Sixty-Three things you must stop believing about yourself

Posted by

0

I admit it was the number 63 that got my attention: that’s so specific as to be comedic and I went into this feature expecting platitudes. I expected them to get weaker and weaker until the feature writer clearly just gave up. But instead Sarah (no surname listed) strikes a hell of a chord with me.

She is writing specifically about entrepreneurs but every one of these applies to us writers. Read her introduction for how these things get their the pitons into us and just why they are so damaging. But then do read the whole list, of which here are the first 10. These are things she says we tell ourselves that stop us getting on, stop us trying things, stop us being successful.

I’m not somebody who follows through

2. I’m good at starting projects but I can’t finish them

3. I’m not an expert

4. Nobody cares what I have to say

5. I’m not perfect. Why would anybody listen to/buy from/hire me?

6. I didn’t work hard enough on this

7. I’m not worth it

8. I don’t deserve [money, recognition, success]

9. I don’t have time

63 Toxic Beliefs That Are Poisoning Your Potential as an Entrepreneur – Sarah, Unsettle (19 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Windows 10 to be unveiled tomorrow (Wednesday 21 January)

Posted by

0

Okay, hand on heart, I thought it already had been revealed. But no, only the fact that Microsoft is skipping Windows 9 to go straight to 10 has been announced. Tomorrow is the big day.

I wouldn’t normally talk about this because there’s nothing to say beyond “it’s on tomorrow”. However, the reason I assumed it had been revealed is the same reason why I may simply not notice when it actually comes out. You can put that down to my being an Apple user but it is truly a long, long time since I even had to think about Windows. That’s nice for me. Business Insider says that’s what it’s like for ever more people:

On Wednesday, Microsoft will show off Windows 10, the next version of its decades-old operating system.

There’s a lot at stake. This may be Microsoft’s last chance to prove to the world that Windows still matters.

A decade ago more than 90% of devices on the internet ran Windows. With the rise of smartphones, and tablets running smartphone operating systems like iOS and Android, that number is down to 15 percent. Developers had to develop for Windows if they wanted to make money. Now, it’s one of many choices, and in mobile it’s an afterthought.

Windows 10 Preview – Matt Rosoff, Business Insider (20 January 2015)

True, Business Insider has a wobbly reputation for accuracy but from 90% to 15%? That is partly that the pot has grown so much: there are now all these extra billions of phones that count as computers. Nobody expects Windows to run on a phone, although Microsoft wishes to God that everyone would. But there is also the fact that usage of Windows is dropping on computers too. This will be on account of how you don’t use Windows, you fix it. You don’t work with Windows, you work around it.

If Windows were a TV show, it would’ve been cancelled.

Read the full piece.

Don’t bother looking for writing work via LinkedIn

Posted by

0

Well, sort of.

But this time, I just couldn’t get the words of a friend out of my head: “Haven’t you ever used LinkedIn to get work?” he’d said. “I just bang out a few mails to connections and—boom!—something always comes up.”

I’ll be honest: I was baffled. Don’t get me wrong—when it comes to LinkedIn, I was a pretty early adopter and trundled past the all-important 500+ connections barrier a while ago. But for me, LinkedIn has only ever been an accessory, a place for potential clients to see I really exist and then, bowled over by the riotous trumpetings of my gold-plated CV, hire me for assignments. Could LinkedIn be more than just a fancy shop window for freelancers?

This Is What Happens When You Spend a Full Day on LinkedIn Looking for Freelance Writing Work – Mike Peake, The Freelancer, by Contently (15 January 2015)

Short answer no with a but, long answer yes with an if. Read the full piece.

Women are the reason some teams are more productive than others

Posted by

0

Part of me doesn’t like this. I believe that the differences between us as individuals is more important than the differences between our genders. That I am me and you are you regardless of our sex. But then as a writer and hopefully decent human being, I am also conscious that women are preposterously badly treated in the workplace. Don’t believe me? You’re probably a man. Not going to complain about it to me? You’ve noticed I’m not a woman.

Seriously: a woman writing what I just did would on average get more criticism than I’ll see. And if you genuinely doubt the maltreatment of women in business, go compare some salaries.

So there is a great part of me that rather likes research saying women make teams smarter. This research is saying that, while there are some other factors that come in to play, those are not the ones you’d predict about charismatic leaders or high bonus pays:

Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others – Anita Woolley, Thomas W Malone and Christopher Chabris, NYTimes.com (19 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Remote control Macs and PCs from your phone

Posted by

0

This is Chrome Remote Desktop and it’s fiddly to set up unless you’re already in to the Chrome browser. But once it’s running, it’s remarkable how well it works and what it does:

Imagine squeezing your retina iMac screen down onto an iPhone 5. You can do it. It might look a bit silly, and initially you might wonder why you’d bother, but it has long been possible to see and remotely control your Macs and PCs on even your iPhone. Now that Google has released Chrome Remote Desktop for iOS, you can do it for free. You’ll do it, too: try this once, and you will forever keep finding other reasons why it’s incredibly useful.
It’s fantastic when you forget a file, for instance, and can now just find and email it to yourself from afar — and it will save your soul, your sanity, and your gas money when you are supporting several family members who live halfway across the country. Just open up your or their Mac’s screen on your iOS device and work as if you were right there in front of it.

Hands On: Chrome Remote Desktop (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, Electronista (19 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Essentials: TextExpander

Posted by

0

I just wrote this on MacNN.com:

Get this essential Mac tool for speeding up your typing

Here’s the thing: yes, TextExpander speeds up your typing, but some of us like typing — and some of us are 120 words per minute. If you’re one of the latter, that doesn’t automatically rule out that you wouldn’t be interested in the venerable TextExpander’s speed, but we figured it wouldn’t be that much use to us; or so we thought. Doubtlessly, if you are a slower typist, then the speed is the key reason to buy TextExpander — but it does so much else, it is so useful in other ways, that we are now dependent on it, and wish we’d bought it ten years ago.

Hands On: TextExpander 4 for OS X, TextExpander 3 for iOS – William Gallagher, Electronista (18 January 2015

Well, I wrote that and then I wrote a lot more, almost every bit of it finding new ways to enthuse about this software. It is that good, seriously. I found out while writing this review that I’ve been using TextExpander for 10 months. Can’t believe it – and yet I find that easier to comprehend than the fact that there was ever a time I wasn’t.

Read the full piece.

Not that this matters, but today’s my 300th

Posted by

0

The 300th time I’ve got up and gone to work for 5am. I am not and will never recommend that you do the same thing but I have to tell you that if it works for you, it really works.

Right now, I confess it doesn’t feel like it’s working. It’s only just after 8pm and I am jiggered to the point of feeling like I could faint. So, you know, that’s not wonderful. But it has been an unusual time, I have worked straight through and I’d say for 290 of these 300 days I’ve stopped late afternoon at worst.

It’s not 300 days in a row, by the way. It sort-of is. The ideal is that I do the 5am start Monday to Friday every week. But if I have a late night working somewhere or I’m going to be speaking the next evening, I skip the 5am to protect my voice. Plus there are holidays. Plus often with travelling I have to be up earlier or it’s going to be longer. Once or twice I was ill. So the 300st is today but the 1st was Wednesday 2 January 2013.

Suddenly seems a bit crap, doesn’t it?

Let’s please not forget that I mean to do this on working days, the working week, Monday to Friday, so that’s already a bit of a difference from every day. Wolfram Alpha tells me that 2 January 2013 was 747 days ago. Count working days alone and it’s 533 weekdays since then.

So of the 533 days I could’ve got up at 5am, I only got up 300 times.

That means I got up a mere 56.29% of the times I could’ve done.

At least that’s more than half.

Just about.

A bit.

I think I’l shut up until 1,000 or 301, whichever comes first.

Airbnb’s Co-Founder on productivity

Posted by

0

I’ve used Airbnb many times and it is as good as they say. Here’s one thing that its co-creator says about handling his workload:

I try to fill my calendar in reverse, from the end-of-day to earlier; I try to reserve the morning for doing “real work.” I find I can focus more in the morning whereas it’s harder to get focused after having been bombarded by meetings, so I try to save meetings for later in the day.

I’m Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder Of Airbnb, And This Is How I Work | Lifehacker Australia

Read the full piece.

Launchbar review

Posted by

0

Just published on MacNN: my review of a superb utility for OS X:

Get it. Here it is on its official site. Go get it now: LaunchBar is that good. There are alternatives, that’s about the only thing that should give you pause, but the most obvious rival to LaunchBar is OS X’s own Spotlight and that is no competition at all. Sure, both let you tap a couple of keys and begin typing things like application names or search terms, but as excellent as Spotlight is, LaunchBar crams more power into the same space. With a couple of keystrokes you can be entering an event into your calendar, you can be sending files to someone, you can be pasting something from the clipboard that you copied yesterday.

Hands On: LaunchBar 6 (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (15 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Though just between ourselves, I’m currently looking at Alfred, a big rival to Launchbar and it has a lot going for it. I shall return.

Open the doors

Posted by

0

It worked. Previously…

I’m closing the doors for one day.

For Wednesday 14 January 2015 I am working on only one project. Nothing else allowed, not even emails, not even phone calls. We’ll see how I get on but even now, writing to you late the night before, I’m feeling a bit liberated. I was looking at a project plan just now, the very barest skeleton project management jobs and realised I was sighing as I went to add in some detail. As I went to colour it all in. And that realisation, plus the clear fact that I can’t finish it tonight, led me to this relief. I will not look at it tomorrow. I cannot.

Close the doors – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (14 January 2015)

It’s true that today I am in a flat-spin panic about everything I’m behind on but the main project from yesterday is far, far and three times far further along. Still not as far as I need it to be but so much further that it’s about the only thing I’m not panicking about right now.

So I’ll do this again.

When I can possibly fit it in.