Take a break even in the worst times

Posted by William Gallagher

A break isn’t something you win for having finished, it is a necessary tool to get things done. The site 99U has a lot to say about this and a lot of quotes from psychologists and business types.

If you start with the notion that having a quick sandwich at your lunch is productive in the sense that it takes less time, that’s true,” the author says. “But we don’t want a hard and fast rule—we want a functional rule.” The desk-lunch efficiency might not be worth it, he says, if you could gain more from stepping away.

Extreme Productivity author Robert Pozen quoted in 6 Ways to Quickly Restore Sanity to your Day – Sasha VanHoven, 99U (undated)

It even includes an acronym. I hate acronyms.

Stop what you are doing, move to a place where this state or emotion is not dominating you and THEN make a decision:

H: When you are hungry, your mind and metabolism do not work well.
A: When you are angry, your mind is reactive, clouded with irrational emotions.
L: When you are lonely, you are needy and vulnerable.
T: When you are tired, everything doesn’t work well – often coupled with hungry

All of these variables can interconnect to create a danger zone for capable decision making.

Read the full piece for this plus five more tips for remaining sane or regaining sanity in busy times.

When you’ve got nothing to do at work

Posted by William Gallagher

Does this actually happen? They’re paying you for 40 hours a week, you would expect that they will have 40 hours worth of work for you to do – and you might expect them to try it on with 50 or 60 hours. Plus if they have very little for you to do, boredom will be the least of your worries as no business can keep you on for fun.

However. Maybe your work year is cyclical and you spend certain months gasping for air and then certain months playing Solitaire on your PC. For the sake of your will to live and – I think coincidentally – to help you get further in your job with this company, there are things you can do. Site point’s Lauren Holliday has advice that is really aimed, I think, at freelance people but if you’re freelance and bored then the thing you should be doing is getting more work in right now.

So while I take her points, I think this is handier when you’re in full-time employment and the issue is not whether you’ll get enough money to pay the mortgage next month but whether you can top your high score in Tetris. One thing she advises that I think applies to all of us, though, is this:

Organize Your Computer. When’s the last time you actually cleaned up your laptop aside from downloading an automatic Mac cleaner app? Your computer works hard so give it the Spring cleaning it deserves during the slow times.

How to Deal with Slow Times at Work – Lauren Holliday, Sitepoint (6 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

There’s no shame in jumping from job to job now

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, there probably still is somewhere. If you’re in the legal profession, maybe it’s still frowned on. If you’re a footballer, maybe – no, I can’t even think of an example, I know that little about sport. If you’re a writer who can’t think of football analogies, though, then it’s fine to get out of that sport website and go somewhere else.

We all used to be told we had to stay in jobs for a decent amount of time. I did it myself. I stayed with one terrible job for exactly a year because I thought less looked bad and would hurt my career chances. It was a bad year. But it had the benefit that I then appreciated every good job I got and ultimately it probably helped me down the line toward going freelance.

There’s just no way to know whether I was right to stay or should’ve got out of Dodge the first chance I got. There’s no way unless I am a carefully-chosen representative sample of many people in many jobs across many careers.

Everyone from your mother to your mentor has advice about the best way to switch jobs. But how can you know whom to trust? Especially since what was true in the job market 20 years ago — even two years ago — is not necessarily gospel now. And the market is constantly changing.

Consider the power dynamic between candidates and employers, for example. Though it differs across industries and regions, and is dependent on the health of the economy, in the past few years, experts have described the current labor market as “candidate-driven.” Job seekers hold more power than employers, a trend that seems to be deepening.

Setting the Record Straight on Switching Jobs – Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review (10 July 2015)

That graphic was created by Harvard Business Review and you can see it embiggened along with other data in the original article. Read the full piece for this plus an interesting examination of the age-old certainty that you should never tell your current boss that you’re looking to leave.

Good interviewing techniques

Posted by William Gallagher

That’s interviewing as in when you want a job, not when you want to screw the truth out of the lying bastards and get it on tape. Also, that’s good techniques as in pretty obvious stuff but people must get this wrong, so.

One more thing. I think this is a completely unnecessary video in that it takes one minute to show me words I could’ve read in about eleven seconds. I won’t be running any more Fast Company videos like this but if you like it more than I do, their site is doing a lot of them.

Handwritten notes and never-ending paper notebooks

Posted by William Gallagher

Even I like having a new, empty paper notebook. I just can’t read my handwriting. Also, I know I’ll lose it and that irritates me when everything I ever type is saved safely all over the place. Plus, how do people use paper notebooks? How fast do they fill them and then what happens? Have they shelves of these things?

Rocketbook says hang on there, William, enough. Rocketbook is a paper notebook that you scribble away on and its pages are saved to the cloud. Dropbox. Evernote. Google Docs. You snap a photograph of the page with your phone and what is written on the page determines where it’s saved. So handwrite during a meeting, then take a mo to photograph the page and before you’ve put your phone away, the Rocketbook has saved that note to, say, an email that it is even now sending someone.

That covers my problem with potentially losing the book but there is also that business of filling up all the pages. Honestly, this sounds like a joke but it’s serious: put your Rocketbook in the microwave oven and wait for a bit. Every note on every page is erased and you have a crisp, new notebook.

I read that and think you must need special paper: yes, but that’s what the Rocketbook is made of. I read this and think you must need special pens: sort-of. The have to be FriXion pens by Pilot which I’ve never heard of but apparently are common.

There is nothing here to help with my handwriting but that’s my problem. Your pen work is much better than mine, you might love this.

One thing. This is an Indiegogo crowd-funded idea except it’s no longer an idea: it’s achieved its target by more than 3,500%.

Rash Recommendation: Sleep Cycle Power Nap

Posted by William Gallagher

Okay, yesterday I got up to work at 5am; around 6pm I had to sleep. At about 7:15pm I was back up, the went to bed at 11pm, got up this morning at 4:45am, contributed to the MacNN podcast that’s recorded at that time of the morning, then back to bed at 7:10am until 8am.

This is typical and this is a bit stupid. But during the podcast, my colleagues Charles Martin and Michelle Hermark both happened to recommend an iPhone app that helps with sleep. They rate Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and Power Nap – actually two apps that I bought before they’d finished speaking.

I’ve tried the Power Nap one twice now, starting with that 07:10 nap. You leave the phone on the bed near you and it does some monitoring, I’m not sure how much, and around 45 minutes later it wakes you up quite softly. Each time it’s a curious surprise to find myself awake and each time I’ve benefited from it.

Whereas when I’ve given in and napped before, I’ve struggled because it’s hard to wake up promptly or anywhere approaching an actual nap time. It’s been more a couple of hours or so. Which is a problem and contributes to how napping makes me feel like an old man.

If I can do this 45 minute lark, that will help me and I hope I can get beyond feeling ancient. Go take a look at the app for yourself, will you?

Pun my soul

Posted by William Gallagher

I do like puns. John Cleese doesn’t. He’s said that the three rules of comedy are no puns, no puns and no puns. But they make me laugh and I enjoy the satisfaction of a good, long pun-fight on Facebook or Twitter. I can’t and won’t pretend I don’t. So this interested me:

Puns are threatening because puns reveal the arbitrariness of meaning, and the layers of nuance that can be packed onto a single word,” says John Pollack, a communications consultant and author of The Pun Also Rises. “So people who dislike puns tend to be people who seek a level of control that doesn’t exist. If you have an approach to the world that is rules-based, driven by hierarchy and threatened by irreverence, then you’re not going to like puns.”

Why Do People Hate Puns? – Julie Beck, The Atlantic (10 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

Weekend Read – but not on laptops

Posted by William Gallagher

Last week, at the Aspen Ideas festival, there came an interesting little moment between Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist, and Jim Steyer, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Both declared that they’d banned laptops and other electronic devices in their lecture halls.

“Many of the students actually appreciate that,” said Toyama, who teaches at the University of Michigan, “because it encourages real discussion, and they know that as soon as there’s a laptop in front of them, they’re going to start Facebooking each other, and that means that they’re not present for the class.”

Steyer jumped right in. “You should know that in my Stanford classes five years ago, I started banning laptops,” he said. “There was no way they were paying attention. They all whined about it constantly for the first three weeks.” He added that his colleague, with whom he co-taught the course, was terrified they’d made the wrong choice. “She was like, They’re gonna just kill us on the reviews!” he said. But by the end, their students, too, expressed gratitude.

The Case Against Laptops in the Classroom — Science of Us

Read the full piece but please print it out first. Concentrate. There will be questions.

Weekend Read: Don’t Use Beta Software

Posted by William Gallagher

BETA stands for Doesn’t Work, Will Break, Might Delete Everything. It’s become a more familiar term since Google labelled Gmail as a beta for years and Apple did the same with Siri. It’s familiar enough a term that people don’t understand it and that’s more than just a shame when it means you can end up losing your work.

The current iOS 9 and OS X betas from Apple are causing problems. The beta for watchOS 2.0 which drives Apple Watches is apparently driving those watches back to Apple as they become useless.

You can and I do think Apple shouldn’t have put out software in this state but that is what beta software is. When you’re first making an application, you clobber together bits and pieces until it sort of, kinda, a bit looks like one day it may work. That’s an alpha release and it’s where you see if the thing has any point and it’s the place you think, do you know, it’d be much better in yellow. Or blue. Purple and orange with spots.

Eventually you reach a point where someone says enough. You can’t change the colour any more. It’s time to get this out into the hands of people to try it.

That’s a beta. It’s software of a set colour being put out to be tried. It will break. It cannot fail but to break. The issue is over how badly. If you’re a developer, the intended audience for a beta, these crashing failures are just your day to day life. They are why there is a beta. A bit breaks, you fix it, next day you move on.

If you’re a user, it’s different. You’re using your computer or your phone to ring people up or to compute, you can’t afford to have a problem. Hence the warnings every software company gives you about how you shouldn’t try this beta on your main or primary computing device and how you should have a backup. It’s a warning to us but it’s not. It’s really a note to future litigators that the company did warn people.

Few folk pay attention to that warning and today that means some people are having to return their watches to Apple.

It’s bad and worse than it should’ve been, worse than it would’ve been if Apple hadn’t made this beta public. But betas are there to be tested and for the problems to be found. There is no better way of testing software that will be relied on by millions of people than to try it with millions. Hence the public beta and for all the problems current ones are causing people, we’re seeing more of it and we’re going to see still more.

It’s important to beta test. You just haven’t signed on to be the one who gets problems so don’t be the one who installs and runs this pre-release stuff.

By the way, alpha releases are followed by beta releases but betas are not followed by gammas. The one after a beta is known as the GM or Gold Master, it’s the version of the software that is ready to ship. It used to be that software was sold on shiny discs so the Gold Master would be sent to the pressing plant. Funny how terms continue long after what they describe is gone.

Recommended: Citymapper comes to Birmingham

Posted by William Gallagher

You can recommend something and mean it yet only later realise that you really, really mean it. Usually that’s just because you liked something and you came to like it more. But in this case, I intellectually knew that Citymapper is a very good app for finding bus, train and walking routes – in London. Also New York. Lots of places.

Just not Birmingham where I live. When you launch Citymapper and you’re in a city it doesn’t cover, it tells you. It also says, listen, maybe we will get to your place some day. Let us know that you want it and we’ll see. No promises, but.

I pressed the button adding my vote for Birmingham and I pressed it thinking I’d never hear another word. Did that and went on to test it all out the next time I was in London. It’s very good and I recommended it thoroughly before putting it away and never giving it another thought.

Until this week when the company emailed to say Birmingham is now covered.

So now I’m trying it out everywhere and for everything and I think it’s great. Go read my original praising review on MacNN.com and then go get the app.

That’s of course especially if it covers your city – and the quickest way to find out is download it and try – but also if it covers cities you ever go to.

Plus, it’s free.