I can tell you now that certain official US corporate websites require Flash for no very good reason. Just to enter account numbers into a form, they need Flash. This smacks of a bored web designer to me.

But iPads will not play nice with Flash so I did remote-control my office Mac again and fill out the form there, some 4,000 miles away from me.

Then iPads kind of make you do one thing at a time. You read books on them, or you email, or you write, or you watch films, you don’t tend to skip about between them. And I had to do more of that than usual: I’d look up a tiny detail of some PDF legal form here and need to research another detail about it on a US business website there. Business means financial too so I was checking online banking, moving funds around, recording everything and that meant swapping from the Numbers spreadsheet to the web browser and back and to and back and to.

Two days ago that was fine: I zipped back and forth like nobody’s business. Today, not so much.

If you do something that uses up an iPad’s RAM then when you swap back to, say, the web browser Safari, it won’t have been able to hold the page in memory and so must get it again. That’s fine, but with online banking that’s seen as your logging out of the secure system so today I was re-logging in.

And a similar thing happened with Numbers: when I went back to that spreadsheet, the document had closed.

I get it and it’s not a gigantic deal, but I don’t get how it was happening today when I was in a hurry and not yesterday when I was also in a hurry. You thought the word hurry was key, didn’t you?

There was one difference. Today I was typing standing up as I ran around, yesterday I was typing at the desk and also using my iPad to play music.

Typing. That’s one thing I forgot. I have written thousands of words on my iPad without getting an extra, external keyboard. Thousands of words typed directly on the glass. But it is slower and my fingers do blunt a bit, so shortly before I left the UK I bought an external keyboard. A Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad. Quite often it gives me a double character when I first start typing, but otherwise it’s so good that it is transformational.

While we’ve been talking, my iPad has been downloading a film off iTunes for me. Angela is away on holiday and mentioned that she’d watched The Third Man last night: call me daft, but I want to watch it with her, so to speak. So I rented it off iTunes and will watch it in a mo.

This one piece of metal, glass and plastic has been how I’ve run my business for this trip. It’s how I’ve kept in touch with people. Perhaps madly, it’s how I’ve been arranging drama meetings back in London. And it’s been entertainment. I’ve read books, I’ve read scripts, I’ve watched many TV episodes, I’ve watched a film or two and I’ve listened to music a lot.

This would be an ad for iPads except for one thing.

As I write this, it’s Tuesday evening Eastern Standard Time and a new iPad will be announced tomorrow. Plainly, I’m not writing on that new iPad tonight but I’m also not writing on the previous one, the iPad 2.

This is the same iPad I bought right back in June 2010. I’ve sat with friends who have iPad 2s and those are clearly enormously faster. I know that business with Safari pages and Numbers spreadsheets closing does not happen with iPad 2. And the iPad 2 does have cameras to let you use FaceTime. No question, iPad 2 is very good. One presumes iPad 3 is going to be better still, though search me how.

But I’ve no reason to buy it. Except fancying it, obviously. As much as I’ve grown accustomed to having my original iPad with me everywhere, this trip has made me appreciate it even more.

Mind you, if you fancied buying an original, nay, classic iPad… one careful if very constant user… You’d have to tear it out of my hands but I’d throw in the original box on my way to the Apple Store…

Very quickly: any chance you’re around London tomorrow? I’m going to be signing autographs at Big Finish Day 2 in Barking. The full details are yours for just a tap of a finger or a click of a mouse.

You start easy at first. It’s just a bit of fun. You’ve got your iPhone with you, there’s nothing bad about writing a little note that you need to buy bread on the way home.

But then you get that high when your iPhone spots that you’ve left the office and it bleeps to remind you about the loaf.

Suddenly, you get home and you’ve got bread. Instead of a niggling feeling that you’ve forgotten something, you’ve got the makings of a sandwich.

I know, it’s crazy.

Only, tomorrow you need more. You need to remember your mother’s birthday.

Then you’re at work and it’s just that little bit easier to make some To Dos than to keep going back to your email to see what you have to do next. It’s sensible and it’s also free. Apple’s own Reminders app, it’s right there, it’s free, it does that trick with popping up when you leave or arrive places.

It’s nothing, you’re just doing this to be sociable. You can stop any time you want.

But Wunderlist comes next. Just a bit more power to your elbow. Lets you break down big tasks into bits, into smaller tasks. There are myriad To Do apps on iPhone and Wunderlist is deservedly very popular. I’ve never used it.

I used to get my kicks from Appigo Todo instead. Loved that app. Lived in that app. The iPhone one now costs £2.99 but you also want the iPad one. That’s £2.99 too. And you should have the Mac one too. That’s another £10.49.

Soon you’re dividing your To Do list into categories. Stuff for work, stuff for home. A shopping list. Repeating tasks; those things you have to do every day like “Ignore new year’s resolution”.

It all makes sense.

It’s only the next bit that gets tricky.

Back about five months ago, I was an Appigo Todo evangelist. Today, I’m not. In between there was a little curiosity about something else, then a bit of a plunge-taking, then a lot, a lot and three times a lot of annoyance, anger and rage. The annoyance was that I’d bought something fairly expensive: I think now it’s cheap but it’s only that when you know it is what you need. When you think you’ve wasted your money, it’s a lot of cash.

The anger came from it not doing what I needed it to do. This more-expensive, much more highly recommended, ostensibly much, much, much more powerful piece of software could not do things that my Appigo Todo could.

And then the rage.

The rage because as annoying as this new software was, there were bits in it so good that it was too late. So good that I bought another version. And then a third. I hated all three versions of this new one but I could never go back to Appigo.

But ask me today, and it’s completely different: it feels now as if I bought the new software in Damascus.

I even have evenings off. Sometimes, anyway.

Because I’ve switched to using OmniFocus.

If you don’t use this yourself, the quick way to describe it is to say that it’s a To Do list. If you do use it, you are right now emailing me to say come on, that’s like saying XXXXXX is a football team or YYYYYY is a car when really ZZZZZZZZZZ. (Hey, it’s your email, you do the metaphor.)

There is one version that is difficult to use, that I mean you look at it and wonder where in the world you even start. But the real difficulty and the reason you tend to break through it and abruptly find this all incredibly useful, is more a conceptual thing.

Todo was a To Do list. OmniFocus is more a list of things that Can Be Done.

Follow.

If I get a job or think of something I have to do, it used to go in my Todo list and sit there until it was done, with this enormous growing pile of things. I used to find it very satisfying when I could get the number of tasks down from some giant number to some less-giant number.

Now, I’ll do the same with OmniFocus in that I’ll chuck anything from the smallest need for a loaf to a book commission into it. But the difference is that later I’ll check through those new ones and start working on them. That’s for the British Film Institute, that’s for Radio Times, this is for when I get around to it, this is if I can be bothered. But the BFI thing might not be due for a month and I probably can’t start it until next week. So, whack, start next Thursday, finish a week on Friday, I don’t have to think about it again.

It takes longer to describe this to you than to do it.

And the result is that I can look at my OmniFocus list and, if I want to, see only what I need to do today. If I’m in London, it’s typically for Radio Times but this week I’ve got a BBC Radio 4 meeting there so I can also see tasks by location: I can look to see what else I can get done while I’m there. Or types. I’ve got ten minutes before my train, I can immediately see what emails or phone calls I need to get done while I wait.

So you see, it is Tasks You Can Get Done Now more than it is Tasks To Do. Take a look at the difference:

I took that screen grab just before I stopped running OmniFocus and Todo in parallel. So it was for the same day, with the same lists of tasks to do. With Appigo’s Todo – which I’m not knocking, I liked it a great deal until I found OmniFocus suited me better – I obviously didn’t have to do all 30 that day, but I had to keep going into it to see what I could do now, what I could postpone. With OmniFocus, though I was getting through the same amount of work, one glance told me that yes, I could knock off for the night.

I thought that having tasks only show up when it was time to do them would mean I would forget them and would be forever behind but somehow it means the opposite. I know I’ll get to them, I know I’m making better use of my time overall. And there are many ways in which OmniFocus shows you what’s coming up, so that you can usefully tell when you can and can’t take on anything else. This is my favourite: the Forecast view in OmniFocus for iPhone:

Things that I have to do at the top, tasks I need to get started in the middle, and below that a quick calendar of the day. There’s more up above and down below.

There’s also a way to see only the tasks to do with, say, my book. So this coming Thursday, for instance, I can see I’ve only got one thing that truly has to be done then so I can take on more. In fact, I’m probably spending Thursday on my book for that very reason – and come Thursday, I’ll have OmniFocus just show me the tasks I need to do for that one project.

I think this all sounds like a lot of work and that was part of the reason I found OmniFocus annoying at first. Felt like I had too much to think about, that I could spend longer playing with this than in getting the work done. Yet in practice, it all just flows so easily – especially on the iPhone and iPad versions – that I spend much less time than I used to thinking about whether I’ve got everything covered.

The location reminders don’t work as well for me as they should (and OmniFocus Support can’t fathom out why) and I’d like the Mac version to be as slick as the iPad one or at least just a bit more slick. But I love how when I get an email on my Mac that I’ll need to reply to later, I can tap a couple of keys and it’s in OmniFocus as a task with what it’s about and a link to that email.

I also love that I jot down something on my iPhone and know that it’ll be on my iPad and my Mac the next time I look.

So I’m a convert. Join me. Come to the dark side. But only tell me about it after you’ve got through the bad bits and are a fan too.

Just so you know, there are three versions of OmniFocus and you don’t need all of them but you will end up buying the lot. OmniFocus for iPad (£27.99) is the best, OmniFocus for iPhone (£13.99) is the handiest, OmniFocus for Mac (£54.99) is the toughest to use. There’s no PC version.

It’s 18:00 on October 31, 2011 and as of this moment, I no longer work at all for the BBC. Slightly strangely, I haven’t left the Corporation – the BBC has left me.