I spent the day hours behind and carrying a ferocious headache because I entirely cocked up my sleep last night.
Coffee, late night email and the snooze button sap people of energy, compromising an employee’s overall performance at work. Though these things seem innocent, an evening cup of Joe, one quick reply to a colleague and an extra 15 minutes of shut-eye in the morning can drastically diminish the quality of one’s sleep.
Read the full piece for things we can do.
This is an article about many of the file formats we are familiar, from HTML to Photoshop, but what interests me is this about word processors:
WordPerfect was always the best word processor. Because it allowed for insight into its very structure. You could hit a certain key combination and suddenly the screen would split and you’d reveal the codes, the bolds and italics and so forth, that would define your text when it was printed. It was beloved of legal secretaries and journalists alike. Because when you work with words, at the practical, everyday level, the ability to look under the hood is essential. Words are not simple. And WordPerfect acknowledged that. Microsoft Word did not. Microsoft kept insisting that what you saw on your screen was the way things were, and if your fonts just kept sort of randomly changing, well, you must have wanted it that way.
I could be wrong, of course, but it always seemed to me that WordPerfect was developed by writers and Microsoft Word by engineers. For all that I admire engineers, in this case I think they did a poor job. In WordPerfect, a document is stored in sequence, paragraph by paragraph, fine. In Word, every single paragraph is like a separate document with lots of pointers back and forth to others. It’s like the paragraphs in a Word document are all free-flowing, free-standing and only happen to line up the way you want.
Maybe I’m just too into this stuff, but if you are too, then do read the full piece.
Or rather contacts, plural. I hate the word contacts: it’s like networking. I relish meeting people and having a natter but that’s nattering and meeting people: it isn’t networking my contacts.
But.
It is weird how your work changes, isn’t it? In this last year I’ve turned from being locked to my desk to barely being at it. Neither is great: both are problematic. But being away a lot comes from working with a lot of people and I am forced to change my mind about how bad my memory is: I’ve had some awful moments when I’ve gone blank but generally I’m far better at names than I thought. Or maybe it’s just that everyone I meet is so distinctive. They are, but maybe that’s how I’m getting better.
Nonetheless, I’ve been prompted into looking into a way of keeping track of everyone I’m talking with: I can’t promise someone something and then not deliver, I can’t. And earlier this week, the makers of BusyCal released a public beta of BusyContacts which has set me off down a wormhole of looking into this subject.
BusyCal is the calendar app made by the makers of once-powerful and actually just once-existing Now Up to Date which I loved and adored and cherished in the 1990s. Back then they had a companion application called Now Contact. It was so much a companion that the two were just always sold together as Now Up-to-Date and Contact.
Fast forward all these years and the company is doing very well with its BusyCal product but I don’t happen to like it. Purely for aesthetic reasons, it just doesn’t do it for me and since you spend a lot of time staring at this stuff, that matters. I went with Fantastical instead and am happy with it.
But somehow I ended up on the public beta list for BusyContacts. I must’ve registered – and you can do that yourself right here – but so long ago that I don’t recall. Anyhow, a beta copy came my way this week and… I’m not very keen on the aesthetics. Fair enough, really.
But it is interesting. Chiefly for this reason: when you look up someone in your contacts list, BusyContacts shows you the text of the last email exchange you had and a clickable list of all the email contact you’ve had. I adore this. Adore it.
Have spent the week trying to get it on an app that a) I like the look of better and 2) works on my iPhone and iPad.
Tried and failed.
I think I’m going to have to buy BusyContacts when it comes out. But I’d still like it look better. And I still want a way to get this feature on my phone.
Plus, I’ve just discovered hundreds of email addresses that I use all the time that are not in my Contacts. They’re in my previous recipients list. Who knew? Working to get those out.
When you have a project you want to do, there are going to be bits you really need to think about and bits that you really need to debate with people.
But there are also bits you don’t.
So do those.
I’ve been in meetings where because the overall issue was big and needed thought, people spent time on the piddling easy and obvious stuff. I realise it’s a way of churning over the detail and processing it, but you end up with people raising objections that are word for word an issue you’ve already said to them. Where you said there’s thing we’ll need to look at, they come back with yeah, but we can’t do this entire project because of this thing. It’s the same thing but they tell you it like it’s news and they tell you it like that’s the end of the deal instead of an issue to fix.
They might be right but, jaysis, it’s irritating.
You also get objections that are simply embarrassing. Again, they come from this process of churning and thinking, they’re half-formed but again you have to deal with them. I was in a meeting three weeks ago where I said “Tough tum tiddly” about a potential problem someone raised. I got the gig, too, so maybe I should say tough tum tiddly more.
When you’re in the throes of this though, give them the time to think and give them the respect that they may know more than you do. But if it looks like it’s going to take a long time and that time will be spent on the embarrassingly tough tum tiddly details, make the call. Is it good enough to continue despite this, are any of their objections useful, are they ever going to get this thing done?
Too often the answers are all no. In which case, take it away and do it yourself or do it somewhere else.
And, by the way, tough tum tiddly.
You’re familiar with the concept of setting an alarm to wake you up. You’ve come across this before. But I think this is new:
Set an alarm for when you have to go to bed
We all stay up later than we should given how early we have to rise tomorrow. And this tells you when to go to bed. It’s not ever going to be a shock to you since you choose the time but still, it works.
It’s like the alarm switches you into going-to-bed mode. Switches your head into it, switches your head away from whatever’s occupying you.
We’ve all been there. The half-written to-do list stretching the length of your arm. The incessant notifications calling for our attention. The feeling of drowning in a list of never ending tasks — from a computer waiting to be configured, to an unplayed game, to a terrifyingly busy inbox. The backlog, we fear, is here to stay. But here are 10 tips for clawing your way out of this predicament.
10 Ways To Dig Yourself Out Of Task Backlogs – Rob Nightingale, Make Use Of (26 November 2014)
Read the full piece.
Unconvinced.
I was a mobile junkie. The phosphorescent glow left me mesmerized and needing more. Each Snapchat or push notification fueled my need for news, updates, and winning the battle against boredom. At my worst, most conversations with friends and family would start with “do you have a charger?”
I remember the turning point. I had just returned from a camping trip where I ‘witnessed’ a beautiful sunset. As I was reminiscing over the dozens of photos I took, I barely had any recollection of ACTUALLY being there. I was so focused on eternalizing the moment through my phone, that I hadn’t taken the time to eternalize it in my brain. I accepted my addiction and decided to make a change.
This is your brain on mobile — Jeremy Vanderhey, Medium (10 August 2014)
Read the full piece.
By reserving his desk for work, and his comfy chair for leisure, Jack was able to create a new habit. Knowing that, should he want to check his emails or Twitter, he’d have to move across the room, gave Jack that little push he needed to stay at his desk a bit longer and get things done.
Workplace Hack: The Distraction Chair – Kylie Whitehead, Contactzilla (26 November 2014)
Read the full piece.
This is a Globe and Mail article that I think sounds shocked at the stunning idea that multitasking could be rubbish. Ignore that and see this as a refresher and I think it’s useful.
Entrepreneurs are expected to do everything and be everything at all times. It’s part of business, especially when you’re first starting out.
However, there are some seemingly productive habits that you may have formed that are actually killing your success in the long term. The candle that burns brightest, burns fastest, and while it’s crucial for you to be productive with your time, you also need to focus on not burning out.
You’re actually hurting your business with these five ‘productive’ habits – The Globe and Mail
Read the full piece.
I would tell you that I am an expert OmniFocus user but it’s a lie. I am expert at the specific bits of it that I use daily. (Hourly.) (Minutely.) David Sparks knows the whole thing and now shows it to you.
He’s done this before with the original OmniFocus in a whole series of screencast videos but now he’s done it more in the form of his Field Guide books. These are all very good, very excellent books that seem to cut through complex issues and just tell you what’s what and what you need to know now. Somehow they are that relaxed and yet by the end you know everything. The books are particularly fine pieces of work and now there’s a video one for OmniFocus.
It’s about all the versions from Mac through iPhone and iPad. And it’s 2.5 hours of video: 150 minutes. You can watch a sample on Vimeo or just go buy the whole thing from Sparks’ site here.
As expert as I think I am, I know about this new video because I’m on the guy’s mailing list and it can’t have been above four minutes since I got the email, checked the sample, bought the whole thing and came here to tell you.