How Microsoft Word became useful again

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Originally, Microsoft refused to put Word on the iPhone or iPad and trusted that its millions of users would go oh, okay then, we won’t buy an iPad. It didn’t work out quite like that and a fair short summary is that Microsoft shot itself in the foot many, many times.

For once people bought iPads and were therefore required to use alternatives to Word, they discovered there are alternatives to Word. Suddenly all of Word’s brilliance gets forgotten and all of its outrageously irritating problems get remembered as we go discover we can get more done without it. In truth we actually can’t: Word is the most powerful word processor there is but with great power comes stupid problems so something which technically does less is much more useful because we can use it more. If you can get your writing done without Word changing the formatting on you, without Word simply crashing just because you dragged in a picture like it said you could, then you get more writing done.

Shunning the iPad was Microsoft doing its once typical and once extremely successful technique of pitching its bulk against a competitor but this time the competitor won and the blowback damage to Microsoft was huge. Word ceased to be ubiquitous. People stopped buying Word just because it was Word. Not just people who were buying iPads but people who were buying word processors for any machines. Including Windows PCs.

Good. We are now back in a world where you have many choices for how you write your words and if choice can be overrated, it’s better than when we just had the one.

But last year Microsoft finally brought Word to iOS and I wrote about how surprisingly good it was, particularly on the iPhone. I’ve changed my mind a bit since then: I hardly touch it on my iPhone but I do keep Word on my iPad and I use it from time to time. It’s been steadily improved too, plus the original slightly messy business of how you could read but not write in it unless you paid some money is gone. You can now use Word without a subscription and it’s worth keeping.

I don’t find myself moving over to it for everything, even though I’d like to find one single application I could use everywhere. As it is, I’ll write on Drafts 4 for iOS, or Pages for iOS and OS X, on Evernote everywhere, Simplenote in many places and occasionally Word. I feel slightly schizophrenic which is fine, but I also find my writing is all over the place. I’ve a hundred or more pieces in TextEdit. A dozen in OmniOutliner. It can take me a spell to find what I’m sure I wrote the other day.

So I can appreciate what this fella Andrew Cunningham says in Ars Technica. The short summary is that he’s now turned. It took the new beta version of Word for Mac to tip him over, but having the one word processor on OS X, iOS, Windows and Android has snared him:

So yes, Microsoft didn’t make it to the iPad or to any of these other platforms as quickly as it could have or should have. There will be people, including some at Ars, who found other non-Microsoft solutions that worked for them in the meantime. But I find myself revising my initial “too little too late” stance to something closer to “better late than never.” A subtle distinction, maybe, but an important one.

You win, Microsoft: How I accidentally went back to Microsoft Word – Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica (20 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

David Allen: You’re Doing it Wrong

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Previously… David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, easily one of the cleverest books I’ve read, certainly one of the most very useful, but also unfortunately just a bit irritatingly with corporate-speak. I mean, come on. Genuinely tremendous ideas explained in ways that don’t explain and do make you wish you’d never started his book.

Fast Company has a new interview with him which they summarise with this headline: “The father of Getting Things Done: You’re Getting Me All Wrong”. And I just find that so aggravating. Read the actual interview, though, and the worst you can say that he comes across as smug. There’s more about his belief we need six “horizons of focus” and I just gesticulated at Fast Company for letting him say that without following him up with “Eh?”.

Bringing those horizons into balance requires reflection, he says. “If you want to say, ‘Am I focused on the right thing?’ I would say, which one of those conversations has not been matured sufficiently or lined up with the other ones appropriately? Some people need to focus more on their goals. Some people need to stop focusing on their goals and actually get shit done.”

The Father of ‘Getting Things Done’: You’re Getting Me All Wrong – Ciara Byrne, Fast Company (16 June 2015)

If you got through that quote, you got to a good bit. Who could disagree with the need to get shit done? That’s GTD in a nutshell: not the shit, at least not in that way, not the ideas, but the amount you have to get through to find the good bits. It’s just that the good bits are clever and immensely useful. Read the full piece.

Amazon to pay authors per page read

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From next month, Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library will pay out royalties “based on the number of pages read”.

So if your book is opened on someone’s Kindle and they leave page 1 on there long enough that they could’ve read it, you get cash. It’s not entirely 1 page equals 1 payment: instead, the money comes from a pot that is shared amongst all authors whose work gets included and then gets read. Says Amazon:

Here are some examples of how it would work if the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:
The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $2,000 ($10 million multiplied by 20,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

The author of a 200 page book that was borrowed 100 times but only read halfway through on average would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

Kindle Unlimited Pages Read – Amazon

It’s that bit about a page not actually being read, there’s no way to know that, but it needs to be open on the Kindle for long enough that it could have been. There’s got to be a way to game that.

Read the full Amazon detail, though be warned it’s (possibly deliberately) the most boring thing you’ll see today.

Travels with my Apple Watch and Evernote

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I’ve tried something twice and it’s set: from now on, every trip I take will see me leaning on my Apple Watch and Evernote.

If you don’t happen to know what Evernote is, it’s a note-taking app – but that description belies the power and convenience of how Evernote works everywhere and all of your notes, every attachment you fancy, it’s all available to you on every device you own plus every device you happen to pass. If you like. The description also belies Evernote’s failings and they are aggravating when they happen, but the service is so good that you get over that.

If you don’t happen to know what an Apple Watch is, there’s probably enough of a clue in the name and if not then Apple has a lot to tell you about it.

For the past little while I’ve been away on a series of four speaking engagements and three meetings in four towns over three days. So you know that means lots of train times, reservation numbers, hotels, whathaveyou. At points things were pressed together so closely and I needed to focus so exclusively on the current one that I changed my Apple Watch face from the one on the left to the one on the right:

watch faces

That one on the left, the minimalist one, that’s called Simple and has been my Apple Watch face for six weeks or so, right from the start. Loved it. But not all of these faces can have complications, the word for extra bits like the date. To help me do this event and then that event without much overlap of concentration, I switched from Simple to Utility. Stripped it back as far as I could to show the least it would, and now I love this one. Love is a strong word, but it’s the right one.

I do particularly love that it’s saying No Events Today because I’m glad of the day off. But throughout these days it’s been saying what the next or current event is and that has been strangely handy.

If I had some event today at 1pm, though, what would happen is that from yesterday evening the Watch face would say that: 13:00 Some Event. It would say that up to and throughout the 1pm event. I had thought that if you had a 2pm meeting right after it then once the 1pm gig had started, the face would change to say the next one but no, it doesn’t. It stays on the current one until that’s over, then it changes.

And that’s surprisingly handy. Being there on the watch face all the time, it was telling me somehow that it and I have got this sorted, don’t worry about it. You know you’ll make the 2pm meeting because you’ve planned all this out. Maybe you can’t exactly relax, but you can focus your head on this current event.

This is all Apple Watch stuff, this is what you get for having a Watch, but that part about planning it all out involves other software. Specifically it involved Evernote for me, but I wish I could say it also included TripIt. I use TripIt for all my trains and planes and coaches; when I buy a ticket online, I forward the confirmation email to TripIt and it parses all the details out. So I can turn to TripIt on my iPhone and see every departure time, every reference number, all that. Beyond handy. All the myriad details of a complicated trip in one place.

But it doesn’t work on Apple Watch.

It does, there is a TripIt for Apple Watch but it only handles airports and plane times. I’ll use it the next time I fly, I like the idea of being able to sit where I like in the waiting area and using my Watch instead of trying to be sight line of a TV showing me gate numbers and departure updates.

But it doesn’t work on Apple Watch for trains.

So I schlepped through all the detail of numbers and times in Evernote. Wrote a note on my iPad that included each thing I had to go, in sequence, with every detail I needed for each one. Train times, ticket references, address of the vote, phone numbers for anyone I might need and for the bits in London, also the Underground journeys to take. Consequently, I looked at this on my Watch perhaps twenty or thirty times over these past few days:

Evernote

See that train reference? Snow Hill’s ticket machines were busy so I had to go to an actual human being – it was like the Stone Age – and read that number out to him. It took the guy a beat to realise what I was doing: “Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were looking at the time.”

Nobody else noticed, nobody else noticed as I used Maps on Apple Watch to guide me to my hotel either. Strolling along with the odd tap on my wrist to tell me turn left now or turn right in a mo.

I did often find I wanted to read the next bit of the Evernote note and couldn’t. The Watch switches on when you turn your wrist or when you tap on the screen; once you’ve got the Watch face up, you can press twice quickly on the Digital Crown to switch to the last app you used. So I’d switch on the face, double tap and go into Evernote, then use that same Crown to scroll down through the note. Very often I was pulling my suitcase behind me and would therefore have to stop to let go of the case, bring up the Watch and tap. I tried once or twice to tap it behind me and press the Crown but it never quite worked.

I don’t think I needed to stop to check it as often as I did, but I stopped very often and on tubes and trains and the like I would regularly scroll through the details. It was more that I was doing that while thinking out the next bit of the day, like it was a background to my thinking, but it was there and it was handy.

Except.

Evernote has imposed a limit on how much you can read of a note on the Watch. It’s definitely Evernote’s choice because other apps will show much more, but as you scroll down through a note, it stops after a certain point. I should know what this is now because I’m getting used to splitting notes into two. I can’t remember, I just went to my iPhone to chop up the note when I’d reached the end of what the Watch would show me.

That is a pain. And I add it to Evernote’s other various pains.

But the convenience of having Evernote, Maps and the utility Face on my wrist all the time was startling and satisfying. Add to this that I think of things to do when I’m walking or driving, the very moments when I can’t do them, but now I can lift my wrist and say “Hey, Siri, remind me to write about using Evernote on my Watch”.

Worked too, didn’t it?

Writing as a career – in 1940s America

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Say, are you a young boy looking to make a career in hard news journalism or a young girl who wants to write about cake decorations? Never fear: Arthur P. Twogood tells you all you need to know in this instructional careers video from around the 1940s. Apart from a so-painful-it’s-funny segment about women journalists, it is rather fist-on-your-chin fascinating to see how news writing used to be. If you redid this video today, we’d see someone receive a PR email, copy and paste it into a website and go home.

How to be productive in the evenings

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Who says you should be? You’ve worked all day, put your feet up. Except, when you’re writing there is a need to keep going and there is a satisfaction in having done so. Or at least there’s a hell of a dissatisfaction or plain misery in having gone another week or month or year without writing.

Lifehacker has the answer. It has several answers and here’s a taster of the first one, which also happens to be the one I most agree with and do my most to follow too:

Get Started As Soon As You Get Home

A number of you [in a discussion thread] said that if you wait until you’ve had dinner or spent some time with your family, it’s too late and your energy is gone—you’re too far out of “the zone” to really get back into it. The solution? Walk through the door, say hello to everyone, and head right for your workspace at home to do a little work. Whether it’s a few minutes or an hour, getting started as soon as you get home and you’re still in work mode goes a long way.

How To Stay Productive After Work – Alan Henry, Lifehacker (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Create something solely for yourself

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We spend all this time writing for audiences – from real live audiences to commissioners and producers – but have a go at doing something just for you instead.

Building small, self-contained projects is a great way to learn and expand on your skills. When you learn by building something new instead of just through reading and theory, you learn implicitly rather than explicitly, and are more likely to retain and use the knowledge you’ve gained.

“Forget the rules, and learn from first-hand experience instead. There’s so much more to be gained from not knowing how to do things the ‘correct’ way, and learning to do them your own way.” Richard Branson

Why you should make things no one will use – Belle Beth Cooper, Crew blog (undated)

It’s not a long piece but there’s a lot in it. I’d not heard of the Crew blog: I got this via 99U.

How to cope with summer

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It’s hot, you’re supposed to be on holiday and enjoying yourself, but did I mention it’s hot? You’re working but shouldn’t be. You’re not working but should be. Summer is hell and sometimes it’s as hot as there.

The Positivity Blog has a lot of advice on how to chill out in every sense. I’m not keen on all of it but I like this one about what to do when you’re not working, when you are on holiday:

Go slow. You’ll be less stressed. And you’ll enjoy all the people, sights and experiences so much more because you’ll naturally take the time to appreciate them.

10 Small Ways to Make this the Least Stressful Summer of Your Life – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (10 June 2015)

You could also bring some work with you. That’s my contribution here.

Read the full piece.

How to survive boring meetings

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This is about meetings at work. If it’s a commissioning meeting about you or you’re pitching to someone, you won’t be bored. Every other meeting, you will. Now, clearly, the most useful and productive thing you could do in a typical work meeting is to get out of it. But since you’re lumbered, do this instead.

Next time you’re in one and somebody is droning on about stuff you have no need or use or desire for, make notes as if you have need and use and desire for it all. It passes the time and that’d be enough because anything that gets you through a meeting is worth it.

But along the way, there are going to be things you spot that actually might be interesting. Usually they’re lost in the droning, but you’ve got them there and they’re standing out at you. Also, you will often get lumbered with some task you have to do. Treat these the same way.

Specifically, when you’ve written in the meeting, put this in the left margin next to them: “- – “. Two dashes. Some people draw a little cube. Some just swipe the pen down to make a large stroke before the first word.

Whatever mark you make, make a mark. Whether you’re handwriting on paper or typing into your iPad, make a mark like this and later you can very quickly see what you’ve got to do. You can very quickly pick out the tasks from the droning.

You know I like technology, though, right? I do this in Drafts 4 on my iPad and recently I’ve been using the @ symbol followed by a space, my name and a colon before the task. That sounds tedious and unnecessary but for how there is a free script you can get for Drafts. Press one button and it scoots through all the droning, finds those @ marks and pops each one into my OmniFocus To Do list.

If you have Drafts 4 – er, and also OmniFocus – go get that script here.