All Contacts apps should work like this: BusyContacts for OS X

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I’m writing about ten pieces a week for MacNN.com to do primarily with software and given my obsessions, naturally productivity stuff crops up a lot. I mean, a lot. I’ve had the chance to evangelise software that has transformed my working life and I’ve also had the chance to try a range of new applications I wouldn’t – to be truthful here – have been able to afford.

Of the 100+ pieces I’ve written so far, there are many standouts but a recent one that was entirely new to me is BusyContacts. It’s a Mac-only address book and it is tremendous. I don’t think it’s gorgeous, I long to change parts of its look, but for features, it’s great. In fact, it is excellent – and chiefly because of one single feature in it.

From my MacNN review:

That feature is the Activities List. Like any other Contacts app, you can look up someone’s details and get all the regular stuff, like their many phone numbers, email addresses, and so on. In BusyContacts, though, you also get Activities. Right next to their contact card, you get a list of the last emails you two have sent each other (this only works with Apple Mail at present). You also get your most recent iMessage exchanges. Their latest tweets or Facebook updates. All there, all the time and immeasurably useful.

If you know you’ve got to call Bert, look up his contact card — and right there is when you last emailed him. You get the date, time, subject and opening lines, so you are instantly briefed on what you were last doing together. The more people you have to juggle and the more projects you are doing, the greater and greater this feature is.

Hands On: BusyContacts (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN, 17 February 2015

That was posted nearly two weeks ago now and I’ve only come to like this app more. Here’s an example of something I’ve found useful that has previously been enough of a chore that I didn’t do it. There is one group of people I need to email from time to time. I could set a group email address but those are oddly awkward to do on Macs and the groups don’t cross over to the iPhone or iPad. It’s not that groups cross over in BusyContacts either, they don’t, but awkwardness and inability to use groups everywhere meant I didn’t bother with them at all.

I used to just find the last email I sent the group, quickly check through the names to make sure I remove a person who asked to be let out of the set, then I write the new email.

With BusyContacts, I can assign tags to contacts. As you read their address book card, type a keystroke and add a tag. It’s easy to do and as you go along merrily adding things like “Writers’ Guild” to a name, you build up a list of such tags in the app. Now I can drag someone’s name to the tag and have it applied.

I can click on the Writers’ Guild tag and only see those people who I’ve tagged with this. So far, so underwhelming, except that once this is what I see in my contacts app, I can Select All and email everybody. BusyContacts lets me send an email to everyone in that list – and it lets me send separate emails to each of them.

That plus the Activity List, it is just startlingly useful. I wish there were an iOS version, I’d be on that like a shot. Read the full piece.

It takes more power to start the engine than keep it going

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This is really just about my sum total of knowledge about cars. I can drive and I can see when they have enough wheels, but otherwise, they are magical devices whose magicality is reduced every time you have to pay insurance or go for a service.

Wait.

I also know what cars look like from underneath, but that’s just because I used to watch The A Team. It’s quite complicated under there, you know.

We’re now into March and while I am loathe to write you another piece about how gosh-hard it is to keep being productive, I need to talk to you and this is how I’ve managed to do it. About thirty times in the last few days I’ve started to write something serious but it turns out that I can only do serious by accident.

So let me take this one car fact and treat it with more seriousness than it warrants.

It is true, though. Starting to write to you got harder the longer I spent not doing it. Where I have not lacked for news or information to tell you, I have lacked the discipline. I will again say that, look, very bad cold, right, six weeks and I’m still snuffling, but I’ve lacked it and that’s that.

Except, you do of course know the phrase that what’s done is done. I reckon that in the same vein, what isn’t done, isn’t done. Somehow that sounds more defeatist but I hear it the same way: the past is the past and we can only change what comes next.

There is so much to tell you. Such gorgeous nuggets of news and details that will help you get more done and enjoy doing it. I’m going to be right here telling you it all – though I’ll understand with far more humanity now why you might sometimes just want to skip thinking about this stuff.

Crisis talks #5: did it work?

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Yes. Compared to the start of the week, I am back working and back at least knowing exactly what I’ve got to do.

I’m not there yet and there is much still to do to repair the damage from delays, much to get me ahead again, much enough waiting for me that there are people who won’t believe I’m back.

I am, though, and as well as feeling better from the cold slipping away (after a month) I am feeling better for being on top of more things.

Not everything, not yet. But more. Nearly most.

Listen, this series has been an attempt to show you how to restart when everything has fallen down and you’re overwhelmed. I’d like to end it by telling you three lessons I’ve learnt:

Don’t hide from your To Do list. Especially not if it’s OmniFocus. Be more ruthless about what work you do and don’t take on
Take time off before you have to

They’re hard-won lessons but they’re won.

Crisis talks #4: at last a dragon

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Previously… I talk to you all the time about productivity but lately it’s been like I’ve been hit with a bag of spanners. A cold of unusual size definitely contributed but I admit I’ve also been just overwhelmed with juggling too many things.

This week is the attempt to put this all right and get back to work. I’m hoping that this will be of some use if you are off the productivity wagon or if you are yet to get to grips with all the plates you’re spinning. But it is also selfish: the fact that I’m telling you about this week in detail means I am doing this week in detail.

Admittedly, on Monday I was feeling sufficiently better that I thought this would be an easy ride to triumph. Instead, snuffles, coughs, loathsome and detestable incapacity was the order of the week.

But at last some progress.

Listen, clue number 1 to being off the productivity wagon is being afraid to look at your To Do list. My To Do list is OmniFocus which I love so much that I practically wear the teeshirt. (Actually, is there a teeshirt? Evernote has them, why not The Omni Group?)

Nonetheless, for weeks now I’ve been afraid of seeing what I wasn’t doing. I’ve continued working as best I could and I know I’ve been getting more done than I think, but I don’t know and I can’t know as long as I am avoiding OmniFocus.

I have said this and everyone who uses this superb software has said this and it is true: if you use OmniFocus, it helps you and you come away feeling lighter. One very specific thing you do to use is to open the bloody thing and see what tasks you’ve got in there.

But a second very specific thing is the Review.

OmniFocus is meant to be this thing that you quickly dip into to see what tasks you can do right now and then you do it. You are not meant to spend much time in the app itself. Except quite regularly, you need to spend a little time in it. This is the review: you look at every task in every project you’re juggling and you make decisions. Add tasks, delete ones that don’t matter any more, all that.

The trouble is that if you have a lot of projects, you open up OmniFocus and it’s saying, it’s throbbing that you have 76 things to review. In detail. It’s just too many.

What you can do is look at your shopping list project, for instance, and say okay, I accept that I have to review it but make me review it once a year at most. Then I have a particular book project on that, frankly, I need to be on top of all the time so I should get OmniFocus to remind me to review that every day.

That’s what I spent all of Wednesday doing.

All of it.

Don’t take this as a criticism of OmniFocus, take it as a criticism of me and of how bad I’ve left everything slide. Yesterday I spent 5 hours and 9 minutes reviewing everything.

EVERYTHING.

And do you know what? I feel so much better. There are still big worries, big delays, but right now, this minute, I feel I know what the worries are and I know exactly what the delays are. I even know how I will solve some of them. And that feels pretty good. If I weren’t still coughing like a banshee, I would be feeling spectacular.

That’s the thing to take away from OmniFocus, it’s the thing to take away from the day and the entire week: look at your list and it helps. Just looking is good, getting a grip on everything. If I hadn’t actually done anything today, I’d still feel good because understanding your situation is better than cowering away from it.

But I did do things.

I said I’d been carrying on working despite hiding from OmniFocus. As I went through 76 projects and an apparent total of 3,010 tasks waiting for me to do, I found I had already done 139 tasks. You know how good it feels ticking one thing off as done? Imagine ticking 139.

And now imagine ticking a further 29 as you go through the review. If I came to a task I could actually do now, I did it now.

True, I did add 15 new tasks. But I also deleted 81 that I either won’t do or do’t need to.

And I scrapped three projects.

I’m still underwater but do you know what? This productivity lark works.

Crisis talks #3: running on rims

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Well, this isn’t turning out to be the Hallmark Card-style positive boost that I planned but it is getting there. I am getting there.

Possibly just not yet. I gave up around midafternoon yesterday and intended to use three or four hours to relax, recover, breathe out, all that. Instead spent the four hours fretting about not working.

Listen, I really need a previously here: I’m in the fourth week of bastard cold and am not struggling to keep everything going, I’m just hoping to get back up to any speed. People are waiting, I’m waiting, I loathe and detest this. However, being a typical writer, I’m also aware that I am not a unique little snowflake and the issues of being overwhelmed yet trying to get on top of things is pretty universal.

Pretty universally whiny, too, but.

I’d like you to have seen a ramp up from Monday’s confessional and I still hope. I thought by Friday I’d be triumphant and maybe we’d go for a drink.

Strangely, I am over yesterday’s snuffles. Three weeks of a cold without much snuffling, yesterday was Snuffle Central. Instead I was up until around 3am or possibly 4am with constant coughing.

Consequently, it’s 8am or so and I am actually somewhat faint and dizzy. But equally I have discovered one joy of getting back on top of things: the council has just emptied our bins and I’d put them out last night instead of scrambling this morning.

Small moves, Ellie.

The plan for today, incidentally, is OmniFocus. Let’s see how examining and reviewing my entire 76 projects and 2,993 tasks feels and whether it is as boosting as it has been before.

But first, some tea.

Incidentally, how are you? All okay? You haven’t caught this cold from me, have you?

Crisis talks #2: Spokes in the wheel

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I spent yesterday writing by the living room fire. Took my little Monday list and did maybe half of it. Didn’t do the tough one-hour job.

Caught up with one project, though just about the moment I did that, I was already behind on it again.

If I do this again today, I’ll be just about on schedule for that one project for this week too. So the plan on this Get Back to Work shtick is to do that. Sit by fire, write, catch up.

I will also have to do the tough hour.

But then I hope to spend this afternoon reviewing all my OmniFocus projects and getting back on track with the countless other things.

So. Lessons from yesterday. Doing anything at all is better than not.

Crisis talks #1: fallen off the wagon

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Okay, it’s 8am on Monday and clearly there is a problem. I am behind on everything, just everything, and there hasn’t been an article on The Blank Screen since 20 January. Equally clearly, I need to fix this.

Maybe slightly less clearly, I think I have to fix it in front of you.

It’s not that I imagine you’re riveted to details of what I’m up to but if you aren’t already struggling with getting more productive, you will be. You start this stuff and it’s great, you feel happier, but then it goes wrong and I’m realising you feel worse than you did back when you were just lurching through life and work.

Let me show you the fight and hopefully you’ll get something from it. Let me show you the fight and hopefully my knowing you’re there will help me stick at it.

A little bit of background, also known as an excuse. Just over three weeks ago, I got a cold. No question, it was just man flu but it knocked me off my feet. Or it should’ve done: I pressed on as well as I could and definitely that was a mistake. By chance I was mostly booked to be writing in my own office but I had four gigs outside and I vomited on the way to two of them.

Yesterday I thought this was all done, finally over, I felt recalled to life. And then mid-afternoon, bam. Desperately difficult to move. Appetite vanished. Increasingly ratty. In the end, I went to bed around 8pm and spent a very feverish night. Twelve hours later, the fever is gone, I have a what feels like a concussion headache and I’m unexpectedly snuffly. That was one thing I didn’t have during the main cold but I have it now.

I also have very obvious problems to do with getting work done.

First, I don’t look in OmniFocus.

That’s my usually beloved To Do app and every praise I’ve given it before is true, I just don’t dare look in it to see what I haven’t done yet.

The second was my email. I do the Inbox Zero thing where I deal with an email as soon as I see it: if I can reply there and then, I reply. If I can delete or archive it, wallop. If it needs a bit more work, I send it on to OmniFocus.

You can’t believe the pressure and the misery of seeing the emails build up after a couple of years of being on top of this stuff. At one point I had around 40 emails in that inbox and I would look at each of them, actually incapable of knowing what to do. Then a new one would come in from someone I just didn’t want to have to think about so I’d go away.

Early last week, I got those 40 down to 0 by doing the Inbox Zero lark and that’s great apart from how I’ve found it hard to keep it down. An email will come in that I know I need to reply to and I’m afraid I’ll forget but I haven’t the consciousness to do it now, so I’ve been leaving it there. And then we’re right back to the same problem.

Yesterday morning I replied to all the ones waiting and right now, this minute, I’m not looking at my emails at all.

I’m going to look at OmniFocus.

It’s going to be a mess.

I was re-organising my entire OmniFocus life when this hit so I know I have just the most gigantic mess of projects that I can abandon but haven’t, projects that are so late I will have to give up on them, just more and more projects. Actually, hang on, I can do this, let me check: right, OmniFocus tells me I have 76 projects and a current total of 2,993 tasks to do.

I’m going back to bed.

No, wait, get this done. Back in a sec.

Ha! Caught! If you just throw things in to OmniFocus they go into what’s called the inbox: just a growing list of things that you’ll think about later. Bung them in now when you think of them, later go back and decide what you’ll actually do. Decide that this is to do with your work and this for home, that this has a deadline and that doesn’t, all this sort of stuff. I am amazed and deeply relieved to find that I must’ve done this going back later.

For there were just seven things in the inbox. I tell you, face up to your fears, it works out. Especially as I’m not going to do three of the seven: they’re not needed now so I just deleted them. It also turns out that I’ve done two of what’s left so I tapped the Done button and felt good. That left two and one is a big job that’s going to take an hour. I admit I don’t feel up to that yet.

But the last of the seven was just that I meant to email thanks to someone. So I did it.

And that’s where I got caught: going in to email her meant that Mail got all the new emails that I’ve been avoiding looking at this morning.

I don’t know what I was afraid or of what exactly I was avoiding but there are – curiously – just seven emails in my inbox now. Brilliantly, six can be deleted immediately so they went to the trash with gusto. One was a thanks email to me so I read and enjoyed that but don’t need to reply so that’s now archived off.

An empty email inbox is a good thing.

OmniFocus is another. I’ve moved that hour-long job from the inbox and into today’s due tasks. I’ve ticked the thanks email as done, so I have an empty OmniFocus inbox too. But right now OmniFocus looks like this:

(null)

That doesn’t look awful at all: you can’t see the details but you can see I have five things to do today. Now, I know that doesn’t include one increasingly urgent problem though I admit I have no idea what to do about that. I feel I may look at that tomorrow.

But look toward the top left where it says Forecast. There’s 53 next to it. And just underneath, you can see I have 52 things I should’ve done in the past.

Now, actually I know I will have done a lot of that. Even in my worst moments I’ve kept on writing so I’m hopeful I’ll have done many of them and just need to tap Done. Okay, no, hang on, I’m being honest with you here so that I can be honest with myself. I feel like you’re holding my hand. Let me check the 52.

I’ve already done 33 of them.

I’m looking pretty smugly relieved here, aren’t I?

I shouldn’t.

Some 16 of those 33 are repeating tasks and I’ve done them yet definitely haven’t done them every day or every week or whatever it is. Actually, I can’t work out how many I have and haven’t repeated.

The bigger number in every sense is further down that same OmniFocus column: do you see where it says 74 projects? I told you I had 76. But this means there are 74 that I haven’t reviewed.

Reviewing is a great thing. You take a minute to look at the whole picture, everything you’re doing, and you add more tasks, you tick off ones that are done, you delete others, you really just get that whole picture in your head. See where you are with everything, make decisions about it all – and then forget the lot. Trust that OmniFocus is tracking everything you need. And instead you just look at doing today’s five things.

The trouble is that reviews take more than a minute, especially when you have 74 projects to look at.

What I need to do is review them all once and then as I go through each one, decide when I want to review them next. Every project must be reviewed but you can say how often. So, for instance, there are certain financial things I review every second day. I keep my shopping list in OmniFocus but I’ve told it to make me review that once a year.

I must go through the rest so that they pop up as needing reviews in some more manageable way. A few a day, for instance. I’ll get on that.

But not today.

Today I am truly struggling so what I’ve just done is create a single To Do task called Monday. I’ve written in it the few things that I truly cannot leave plus some notes about them.

This is not how to use OmniFocus. But it will get me through today. See you tomorrow?

Lack of sleep kills your productivity

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Tell me about it.

Pushing late into the night is a health and productivity killer. According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, the short-term productivity gains from skipping sleep to work are quickly washed away by the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on your mood, ability to focus, and access to higher-level brain functions for days to come. The negative effects of sleep deprivation are so great that people who are drunk outperform those lacking sleep.

We’ve always known that sleep is good for your brain, but new research from the University of Rochester provides the first direct evidence for why your brain cells need you to sleep (and sleep the right way–more on that later). The study found that when you sleep your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of neural activity when you’re awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you’re asleep. So when you don’t get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think–something no amount of caffeine can fix.

Skipping sleep impairs your brain function across the board. It slows your ability to process information and problem solve, kills your creativity, and catapults your stress levels and emotional reactivity.

Sleep Deprivation Is Killing You and Your Career – Travis Bradberry, Inc.com (20 January 2015)

Oh. They told me about it. Read the full piece so that they can tell you too.

The difference between Evernote and Dropbox

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I use both of these and I know which I’m going to turn to when. But you try asking me why. It’s one of those things where I struggle to explain the differences and why I’d use either, let alone both. But this fella – he blogs in the first person but you try finding out his actual name – has the answer in a short and good explanation. Here’s his take on why this is an issue:

Both services are based in the cloud, and both services can be a huge asset to your backup strategy and workflow. Unfortunately, they’re often lumped together or painted with the same brush when in fact, they are actually quite different. If you’re using one of the services exclusively, you may not realize how the other service can help you. Similarly, you may actually be “rocking” both services concurrently with no clear dividing line that tells you definitively “this goes into Dropbox” and “this goes into Evernote”.

Dropbox vs Evernote – The Differences Explained, and How to Use Them Both Effectively – Tech Barber (17 January 2015)

Read the full piece to clear up any confusion you have or that I may have given you from my interchangeable use of the terms.

Please stop using ‘12345’ as your password

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Every year SplashData surveys the most common passwords and you know that the results are scary. I think it’s even scarier how they do it: they chart the passwords as revealed by leaked accounts and hacked systems, by all the many, many security breaches that are reported every year. There is always enough data to make the survey statistically significant, which means even if you haven’t had your password cracked, you probably use one of these and you are going to be hacked.

Here’s the top ten for 2014 from the most common to the least:

123456
password
12345
12345678
qwerty
123456789
1234
baseball
dragon
football

Dragon? What’s going on there? Anyway, the list continues so if you’re feeling smug, stop now. Unless your passwords are things like 17e£**jjli99Nn like my bank account’s one.

Despite the scary list, by the way, SplashData does try to reassure you a bit, though. A bit:

“The bad news from my research is that this year’s most commonly used passwords are pretty consistent with prior years,” Burnett said. “The good news is that it appears that more people are moving away from using these passwords. In 2014, the top 25 passwords represented about 2.2% of passwords exposed. While still frightening, that’s the lowest percentage of people using the most common passwords I have seen in recent studies.”

“123456” Maintains the Top Spot on SplashData’s Annual “Worst Passwords” List

Read the full piece and then make me personally very happy by getting and using an app like 1Password. If I’ve met you, I’ve told you about this. I’m not as evangelical about this specific app as I am about, say, OmniFocus for To Do tasks, but I am telling you that you must get an app like it. Must. Seriously.

PS. I was kidding about my bank account password. You knew that. But I had to say it. I really, really had to say it.