Contents

Filling the Blank Screen

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Getting Started

Chapter 2 - You’re on your own and it’s necessary

Chapter 3 - You have to love ideas enough to be willing to hate them

Chapter 4 - You don’t know what you do

Chapter 5 - Don’t wait

Chapter 6 - Start it now. Just start it

Chapter 7 - Just Say Yes

Chapter 8 - How to get going on tough days

Chapter 9 - Essential morning preparation

Chapter 10 - Whatever you do is enough

Chapter 11 - Yes, you do have time

Chapter 12 - Location, Location, Location

Chapter 13 - Process stories – finding how you work

Chapter 14 - Write down your process for doing things

Chapter 15 - Ask for what you want and ask it now, ask up front

Chapter 16 - Seriously, it’s the small moves that work

Chapter 17 - Wonderful

Keeping Going

Chapter 18 - So you haven’t done what I told you, so what

Chapter 19 - Make writing a habit by tying it to something else

Chapter 20 - Push on

Chapter 21 - Have a production meeting for one

Chapter 22 - On balance

Chapter 23 - When you have two equally urgent things to do

Chapter 24 - Is this safe? Using passwords as positive reinforcement

Chapter 25 - To Not Do list

Chapter 26 - The Sudoku approach

Chapter 27 - Pick yourself up and have another go

Chapter 28 - The myth of nerves being good for you

Chapter 29 - A quick fix for days you’re below par

Chapter 30 - Waiting for something you don’t want to do

Chapter 31 - Don’t give yourself a deadline

Chapter 32 - Seriously, no deadlines. Unless...

Chapter 33 - Write first, edit later

Chapter 34 - Using your travel time

Chapter 35 - If you must prioritise, do it this way

Chapter 36 - Review everything so you don’t have to see it all Posted

Chapter 37 - When is it over

Time and Emotion

Chapter 38 - Lighten Up

Chapter 39 - The night before the morning after

Chapter 40 - The Christmas Eve Lagrange Point

Chapter 41 - Stop churning and just do it

Chapter 42 - It’s about time

Chapter 43 - Take a breath. Or a holiday. Or something in between

Chapter 44 - Year planning in May

Chapter 45 - Phone a friend. Randomly

Chapter 46 - Sometimes you just don’t fit together

Chapter 47 - The 5am anniversary

Chapter 48 - Writing lessons from being a director

Getting it right and wrong

Chapter 49 - Writer’s Notes: How to Invoice

Chapter 50 - It’s handy to have a raging ego

Chapter 51 - What to do when you’ve cocked something up

Chapter 52 - 10-4, good buddy – writing buddies rather than groups

Chapter 53 - You are feeling very sleepy

Chapter 54 - Negotiate like the FBI

Chapter 55 - Statistics are not everything

Chapter 56 - Use the news approach to get people listening

Chapter 57 - How to Get Rejected – I didn’t think of this bit

Chapter 58 - More on how to handle rejection

Chapter 59 - Calling it

Chapter 60 - Produce your phone calls to make them easier and quicker

Chapter 61 - Decision paralysis

Chapter 62 - Make it worse for yourself

Chapter 63 - Emotional intelligence

Chapter 64 - Must do better

Technology

Chapter 65 - Introduction: I can stop any time

Chapter 66 - But I hate computers

Chapter 67 - Eating the dog food

Chapter 68 - The five tools you need for writing, definitely

Apps

Chapter 69 - It’s when an app fails that you realise how much you

Chapter 70 - Why it’s worth grabbing free apps

Chapter 71 - Review: OmniOutliner

Chapter 72 - How to pick the right To Do app for you

Chapter 73 - Review: OmniFocus

Chapter 74 - OmniFocus clone on Android

Chapter 75 - Windows alternatives to OmniFocus

Chapter 76 - The wild and strange world of using Mac Keynote on a PC

Chapter 77 - Review: Beesy, the bionic productivity app

Chapter 78 - NowDoThis and take it seriously

Chapter 79 - Me and NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages

Hardware

Chapter 80 - Snap review: Belkin Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad

Chapter 81 - If you only buy one productivity aid this Christmas

Email

Chapter 82 - Don’t put people off with your email address

Chapter 83 - Why and how to lie about your email address

Chapter 84 - The good, bad and dangerous of email signatures

Chapter 85 - How to email the person you want

Chapter 86 - Email your To Do tasks right into OmniFocus

Chapter 87 - Email hacks – create a temporary group in OS X Mail

Exploit that expensive computer

Chapter 88 - Quick productivity tip – don’t search for questions

Chapter 89 - Stop visiting websites. Make them come to you

Chapter 90 - Minimise support delays

Chapter 91 - Tweet in your sleep

Chapter 92 - Zipping files doesn’t do what you think

Chapter 93 - ¿ Best calendar tip ever ?

Chapter 95 - Tag. You’re it

Chapter 96 - My future is here. Your mileage may vary

Chapter 97 - Go Fucking Do It

Chapter 98 - Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

Chapter 99 - It’s not enough to have all your work with you

Exploit that expensive phone

Chapter 100 - Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like

Chapter 101 - Use location reminders for work you don’t like

Chapter 102 - Location, location, location – in IFTTT

Chapter 103 - How to get a refund on the iOS App Store

Thanks and other stories

Chapter 106 - Acknowledgements

Filling the Blank Screen

Copyright © 2014 by William Gallagher

Cover and photography by William Gallagher

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.

Dark Ride Publishing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN-13: 978-0-9926569-6-6

williamgallagher.com

theblankscreen.co.uk

To Angela, to the now very creative and productive readers of The Blank Screen and to all passing by

Chapter 1

Introduction

Toward the end of the original Blank Screen book, I wrote this:

“You should look at my website… it’ll tell you some more productivity things. Mind you, if those were that great, they’d already be in the book.”

I’m not saying I was wrong. But it was not the most right I’ve ever been. At the time, I did have the website williamgallagher.com but I did not have one clue that it would become what it has. The Blank Screen website is now a ballooning resource of news, articles, productivity tips and videos. But I’m not kidding about ballooning. In under 11 months, the site passed 1,000 articles and more than 250,000 words. 

This book, Filling the Blank Screen, is the best of those articles. Over 100 of the best, the most popular and the most discussed pieces have been gathered together, tarted up, edited, improved and expanded on to bring you a smorgasbord of advice, information and specific tips on continuing to be the creative but now productive person you are.

Much of this comes from what I’ve learnt since writing The Blank Screen and, ironically, becoming far busier because of it. Part of that new workload is that I have run Blank Screen productivity workshops for groups such as Writing West Midlands, the Writers’ Guild, Newman University and the Federation of Entertainment Unions and had such a treat at literature festivals including Birmingham’s and Stratford upon Avon’s. I’ve done this a lot now and I know two things will be true every time: what I’ve got to tell you really works – and what you’ve got to tell me is gorgeously useful.

I’ve learnt from you and I’ve discovered from me much more about keeping going when things are hard, about fixing problems, getting started, handling issues. And I’ve learnt much more about exploiting both my computer and my phone. Hand on heart, I thought I really knew all that well but, well, I didn’t really know all that.

This isn’t a replacement for the original book. I hope that if you haven’t already read it, you will check out The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) because I think it will help you. Plus I think you’ll enjoy it. Just as I hope you’ll enjoy reading The Blank Screen news site and the weekly email newsletter too.

One thing. You will hear the word productivity mentioned a lot. I mean, a lot. But I don’t want you to speed up your writing necessarily, I’m not here to tell you to crank stuff out. I’m here to get you more time to devote to the one thing that only you can do: write the way you write. 

Quick aside? This is what I actually call productivity: not tools, not theories, but a writer writing. I have adored Jane Austen since I read her line that “pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked” and here she is, superbly telling a guy where he can shove his ideas for her next book: “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Let’s get to work, shall we?

William

Getting Started

Chapter 2

You’re on your own and it’s necessary

“It just seems like, you agree to have a certain personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone” – Angela Chase (Claire Danes) in the pilot episode of My So-Called Life by Winnie Holzman

Maybe you were the class clown in school. If you run in to someone from there today, you still are. To them. You’re somewhat older and you’ve been through the wars but that doesn’t matter. You’re the clown, they’re the ones who were your best friends even though you now cannot see what you had in common with them. She’s the one you fancied and, god, if you aren’t still tongue-tied talking to her.

We are slotted into types and categories by everyone and we do it to them too. This is true, this has always been true, and it has always been interesting when you run into more than one set of friends at the same time. And it’s hugely more interesting now that we have Facebook and you can see the strata of your life reflected in those friends who knew you here, who knew you there. 

But there is one result of all this that actually holds you back. That stops you doing things.

It’s this. Call five friends and tell them you’re moving to New York. You haven’t got a job there, it’s just something you’ve got to do and you hope to find somewhere cheap to stay at first. I hope that at least one of your friends will be excited for you but you know that at least four, probably all five, will try to talk you out of it.

They’d be right to. No job? Nowhere to stay? They’re looking out for you, they care for you. This would be why they are your five closest friends that you can call about this stuff.

There’s a part of them, too, that reckons New York is a long way away and they’ll never see you again. You can’t object to that, that’s lovely.

Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one who goes to New York. You’re not the one who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.

Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.

So you can’t take their advice. You just can’t. If you did, you’d never do anything. I sound like I’m criticising your friends but really the only thing I dislike is what they do afterwards. After you’ve moved to New York, after you’ve started your business. Then they tell you they always knew you could do it. Sometimes they take credit. That, I criticise.

But the rest of this is just practical: no advice from friends, just don’t do it.

If you want to do something, if you want to start something new and your friends cannot give you the advice or help that will get it going, then you’d think that you would turn to strangers.

Unfortunately, if you find a stranger who knows all about New York and starting businesses, the odds are that they sell relocations to New York and they sell services to new businesses. They don’t see you the way you were because they’ve never seen you before. But they also cannot be looking out for you as well as your friends are. 

Which means, sorry, you’re on your own. It’s a horrible place to be because you are a composite of your friends and these strangers: it’s easier to stay where you are and it’s easy to find falsely rose answers too.

Look for people who have done or who are doing what you want to do. Work with them. I believe now that this is why writers’ groups can be so useful: writing is an illness and nobody understands that more than other writers. I say I believe it now because I’ve only recently found a kind of group that works for me. Proper, traditional, meet-every-Friday groups have never done it for me: I’ve not fitted in or the group doesn’t want the same things I do. (Example: I’m a professional writer, I write to be read, but two groups I tried were more into the cathartic nature of writing for oneself, writing for pleasure.  Fine, but not for me.)

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands. It’s a programme without an overt agenda: they even say there are no meetings and sessions, but there end up being meetings and sessions and they are terrific.

I come away from those enthused, fired up, certain that I can do whatever mad idea I currently have – and then I do it.

Thereafter, I’m the guy who does that mad thing.

I’m being fairly specific about Room 204 here when I wanted to talk in much vaguer generalisations. I’m talking about all of your friends and everything you do.

But hopefully there is one friend who both wants what’s best for you and sees that it is this new mad idea you have to pursue. If you also see both what’s best for her or him and you see that it is their new mad idea that they have to pursue, marry them.

Chapter 3

You have to love ideas enough to be willing to hate them

The best work you ever do will be so much trouble, so much effort, that by the end you will hate the sight of it all. But it is important enough to you throughout and you love it so much at the start, that you must be willing to hate it if that’s what it takes to get it done.

I’m not clear. I can feel it. Let me try an example, see if this is any more comprehensible. I once pitched to write a book about The Beiderbecke Affair in part because I love that show. (UK edition, US edition).

I also felt that Alan Plater’s drama series warranted the attention plus I knew there was enough material to explore, I had all the professional reasons you can think of covered. But also I loved it and Alan was important to me, that’s why I picked up the phone to the British Film Institute.

Nonetheless, I knew that by the time I’d finished the book, I would’ve seen the show so often and I would’ve said the word Beiderbecke so much and I would’ve thought about it so incessantly that I would be weeping to get away from it.

Still, I knew the book was worth that. And if I came out at the end hating The Beiderbecke Affair, that was a small price to pay for hopefully getting the work to an audience, introducing other people to the Beiderbecke world.

As it happens, it didn’t happen, I didn’t hate it once. I got a bit panicky, I got a bit worried about the deadline, but I never hated it.

Actually, there was one night right in the middle of it all when I was away researching Beiderbecke scripts at the Hull History Archive and I needed something to watch. I had a pizza, I had a tiny hotel room, it was so hot and I was so tired that I was nude, actually, nude and freshly showered, stretched out on a towel on my bed and deeply needing something to watch. I had certainly read several hundred pages of Beiderbecke scripts that day and I know I had photographed a thousand. (I had no scanner but I made an arrangement with the archivists that I could photograph the pages to effectively make copies of the script to study later.)

I was cross-eyed and knackered. Too hungry and too hot to just sleep, too weary to read, too bone-tired to think. There was no TV and all I had on my iPad was The Beiderbecke Affair episode 5.

And I loved it. Was disappointed that I hadn’t got episode 6 on there.

But I was willing to hate The Beiderbecke Affair if necessary. And if your work, if your project, doesn’t come with that risk, find a better project, okay?

Easy.

Chapter 4

You don’t know what you do

You know what you're doing, but you don't know what you do. I'm writing to you from a school where I'm just a guest at a Royal Television Society project which is about getting kids into television careers. I am the tiniest part of it, I am merely a live version of one PowerPoint slide that lists various jobs people can do. But of course it's not me who matters, it's what I've done and in this case how I started at a school like this one.

Not as good, to be truthful: I'm very impressed with schools today in comparison to my old one. (I should go to my old school sometime: that would be so strange.)

But you forget that what you do every day is something that you hopefully wanted to do, it's certainly something that you had to work hard at doing. And there are people starting out who maybe want to do the same but certainly need to see that it can be done.

That was the problem in my school: I am a writer but then writing was something I believed other people did, it was something the school discouraged. If a writer, any writer, even me, had come in to the school, I would've started my writing career ten years earlier.

Maybe I would've benefited from that push more than most. The kids in this school are easily the smartest I've met so far and they are asking very sophisticated questions. But the fact that they have the Royal Television Society in here, the fact that actually at this moment all of the kids are working on a genuine practical exercise – not a theory, not an ideal, but a real television project – it is fabulous to witness.

And of course it's a honour to be included. But it's also sobering: I always feel as if I'm just starting out but if I'm made to look back, there is plenty to see that the school-age me would be very proud of.

The odds are that you think of yourself as just starting out in writing. I’ve been a full time writer since the late 1980s and a full time freelance writer since 1996 but I haven’t done anything yet, I haven’t got started yet. I’m hoping that’s a normal thing for writers, as I’m not sure I could stretch to regular therapy bills just at the moment, but if it is, if you have this feeling too, stop. You can manage that for a moment, you can handle stopping feeling like this for a little time. And spend that little time thinking about all you do that you don’t think about, that you would’ve loved knowing you would be able to do one day. That you aspired to and yet now ignore. It’s easiest with very visible things like when you’re first published in this or that place, but secretly – seriously, very secretly, I’ll deny this to your face if you tell anyone – I also look at how my writing has improved over the years. 

I don't know what I do. Mind you, I also don't know what I'm doing, so.

Chapter 5

Don’t wait

Yes, it’s easier to put that phone call off and yes, you’re probably right that you wouldn’t get the work anyway: they don’t want you, everybody else is far more qualified, you’re wasting your time, there’s no point even ringing. 

It is easier to think all that than it is to call them and one reason is that you may well be right. But just promise me that the next time something like this comes up and you have an opportunity but you’re doubting yourself, you will say yes or you will phone immediately to ask about it. This is easy for me to say because I suspect I have more faith in you that you do, you daft eejit, but because it’s easy for me to say, I’m saying it. Maybe you won’t get the gig but you can do it, you can do it in the way that only you can. Don’t write off an opportunity.

This is also easy for me to say because most of the time, I do it. It is hard, I grant you. Especially the phone call part: for some reason that is a killer for me. If I’m doing a job for you, if you need me to ring someone for you, that’s fine. And I’ve been a journalist for years, it’s natural and second nature to pick up the phone then. But for myself, calling about something I want, it’s tough.

But whenever I haven’t called or I have hesitated, I’ve got nothing.

And whenever I’ve said yes, it’s worked out. Sometimes better than others. Occasionally I’ve looked around wondering what in the world I’m doing here and how will I make it through another two days of this. But usually, it works and works out well.

I can see where I was when I got a round-robin email from a colleague on the Writers’ Guild committee saying he wasn’t able to go to a thing, would one of us want to do it instead? I said yes and filling in for him at one single meeting has led to nearly a year so far of very many and varied jobs that all sprang from there. I get to work and have a really great time with people I’d not heard of before I said yes.

It is true that there are better qualified people than me, there are simply better people than me. But so long as they hesitate and I say yes, I’m okay with that.

Chapter 6

Start it now. Just start it

I’m all for choosing a time to do a certain job: I live by deadlines anyway but it’s sensible and productive to pick a time that you will begin. Take a moment to judge how long something will take and assess when you’ll have all you need to complete it, then set that as a start date.

That means you can ignore it until that date and I am really all for getting stuff out of your head until you need to do it.

Except.

It’s that word ‘assess’.

I offer that the best way to assess a job is to start it. I’ve had times when I’ve had a last email with details of a job and as I’ve already known and confirmed the dates, I’ve only skimmed that message. Invariably, that’s been a mistake. Sometimes reading it over isn’t enough either.

Once or twice now I’ve done all the practical things yet as I came to start the work, realised I needed something more. Something that wasn’t apparent until I’d begun.

So I suggest you begin a job even if you’re going to then slot it into a date or a time later on. This lets you really understand what you need. It’s like checking you’ve got all the parts when you’re assembling furniture. You don’t do that and so far it’s worked out okay but you know some day it’s going to bite you.

Start the work, assemble some of the bits.

And then email the person who’s commissioned you. Having made that tiny start, you’ll be able to find some detail you need to check. Or at least that it sounds reasonable and believable that you want to check it. So you email them about that and they get the message: you’re on the case already. That goes down very well.

And then they email you back with the answer and thanking them, taking that detail and adding it to the work plan, it means one of two things.

First, you’ve started now and sometimes the ending is so clearly in sight that you might as well just go ahead and finish. When you can do a task, do a task.

But second and more commonly, when you come to do the task later, you feel like you’re already well underway – because you are.

Chapter 7

Just Say Yes

Look, this is just you and me, right? I can tell you something and it won’t go any further?

One day this week, I was working at a college. The weather was very, very hot, the food was terrific but I ate too much, too quickly, and I’d had everyone working such a lot that they were flaking out. I’d got them all flying off around the college doing these things and when I could manage to keep my eyes open, I could see that the students in front of me were struggling. There was just no question but that the ones everywhere else must be the same.

Right.

On your feet.

I got the three or four students in my room to stand up and follow me. I strode out of that room, across the little campus – it was the most gorgeous 1900s home converted to a college – and led them through the building. Picking up the other students as we go. Right, with us. Come on.

One of the students commented on how well I knew the college. This was my first time there and by chance everyone on this residential writing course had done at least one other project there. So they knew this place and knew exactly where I was now leading them all.

I didn’t.

Not one single clue.

Didn’t know where I was going and most definitely did not know what we were going to do when we got there.

But the sheer surprise of how Pied Piper I’d become, coupled to how anything was better than staying in front of screens in hot rooms, meant that the entire group followed me.

Tricky.

I saw a door out to the college’s garden. That’ll do me. This way.

Across the garden. Saw a huge tree. That’s where we’re going, I said, having decided that during the very sentence when I said it.

Here’s what we’re going to do.

Nine people facing me in a beautiful garden. And I stole a writing exercise. Can I just quickly tell you this one? Because it’s good. And I only learnt of it about a week before. Learnt is a writer’s euphemism for “I’m having that”. And the moment writers Polly Wright and Mandy Ross showed it to me, I knew I would use it somewhere. Didn’t expect it to be a few days later.

You need a big group. Nine is just about enough. Stand in a circle and create a character together. The first person says whether this character is a man or a woman. The second says whether they’re tall or short, perhaps old or young. You go around the circle adding details and there are two rules. First: whatever you say, that character is. No going back, no changing, no replacing. He is an old man with a peg leg. Deal with it. And the second rule is that you can’t repeat anything.

The result of the rule is that people get more and more detailed and therefore so does the character. Eventually you name him and our one was Cornelius. He is a hunchback with a peg leg, a distinguished moustache, he could use a bit more deodorant, he loves animals though he has a phobia about cats, he is in love with a prostitute and keeps documents locked away in an old antique safe. There was a lot more.

And there was a bit more to do.

Having got all this about Cornelius, you go around the group again. This time each person announces who they are in Cornelius’s life. So I can say that I’m his brother, for instance, though we haven’t seen each other since that time in Nam. Or something. Our group this day included Cornelius’s estranged wife, long-lost son, hang gliding instructor, postman, drinking pal and Jezebel, the first prostitute he slept with.

That’s usually where this ends. You’ve created one main and detailed character, you’ve created a life really, and you’ve populated it with many more characters. When you do this in a circle, you can’t help but leap to connections and stories and when this was first shown to me, the group I was with bounded off to write tales about these people.

I didn’t want that this time. I just wanted my group to step away from their current work, think in detail of something completely different, and to do it on their feet in the garden. That’s post-rationalisation, that’s what happened and what I then told everyone was the plan all along. Really all I’d wanted was to shake us all awake.

It did that and I’ll admit to you that I rather enjoyed leading this group across their campus like that. And I’ll admit that most readily because they then led me.

They didn’t want to go back to their work. They wanted to continue this circle. So we did. I should ask Polly and Mandy if this happens to them, but for us they really wanted one more go around. Easy, I said. Definitely, I said. Good idea, I died inside, having not one clue what to do. “It’s that antique safe,” I said. Immediately. As if pre-planned. I don’t know how I was doing this that day but I’d like to do it again, please. “What does Cornelius keep in that safe?”

I can tell you that it turned out to be a big safe. It’s actually a beautiful oak box with a diary listing his previous lovers. Out of date condoms. (Please, this is a family show.) Bed sheets. What appears to be kitty litter but is really… something else. Mysterious. And there’s a will, covered in melted jelly tots and Spangles.

We did not use one pixel of that in our work for the course but clearly we could have. And clearly the exercise was a true boost. We all of us, myself included, went back to work then really alive and alert and ready.

And that’s not what I meant to tell you.

Sorry, got excited.

Here’s what I want to tell you and here’s why our natter this week is headed Just Say Yes.

I want you to say yes. I recommend yesness. All the time.

One day last week, it was very hot and I was driving around somewhere, lots of meetings, oodles to do. At some point racing back to a carpark, I scan-read my emails and saw one from Polly about a college. She’d sent it hours before, I didn’t read it properly until some hours later, but it was about how a certain college suddenly needed a replacement tutor. I can’t remember now but I think Polly had emailed a dozen of us. Something like that. She’d been asked to do the course and couldn’t, so she told us and explained how it was so urgent that if we could help, we should phone right away.

I must’ve read that properly five hours after she sent it and what she said of the course and the college was so interesting that there was no question but that every other person on the email would certainly have phoned by now. Plus, hand on heart, I wasn’t sure I could do what they needed.

I’m sitting now in the same seat I was when I rang them and I can picture how it had felt. No point ringing, far too late, can’t do it anyway, let’s have a quick mug of tea and get on out to the next meeting.

You already know I rang and that I got the gig, it’s a wee bit late for me to try building suspense here. But you also know how well it worked out. For me, at least. I don’t want to claim great success for the students and the college though it all felt marvellous to me. You can feel the enthusiasm in me. I think I sound as if I’m on my feet, pacing around, striding, gesticulating, sparking.

I had a lot to do this week and I am now about five days behind because of this. (It was a three-day course, the longest I’ve ever taught by about two days, plus I had a lot to do planning it and meeting with the college staff.) But just as the garden exercise invigorated us on a hot and heavy day, so doing this, being somewhere new and having to get people the best experience I’m capable of, it has invigorated me.

I’ve done a lot of things that didn’t work out, I’ve done even more that were a shrug. But sometimes I get to do things that I love. And they all come from closing your eyes, crossing your fingers and just saying yes.

Okay, in this case, it was phoning someone up first and pitching. But I could’ve far more easily have just said no to myself and not had this bounding, bouncing, glorious week.

So when someone asks if you can do something, you say yes. Okay?

Chapter 8

How to get going on tough days

This should not be a tough day: I’m off to be a judge at a Royal Television Society event, I’ve been looking forward to this. But I did not sleep last night and today is proving very tough. So the idea of performing – of just being up and alert and responsive and hopefully clever and decisive – that’s tough.

As I write this to you, I have ten minutes left before I must leave.

So about twenty minutes ago, I was as far from ready as you can be. I’d like to offer you a recipe for how to get up and go but that presupposes what I’ve done will work. Right now, I’m more confident than I was, so I’m going with this.

Job 1. Shower. Again. When I’m this tired, I think the water in my early morning shower just knew to leave me well alone. It did its job, it did the cleaning, but this second shower is the freshening spin cycle.

Job 2. Shave. Probably not for everyone, this, but it works for me. Partly because you of course feel better for looking a smidgeon better, but also I have to really concentrate. My skin is so sensitive that even sensitive-skin razor blades cut me. I was lucky today but I had a standby shirt just in case.

Job 3. Listen to something. I chose to listen to a design podcast called 99% Invisible. But whatever it was, making it something I could listen to rather than hear – so speech radio instead of music, for instance – got my head working.

Job 4. Load the dishwasher. I have no idea why this helps but knowing I won’t have to come back to that later made me feel more in control of the day.

Job 5. Caffeine and terrible things. I’m sitting here with a can of Pepsi Max – I would’ve preferred tea at this time in the morning but don’t have long enough to drink it – and two chocolate mini-rolls. I have no need for any of this. But the caffeine is helping and the chocolate isn’t hurting.

Job 6. Do something in the seconds you have left. Such as write to you with a list of six jobs to get yourself going.

If it all fails, I’ll tell you. But right now I feel ready in every sense. And thirty minutes ago I was a lump.

Wish me luck, though, eh?

Chapter 9

Essential morning preparation

I’m back on the getting up to work at 5am lark after about a month away doing various jobs and then one of those there holidays. This morning I woke up, looked at the clock, saw it was 04:53 and said aloud: “Well, this is fun, isn’t it?”

Getting up at 5am for day 256 was as hard as some of the first few days but it was helped by one thing, gigantically hindered by one thing and conned by a third.

The Helpful Thing

I had a plan. I knew exactly what I was going to be working on the moment I had showered, made a mug of tea and sat down at the keys. No hesitation, no choosing, just straight to it: I was going to work on a particular book project. There’s a lot to do today but for the first hour, I’d do this and then it would be done plus I’d be on my way.

Until today I would’ve said that this is easily the biggest thing in working at stupid o’clock: if you go straight to the keys with a purpose and work for an hour, then at stupid o’clock plus one you feel you’ve really achieved something. Half of you now wants to go back to bed but half of you is bursting to continue and that To Do list looks pretty doable.

The Con

It’s 06:46 as I write this to you and I haven’t done a word of that book. Because right after I said “Well, this is fun, isn’t it?” I rolled back away from the clock, looked at the ceiling and while waiting for the alarm thought: “Act 1: Lights up on Mabel. Very plainly dressed: specifically, no jewellery, no bag.”

Without planning to, I’d got the start of a script I’d been working up. Most of it was done, I was just struggling with certain elements like the start and there it was.

So that’s what I did instead of the book project. And now I should really go do the book project, except that I am still suffering from The Gigantic Hindrance.

The Gigantic Hindrance

The milk has gone off. Did you hear me at 05:10? Tilting back my freshly-showered head, my hair still damp, and my face raised to the heavens as I howled?

There are worse things in this world but a mug of tea with bits in is up there.

Chapter 10

Whatever you do is enough

I’ve said this before: I wouldn’t kill to write like songwriter Dar Williams, but I’d maim. She has a fine and long body of work, a now substantial discography but interestingly, she’s against being disciplined and productive. I’m obviously paying more attention and notice because I rate her so much but I think she makes these points particularly persuasively.

She makes them in an interview on Songfacts where am unnamed interviewer presses on the point thisaway:

Songfacts: When you look at this collection, does it amaze you that you’ve accomplished what you have? I don’t want to ask you to brag, but there must be some moment of pride to be able to look at all these songs and re-visit some of your accomplishments over the years. How does it make you feel when you look at the songs that make up this collection?

Dar Williams: Well, when I was in college, I put a stick-it on my computer, which was huge, that said, “Whatever you do is enough.” I had totally lost my mind, and I was coming back from that. So I would say to myself, you know, you’re supposed to do a ten-page paper, if you do one page you’ll get a D+. If you do two pages, you’ll get a C-, or if you do three pages you’ll get a C-. So that’s all better than an F, so why don’t you do a page?

And it was really, enormously helpful to me. And then a friend of mind was kind of coming back from her lost moment, and I put the stick-it on her computer, and she took a very playful approach to this paper, really appreciating the fact that she wasn’t writing about something very tangible, and just giving it a very playful approach. And she got an A. Her professor said he read it for his wife. It was like, by letting the pressure go and allowing herself to do what she could in that moment, she released a sort of joy in the meaning of the whole assignment.

So it’s like I have a little stick-it on my inner computer that says “Whatever you do is enough.” And I don’t force lines, and I don’t force myself to write every day, and somehow out of that came seven albums that don’t, to me, feel forced. And that’s the only thing I’ll boast about is that there’s nothing about it that to me sounds like I said, “I have to write for 2 hours a day,” with lines where there were no inspiration. I felt it when I wrote it. And I think that experience coming back from being totally insane and putting that stick-it on my computer was a good beginning to a less forced work ethic.

Be sure to read the whole piece: this is all she says on productivity but it’s a wide-ranging interview and she’s smart across it all.

Chapter 11

Yes, you do have time

You do. Don't tell me you're busy, I know you have time. Time to start that massive project, time to do something completely new. What you need to get this new or massive thing done is not time, it is involvement. Excitement.

I would say that I've been a bit busy this week yet I've also read – hang on, just checking – 396 pages of The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). I'm reading it in the kitchen while I cook, I'm reading it on tea breaks, I'm catching a few minutes here or there with it. I'm not reading in bed: I've got this novel in paperback and for reading in bed I prefer my iPad. I'm never going to read it or anything else in a bath: I get that it's a relaxed time and that therefore reading should be great, but the idea of holding a book that is getting more sodden by the minute through steam or, god, shudder, shake, dropping it into the water. Eugh. Never.

So my time available for reading must be quite small yet I've read all of this in about a week, maybe a day or so more.

This happens to me regularly: one non-fiction book or novel will take me months to read, another one will zoom by in days. It is down to engagement and involvement: I'm enjoying The Cuckoo's Calling and it's pulling me back.

The great thing about new projects and massive new undertakings is that they are new. That they are side ideas, side projects, at least at the start and there is always the issue that you have other things to get on with. Other priorities, other demands on your time. Let the new project be a guilty pleasure that you enjoy spending time on and you will find the time.

You have the time. You do.

Chapter 12

Location, Location, Location

Last May [2013] I was writing a huge book about Blake’s 7 plus a two-hour Doctor Who radio drama and a short one-act stage play for the Birmingham Rep. As you do. That’s actually the little cauldron I was in when I thought of The Blank Screen and so started writing that book at the same time. You can of course argue about the quality of my work – Doctor Who: Scavenger comes out next month so you can even hear it for yourself – and I did use half a dozen productivity tools to handle it all. But one that really helped was that I moved around.

I wrote Blake’s 7 in my office on a 27in iMac. I wrote the Doctor Who on my MacBook Pro, mostly in my living room. And then while this wasn’t as hard-and-fast, I did write at least some of the play on my iPad in the kitchen.

It got so I associated certain rooms and machines with certain projects. The Blank Screen is definitely an iPad book: I wrote that going everywhere, starting with the first thousand words on a bus ride to go see my mother. But Blake’s 7 is definitely an iMac: I say this to you and I can see it. My Word document open here, an episode of the show there or audio from an interview or a scanned document from the BBC Written Archives there.

I don’t think I ever told any of my editors or producers this, but in my head if I had to call them about something, I would first go to the room and the machine that I associated with that.

This was entirely a contrivance. The complete text and all notes for all of these projects were always on all of these machines at the same time. I could and when necessary did start a sentence of one book on one machine and finish it on another.

And at every place I also read RSS news. So I don’t know why it’s taken me ten months to find out that other people benefit from this madness too. The website ImpossibleHQ advocates dividing your day’s tasks into groups and then physically moving to different locations between each set, specifically: “Once you finish all the tasks in group #1, get up and move. Close your tabs, pack your bags, and physically move your butt to your next spot. If you can, walk or bike to your next stop. Avoid driving if you can. The physical activity is important.”

Hmm. I’m a writer, we’re supposed to be sedentary. But biking advice aside, I’m persuaded by this idea.

Chapter 13

Process stories – finding how you work

By coincidence, two friends talked to me about this lately: how we writers go about our writing, the way that we get it done. The process, the writer’s process. I was thinking that the short answer is a shrug: you do what you need to. But there is a comfort to having a system that works for you, specifically there is a comfort in that if you know you are always writing at the last minute and that always turns out okay, maybe you can stop beating yourself up about it now.

I can’t tell you my process. I can go on about the 5am starts (today was day 231 of that, by the way) but that’s less a process, more a stupidity. It’s 8:30 so now and I have written 1,200 words on one project, I have done a pile of emails about a couple of events I’m producing, I have drunk quite a lot of tea and gone through my To Do list. Including the stuff I found I’d done over the weekend, I ticked off about twenty items on that list. I think I probably only actually did six or seven of them this morning. But they’re done. And yet this isn’t a writing process, it’s a productivity one. Because it’s easier to be productive than it is to write anything down.

Maybe that’s my process: do everything else rather than write. It’s a rubbish process.

So I would like to find you a way to write that is efficient and quick and gets things done. But I haven’t found it because I can’t find it because I think the very notion is bollocks anyway. Not if the aim is to be efficient. If the aim is to explore your own writing and to end up having written instead of just thought about writing, that’s different.

One friend, Alex, says she’s still finding her system, her process. Then either by total chance or because we writers are all forever thinking about this stuff rather than actually writing, another pal, Ken, wrote a blog about it in which he said: “If there’s a point to this post. I think it’s this. I think there are lots of ways of writing and if you’re stuck staring at the notebook or the plotting software, consider letting it go for a while and just writing. Just write. See where you go and where you end up. Just don’t settle for what you write in that initial foray.”

Read My Way is Not the Best Way but it’s Mine on Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff. He’s a smart guy, he writes very well and his blog was a key impetus in my making my own Self Distract be a weekly thing. Do have a read of the whole piece, would you?

Chapter 14

Write down your process for doing things

Write it down now.

A very long time ago, I used to be a computer programmer and there was a culture that documenting what one did was a waste of time. A good coder just got on with it, a good coder didn’t need to leave namby-pamby notes in the code.

That reminds me of how my brother used to refuse to wear a seatbelt because he (believed) he was a great driver. It’s the same level of idiocy and it’s got the same shockingly, overwhelmingly stupid blind spot. If you were this great driver, if you were better than anyone else, that means everybody else is worse than you and they are all on the road heading your way.

Similarly, coders who didn’t believe anyone should document what they’re doing were bollixed when they had to update someone else’s spaghetti of a programme. Talk to me about elegance in coding, talk to me about the language of the very finest programmers, just talk to me about it all later ’cause I’ve got this mess to sort out now.

I’m minded of this for two reasons. The Evernote company blog just said it and said it thisaway: “Whether your business is a one-person shop or a multinational corporation, it’s very likely that you have a number of repetitive processes you go through on a regular basis. Some of these tasks could include preparing reports, submitting expenses, ordering office supplies, or responding to customers. Whether big or small, Evernote is the place to document your processes and maintain consistency.” (Save Time by Documenting Processes – Joshua Zerkel, Evernote Blog.)

That’s not really a blog, it’s a sales brochure for Evernote and the full piece goes on to detail just how that software is good for this. But it does sound like it’s good for it, I am convinced.

But I’m really convinced because I helped a friend out with her website recently and it took me quite some time because the things she needed to do I had already done on my own. I’d just forgotten how I did them.

I got it all working, I figured it out again – it was a WordPress installation, need I say more? – but I wasted a lot of time and actually while I got it working, I didn’t get it working quite the way I’d like. Not quite the way I have it on mine. I just could not find the specific plugins and settings I wanted for her and so I’d had to compromise.

So I’d compromised and it took a long time to get to the point of compromising. If I’d kept a note of what I’d done on mine, we’d have had hers running in a jiffy.

Much as I say about To Do tasks: if you have a complex thing that you do or even a simple thing that you have to do a lot, write down all the steps as if someone else is going to do them for you.

Chapter 15

Ask for what you want and ask it now, ask up front

I do talk about this in my book, The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers (UK edition, US edition) but I’ve just now, this minute, had to put it into use for a new reason. When you want something and you’re emailing somebody to get it, say so right at the top. Line one.

The reason I give in the book is that we’ve all had emails where we’ve wondered what in the hell this person wants. And when they do that very British thing of working up to the point by reminding you who they are, how we met, how, gosh, you said some day you could send me something, maybe, hello, it has an unintended effect. I read all this about that time we met in ‘Nam, how we stole a taxi together in Saigon and wrote Les Mis 2 together and as it goes on, as it gets ever more specific, I can’t help but worry. This is going to be big, I think. This is going to be really serious. This may be trouble.

And then they just ask for a link to the book. (Here, have the UK link and the US one too. It’s no trouble.)

But there is also the fact that saying what you want right at the start is a difficult writing task. Especially today. I had to write to my agent with all sorts of issues. All good, you understand, but just the sheer volume of things to discuss about new projects, things I want him to do, things I should’ve told him I’d already done.

The more I thought about it, the more I could think of other issues I needed to cover. It’s fine to think I should pick one and only email about that, leave the rest to another day but this is a real job and a real email about a real thing. Anything like stripping it down would be a correct writing exercise but not what he or I needed. Too much, too intertwined, too complicated.

So I started with line one. What I want.

There is always something that you want most, there is always something that you want first. So I wrote that down.

And having written it, every single other thing fell into place. It turned out to be what I call a three-biscuit email (it’ll take him those and some tea to work through the things in it) but as a reader today he will fly through the email and know exactly what is going on and exactly what I’m after.

Because I spent so long thinking about the first line, the rest of the email poured out of me in a flash. 

It’s a big deal for me, it’s a complicated subject, but wallop, that email is done and I’m on to the next thing. Specifically I’m on to talking to you. And now I’ll just pop off to get some breakfast. I’m starving and saying all that about biscuits did not improve things.

Chapter 16

Seriously, it’s the small moves that work

Seven weeks ago I decided I wanted to try creating an email newsletter for The Blank Screen. Six weeks ago, the first one went out to about ten people. Today the sixth went out to forty.

I’m not saying anything about the quality of the work – though that people are adding themselves to the newsletter is enormously gratifying – but I am saying that it was an idea that became a thing.

It’s now a normal thing. I knew this morning that my day would begin with writing a Self Distract blog as ever, then that I would do the newsletter. Then I’d be off writing an article for someone else and a script for someone else, but the newsletter is a regular, locked-in part of my week now.

There was a moment when I was first bringing The Blank Screen book to the web as this news site that I thought about an email newsletter. But I thought it would be a lot to take on atop everything else. Now it’s just here and it’s normal, it’s what I do.

It’s fun and it’s hard and to make it worthwhile anyone reading it takes planning and writing effort but I know I will do it every week. I suppose it takes discipline but it doesn’t seem that way now I’ve started and it’s running. It feels more like momentum.

I think creating new things is often like an engine: it takes a huge amount of energy to start – it literally takes an explosion – but then once it’s running, it keeps on going very easily.

I thought about this today just because I mentioned to someone that this morning’s newsletter was the sixth and I stopped mid-syllable. It can’t be six weeks, can it? Six editions? Already?

The thing I’m taking away from this is that you can do new things and you can enjoy them, you just have to start.

See the newsletter for yourself: sign up for free here.

Chapter 17

Wonderful

I'm British, I can't do this. Actually, I'm British so that means I can and I do but I don't tell anyone. It's just the way we are. But I'm going to tell you. You've got that face, I can tell you anything.

Alongside my email Inbox, I have the things I recommend in The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition): a Follow Up mailbox and an Archive. Also a trash and a junk and I'm both ruthless and quick about sending things to either of those. I do also have a Travel Bits mailbox that holds train and plane ticket emails. Much as I use and rather adore TripIt, it recently couldn't parse a plane ticket and there are some operators like National Express who want to see their own format emails when you wave the phone at you.

None of this is difficult to tell you.

This is.

I also keep an email mailbox called Wonderful.

When an email arrives that really lifts me, I'll put it in there and cherish it. Certain commissions I've longed for. Gorgeous messages from people about enjoying The Blank Screen. There's more, I'm not telling you. But you get the idea. Lately I've also started an Evernote notebook called Wonderful for things like this that don't arrive via email. Letters I have scanned in anyway, I'll put in there. Tweets, facebook messages. I'm not very consistent but I do it.

And the result is that every now and again I can go take a look and feel better.

If you want to get techy about it, I suppose I could just tag these things with the word 'wonderful' and leave them wherever they be, but I like having this growing pot of people I like saying the most amazing things. When you see them all lined up like that, it's overwhelming enough that I can't process it so easily. I can't rationalise that she was just being polite, that he wanted something, that they got the wrong man.

So I want to recommend this to you.

Do it yourself, go on. Have your own Wonderful inbox. Just pretend like it was your idea and not mine, okay?

Keeping Going

Chapter 18

So you haven’t done what I told you, so what

This has come up a couple of times recently. I have a natter with someone – because they asked, come on, I don’t accost people in the street with productivity advice – and it seems to go well.

I think they get a good idea of what’s really on their plate and which of it matters to them. There’s usually a new project that they want to do and after a hour or so with me, they tend to have a plan. And most importantly, I think, that new project has turned from a nebulous, unwieldy thing that’s overwhelming them into something they can do. And will do. Talking it through invariably leaves you physically no further forward yet in every other way extremely far down the line. The intangible is at least well on its way to tanging.

But.

What’s happened these couple of times is that armed with their own new plan and, I believe, fully enthused at what they’re going to do, they haven’t done it.

They tell me this with something approaching guilt and I feel terrible. I like people thinking of me as someone to account to if that is what helps them, I loathe it when they think I’m judging them, damning them.

So here’s the thing.

Bollocks to me and what you think I think of you. What I actually think has not changed at all: I think you had this great idea and it wasn’t working out but now you have a plan, now you know you can do it. Whether you do or not almost doesn’t matter.

I want you to do this thing: it is exciting and it’s you, only you can do this and I want to see how it turns out. But what I needed, if we’re to get all personal about this, was to help you go from this stage of it being a mountain ahead of you to your seeing the path you need to take.

I promise you that I will never think badly of you for not having started on your path yet. I’m struggling to think of a situation where I would think badly of you. Come on, it’s you. How could I think badly of you?

And here’s another thing.

That plan you came up with, that simple set of steps to get this project of yours started, it’s still there. You may have changed: your interest in it may vary, your ability to fit it in with everything else you’re doing may very well have varied, but the plan is true and you can start it any time.

And let’s have a mug of tea sometime.

Chapter 19

Make writing a habit by tying it to something else

You have lunch most days, right? You go to bed pretty much every night? Write for half an hour before you eat lunch. Write for ten minutes before you go to bed.

That’s it. That’s all. That was, in full, a productivity tip of the week – I do one in each The Blank Screen email newsletters.

I can’t make this sound bigger or somehow more impressive a tip than it is. Just find a thing you have to do or a thing you like doing and then do some writing before it. Before it every time. Make the two things go together like a double bill. It means you won’t forget to do it, you will make it a habit.

Just be careful of one thing. Whatever you tie this writing to, make sure you do the writing before it. Not after. Telling yourself you’ll write for an hour after you come back from the gym won’t work. Telling yourself you’ll write for ten minutes before you go to the gym, that works.

Chapter 20

Push on

I’ve said this before but I happen to work best in hour-long chunks. It took me ages to find that out but it’s true and I try to stick to it now. Except, once you’ve set a timer for sixty minutes and begun working, there comes a moment. A bad, bad moment.

It’s usually between thirty and forty minutes into the run when you are spent.

Seriously, you’d give anything to to stop now, that’s enough, I’m out of ideas, it’s all over, surely I’ve been good, I can take the rest of the hour off, please, I’m begging now.

Push on, okay?

I’m saying this to you now because I’ve been reminded of why. I did an hour on a project I’ve been putting off for a while and, yes, just over thirty minutes in, I wanted to stop. I tapped on my iPhone to see how long was left and it was about 26 minutes. Rarely has 26 minutes looked so long.

But I did push on and in those final 26 minutes I pretty much finished the project. Got over the difficult bit, found a clever – I think – solution to an issue, drove on into new territory and found new things. When the timer sounded, I flicked at it to shut the bleedin’ thing up, I’m working.

I do also believe very much in stopping after the hour, in stopping when you are at that full flow. It sounds wrong but if you leave at the top, you come back later ready and rearing to go. If you stop when you fizzle out, you come back pre-fizzled.

But anyway, how great is it that I wanted to continue? This thing I’d been putting off, this thing at with 26 minutes left to go I was thinking kettles and biscuits and breakfast, now I’m on a burn with it and am near-as-dammit finished. That is finished in the writer’s sense of the word where it means finished, yes, but nowhere near done yet. But still, finished.

And because I pushed on to the end of the hour.

I think you can smell the smugness from there and I can only apologise. But it’s worth my looking irritating to you if it makes you try this too – and I think if you try it, it will make you feel this good as well. The only thing I don’t know is whether you need an hour. It’s so right for me, somehow, but plenty of others work best in half-hour sprints or two-hour marathons. Just pick a time, a duration, that’s a bit hard. If it’s easy, you don’t get that half-time slump so you don’t get the chance to rise above it.

I’m all for rising above things, I should do me some more of that, but it’s a combination of the satisfaction of rising above a problem and the resulting liberation that matters. At that 26-minutes-to-go point, I had a problem I couldn’t solve and ended up just trying different approaches until I found one that broke through. After that, I was just slamming down points and ideas and issues and they were coming out of nowhere, or so it seemed. That rush after the dam is fresh and it feels new and good.

‘Course, I’m a writer, I may look at this later and think it’s all nonsense, I can do much better than this tosh. But at least I’ll be thinking I can do much better. And it is always and forever easier to change something on the page than it is to make the first scratches on the paper.

Actually… today was my 245th day of getting up at 5am and it was the hardest in a couple of hundred. I’ve not come so close to turning over and carrying on sleeping since the very earliest of the days. So I pushed on then and I pushed on during the hour. No wonder I reek of smugness.

Sorry about that.

Chapter 21

Have a production meeting for one

In The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition), I argue that there are two types of meeting. I think I was wrong: I think there is or at least there could be a third type and that it is useful. To be clear, the two types were:

Pitch meetings where it’s all about you and your work

Day job meetings where it’s all about the day job

The first type is the one you want as a writer or any creative person. They are important: they are how you get commissioned so of course you work to get as many of those as you can and you really work hard to make each of them count. The second type is just the ditchwater-dull sort you are forced to have in your day job. I spend a lot of time in the book covering how you can get out of them and, since you usually can’t, what exactly you can do to make them faster and make them work and keep yourself awake.

You have to meet. But you don’t always have to meet and when you have ten people in a room doing bugger-all and getting nowhere slow, that is a gigantic waste of ten people’s time. I reckon the poster-boy worst example of this kind of thing is what I would often see at the BBC: everybody would gather for a meeting whose sole and entire purpose was for whoever ran it to tell his or her bosses that they had run this meeting.

All of this stands, all of this is true, but I forgot another type of BBC gathering: the production meeting. Sometimes called an editorial meeting. Believe it or not, I still think of them as the budget meeting – there is not one single element of them that is to do with money but that’s what these were called in Lou Grant, the show that made me a writer. (Budget Meeting was the US newspaper term for an editorial meeting and I imagine it comes from how you have a certain amount of space in a newspaper and you are budgeting this much room for that story, that much for this. Certainly these Lou Grant meetings regularly included background detail such as questions about giving this much space on the front page and continuing a story inside.)

These meetings are not about your writing work but they can be. And they are so useful that I’m embarrassed I didn’t mention them. Especially as I think you can use them yourself, you can conjure up a kind of production meeting for yourself.

Production meetings have certain things that are always the same. They are regular, for one thing. Newsrooms and news programmes tend to have them at least daily, almost invariably first thing. They are always focused on the same result: BBC’s The One Show doubtlessly has a production meeting focused on that day’s edition. Anything that doesn’t belong or can’t go in today’s edition, doesn’t get discussed. Or probably not, anyway.

Then you have specific resources: this many people who can do this much in that time. Anything they can’t do, you don’t do – or you look for outside help, you schedule it all in some way that it becomes manageable over time.

Next, every person in the meeting brings ideas. That sounds so wishy-washy but production meeting ideas are not one-line blue-sky wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-feature-daffodils-somehow things. They are one-line ideas that have every detail behind them that it would take to get that idea on the screen or on the page. You throw in your idea, if it isn’t liked or you can’t adapt it to one that is, it’s out. If it is or you can, you contribute exactly how it can be done. Or more likely, you just go off and do it.

When ideas die, that’s a lot of wasted work. But when they fly, you’re ready to go. And the process works not just because the better ideas rise to the top in these meetings but because working at them this way gets you thinking of better ideas to pitch.

Last, production meetings almost always include some kind of diary discussion. Very broadly, there are two types of ideas discussed at a production meeting: diary items and non-diary items. There is always someone whose job it is to maintain the diary: not of where you and your colleagues are but of what is happening. I’ve worked in entertainment news so the kind of diary I’d be looking at would have entries such as “Film screening Monday 10am”, “Harrison Ford plugging Muppet theatre play Wednesday” and so on.

The BBC maintains the most exhaustive diary of everything that any news programme could want to know but your team knows what to take from that and your team also runs their own.

Then non-diary items are everything else: they are the things that come up, the breaking news. A celebrity death is unlikely to be pencilled into the diary ahead of time, for instance. (Though their obit is regularly written long in advance.) 

It happens that this week I have a meeting about one event, I actually have an event, and there are some discussions about at least one other confirmed and one other possible gig for later in the year. My mind’s been going through what I need to bring to the meeting, what I need other people to agree to. And I’ve realised that my mind has been going through exactly what it used to with production meetings.

I miss them. I’ll be honest with you, I miss the rigour of having to come up with ideas, pitch them to a group and then either get them or be assigned some other idea to do my best with.

And it occurs to me that I could, perhaps I should, and probably I shall run some little production meetings of my own. Just for me. God, that sounds lonely and pathetic. But I think it might be useful.

I have diary and non-diary items to get done, for instance. This week should be devoted to the events but actually it can’t be, I have to do other things too so I have issues of resources and time.

I also have the shape of the week. When you work in radio or television you are conscious of time in a slightly different way: you think about the top of the hour, you think about your third-hour guest. You know you have to have a news bulletin at this point, you know you should start the show with a bang and that it would be good to finish with one too. I have the week where I know when my events are so I know what has to come before those, I know what I will have to postpone until afterwards.

And I know all this because my noggin’ just worked it all out while I was talking to you. So thank you for that – and I hope you find production meetings useful for your work too.

Chapter 22

On balance

Here’s a secret. I just checked all my various bank accounts – business, personal, tax, savings, all that stuff – and I needn’t have bothered because it’s Saturday.

My bank’s computer system doesn’t bother to register most changes over the weekend. It does some, but not most. Couldn’t tell you why. Not a clue. I think it’s feeble and I think it’s amateur, most especially when it does register a payment made on Saturday but then afterwards changes its date to the Monday.

But I know it does this and I know it’s pointless checking anything on Saturdays or Sundays and yet I continue to check because that’s what I do. I check all my accounts every day.

You may call this excessive. But it is a direct response to a problem of mine. I write for a living but it is the writing that I want: writing for a living is being able to live while writing. Money isn’t the focus, money isn’t the objective. It’s working out nicely, thank you for asking, but my head is always over here in the writing instead of on the bank accounts and the invoices. And there have been times that has caused me problems.

Now that I talk about writers being productive, I have learnt a recurring truth: all this felgercarb about accounts and pitches and calls and the sheer volume of things writers have to do that is not writing may be a burden but it is also easier than writing. And if you get it done, it is done. Done and gone. It isn’t weighing on your mind and affecting your work.

So I tell people to get this stuff done now and what I’m telling you is how I do that. I check the balances every day. It means I know the moment a client has paid, it means I know the moment I’d paid off my iMac. (When I bought a 27in iMac, Apple was offering interest-free repayments and I knew – I knew – exactly what difference that would make to my balances and my cash flow. It was the right way to buy at that moment and I did it without hesitation, yet I was also glad when the last payment was done.)

All of which means there is a specific and positive reason to stay on top of these things. But because I know it is an issue with me, I also check the balances every day in order to check the balances every day. In order to make sure that I don’t slip back into any problems.

And I’d like to tell you this is a nice round number but actually, today was the 918th day in a row.

Doing anything 918 times is going to take you a while. So over that time, I have learnt various ways of checking extremely quickly and I keep looking for faster ones too. So I can tell you, for instance, that if you’re the UK you shouldn’t both with the many online systems that gather up all your accounts from all your banks and display the lot in one handy dashboard-like screen. They sound great but every time I’ve tried them, they have been impossibly slow. If I tell you that it is quicker for me to go through each account and each bank separately, you’re thinking I’m shaving a few seconds here or there but no. Surely these systems are better now but every time I’ve tried, logging in to each account myself has been faster by about thirty minutes.

That’s in the UK, though. If you’re the States, it’s completely different: you should take a long, hard look at Mint.com. I wish that were available here. And I can also tell you that 1Password is a godsend for this: one click on my Mac or one tap on my iOS devices and it has gone to the bank sites, entered a lot of the security details (but not all, I’m not that stupid) and I can be entering those last details, seeing the accounts and getting out again in seconds.

Today was the 918th time in a row that I checked my balances and yesterday was the 211th day working day I’d got up to write at 5am. I am a writer, I do not like constraints and I do not function at my best keeping very specific, regular office hours, yet I apply these daily responsibilities to myself and they work for me.

They work one day at a time. We can all do one day of something. I just advocate doing one day tomorrow too.

Actually, this has just popped into my head. I’m very much a Suzanne Vega fan, I think she is an astonishing writer, but her first album and its first side and its first song begins with a first line that goes: “It’s a one-time thing. It just happens a lot.”

I can’t believe that got into my DNA. But I just check the balances once. I just get up at 5am once. And then it just happens a lot.

UPDATE: You can imagine that I continued to do this daily checking. But I did return to the topic for The Blank Screen on the third year anniversary, the day I checked for the 1,095th time, because I realised something else: while I might want those balances to be healthier, the fact is that whenever I doubt I’ve got the discipline to do something, I can now look to 1,095 days in a row where I had.

Chapter 23

When you have two equally urgent things to do

Do one of them.

That’s it. No great debate, no big decision, just do one of them. Either of them. Doesn’t matter which. Try random, try flipping a coin, try alphabetical order. Just try something, just pick something, and start on that right now.

In the most extreme case I can think of, you have two commissions from different places. Both equally important, equally urgent, both equally on deadline, both equally hard to do. And you can’t afford to disappoint either commissioner.

Even then, do one.

The odds are that you won’t really disappoint anyone: even if the other piece is a bit late, often that’s okay. But even if it isn’t, even if choosing to do one commissioner’s job will seriously disappoint the other, you should still do it. Because the alternatives are worse.

The first and most obvious alternative is that you will try to do both pieces in the same time. We can do amazing things under pressure but even if you manage to finish both pieces, neither will be good enough. Cue disappointment from both commissioners and the certainty that you won’t be hired again.

But then the second alternative is that you try being clever. Clever is good. Except in this case you try to prioritise the pieces, looking at which commissioner will be the most valuable to you later, which job is the better. But we’re talking about the most extreme case when there are two exactly equal tasks. Even if they aren’t spot-on equal, though, this truth applies everywhere and everywhen: the time you spend deciding between the two is wasted.

Don’t spend time prioritising, spend time doing.

Chapter 24

Is this safe? Using passwords as positive reinforcement

I honestly thought that this was just me – and I thought I couldn’t tell you because writing it here would mean I was putting online a Very Big Clue to one of my key passwords. That last bit may yet be true and I may yet regret it if I’m not circumspect enough, but it isn’t just me and it is useful. Just be wary of this: take it as a thought experiment rather than a recommendation. But:

You can set a password that helps you mentally

My example. A couple of years ago now, I had an important project on and it was many things from exciting to fun but with a dollop of queasiness in the middle because it was so big. Literally big: not as in important, though it was, but physically heavy and prolonged lifting. The kind of thing that you think you’ll start tomorrow, it’ll be fine.

I changed one of the passwords I use every day to be approximately a word from this project. I wasn’t entirely daft, I didn’t use a single plain word, I dressed it up with 3s instead of Es, that kind of thing. But during the life of that project, I reckon I typed that password six or seven hundred times. And each time, every single each time, it kept the project in my head.

The project is long done now and I’ve changed the password, I don’t have anything on at the moment that particularly makes me want to do this password trick again. But friend-of-the-site Daniel Hardy just sent me a link to this article on Medium, How a Password Changed My Life. Its writer, Mauricio Estrella was going through a divorce and not going through it all that well, when he gets into work in a hurry and his computer won’t let him on until he’s changed his password. He wrote:

I was furious that morning. Tuesday, 9:40 a.m. – It was so hot that my torso was already sweaty even though I just got to work. I was late. I was still wearing my helmet. I think I forgot breakfast. Something tastes like cigarette in my mouth. I need to get shit done before my 10 a.m. meeting and all I have in front of me is a huge waste of my time.

So there it was… This input field with a pulsating cursor, waiting for me to type a password that I’ll have to re-enter for the next 30 days. Many times during the day. Then, letting all the frustration go, I remembered a tip I heard from my former boss.

I’m gonna use a password to change my life.

It was obvious that I couldn’t focus on getting things done with my current lifestyle and mood. Of course, there were clear indicators of what I needed to do – or what I had to achieve – in order to regain control of my life, but we often don’t pay attention to these clues.

My password became the indicator. My password reminded me that I shouldn’t let myself be victim of my recent break up, and that I’m strong enough to do something about it.

My password became: “Forgive@h3r”

Now, he doesn’t and I don’t want to get into the details of his divorce. It’s true what you’re thinking, there are two sides to this, but I think divorce is such an overwhelming thing that when you’re going through it, the sheer scale means you can only handle there being one side. Your side. So whether his ex would agree or not, for him “forgive her” was central to his coping and recovery.

In my mind, I wrote “Forgive her” everyday, for one month.

That simple action changed the way I looked at my ex wife. That constant reminder that I should forgive her, led me to accept the way things happened at the end of my marriage, and embrace a new way of dealing with the depression that I was drowning into.

He’s okay now and one hopes his ex is too. But having used this password as positive reinforcement, he now uses other passwords to do similar things. He used it to stop smoking (“I shit you not”) and to motivate himself into things.

Read the full piece over on Medium for exactly what he did and exactly what his passwords were for them.

Chapter 25

To Not Do list

We've had To Do lists. A lot. We've come up with Done Lists which are very satisfying: you write down what you did as you finish it and then looking back later is immensely cheering. But maybe we could take a further step and write ourselves a To Not Do List.

It feels risky. Like it could end up as a kind of new year's resolution fad: I will not drink so much tea, I will not keep putting off the gym.

But it could also be a good guide. I keep reading headlines lately about the first app that people use in their mornings and I've been stopping at the headline because I don't want to find out the detail. Chiefly because I want to avoid thinking about mine.

Since you're here, I'll face up to it. My first app is email. If you don't count Awesome Clock, which I use to give me an old-fashioned analogue clock face on my iPhone all night. If you don't count my iPhone's own alarm. Then it's email. As I lurch to the loo and on to the kitchen and into my office, I am checking both my main or personal email account and my public one, the wg@williamgallagher.com address that is your best route to talk to me about The Blank Screen.

I want to stop doing this. Funnily enough, I've been training myself to make sure I check my calendar every morning and that's going fine. So I want to keep that new habit going, I do want to reinforce my early OmniFocus use every day.

But I have to drop the email one.

Because too often now I've woken up at 5am to start writing and been derailed by a bad email. Usually a rejection. And at that time of the morning, most rejections matter. Later on, they wouldn't, but right there and then I am somehow more open to the slap.

I'm fine with being slapped. But it also saps. There are few things worse than getting up at 5am to write but one of them is getting up at 5am and not writing. I've seen this after big projects finish when the pressure is off and I have nothing that truly has to be done then. That's a horrible time. But yet worse is this paralysing that you can get from certain rejections, when they're strong enough, when they're important enough.

All this is on my mind now because I had a rejection that would've cut whenever I read it, but it did especially stop me one 5am start.

Or it should've done. It certainly did for a time. I certainly struggled to begin working. And I didn't do the thing I was intending to do that morning. Instead, though, I worked on fiction. You know how great it is when you are reading a book and you're completely into it. Writing fiction, at times, can be similar. For whatever reason, I hit that moment that day and by the end of 2,000 words on that project, I felt better.

And I had a solution to the rejection.

Without thinking about it, without brooding on it, my noggin' had found a way around the problem.

Now, that's good. And having been able to take my mind away for 90 minutes or whatever it was, that was also good. But the solution requires other people and it requires much planning, all stuff that I couldn't do anything about at 7am that morning.

So if I'd just put off reading the emails until, what, 9am, I'd have had four hours solid work done, I'd be far less prone to the rejection paralysis and when my head came up with a solution, I'd have been able to do something about it right there and then.

Top of my To Not Do List, then, is this: I will not check emails first thing in the morning.

Do we have a deal?

Chapter 26

The Sudoku approach

My wife Angela Gallagher taught me how to play Sudoku. She did it during one of our hospital visits when she was being treated for breast cancer. Not the happiest of times for either of us, really, yet there were moments. We would routinely spend five or six hours waiting, never knowing how long it would be, and she would play Sudoku on her iPhone. I can picture the seat I was in when she explained the rules and since that day I have played thousands upon thousands of games.

I still associate it with those times, even years later and when her treatment has been a success, but along the way I promise you that I have also learnt some productivity lessons. From a game. From a game Angela taught me in order to burn up some time waiting.

There is something to how you make decisions in this game where you don’t know where a certain number goes but you can make conclusions about it anyway. It’s got to be in one of these two spots, you’ll tell yourself, and that’s no use in that square but it does block out a line. Without knowing where it will go exactly, you do exactly know its impact on the rest of the game.

I think I’ve learnt from this that you don’t have to wait until you have a definite final answer, that sometimes you can draw enough of a conclusion that you can get on with something else.

But without doubt, this is the one thing I have really learned from playing Sudoku:

Walk away and come back later

I have struggled with a Sudoku puzzle, struggled and then when forced to go away to do something else, I’ve regularly come back and immediately seen the answer.

I have been of the school that says you work at something until it is done. But sometimes it’s better to stop, do something else, and then come back.

By the way, I’ve only ever played two Sudoku apps and the first one, the one Angela taught me on, is no longer available in the App Store. But my current obsession is Sue Doku which is a just preposterously cheap 69p UK, 99c US. I’ve played this for hundreds of hours now, I can’t believe the pleasure and the productivity lessons I’ve got from a whole 69 pence.

Chapter 27

Pick yourself up and have another go

Productivity is supposed to just be a handy single word to cover all the things we want to do. But it becomes a label and then it becomes an ideal and you can see people for whom the word itself has become a cult. If you spend more time thinking about productivity than actually doing anything, you need help.

Hello. My name is William.

(Hello, William!)

The ease with which we can get caught up in shaving a few seconds off those tedious emails, in making sure our work is everywhere we are so we can get right down to it and finish that vital paragraph on the train, in writing sentences so long that you’ve forgotten the start… um… The ease with which we get caught up like that is one reason I think it feels so bad when we stop. When you fall off the productivity line, it’s rarely because you’ve made a conscious choice to get a life. It is usually that you didn’t keep up the effort. That feels bad enough but then these things snowball and you just see all the jobs you’ve got to do mounting up and mounting up. Perhaps because you have been on top of it all, you can see how big that mountain really is and that makes it even harder to get back going again.

Bollocks to mountains.

Do you know the phrase ‘sunk cost’? It’s the money you’ve already put into something. If you’ve invested £50,000 in something that isn’t working, it’s ferociously hard to forget that £50,000 and move on. Of course it is. It’s bleedin’ £50,000. Yet sometimes you should weep now and move on, sometimes it is a sunk cost. Because we are so wired to feel the loss of that £50,000 that if someone says you can get it back by just investing £20,000 more, we actually think about it. So we should: I’m not saying all investors should always bail out early – though you know how every website gives financial advice like that and then says, by the way, nobody here knows anything so you can’t sue us? Seriously, I know nothing about investing. I’m making an analogy. You knew that but I had to say it. Anyway. This £20,000 more lark: we don’t see the £20,000 because we’re still blinded by the enormity of the £50,000 we’ve lost. There’s a very good chance that we will spend that extra £20,000 because of it.

And then sometimes we’re out by £70,000.

You doubt me, I can tell, but this is similar to how repeat con men work: they find someone who has been conned and promise to hunt down the bad guys – for a certain fee. And then of course they vanish too. Sometimes it’s the same outfit hitting you twice. They do it because it works. We can easily be so blinded by one thing that we fail to see another.

So sometimes you must, you must accept that the money and the time and the sweat you put in to something is gone. It is this sunk cost and nothing you do will bring it back. More, maybe everything you can do will make it worse. Except moving on.

If you’ve fallen off the productivity line, forget everything that’s behind you. Yes, you failed to complete this important thing, yep you should’ve done that other vital thing. But you did fail and you didn’t do what you should.

Let it go. 

Because it is already gone.

Bollocks to all of it, there is literally nothing you can do to fix it so move on and put all that energy into doing the next thing instead. Some problems will cause you damage forever but not actually that many and most things you didn’t do today will be forgotten by everyone else by tomorrow, so join them. Forget it. Move on.

If you really are in a bad place and it really does seem like a mountain that is resting on your chest, do take a look at Bad Days in my book The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition).

But also just take a breath. Look at what’s in front of you right now and see what tiny bit of it you can actually do, right now.

Don’t look down, don’t look up, just chip away in small moves and I promise they add up to mountains. And if that’s too Hallmark Card-like for you, think of it this way: maybe small moves don’t add up very quickly or to very much, but they add up to a hell of a lot more than your sitting there doing nothing but regretting mistakes.

Chapter 28

The myth of nerves being good for you

I have the very best time talking with people, leading a writing session, meeting folk, yapping away. The very best time. But I get nervous beforehand. Seriously nervous.

On a way to a script meeting at Crossroads, I drove in to the carpark, opened my car door and threw up. Then I went into the meeting and might as well have done the same thing for how much use I was.

I've only actually vomited that once but it's been close a fair few times. And every time, every time, every time, I am so nervous that my body chemistry alters. I think my mind chemistry takes a beating too because you probably wouldn't like me as a big event gets closer. It's not that I'm mean suddenly, but you'll quickly conclude that life is too short, whatever you want can wait until I've returned to planet Earth.

That all goes the second I begin talking. The instant I step on stage. The instant. I have this very clear visual image of many, many times when I've looked at the microphone, taken a breath – and boom, I'm off. I truly cannot over-empathise how exciting it is to meet people and bring them something I know they'll enjoy. I can say that last bit with huge ease because I'm sure I've stolen everything from cleverer people.

But I'll do confession another time, we're here to talk about nerves. Since I talked at LitFest Birmingham, a literature festival in Birmingham, back in September 2012, I've counted the talks I've done. Talks, workshops, writing sessions, radio interviews, television, anything. I'm not sure why but I note the date, the event and the number of people present. If I had any brains at all I would also jot down what I spoke about so that I don't repeat myself, but I haven't so I don't so I might.

Last night I did my 42nd since then – so that's what, two or three events every month. That's not a fair estimate as it's all trending upwards, but typically I've always got something on the horizon and so I always have nerves.

If you take nothing away from me today, make sure it isn't this: the only way I cope with nerves before a big event is to have a bigger event scheduled before it.

That's not my biggest mistake, though. My big one and the thing I would actually like you to take away or perhaps argue with me about, is that nerves have no connection to the quality of the event or of the work you do.

I came to believe they did. I've always believed that if you're blasé about a talk, you shouldn't be doing it. But I came to find that the opposite was the terribly seductive idea that the more nervous you are, the better you'll be on the night. It's this business of the instant transformation when I reach the stage. That change feels the bigger when you've vomiting in the car park.

But.

I've done 42 talks. Nervous before all 42. I'd say that roughly 20 went brilliantly and I know that means 21 went merely superbly. Because I know that I died on exactly 1.

I deserved to, I was crap. But it wasn't because I was less nervous. It was because I wasn't well enough prepared. (I need to tell you that it wasn't for want of trying. I spent a lot of time on that gig and it was just somehow eluding me, I didn't nail the material until the morning of the event and I was wrong to think I'd manage to master it in time.)

You can't really base any science or true statistics on one person's 42 experiences. But you can try. And concluding that nerves have no connection at all to whether or not one succeeds, if concluding that success is entirely dependent upon your material, that's ultimately better for your stomach, for your audience and for the poor people who had to clean up the car park.

Incidentally, if you dare, I am available to talk about writing, technology and productivity. Just don't ask me to talk about nerves because that would be just far too meta for me.

UPDATE: This was posted to The Blank Screen website in January 2014. By the time this book came out in August 2014, that 42 had become 96. Shaking nerves, yes, but I’m glad to say they’ve been free of vomit.

Chapter 29

A quick fix for days you’re below par

A quick fix when your problem is you and how you're feeling. This works especially if you're feeling slow and lethargic, it's good if you're feeling in any way too below par to get any work done:

Go see somebody

I don't mean a doctor. I mean arrange to get a lunch or a coffee with someone now.

It may well be that what you ought to be doing is staying right where you are and getting this bastard piece of work done, but the odds are good that you would just continue pushing the pieces around without getting anywhere. And the odds are high that whatever you do accomplish will be about as below par as you.

So if the hour or the day is not going to work out, spend that time or a key part of it going to have a coffee with someone.

Because it does three things.

The obvious first one is that coffee will perk you up. That’s why they’re called percolators.

But there is also the business of who you go to see. There's the issue of whether they can see you, but before you pick up that phone you need to have thought of someone to call and you need to have an idea of what to call them about. Maybe you can just phone them with the idea of getting a coffee; I tend to need something more to offer them, like it's a coffee about doing this or it's a tea about doing that. Whatever it is, you have to pick the person and you have to think of what you'll say and you have to phone them.

And you'll then have to do that with the next person if your first choice can't make it.

Then when you do meet them, though, that's when the third and by far the biggest boost comes. This works with anyone you meet, anyone at all. But it's greater if it's someone you like. Greater still if it's someone you in any way admire. It is beyond measure greater if you also fancy them.

Whoever they are and whatever you think of the way they flick their hair, you will be performing for them.

There is just no possibility that you will present yourself as this half-dead sloth who could barely type a word. You will bounce. You will lie.

And the lying and the performance will pick you up.

Then get back to work as quickly as you can before it all fades.

Chapter 30

Waiting for something you don’t want to do

I have a meeting in one minute's time. It's not a writing job, it's just a thing I need to get done and the fella is coming to my office so it's not like I've got to rush out. There's no reason to think he'll be late but equally no pressing reason to assume he'll necessarily be on time to the second. So right now, naturally, my mind is on that meeting and I am listening out for him.

But my mind has been on that meeting most of the day and I have been listening out for him since 5am. Even during a terribly entertaining tea room chat, I had it niggling away because I don't want to do it. Incidentally, no offence to him: I need him to do something, he's doing it, I'd just rather get on with other things.

There is always something you don't want to do and I am always losing a lot of time waiting for it. Waiting is death to me: I get nervous even when there is nothing to be nervous about. And I am sure those nerves then impede whatever it is I'm doing.

So today I've practiced doing something new. I'll have to build up for when I'm faced with things I really, really don't want to do. But today I wrote solidly for four hours and then went out to meet a pal for a coffee. And now I'm back, I'm writing again. My ear is out, I'm glancing at the window, but I'm also writing.

This, in fact. Specifically this. If you see a lot of pieces about writing a lot of pieces while waiting for people, it will be because I've somehow got a lot of these suddenly. I hope not.

But I'm distracted enough that I can't do much: I didn't think that I might be able to concentrate sufficiently to do anything at all. Yet here I am. So thanks for being my guinea pig and the next time you're doing something, have some small bits of other things to do as well. They take your mind off stuff and they also get done. He'll be gone in an hour and I'll have to race to catch up with work but if I can find a small short thing to do while I wait, that's something off the To Do list.

Some people included an anticipated duration for tasks on their To Do list: this is an all-day job, that is a five-minute one and so on. I never have and don't expect I ever will have the patience and dedication but finally I understand why they do it.

Chapter 31

Don’t give yourself a deadline

You’ve got this thing to do, it’s important, you want to do it, you need to do it, of course you’re going to put it on your To Do list and of course you’re going to put a deadline.

Don’t.

Does it actually, really, seriously, honestly, have to be done by a certain date? If you’re delivering something to a client, yes. But that is about the only time you need a deadline. If you work at a place where, say, the holiday rota comes out on a particular day and you’ve got this many seconds to get your request in, fine.

Everything else you do, avoid setting a deadline.

Don’t have a start date, don’t have a deadline date, just have the task.

Because you are going to get it done. It is on your list. You’ll write the task as if someone else is going to do it, fine. It’ll help you to say that it’s a task to do with this project or that: I have tasks for an event I’m producing, for instance. I’ll say the task belongs in that event project. If you’re using OmniFocus, you have to set a certain amount of detail in order to get the task out of your general-purpose, catch-all task inbox.

That task will then stay out of your way until you go looking for it. Part of using a good, trusted To Do system is that you don’t have to constantly see all your tasks because you elect to review the lot at certain times. It’s a core concept of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

So it’s there, you don’t have to keep thinking about it, you will get it done.

If you added some artificial deadline, the task would pop up in your face on that date. But it’s an artificial deadline. A contrived one. Odds to onions, you’d see that notification and you would dismiss it. Why wouldn’t you? It isn’t a real deadline, you don’t actually have to do that now, swat it away.

Deadline notifications just became meaningless.

If you’re having to consciously stop and work out whether this deadline is the real deadline, you’re screwed.

I will spend time on my To Do tasks when I’m writing them in. Actually, no, I’ll often chuck half a thought in and then work it up into a proper task when I get home. But once that’s done, once it’s in the list, I don’t want to have to think about it until either I’m ready to do the task or it is time that I have to. Don’t make yourself have to work your list, deciding every day what’s real and what isn’t. Spend that time doing your To Dos.

Chapter 32

Seriously, no deadlines. Unless...

Yesterday's post on not setting deadlines for your tasks got me a lot of reaction from people saying they have to set deadlines or they don't get things done. And I do agree that even a fake deadline can be a motivator.

What I'm saying, though, is that most tasks do not need this so don't do it. Don't give deadlines unless they are real or you really need it.

So for example, straight from my own To Do list this right now:

Change Evernote and Dropbox passwords

I need to do it, I want to do it. In fact, I want to do it quite regularly. But it doesn't have to be done today, it doesn't have to be done tomorrow. It's in my To Do list and I will see it every time I choose to review my entire list. I'll see it when OmniFocus says it's time for me to review my project called “Mac &c”. (Quick aside? The way people used to write “etcetera” wasn’t “etc.”, it was “&c”. I just like that and I use it a lot in my private notes. This is the first time I’ve shared that.)

But I won't see it today. I didn't see it today. I just had to go looking for it now, trying to find a good example of all this. (Confession: it was difficult. It seems most everything I'm doing is urgent.)

Or this:

Book Four Oaks train for Wednesday morning

That obviously has a deadline, doesn't it? If I didn't see that task on my list until Thursday, I'd be sunk. So in theory I would have a deadline of Tuesday and maybe a start date of last Friday when I was asked about going to this school.

I say in theory because I don't know. I just found that task in my list now but I've already done it, I've already booked that train seat, so I just ticked the task as completed and it's gone. Vanished before I could remember to check what the dates were for you.

This is how most of my To Do list work goes now: I check the list, see I've done a lot of the things already, I tick them all off. I used to find something on the list, do it, come back to tick it, pick the next thing, go away, and so on. Rinse, repeat. Now I see what I've got to do today and I just go do it. My life runs by this To Do list yet I hardly look at it. That's one thing I adore: I don't have to be a slave to checking this stuff yet it just still gets done.

And one thing that used to make me come back to check the list every few minutes was how often I would set deadlines. Fake deadlines. Really just the same as writing it all out on a piece of paper and pretending you can get the lot done tomorrow.

Here's a third type of task from my list now:

Write 20,000 words of novel MW by end of May

There's a deadline right there. It's fake. Nobody is waiting for it – well, nicely, they are but not specifically at the end of May. But I am doing a writing buddy thing for April and May with someone who's particularly good at fiction so I want to have a substantial chunk to show her by the end. (I'm on about 13,000 words, thanks for asking.)

If I miss that end of May deadline, it doesn't matter. It's more than just letting myself down since I have told this buddy that I'm doing it. She may not be waiting for it, she may be dreading getting it, but I've told her it's happening so I feel held to account.

That's good. That's planting a stick in the ground and working towards it.

I have no problem setting deadline dates for this fakery.

I just want you to stop doing it for “Buy beans at supermarket” too.

Chapter 33

Write first, edit later

One of my books was peer-reviewed by an academic who criticised the first draft with the comment that the first third was plainly rushed. The last two thirds, he or she said, were clearly far more considered and therefore vastly superior.

You know where this is going, don’t you? I’d spent five months writing the first third and one week doing the rest.

That wasn’t through some disinterest in the ending, it was more that I found it hard to start. Not in the sense of putting my backside down on the chair, rather that I had to find the right point and the right tone to start the book or the whole thing wouldn’t work. It was very important to me and I wanted to get this one right, more than ever.

But pondering turned into paralysis and though I was writing away all the time, I was really rewriting. I have no idea how many goes I had at the opening chapters. I just know that the deadline got frighteningly close and that suddenly I was having to write at speed and at 2am.

Stuff it, I’m going to tell you. The book was my first, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair (UK edition, US edition). It was important to me because everything is, of course, but also it was my first book. Plus it was about The Beiderbecke Affair, the 1980s drama serial by Alan Plater that either you don’t know at all or you are already humming the theme. It’s astonished me how many people have written to say they loved that show and also that they really believed they were the only ones. It was a show that felt like your own. It was that personal. I think it was Alan’s best work and that’s saying something because he wrote 300 or more scripts for television, stage, film and radio.

He was also a friend. He died in 2010 and not many months after that, I phoned up the British Film Institute to propose this. Someone should do a bio of Alan but I can’t, that would turn a friend into a journalism subject. But I could do Beiderbecke. I could really do Beiderbecke. It’s personal to me just as it is with so many.

Here’s how personal it got. I have roller blinds on my office window but I’ve never got them to work. They’re just hanging up there at the top, half stuck in knots. And it’s a big window. So at 2am, the lights on in my office, the dark night outside, that big window is a mirror. Even under deadline pressure, I was getting really, really, really intense about a particular point to do with the show. And I promise you I saw Alan Plater reflected in the window. He was leaning back in his chair, lighting up a cigarette, and saying that it’s only a TV show, William.

I didn’t have time to rewrite the last two thirds much. But I also didn’t need to.

Even when I went to the second draft – and I must say that anonymous academic had a lot of really good points that I stole, as well as some that I just ignored – I didn’t have to change the back of the book.

Sometimes, you just have to press on and, sometimes, that works. I’ve discovered that my top writing speed is twenty pages of script or 10,000 words a day and that I can keep that up for about eight days in a row. Whenever I’ve had to do that, it’s been with the full realisation that I’m going to have to change a lot later. Edit, improve, fix, rewrite. It’s true. But even in those times, it is remarkable – to me – how much doesn’t have to be fiddled with.

Stop analysing, just do it.

And then analyse later. I’m not advocating being careless about your work, but I am saying it’s easier to change something than it is to make those first marks on the page.

Chapter 34

Using your travel time

It’s been a long time since I drove very much at all. There was a time where, for several years, I would drive from Birmingham to London and back on a day at least once a week. But that would be a three-hour drive in the morning, leaving around 5am, and a four-hour drive back in the evening.

Plus I’d do eight to ten hours work in the middle.

So that was, what, help me count here: up to 17 hours away from my home office. And all but a ten-minute lunch break of it spent working.

When I got my first book contract, it obviously came with a deadline and I could not afford to lose 17 hours on a London day each week. I also obviously couldn’t afford to walk away from the eight to ten hours paid work, even if I hadn’t enjoyed it. This was Radio Times, easily one of my favourite writing jobs in my career.

But I could reclaim at least some of the travel time. If I gave up driving and instead went by trains or coaches – very often coaches because, wow, the price of trains that early in the morning – I could write. Not all the time. Once or twice on a train coming back I’d take a look at the crowd with me and feel wee bit uncertain about getting out a couple of thousand pounds of computer equipment. And sometimes I’d just be too tired.

Quick aside? The train from London Euston to Birmingham New Street goes via Birmingham International where there is the airport and the National Exhibition Centre. Amongst very many other things, the NEC hosts rock concerts. One night, I fell asleep on the train and woke up with my face pressed against the window.

And on the other side of the glass were a group of AC/DC fans pressing back and grinning at me.

Anyway.

I forget how long this went on for but it was probably three months. The book was published in November 2012 – it’s BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and I am deeply proud of it, I feel honoured that I got to be the one to write about that – so this would be late 2011, maybe early 2012.

But what I remember with total clarity was that when it was done, when I had delivered the first draft and could go back to driving, I had saved slightly over a thousand pounds in petrol.

Now, that’s not an accurate figure for saving because it doesn’t account for all the money I spent on trains and coaches. But it was a shock of a figure. Shock enough that to this day I refuse to let myself think about all the months of petrol I’d paid up to then. At least ten years with at least once such drive per week. You add it up, I feel ill.

It was also shock enough that I could not go back to doing it again.

So from that day on, I stuck to trains and coaches for my London work. I sold the car, even.

We still have a car: Angela has one and I use it when necessary or when we’re both going somewhere, I will usually be the one who drives us. Gives her a break from all the driving she does in her work.

Today it was necessary. I dropped Angela off at a place this morning, drove to a couple of jobs, then to a Theatre Cuppa gathering in the early evening and back. Then Angela was off to a production meeting for her theatre work (you cannot believe how proud I am that I can say that to you, I just find the very words delicious) and I was off to a Writers’ Guild committee meeting.

My meeting was quite short but it then took me an hour and a half to get home by bus. I’d driven 170 miles in about six hours today, the last 10 miles were a 90-minute series of bus rides. And those bus rides had more adventure in them. I got to see stand up rows between passengers and drivers, I somehow got to see one woman passenger flash another one even as I actually couldn’t quite see why. The flasher was not complimenting the flashee.

But I missed a lot because I was writing. I wrote nothing all day except some notes at the various places I drove to so I was behind. But on these buses, while keeping an eye on timetable information through my various iOS travel apps, I got to write.

I didn’t enjoy that it was 90 minutes, I didn’t enjoy the drizzle as I got off the last bus. But I got things done and so instead of feeling knackered and pointless tonight, I feel I’ve got on with something and that I secretly deserve to watch the first episode of Community, Season Two, which the finest of fine people has just loaned me.

There are 24 episodes in this season. That’s my productivity destroyed for the rest of the week.

Chapter 35

If you must prioritise, do it this way

I really believe that when you’re right up against it, doing anything is best. The time you spend choosing between similar projects – similar in interest, difficulty, reward, promise for future work – is definitely better spent just getting on with one. And that time might even be the difference between finishing one thing on time or finishing none.

But.

Many people disagree with me and say you have to prioritise before you can do anything. Seriously, though, I need to buy a curry from Asda and I need to make some edits to a short story. You know which is most important but depending on when you read this, you can’t tell which is the most urgent. It’s a production deadline vs a supermarket closing and my stomach collapsing. So priority is overridden by urgency. I would rather get on with the work than try to juggle all this.

There is this thing called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. I’m not clear whether Dwight D Eisenhower invented this or just used it so much that it became famous, but the fella did definitely divide the world into four squares. Think of it like a very wee Excel spreadsheet with just two columns and two rows.

The columns are headed Urgent and Not Urgent.

The rows are Important and Not Important

That means Column 1, row 1 is both Urgent and Important. If you’ve put a task in there, you shouldn’t be putting it anywhere, you should be Doing It Right Now. Or Else.

Equally, Column 2, row 2 is Not Urgent and Not Important. Do it or don’t, who cares?

I like that this is a way of displaying tasks in text which is also good for visual thinkers. But I still don’t do it.

Chapter 36

Review everything so you don’t have to see it all Posted

Right now I have several hundred tasks in my To Do manager, arranged in probably a couple of dozen different projects. Everything I ever have to do, everything I ever think of gets chucked into OmniFocus. Now, many of them never get done. If it occurs to me, I'll add it to OmniFocus and think about it later. When that time comes, often I've done the thing already. Very often I'll find it occurred to twice so it's in there twice. And fairly often I'll look at it and decide no, I'm not going to do that.

But otherwise, it's all in here and it's all live.

Except.

I have a busy day today and OmniFocus is showing me 24 things. Just 24. Actually, hang on… I see I've done four of them this morning. Okay, that's 20 left. But as much as 20 is, it's nowhere near as much as several hundred. I can completely forget all the rest of them, I can pretend they don't even exist and because I do that, I am doing these twenty – wait, just remembered another one I've done, it's now 19 left – I am doing these 19 at a clip.

That's nice for me.

But the reason I can do it all is that OmniFocus is hiding the rest until I need them. And the reason OmniFocus can do that is because I review regularly.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I open up OmniFocus and check every task in every project. If you think ticking one thing off as done is good, imagine how great it was just now ticking off five or doing a review and seeing you've already done thirty tasks. I look at every task and if it isn't done yet, I have a ponder about why. Do I need to do something else before I can get that done? Fine, add another task. I rattle through these remarkably quickly and at the end I still have the hundreds of tasks but I know what they all are.

And most importantly, I know they're being dealt with. Those things I have to wait for Bert to call me back, they'll wait there until he rings me or I chase him. Those things I know I have to do on Tuesday, I'll see the list on Tuesday and not before.

You end up trusting your system, whether it's OmniFocus or anything that works to David Allen's Getting Things Done ideas. And that trust is amazingly liberating. Knowing that you list is only showing you what you need to know now, it means that the list is doable.

And that means you do it.

This is one of the key things that makes a To Do list something I use rather than hide away from. And it's just this simple idea of a review.

Seriously, you don't need OmniFocus to do this. But, seriously, OmniFocus could just be the finest piece of software I've ever used and it is certainly the one thing that has made me productive. You'd think they were paying me.

Chapter 37

When is it over

There’s not going to be some great life-changing Hallmark-Card-like slice of advice here, I’m just wondering about something I have wondered about a lot.

I wonder when things are over.

There must be a day when something is done. This first popped into my noggin’ some years ago when I read a line somewhere about how Dar Williams was about to release a new album – and to me, the one before was still the new ‘un. (I think it was Many Great Companions, which is so good that when a friend asked what I liked about Dar Williams, I just bought her the album. It’s cheaper to write reviews, but I wanted her to have it. I want you to have it too, but I’m a little short today.)

I can’t remember when this was but I was surprised because up to then, her previous CD had been the new one. My own Doctor Who releases go through a similar sequence.

Actually, Doctor Who, there’s a thing. I go through various processes writing those, there are the same types of deadlines to the same types of timescales and in theory I could say my involvement ends when I deliver the last draft. But there’s no way to be sure that there won’t be more to do then. So call it when the scripts are in studio, that’s definitely the end for me. Well, sometimes I’m in studio and working on scenes. Okay, post production. Definitely no involvement there, so that Doctor Who is over and I’m looking for the next one.

Except there are liner notes to write for the CD. Quite often there are interviews to do.

So okay, when it goes on sale. But that’s when I start talking about it all, I suppose officially because that’s marketing and promotion, but really it’s because now I can finally talk to you about it.

I don’t put “Tweet about Doctor Who” in my OmniFocus To Do list. It isn’t a task, it’s what I do for fun. So by the time we reach the tweeting stage, you can bet that my OmniFocus Doctor Who project is long completed. So that’s definitely it, that’s definitely over. I have ticked off everything I have to do, everything I have to deliver, I can mark the entire project as done.

That seems very satisfying.

And that’s why this is on my mind today. I did an event yesterday that has been some preposterous number of months in the making and this morning I’m doing my OmniFocus review, I’m getting to that project and I am about to grandly click on Done, when I don’t.

Because I’ve thought of some more tasks. Well, call them tasks because it would be bad if I didn’t do them. Just wrapping up stuff, there are so many people I want to thank for getting this done for me, for instance. That could go in the fun pile, that needn’t be a task To Do per se, except I’ll feel very bad if I forget someone in the rush. So I jotted down who it is. And okay, I know it’d be handiest for this person if I phoned and for that person if I texted, and so on.

Then there’s the money to do with the event. That truly is a task. That is several tasks in a row.

When that’s all done, then, that’s when this event is over.

Okay.

Sorted.

I just need to keep the event details around because I’ve had a lot of praise for it that might help in the pitching for the new one.

Time and Emotion

Chapter 38

Lighten Up

I am behind on my work this week and it is officially because I had various meetings away from my office – but I think it’s more because I’ve worried about how far behind I am.

I knew Monday would be a write-off; I had things to do all day and all evening in London, forget getting much else done, much else written. Tuesday just had two chats but one was in Birmingham city centre so there’s travel time too. And today I went to a hospital with my wife Angela Gallagher where she was at very long last signed off for the end of her treatment for breast cancer.

Today I don’t care that I failed to get enough done. Not today. Today is fine, today is mighty fine.

But now we’re back and it’s around 6pm, far too late to make any calls for the day, I am slipping back into reviewing what I should’ve done instead of what I have done. Let me take that hospital appointment as a clue to how I should be looking at everything, at how I think we all should. There is no work that would’ve kept me from that appointment. Bollocks to everything else.

In a less dramatic, less bollocks, more I would reschedule if necessary kind of way, yesterday’s two chats were terribly entertaining and fun as well as getting things done. I enjoyed the nattering, I enjoyed the company. So what if I have to write this evening to make up for it?

And so what if I lost Monday?

‘Course, there are limits. You may not see me tomorrow because my head has got to be down, my fingers have to got be typing a lot. I mean, a lot.

But every once in a while, William, lighten up. Productivity is about the quality of work you do, not the quantity.

Chapter 39

The night before the morning after

Today is the 176th day I’ve got up to write at 5am. I can tell you that it was easier than the 175th because I’ve been awake since 4am trying to work out what to do. And the thing I’ve learnt is that more important than making yourself get up is having something to do the moment you have.

Er. Apart from the bathroom, the fastest shower in history and the mandatory giant mug of tea. I can get to my keyboard by around 5:15am at a push, and I do push, but it has happened that once I’ve got there, I’ve gone um.

Only a few times. But enough to give me the willies. I’ve had days where I’ve done some emails at that time, I’ve even had one day when I watched some TV that I could call research but, come on.

It is hard to get up this early and it is very easy to waste the time when you do. I wrote about this 5am start in the original Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition), and it was meant to be an example of how you should search for the extra moments that you are able to write. How you need to find your schedule. I happen to write best this early in the morning, even though that goes against every late-night-jazz bone in my head. So I don’t like getting up, I really don’t like going to bed, and I’m not very keen on how tired I get by the end of the day, but the work I do is better. And, face it, it’s also more. I do more work and it is better. What’s not to love?

Everything.

But that’s about all the book said. I do talk in it about my particularly brutal way of making myself get up but that was as much about habit-forming and self-immolation as it was anything else.

And what I have really learnt since finishing the book is this business that you have to have something to do. Get up at 5am or whenever you like, but do not spend any time at all then planning what to do. Go to the keys and be writing immediately or you won’t do any writing.

It just occurs to me that this is a lot like people who lay out their clothes the night before. I have not once done that. Suddenly I see why they do it. I vow to you that I’m going to do that too, except I know I’m lying and, hey, I do enough with the making myself get up this early, enough already.

Maybe a better example is the type of novelist who ends the day by writing the first line of the next chapter. So in the morning, there’s line 1 already done. I can vividly understand that now.

It’s almost never that I’m lacking for a job to do. There was one time, back around the 150th day, that I’d finished a huge project and genuinely wasn’t sure what to get to next, genuinely wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t instead breathe out for a bit. But usually there are plates spinning aplenty and it does take some figuring out to decide which is the most urgent or which is the most important. Fine. Just don’t figure it out at 5am.

Or 4am. I found 4am worse today. The fact that it was 4am was pretty bad all by itself but then I had the sense of pressure that I’d only got an hour before I had to be up and writing… something.

I’ve got meetings and travel I have to do today that are affecting the shape of my day and I have one urgent deadline that you’d think I should be doing right now but it’s a radio review and that means I listen to a play. I’m planning to do that while driving and travelling to these meetings. 

I’ve got a lot of chores to do – literal chores around the house but who’s going to do any of those this early? – and I’ve always got lots of financial stuff to avoid.

But then there is the one big editing job that I need to get away today and there is the more creative one that I long to start.

I will get that editing done. I will do that review. I will start that creative project. I know I will because I have the time and I have that time because I made it by getting up at 5am.

But I also have you to talk to and that’s what I knew I’d do. Around 4:15am, I realised that I could do this, that I now had this to tell you about planning ahead, I knew I wanted to talk to you. In all the rush to be productive and edit this, write that, plan the other, we can forget the wanting and it’s important.

So hello. Nice to see you. If it’s 5am where you are, I feel your pain.

And I can help your pain just as much as I can help my own: tonight when I go to bed, I’m going to spend a few moments figuring out the shape of tomorrow. So that I can go straight to the keys at 5am on day 177 and begin writing.

Chapter 40

The Christmas Eve Lagrange Point

There is this thing called a Lagrange point. Usually when it’s mentioned it is specifically the one of these that lies between the Earth and its Moon. You know that the Earth is big and its Moon is comparatively quite small so one of them is hefting a bit of a gravity tug where the other, not so much.

But they do both tug and there is this one point between the two bodies where the big pull of the Earth is exactly and precisely matched by the little pull of the Moon.

If you’re in that point, it’s as if there is no pull at all, not in either direction. And I imagine this to be a peaceful place. Floating. All the pressures and all the gravity and all the worries and problems are still there, every last one of them, but you are somehow at peace.

Welcome to my ideal Christmas Eve.

I don’t know why I like Christmas Eve better than Christmas, I don’t know how I can call it a peaceful time and somehow associate that with not working when I am of course working. But I do like it best and I do call it a peaceful time.

I do call it a Lagrange point.

And I hope you get these too.

Chapter 41

Stop churning and just do it

Look, you're reading this but you know you should be doing that thing. Five minutes, you're giving yourself five minutes. And a mug of tea. Obviously you have to phone your accountant, that's not prevaricating. And if you don't plan the week's food shopping, nobody will.

Stop.

And start.

That's possibly a mixed signal there but you know what I mean and you also know it already. In your heart of hearts and your head of heads, you know you should be doing that thing right now.

All I'm adding to that is this single point: you didn't really enjoy that mug of tea, you didn't fully concentrate on that accountant phone call. If you could genuinely put something out of your mind then maybe you could really prevaricate, maybe it would even be a good thing to be able to clear your head like that. But you can't so you can't and it isn't. Add up all the time you spend churning over this thing and it is invariably far longer and more insidiously painful than just doing the bleedin' thing right now.

It won't be easier for doing it now. It won't magically be all okay and sunshine.

But it will be done.

Chapter 42

It’s about time

If you possibly can, get some work in radio. What you learn – it doesn’t teach you this yet you inescapably accrue the knowledge and the experience and the feeling – will change how you approach time.

I recently spent a day at a BBC radio station for the first time in many years and all this came back to me with a slap. One of my most favourite things in the world is how radio splits time in your head. Part of you is seeing the minutes of a show roar by so fast yet part of you is also crunched up in panic over how you will fill the next twenty seconds.

You cannot have dead air. I’m not sure if this is still the case but at one point if you were silent for long enough on a radio station, the transmitters switched off. And it takes a long time to get them back on.

Whatever the technical issues, though, you cannot have dead air. Think of all the times television tries to cover up a swearword by dipping the sound. Usually the bleep, sometimes they dip the sound to silent for a second. And when they do, the entire room notices and reacts.

The driving need to keep the show going and to fill the gaps that are coming up ahead of you like Gromit adding train tracks as he goes, it is beyond overwhelming, it is inside you. It is you. I’m sure it’s the same in television and actually it was in my first TV job that I learnt the average speaking rate is three words per second. (In those days video machines needed time to get up to speed so you’d make a mark on the script so many words, therefore so many seconds, before the vision mixer needed to cut to it.)

But I got this sense of time from working in radio a lot so radio is special to me, time is special to me. And alongside that parallel track of slow and fast time, you also get the shape of time.

I do this now in workshops. I think of things like the top and bottom of the hour. I know that this item will be a hard one – hard as in inflexible, it’s a certain length like a prepared video package – and how I also need a couple of soft items – live interviews or discussions that you can just end when you need.

What’s more, seeing time this way helps you with everything: you look for the thing you can do now rather than have dead air. You look for the shape of the hour and of the day. Time runs away from us, time catches up with us, but it is our chief resource and we benefit from using it more.

Chapter 43

Take a breath. Or a holiday. Or something in between

A couple of weeks ago I got an email that so annoyed me, I wanted to reply instantaneously. But instead I calmly made lunch, watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother – and then exploded.

It was going so well until the end there, wasn't it? I sounded so calm and professional. Once in a very long while, though, it is fun to make the ground shake – and that's not what I want to talk to you about. It's that 45 minute break I took before replying, that's what's key, that's what you and I need to talk through.

Number one thing: just because someone has emailed you, that doesn't mean you have to reply at all, let alone that you have to reply right away.

I'm a scriptwriter and the analogy I leap to is when you read a script that has a character asking a question. In a bad, tedious script, the next character will always answer it. In good scripts, they won't. For at least three reasons, the greatest being that it is extremely boring. Then there is also the fact that we don't tend to talk like that in real life. And there's also that often the answer is a chore to get by because you've done all the work with the question.

Follow. Here's a bad line of dialogue:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?

You know that the next line belongs to his son. You know that this happens a lot, you know that his son uses the Dad Taxi all the time. You know the father doesn't like Sally. And you even know what time the next scene is going to start and end. It's not that bad a line, since it gives you all of that attitude along with all of those facts, but it is a question that does not need an answer. In real life, the kid would sulk. In scripts, bad writers automatically write him an answer and that answer will be rubbish. It will be an answer because of course he must reply with one. It won't have any value, it will just be a delay before the next thing happens.

Just let me stay on scriptwriting dialogue for a moment. This is an aside, I know, but even in an example, I want to be clear that there is a difference between an answer and a response.

This is how that exchange would go in a bad script:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?

SON: But you promised you would! I've told Sally I'm coming and everything.

And this is it in a better one:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?

SON: I can go over to mom's, she'll drive me.

It's a response and it also tells us that the mother and father are divorced.

Anyway.

Back to the point about replying and responding instantaneously. We do think we have to, we feel bad if we don't. It's as if it's a phone call to us, we feel the pressure to reply, the pressure that the other person is waiting. And they are.

But still: train yourself to not automatically reply to emails.

I'm not saying be rude, I'm saying avoid kneejerk reactions by avoiding replying. Maybe just for a short while, maybe forever.

A few days ago, a friend asked advice on a technical thing and I didn't know the answer. I was replying instantly to say this when the phone rang and I had to go off doing something. I felt bad leaving her hanging, leaving her thinking that I might be able to help. About an hour later, I got to reply to her – and in the hour I'd thought of something. Completely unintentionally, completely without planning or even conscious thought, something had whirred away in my noggin’ and popped out when I was ready to reply. It didn't solve her problem, it didn't save the day, but it was useful and I got it because I took time before replying.

That was an hour. The lunch and HIMYM was about 45 minutes.

It’s enough. But if I could tell you about making the ground shake, I’d love to. You’d just go off me a bit.

Chapter 44

Year planning in May

If you didn't even make it in time to have New Financial Year's Resolutions, do it now. Sketch out your next year and make me feel more sensible for how I'm doing it.

I did a rough year plan last December or perhaps really I had a thought about making a rough plan. I definitely helped others with theirs and they definitely tried to help me back, but I resisted. Mostly through being a bit focused on the month, the week, the day, the hour and occasionally the minute plan. But also because a year seemed a bloody big thing.

The year has got shorter now we're in May, but I'm not specifically planning 2014, I'm looking 12-18 months ahead. And the reason I think I can do this is that my work has changed. I'm much more tied to a calendar now: I just did a gig at a festival and that was on a certain day that was arranged many months before. It used to be that everything I did was task-based in that I'd get some work, I'd do it, I'd go straight on to the next. There were usually deadlines but they were always short ones and the quicker I could turn something around, the better.

With festivals and events taking over, I feel like I've got these tentpoles ahead of me. I can't take on much in early October, for instance, that’s full. Knowing that now, here in May, is weird but I like it. And whenever you find something you like, enjoy it, exploit it a bit. I've already used that October tentpole to say I can't do this other particular thing until December. I know that the two events need to be separated by a fair time, I know how long it will take me to finish up one and get the other going, I know how much time that will leave me for the short-term work I rather live for.

When did I get this organised? Today. And the thing with being organised around tentpoles in your calendar – I'm just making up terms now, aren't I? – is that the constraints are liberating. Knowing that I've just this week done one event means I can wipe that from my head and concentrate on one I've got for 31 May and then I can forget that until the next one in August.

I'm losing the anxious uncertainty I had when people would ask if I were available for something and I'd always say yes regardless of how hard or sometimes impossible that would make my month.

I keep saying this. As writers, we create characters and we set rules – our blind watchmaker can't suddenly see just because it solves a plot problem – and setting ourselves just a few rules, a few plans, helps.

Go plot out your next 12-18 months, would you? Whatever month you’re reading this.

Chapter 45

Phone a friend. Randomly

I have not one single idea whether this is productive but it is fun.

You know that after you’ve produced something, you go back to all those people you needed beforehand and you thank them. Of course you do: without them, it wouldn’t have happened.

But I was scrolling down my iPhone’s Contacts list to one of them and right underneath her was an old friend and colleague I haven’t spoken to in a year or more.

So I rang her. Nothing to say, nothing to ask, just a call in the dark.

I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did because I had a blast. So much so that I have actually considered doing this more deliberately, phoning more people randomly. Except if you do it deliberately, it isn’t so random, is it?

Not sure about that now. But I had a lot of calls to make that day, plenty of them fun like the post-event ones, enough of them tedious like chasing this or that, and this random one-off in the middle. I tell you, it made my day.

Chapter 46

Sometimes you just don’t fit together

Just sometimes. You’re with people and it is not clicking. You’re saying something dry and maybe hopefully witty, but is it hot and echoey in here or is it just me? Hello?

Let it go.

Or put it this way: they may be fine people, they may be foul; you may be fine or you may be foul, but bollocks to it all.

Sometimes you can’t fix something and there will be nothing you can do so stop trying.

Move on. Okay?

And yes, I’m talking from personal experience. But you’re reading from personal experience too.

Chapter 47

The 5am anniversary

Today is the 250th day I’ve got up at 5am to write. That doesn’t feel like much given how long I’ve been a writer and it will feel feeble if you’re a farmer. But I want to mark this little anniversary in some way.

I only just thought of that this morning as I lurched very slowly out of bed. Yesterday I fair bound up out of there, today was tougher. Perhaps I should’ve kept a record but very broadly I think the 240s have been some of the hardest since the very first 5am starts.

It definitely goes in cycles, though.

There were patches even during the 20s and 30s where I would bound upright and not think about all this. There were times somewhere around 80 mornings in that I would come close to turning over.

I don’t think you need my sleep diary, if I had one, but the 5am start idea was difficult for me and I don’t think that even I can find a way to say I’ve failed at it. So there is discipline, there is effort, there are lessons.

But most of all there are results.

That’s why I do this thing. I’m not advocating getting up early as some kind of health advice. Look at me: I don’t know from health advice. And I’m not even recommending that you get up at 5am per se. What I did before all this began was to experiment with looking for when I wrote the best. Also the most, I was on various deadlines so most was an important issue, but chiefly the best. When did I write the best and preferably not have to rewrite quite so much.

It’s just an astonishingly awful thing that the answer is 5am.

But, okay, at least I know.

And now, 250 mornings in, I know these things too:

1) Bribery and threats

For the first 180 days I used my own Brutal £1 Pot Trick (as covered in my book, The Blank Screen, UK edition, US edition) to trick me into getting up. (The short summary is that I did bribe myself each morning but I also threatened. There was a treat for doing it but also a very big penalty for not.) I’d probably carry on using this, I had intended to and lately I’ve wondered whether it would help to try again, but it’s an expensive kind of thing and I wanted an iPad.

2) Alarms

I love my iPhone but there are times I hate my iPhone. Specifically at 5am. Or rather at about 6:30am when I’d wake up feeling great, feeling refreshed, feeling amazed that I could be so renewed and reinvigorated by a night’s sleep that was ending at 5am. And then seeing that my iPhone’s alarm was going off.

The alarm has to be very quiet so that I’m the only one it wakes, being right on top of it and able to switch it off quickly, but it does have to make a noise and sometimes it doesn’t. Not because I’d turned the volume down too low, not because I’d switched some setting.

Just because.

Yes, I had a moment of worrying about deafness. There was the screen with its Snooze button on that white alarm banner, but no sound.

After this had happened a few times – I have no idea what caused it, there’s no pattern I could see – I gave up setting an alarm for 5am.

Instead, when I’m going to bed, I ask Siri to wake me at 4:59am. And then to wake me at 5:01am. Two alarms. Many days they both work, just once or twice neither has. And for the rest of the time, one of them has and that’s enough.

3) It’s worth counting

I often forget until hours later, but just tapping a + on a counter app is a little bit satisfying. If it’s a choice between the satisfaction of a tap and the joy of another hour in bed, the bed wins. Let’s be clear there. But as it’s really a choice between bed and all the benefits that getting up early bring, the counter wins.

4) Do something. Have something to do

It’s like laying out your clothes the night before. Have something that you are going to do first. You won’t always do it. Right now, I’m not doing it. I had a plan for what I need to do and instead I’ve come to you. But this isn’t about the discipline of making plans and sticking to them. I get up at 5am, that’s discipline enough for anybody. It’s about using this Stupid O’Clock time and making it count.

Doing anything is fine. But it must be done. Easily the worst mornings of this whole 250 run are the couple where I had nothing to do. I had plenty I could do but nothing that was vital, nothing that made me ill with worry.

It was truly, deeply, insanely awful.

There is just little so stupid as wasting time at your desk at 5am. You don’t even spend some time deciding what to work on, you start checking emails and reading news.

So if there is not a particularly pressing deadline already, I will choose something the night before and make it the thing I will work on first. The aim is to get straight to the keys, to do the fastest shower in Christendom (I often re-shower later), get some tea (I definitely re-tea later) and start writing.

Today for example, I made a note in OmniFocus that I would finish a short story I’ve been commissioned to do. Hello. This is not a short story. This is you and I talking. But it is me writing and that is the sole aim of getting up at this time.

It’s a simple aim but it works for me and I find it very difficult. So, nuts to it: today is my 250th day of getting up at 5am to write and I’m proud of myself.

Chapter 48

Writing lessons from being a director

Seriously, listen to me here, I have such a long history of directing. I directed my first play this morning.

It was a ten-minute short written by myself and the Burton Young Writers' Group which we've worked on in a few of the monthly sessions I've led with them this year. Writing West Midlands, which runs the groups, funded the hiring of a real cast to perform the kids' work and it went tremendously.

But the other day, someone asked me if I were directing it and I just said yes.

I had to, there was nobody else who was going to do it, it was just obvious that it would be me as the group's leader. But as soon as I'd said 'yes' aloud, the voice in my head continued with the word 'oh'.

I'd been thinking of the project as a writing one and I suppose a little bit as a producing one. I've been becoming very irritating about producing lately: there's a way to argue that I produced six events over the last six weeks and yeah, yeah, enough already, shut up William. My wife Angela Gallagher has been an event producer and it thrilled me to be doing the same thing, to be able to really learn from her. It's one thing asking her every detail of what she's doing when she's doing it, it's another to be needing to put that into practice for myself.

But I didn't think about directing.

Until this week when I was one of the people casting.

So I recommend becoming a director by default and preferably at speed and even more preferably while also writing and producing. Keeps your mind off it.

And then I now also further recommend directing with as little time to spare as you can.

I had an hour today. But I knew exactly what I wanted. And this is the productivity lesson I taught myself:

If you know what you want, people will do it

If they're good, they'll also question it and improve it and grow it with you, but they are bringing their talent to what you want so just bleedin' get on with deciding it and telling them.

We changed a lot, not least because one actor had a ferociously bad day trying to get to us in time and didn't manage it. We changed oodles.

But I have never been so clear about what I wanted a production to be, not even when I've been writing scripts. And to see it work, to see talented actors do what you want and take it further, I tell you, I'm hooked.

Maybe you have to be a writer and possibly an English writer to really get this but I am used to adapting to what everyone, anyone else wants and to do it this way around felt like just getting on with it. I like getting on with things.

And I loved directing this play. Ten minutes? Young Writers' Group? Sold: it was a career highlight. Especially seeing the faces of the kids as their work was performed. I feel privileged and happy and that I've learnt a lesson or three.

Okay, maybe a lesson or two. Who’d have thought there could be two life lessons from directing?

The lesson is to delegate. I am used to doing everything myself and I’ve often argued that this is good. Whenever you can take on a task yourself, it is great because you know you’ll do it. Waiting for other people so very often means it doesn’t happen.

So I’m not a control freak in that I need things be done my way, I’m a productivity freak in that I need things to be done.

Yesterday’s play needed me to work with the cast but it was in a writing session and there were a lot of people there. Normally I’d fuss over everything, I’d think myself smart for finding a way to incorporate everyone. But there was no time.

I have an assistant when I’m leading these writing groups and yesterday it was poet and writer and journalist Justina Hart. I told her she had an hour and I needed this, this and this. Never gave her another thought, I got right on with the next crisis.

And at the end of the hour I had this, this and this from her and the group. I’ve no idea how she got there but the result wasn’t just what I would’ve done, it wasn’t just what I had wanted, it was better. Far and away better. Just far and away.

Let go, William. Tell good people what you want and then get out of their way.

Now, you’re a writer, go direct something, would you?

Getting it right and wrong

Chapter 49

Writer’s Notes: How to Invoice

The Blank Screen is all about keeping us writers creative but making us more productive. But if there is one thing we put off more than writing, it is invoicing.

Nobody tells you how to do this and we hate doing it.

So here’s how to write an invoice and if you take a squint down and think this is a long job, know this one thing:

1. It just took me 8 minutes to write my first invoice for a new company

2. It then took me 2’42″ to write one for an existing client

I’ll tell you now, these were very small invoices but the amount doesn’t affect the time it takes. What you should take away from this is that for a pixel over 10 minutes work, I’d written and sent – notice that, also sent – invoices to the value of £120.00. I won’t pretend that either writing job took very long but without that 10 minutes invoicing at the end, I wouldn’t be being paid.

So it is a chore, yes, but it’s incredibly quick to do and without it you don’t get to eat.

This is when you do what:

1) When you get the commission

Know how much the fee is. If you don’t know, ask before you do the work. Your editor deals with this every day: when I’ve been a commissioning editor, I’ve known my freelancers’ fees better than my own.

Ask how the company needs to be invoiced: actually, just ask exactly this: “Do you need purchase order numbers?”

If they do, they’ll tell you the number and they’ll also tell you anything else. That new client had also assigned me a vendor number. You don’t care, I don’t care, if they give you purchase order numbers, vendor numbers, anything else numbers, you just keep a note of them and copy them out onto the invoice.

Ask specifically how you are to deliver the invoice: “Do you need invoices posted or can I email them – and what’s the best address?” Cross your fingers that they’ll say email is fine because it’s so much faster and more convenient for you.

Some firms will send you a tonne of forms to fill out with your bank details. Schlep through the lot and get it done.

2) When you’ve done the work and delivered it

Invoice. Don’t wait. The invoice has nothing to do with whether the editor will ask you to do some more work on it. Send the writing, send the invoice.

It does not help you sitting on a pile of invoices – and it doesn’t help them, either. A magazine issue will have a budget allotted to it and ready to spend. In theory you should always be paid whenever you get around to invoicing but in practice, good luck getting cash if you let it slide past the end of the financial year. Or perhaps, good luck getting commissioned by the firm again if you do.

So invoice promptly.

And this is how you write that prompt invoice:

a) Your name or company name at the top

You could include a company logo if you like, but don’t try to make this pretty, work to make sure that it is clear.

Definitely include your bank BACS details so that they can pay in directly. You want this. You really want this because it’s a right pain getting cheques, losing time going to pay them in and then waiting for them to clear. Encourage companies to pay by bank transfer and do so by giving them your business account’s sort code and account number.

You do also have to give them the ability to send cheques. That means listing your postal address and stating specifically how cheques should be addressed. That’ll be your name, your company name or a combination of the two: “Bugs Bunny trading as Acme Writing”.

b) “For attn. Accounts Department” and their address next

c) Today’s date. 

This is the date of the invoice, not the work.

d) Number the invoice.

It’ll help if you have a system so you just know that number 12 is next.

e) Describe the work

Some clients will give you the text they need for this. They’ll call it the brief or they will specifically tell you to say this or that for the invoice. It will be very short. If you’re invoicing for several things at once, the description can include an explanation of the fee: “3 days writing workshops @ £450/day”. This is where you list any purchase order numbers, vendor numbers or the like. If the client gives you any of these, use them. If they don’t, shrug.

State the date of the work here. If you’re doing an event, say, then the date is the date of that event. For a written project, it’s the date you were commissioned. That’s sometimes hard to pin down, especially when you’re doing all this months later. Find an email and use the date of that.

State any date or other detail given you for when the work will be published. If it isn’t a specific date, then it’ll be something like “Acme Magazine October Issue” or “BBC week number 12″.

f) Who commissioned you

If there’s a problem, this is who the accounts department will go to first. Usually your editor’s name.

g) Number the job

This will certainly help when you’re invoicing for several things at once – “3 x 2-page tutorials” – because you or the client can then query a specific job if necessary. But just do it anyway. Do it always. Number every job as you get it.

It helps you when you’re doing the invoices because you can see and then state each job quickly. It also means you don’t miss one out by mistake and never get paid for it. But it also helps you psychologically as the number of jobs keeps on going up.

It’s up to you whether you write a separate invoice for each job but only do that if you know it will affect when you get paid. Maybe three jobs are for the March issue of a magazine but one is a Christmas special. If the company states that it will pay 45 days after publication, invoice the Christmas one separately or you could end up waiting until next February to get your money.

h) Money

Next to each separate job number, write down the fee.

i) Expenses

If you have expenses and it’s agreed that the client will pay, write those down too. 

j)VAT registration number

If you are VAT registered then make sure your VAT number is listed somewhere on the invoice and specify how much money that VAT is.

k) Total.

That’s the complete total for everything including the fee, the expenses and the VAT if you have that.

l) Save as PDF and email to the accounts department

Once you’ve done this once, keep a copy of that first invoice and use it as a template.

One more thing

This is a chore and you are a writer, you do prefer writing. But you also like technology so use it. I have one monthly gig in Burton upon Trent and when I leave there, my iPhone knows I’ve gone and OmniFocus pops up a reminder to do the invoice. I might not do it then, but sometimes I have done it on the train on my way home.

I don’t actually do that gig for the money, I’d pay them to let me do it, but that doesn’t change that it is paid, I do need to invoice, so I should invoice promptly.

Chapter 50

It’s handy to have a raging ego

You’re going to be asked for a bio or the cover image from your book or some kind of graphic to do with you work. Certainly you are going to be asked for links to where people can read your work. It will happen because you’re getting your work out there and this is just how it works. And every time that anyone asks you, they will ask for those same things: bio text and some kind of image. So keep them ready.

Spend the time now to write a bio and get your best photo of yourself. Really think about that shot of you. The first time anyone professional takes any shot of you in connection with your writing, ask if you can use it for this. A photographer with the utterly wonderful name of Wayland Thor Badger was photographing Birmingham’s PowWow LitFest in 2012 and took a shot of me listening to someone. I have rarely looked so rugged. I used that shot hourly for two years. Take a look at his work at Manicks Productions Ltd.

I’d still be using that shot today but for how Writing West Midlands included me in a booklet about writers in the region who they’ve supported. They’ve supported me a lot and I like them immensely, it was an honour to be asked and I then had a really good hour nattering with photographer Lee Allen. Whether or not you ever want to hire a photographer, go take a look at his website right now because the front page example shots are joyous. You never knew wedding photographs could be of any interest to anyone not related to the bride or groom. I think he made me look good and he was battling with a big problem: in my hurry to get to the shoot, I had shaved a little too quickly and cut myself deeply. I mean, it was hard to look at. So that’s a tip for you there, don’t mess with blades before a shoot. This is the kind of thing we writers need to be told. Or at least I did.

Despite the war wound, he shot so many photos of me that I’ve – with permission – had a little stock of different images that I can pick from depending on who’s asking. Consequently if you ask me, you may get a Lee or a Wayland shot and I do like that I can just pick and email them back to you.

But before I had any headshots, I had cover images. I write books now so that’s comparatively easy, I just use the front cover. When I was solely writing on magazines then I had the odd cover feature, I would use those – though, to be frank, I hardly ever got asked then. Still, when I was trying to promote something of mine, I would need a graphic and the covers were handy. You can’t believe how much work goes into designing a magazine cover – once when I was features editor on a particular title we had whole meetings solely to analyse the cover after every issue when we could compare sales figures and see what did and didn’t work – so they are well done. Usually. And since you need graphics and images as much as you need words now, having someone else’s relevant and well done cover is a boon.

Then as soon as I could, I would use covers from my Doctor Who audio dramas and there I really win because the artistry on those is beyond superb. I can’t just pick out one artist, but I will because he’s right here with a Flickr gallery of especially gorgeous works: take a look at all Simon Holub does for Doctor Who and Big Finish.

Get the cover JPEG from your publisher – or just grab it from Amazon. The publisher will have the kind of high resolution images needed for magazine printing but most of the time it’s going to be a website who is asking you and a grab from Amazon is fine. If you don’t nick it from there, that’s where the website will.

But it’s better if you do it. It is always better. You know you can’t get the wrong image and you know they could. It’s the same with links, it’s even the same with bios: you are only dealing with you but they might be featuring ten people and mistakes happen.

They’re less likely to happen if both you and the magazine or website are organised. You can’t do anything to make them be better prepared but you can do everything to make sure you are.

So schlep through all this writing of bios, select an extract from your writing, get all the right links for your work (remember to get both US and UK links at least), prepare the images and then keep them all in one place.

Specifically Dropbox.

If you sign up for a free Dropbox account you get 2Gb of space to store files in and the ability to send anyone a link to any of them. They get the link and they can click or tap on it to download the lot: it’s not only handy, it’s essential because images can be too big to email directly.

I keep a folder on Dropbox with all my cover images in high and low res versions, copies of my CV tweaked for different markets and some short and long bios plus headshot photos of me.

I tell you, I look at that folder now and I looked at it a lot when I was making it and I fair blush with embarrassment at being so egotistical.

But then I’ll be asked for a bio to go in an event brochure and I’ve sent back exactly what they need before they even noticed they’d hit send. Obviously I like that and obviously it’s useful for them to have this stuff right there.

But there is another reason to do it. Like anything else in my Blank Screen book, I am very much an advocate of spending a little time now to save a lot of it later. You’d think that it would take the same time to write a bio when asked for it as it is to write up one early, but that’s not the time saving.

This is. Last year I did a thing as part of a group and we were all required to provide various bio details and headshots. I replied with it all immediately – and never had to think about it again. Some of my colleagues took days, a fair few took weeks and at least one took months to do the same thing. And you can bet that all the way through those months they were thinking about it. Putting it off, wishing they had done it, telling themselves they’d definitely do it this weekend.

That’s the time you save: all that thinking and procrastinating. That’s why you should do all this now and get it done.

But it is also fun to be able to zap the stuff back to someone when they ask. Bless them for asking, too.

Chapter 51

What to do when you’ve cocked something up

Tell everybody right now.

Last Monday I had an email confirming a thing I'd agreed to do and I had the stomach lurch when I realised I had entirely misunderstood the gig. I'm glad to say that this is rare but it happens and it always happens for the very silliest of reasons – and it is invariably entirely my fault.

For this one, I could and later I did work out the whole chain of reasons why I went wrong. There is a certain logic to it, I can sort of see how it happened, I can see what I did. Not why, but what.

I did spend a few reeling moments on this at the instant I found out but then I parked trying to rationalise it all, I made some tea, and I emailed the person back putting my hand up.

That's got to be a scary email to get so I did spend as much time reassuring her that I was on the case now as I did apologising for my cockup.

And then I had to go through it all again with an entire group of people I happened to be representing. I'd told them what I had believed but now I had to tell them the truth and get their help to fix it.

I told them the truth.

They fixed it.

We fixed it.

And I got a lovely note from the woman I was working with. I had cocked up my part of her event but because I told her right away, because I then fixed it all, the note said I was one of the few people who just did what he agreed. No grumbling, no messing, no need for a thousand reminders, I just did it.

She's kind of right. She's definitely kind.

But I'm telling you this from the heart and the stomach. When you see a problem you've created, you can't hide it. No good comes of trying. Just own up and sort it out. It's easier said than done, naturally, but I started the week with actual pain in my stomach and I've ended it feeling a lot lighter in my heart.

Chapter 52

10-4, good buddy – writing buddies rather than groups

I’ve never been in a writing group that actually worked for me. Lots of nice people, often lots of interesting writing, but somehow, no. I did once suggest to a fella that rather than a group per se we should just set a challenge to write this or that by some time. That fella was Piers Beckley and, wow, did he take that on. For years, he would set a month’s challenge whereby an increasing number of us would agree to write a TV script, a play, all sorts of things, and we’d do it by a certain date.

No discussions of the work, unless you particularly wanted to. No notes, no plans, no debates. You wrote it and you delivered it to the group purely to prove that you had done the work. It really was quantity rather than quality in that the sole thing measured was whether you delivered on time. But it didn’t half work for me. Committing to something, knowing other people were waiting, it was an impetus to get writing. It was also liberating: worry about the details later, get the idea written down and finished first.

Ten or more years on from this, I’ve finally twigged that it was the accountability that I needed most. Obviously I need help with my writing – maybe I’m thinking professional help by people with earnest expressions and white coats, maybe I’m not – but that’s not what I need from a group.

But I earned a place on Room 204, a Writing West Midlands programme, and one of its members, Jeff Phelps, set up a buddying system. A self-selecting subset of Room 204 people got writing buddies. Just a few of us. And I contributed one thing: my wife Angela Gallagher‘s recommendation that we try monthly buddying. Go around the whole group, one month at a time. It’s a shame when you get someone good and then have to leave them but it’s a huge relief if you get someone you can’t bear and yet know you’ve not got long to wait for freedom.

I think we’re almost through the first round of month buddying. And one good outcome for me is that I haven’t hated anyone. Either I’ve been very fortunate in who I’ve paired up with or Writing West Midlands is very canny with who it selects for Room 204. The only bad outcome for me is that the month isn’t as long as you’d like. Christmas nobbled one month down to two weeks, too.

So we’re going to move to a two-month cycle shortly but otherwise everything’s the same and I recommend everything.

Particularly this. At the start of each month, I now send my new writing buddy a list of the three things I really need to work on during our time together. That’s it. The idea is Yasmin Ali‘s and she was my first writing buddy so I stole it from her and use it every time. And every time I’ve used it, I’ve said it’s Yasmin’s idea and every one of my subsequent writing buddies has said yes, they know, they’ve stolen it too, isn’t it great?

You get the focus of picking three things and then you get the accountability that the buddy on the end of that email or Skype or FaceTime or phone or across the coffeeshop table knows what you should be doing and you have to tell the bastard when you’re not.

Accountability. When you work for yourself, it can be hard to do. And it can become contrived if you force it. But find the right group of writing buddies and I’m finding it works a huge and enormous treat.

Chapter 53

You are feeling very sleepy

The Blank Screen is about being productive. I have a section in the book (UK edition, US edition) devoted to the issue that “Time off is vital” and it says:

Apparently.

That’s all.

I didn’t have one more word of information, advice or even opinion for you about time off. I don’t do time off, I don’t know from time off.

But I’m learning a hell of a lot about sleeping.

This is still a work in progress and I would like to have figured it all out now but I’ll take anything I can get. Since January 2013 I have been getting up to write at 5am weekdays. (Not every weekday: I’ll book time off for lots of reasons like speaking engagements that mean I’m not home until 1am the night before. I’m not daft. I’m insane, but I’m not daft.) Today was day 223 and it was stunningly hard but as I almost always am, I am glad I did it because I got three big things done that were pressing on me. I’d finished them before 10am so suddenly Monday morning looked pretty good to me.

But.

The big downside of getting up at 5am is – well, okay, it is the getting up at 5am. But the second big downside is how tired I get toward the end of the day. Both the end of the working day and of the real day of the week. Actually, in some ways that’s an improvement for me: I now want and get evenings off where before I’d just carry on working until I stopped. The trouble is that I can be so bone-tired that the evenings are a struggle to stay upright.

It’s not as if you get a choice about stopping working and taking the evening off, though. Tonight I’ve got a Writers’ Guild committee meeting, for instance, and I’ll be home from that around 10pm. I don’t know about you but I can’t just go straight to bed. At least, I rarely can: I’ve had some times in the 5am Years when I’ve had to crash out instantaneously. But usually I have to wind down a touch so that means tonight it’ll be 11pm before I go to bed.

So 5am to 11pm, it isn’t tenable. Much as I wish it were, I can’t do it. Can’t do it without help. I’ve tried caffeine, I am currently powered by caffeine, but I’m also trying napping.

Even saying that to you feels wrong. Why is that? I don’t work 9-5, I do work for myself, why does it feel so wrong to take a nap? I was struggling today so I slept from about 1:30pm to 2:30pm. It isn’t like having a second day, like getting up entirely refreshed, but where I was finding my mind folding in on itself before the nap, after it I sprang back out of the bed.

It feels like such a waste of time but the work I’ve done since has been better for it. As far as I can tell subjectively, the work I’ve done since that nap has been as good as the work I did first thing this morning. That’s got to be a good thing, that’s got to be a productive thing to pull off.

So we’ll see. There are so many days when I can’t do this – because I’m working in someone else’s office and they’re paying me to, I don’t think naps would go down well there – but when I can, I’m going to try doing it. I should try to do this with some statistical measure so I can assess what’s working regularly and reliably.

One thing that may help is a new app that I haven’t tried yet but wanted to tell you about. It’s called Best Sleep Hygiene and that’s one of those titles that doesn’t make any more sense the longer you know it and that you don’t get used to. It’s not about hygiene, it’s about how long and how well we sleep. I tell you, the title is giving me pause. But it’s a free app and it promises to analyse your sleep patterns. So I want to at least point it out to you even if, like a typical writer, the title is holding me back from exploring it here.

Chapter 54

Negotiate like the FBI

I’ve got to tell you this: of the more than 1,000 articles on The Blank Screen news site, this is by far the most popular. By far. But only with spammers. You shouldn’t ever know that because I do all that tedious filtering to make sure only real people saying real things get on, but I get to see hundreds upon hundreds and sometimes upon hundreds of spam comments. They are all fixated on this one entry and I have no idea, but I’m watching to see whether spammers have got really good at negotiating.

Specifically, negotiating like you’re the FBI and the person you’re dealing with is currently holding hostages. They have your attention. You have theirs. You both have guns.

Writer Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree has taken the FBI’s Behaviour Change Stairway – a diagram of their standard approach – and applied it to the freelance life. He says: “The Behavioral Change Stairway Model was developed by the FBI’s hostage negotiation unit, and it shows the five steps to getting someone else to see your point of view and change what they’re doing. It’s not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.”

The first step of the five – and I think the most useful for us in all the dealing we have with editors, interview subjects and really everyone – is called active listening. It’s one of those terms where you shouldn’t need a qualifying word like ‘active’, we should always listen to people actively. But we don’t. Uh-huh. That’s interesting. What time is it? 

Active listening is close, I think, to interviewing. I do this all the time in part because I was trained to, I suppose, but also because I am just more interested in you than I am in me. I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it. Whereas you are new and exciting and I want to know everything. 

You’re the same as me, I can see it, and I can see it in part because you’re a writer. We might spend a lot of time digging into ourselves but we also steal from everyone around us and that requires listening. I’d recommend practicing it, I’d recommend getting some journalism training if you can. But there are also people who train you in active listening. I recently gatecrashed a writing session that was all about this and I learnt a lot from the speaker, Steph Vidal-Hall. Email me if you’re in the West Midlands and I’ll pass your details on to her.

What I’d say active listening means is genuinely paying attention to the words someone is saying but also looking at the tone and what they are not telling you. It also means asking the right questions and specifically asking ones that let the speaker go wherever they like. Barker says: “You don’t want yes/no answers, you want them to open up. A good open-ended question would be ‘Sounds like a tough deal. Tell me how it all happened.’ It is non-judgmental, shows interest, and is likely to lead to more information about the man’s situation. A poor response would be ‘Do you have a gun? What kind? How many bullets do you have?’ because it forces the man into one-word answers, gives the impression that the negotiator is more interested in the gun than the man, and communicates a sense of urgency that will build rather than defuse tension.”

Step 2 is empathy and it comes directly from that listening: you understand what they mean, you get where they’re coming from. You might not like that they have hostages or that they are not telling you what you have to do to get a commission, but you get why they are doing it. I promise that if you listen closely, you cannot fail but understand them.

Next, step 3 is rapport. I like Barker’s quick definition: “Empathy is what you feel. Rapport is when they feel it back. They start to trust you.” Remember what they say and repeat it back to them, then you can start exploiting this with step 4: influence.

I think the bad side of this is that if someone thinks you understand them, they are prone to your influencing them. But the good side of it is that yes, you do understand them. Not only is that good for you professionally, it’s a little bit good for your humanity. You have needs, they have needs, you can see whether they match and perhaps how to make them fit. This all sounds very calculating but it’s really only a little bit calculating. You aren’t going around manipulating people for your own evil ends and a 12-episode commission, you’re working to help both of you. Remember that an editor wants you to be the one he or she hires: it is the dream outcome for you to be exactly the right person with the right idea, the right talent and the right fee because if you are, the job’s done. No more callers, we have a winner.

It’s the same as with someone who has taken hostages. They are not really planning to spend the rest of their life with these people, they are using them for leverage and they want to talk to a negotiator. Neither gunman nor publisher will admit this to you, but it’s true, they want to talk, they need to talk and they would very much like you to be the right person for them.

So understanding them helps you help them. Everybody wins and it costs us nothing.

Chapter 55

Statistics are not everything

Two or three times now, I've come across a link to the same article about how the most impressive people in the world run meetings and two or three times now I've come within a pixel of recommending it to you yet always stopped. Let me cave in so you can check this out yourself: it's Run Your Meetings Like a Boss – Lessons from Meyer, Musk and Jobs on 99u.com.

But now let me tell you why I kept not doing it. I'd follow the link, start reading the piece, and it begins with a description of Melissa Meyer from Yahoo and how she likes to run her meetings. Meyer is impressive, when I've read interviews with her I've rather admired her, but this particular article's first point about her keeps stopping me reading any further: “Mayer believes that numbers and facts are essential to having effective meetings. She thinks of data as the great equalizer: whether you’re an intern or a VP, you can have your way as long as you have the data to prove your claims. By making decisions with metrics, she can avoid lengthy debates stemming from opinions and organizational politics. Businessweek offered a peek into Mayer’s process: ‘Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.”’

Bollocks.

I've friends who work in research and they are clever and talented. Also witty, as it happens. But you can't research the future, you can only research the past and a bit of the present, you can only analyse what you can show people. And people tend to be wrong. “We want a typewriter ribbon that lasts longer” does not lead you to the internet.

More, the folk who do rely on research are people too. So they tend to be wrong. Microsoft spends a deeply astonishing about of money on audience research (I want to say billions, but that can't be right, can it?) and look at them. Specifically, look at Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows. There was a fascinating blog about the development of that and its seemingly radically new way of making the word processor easy to use. Two things to take away from that blog and all of Microsoft's talk about Word 2007: first, the new system meant that whatever you wanted to do in your document, the right tools – and only the right tools – were presented to you in a ribbon. Second: they did extensive user testing. Extensive. I got bored with how much the blog went on about this.

Yet on the final day of that blog, Microsoft posted – ta-daaa! style – the first screenshot of the complete Word 2007 document screen. And there was no visible way to open an old document nor create a new one.

You can tell me you did your research extensively, you can tell me all about getting in loads of people to test out every scintilla of design paradigm you explored, but apparently none of them – none of them – either tried to open a document or to create one.

Microsoft, you were had.

There was probably a PowerPoint presentation somewhere that said 100% of people who used the new Ribbon thought it was much better. This thereby hiding the fact that 100% of people did not use the Ribbon.

I would've found it useful to be told that 0% of people could not use my product. I'd have found much to think about if told 75% of people prefer it when I write shorter Blank Screen posts. But setting up a situation where you get a huge amount of data and then setting up a scenario where you say you rely exclusively on that data, that's putting research on a pedestal. Doing all that and then just ignoring the bits you don't like, that's neither statistical nor creative, it's only stupid.

Well, probably also expensive, so not only stupid.

There are certainly people who need figures to deal with the world and there are certainly people who find them constraining. I think I clearly sit in the latter camp so your mileage may vary. But my sticking point with all this is not the use of research, is not the studying of figures, it's the mandate that you must do this. That you can't tell Melissa Meyer that an idea is bollocks, you have to tell her that it's 67% bollocks.

It just reminds me of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad: “Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50/50 chance of living, though there's only a 10 percent chance of that.”

A friend is an important accountant in a coach company. She once said to me that marketing and advertising was a problem because you couldn't tell how much of a return you got on it. You couldn't directly measure the success of a marketing campaign, you cannot say how much of your business you get from marketing, therefore she didn't like it, therefore it was a waste of money.

It's taken me years to think of the snappy rejoinder but there is one and it is this:

You can measure how much of your business comes from marketing and it is a very simple maths equation. It goes: equals 100%.

Don't believe me? Cancel all marketing. Stop TV ads, stop press, stop billboards, radio, internet. While you're at it, remove the signage from your coaches: that's nothing more than advertising anyway. Signage at the coach station, what's that really for? Kill it. Do you have a phone line? Don't advertise the number. Do you print your company name on the tickets? Stop that. It's just branding, it's a waste of ink.

You won't die overnight. Momentum from existing customers will keep you going for a while. They'll even get you new customers by recommendation. For a while.

But you'll die.

Melissa Meyer is cleverer and more successful than I am. If it works for her, it works for her. But if this really is how she operates, I couldn't work for her.

Do let me know if you manage to read on past that opening section of the 99U article and it turns out to be good, would you?

Chapter 56

Use the news approach to get people listening

Nobody’s rude. Okay. Not many people are rude. Alright, the people you talk to and who get to work with you, they’re not rude. But they are all as busy as you are and it’s hard to get them to do what you need even if they need it to. Even if they want it too. (Hopefully you’re not spending a lot of time forcing people to do things they hate. You know that. I just had to say it.) Without trying to criticise the whole of humanity in one massive generalisation, here I am criticising the whole of humanity in one massive generalisation:

Faced between a massacre in a foreign country and stubbing your toe on a door frame, most people would fixate on their toe.

Because it’s closer.

Also, we’re horrible human beings, so, you know, there’s that.

But faced with everybody focusing on themselves and faced with the certain fact that you need people to work with you, do this. Do what every single television news bulletin you’ve ever seen does. This is a mantra for broadcast news:

Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em

Tell ‘em it

Tell ‘em what you’ve just told ‘em

Why do you think news bulletins start with the headlines? If the top story is so important, why aren’t they just beginning with that? You can say it’s because the headlines are a quick way to see whether you want to watch the entire bulletin and I can then say aha, got you. That opening is how you get attention.

But look at the next bulletin that comes along or look at rolling news stations at the top of the hour. They headline the major stories yet they also headline smaller ones. Weather presenters now appear in the headline block saying things like “Will there be rain to spoil this weekend? Find out later on”. What is that doing in the news? Not in the headline block, why is it in the news at all? It’s weather – and they’re standing there refusing to tell us what it is. What is point teasing the weather?

The point is that they tell us what they’re going to tell us.

Then we get the news stories, we finally find out whether it’s going to rain.

And then we get “The headlines again”. Why?

Because it gets us watching and then it keeps us watching and finally it makes us remember. Three times’ the charm.

If you have to tell someone something or you know the work can’t be done, won’t be achieved, find three ways to tell them. Three ways and three times. You know it makes sense: you have seen it in action eleventy-billion times.

Chapter 57

How to Get Rejected – I didn’t think of this bit

The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) and particularly the workshop I do based on it has a particularly popular segment called How to Get Rejected. Without fail, everyone thinks it’s a joke at first – and I’ll do anything for a laugh, it could easily be a gag – but then sees both that I’m serious and that it’s useful.

The one-line summary is that when you’re rejected, let it go. Because it’s already gone. The decision is made and you cannot change it – but you can change the future. Not always, not anywhere near always, but sometimes and it’s better for your anxiety pill intake as well as being good for your career:

Be the one writer who’s nice about all this. Steven Moffat had a particularly good line in Press Gang: ”It’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice”. It’s also just easier. See a rejection as personal and you get tied up in knots; ask them for feedback and you get tied up with the reputation of being a whiner – without getting any advice that was of any use to you. Either way, you get tied up and the whole point of this book is to show you how to be more productive. So be more productive by being nice about the things you can’t control and putting your effort and your time into the things you can. 

But.

I had a rejection yesterday that mattered. I responded the way I say we all should and it was particularly easy to be nice because I knew for a fact that the guy who brought me the news was not the one who’d made the decision. I knew he’d wanted the project to go ahead too, he’d gone to bat for me. So it was extremely easy to reply gratefully to him.

Only, this is the first time I’ve then had to pass the rejection on to other people. I still can’t tell you what the gig was because within an hour I’d thought of something else I could do with it so it’s still live, but it’s one where I’d had to get rights sorted out before I could pitch. Now I had to explain the gig was up to the rights owner.

It was a weird position to be in: I had been rejected and I was now rejecting – not literally but effectively. Just as the fella who told me wasn’t the one who made the decision, I obviously hadn’t made the decision either but he was the one telling me and now I was the one telling the rights owners. This is a project that matters to us all very personally as well as artistically and professionally so I didn’t enjoy dialling those numbers.

But the main rights owner, while as disappointed as I am, was nice about it. She took the rejection in exactly the way I believe we all should. She was nice and she understood that it wasn’t me. (We did then have a little shared grumble, because we could.) She was a pro and it reinforced for me that this works. I left that call feeling better and even energised to find a new route for the project. I’ve seen before that my being relaxed and nice about this has worked for me but now I felt it from the other side and I understand.

Being nice about a rejection doesn’t change the rejection. It may never change anything, ever. But it’s always better for your soul and your stomach. And I now believe that it is always better for the person who is rejecting you. There’s nothing wrong with making things better for them: they’re going to reject you regardless, it’s not like you’ll make them think they’ll reject you because you’ll take it better than other people. And often enough, it leads to other work in the future. That’s obviously great, that’s obviously what you want, but I see it as a bonus.

Leave ‘em laughing, it’s the only way.

Chapter 58

More on how to handle rejection

I’ve just had forcible reminders of how useful my own good advice about rejections is. Seriously, is that a bit creepy, complimenting my own advice just because it’s in paperback?

This is what happened. I had three things on this week where two of them had the definite potential to be rejections. They were the closest thing to actual interviews I’ve had in years. Actually, one of them was without question a full-on job interview. The whole thing. Me in a chair facing four people behind a table. I’m honestly not sure how I managed to talk for all the flashbacks I was getting.

That was a clear project where it was going to be a yes or it was going to be a no. Also a quick yes or no, which is so useful. A second thing was far less formal and it became the kind of thing I am more used to now, a meeting to see if my face fit and whether the work was what I could do and what I wanted to do.

The third turned out to be a yes or no, I just hadn’t a clue it would work that way. But more on this in 2015. I know it seems a long time, but that’s what I thought when the Veronica Mars movie was announced in March 2013 and the next thing you knew, I was watching it in the cinema, so.

The remind/reinforcement, right. I didn’t get the work for the interview one. I am disappointed: I won’t pretend I’m not. Rejection is normal, it’s practically my only form of social interaction, and most of the time the rejection is trivial. Genuinely, I have read emails and letters where I’ve been told that, gosh, the standard was just so high and I’ve spent longer trying to remember what this is all about than I did pitching for it.

Mind you, get enough of those trivial ones in a row and you feel it.

So the interview one was bigger, I really wanted that and it is a help that I understand why they went for someone else. Two someone elses, in fact. And as I read their names, I just thought yes. Perfect. They’re who I’d have hired too.

But what really made that rejection hurt the less is that at the time the email was sent, I was in that second thing, that sort-of interview, and I was finding out that the work was mine if I wanted it. (Literally, that’s what they said. I’m not being cocky about it and overestimating how good I was, they said those very words in that very order. I like them.)

If I’d not been doing that, I’d have got the email when it was sent and that would’ve been a punch. As it was, I came to the email during a marathon session as I caught up with all the messages I’d missed that day. The volume of them plus the success at getting a gig I really fancy, that made failing to get this other one okay.

Okay enough.

So get over your problems with rejection by never waiting to hear the result, by going on to the next thing. The worst that can happen is that you get both and if that genuinely is a problem, worry about it when it happens.

Chapter 59

Calling it

My name is William and I have a problem with cold calls. Making them. I'm fine with getting them, I can even enjoy getting a good cold call from someone so long as they don't stick robotically to a script. They always do but I always give them a chance to break free so I feel I've contributed something to the chat before I hang up on them.

But making cold calls, that's tough. And that's tough in another sense as I have to make them. I want to make them. I'm speaking at the Stratford Literary Festival next month because I cold-called. Obviously it took more than that one call, it took chats and emails, but it wouldn't have happened without my dialling that number. Me. Stratford. That's worth the difficulty of making calls.

I've developed two coping mechanisms that I want to tell you about. I want to tell you about them because this week I've been trying a modified version of one and am now ever more sure it works. At least, that it works for me. You own personal form of paralysis may vary.

The first is that I know from years of struggling with this that statistically my most effective phone calls are made between 11am and noon. I've written in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) about blocking out certain times to do certain things and that hour is for phone calls. Monday to Friday, 11am to noon. Bang, bang, bang.

But to do it bang, bang, bang-like, I have to use the other strategy. This is exactly the one I write about in my Blank Screen book about writing To Do tasks as if someone else is going to do them. So in this case, rather than Call Anne, I write Call Anne re invoice number for the Doctor Who feature. Sometimes I'll even put the phone number in there too.

And that means no thinking, no looking anything up, just read task, see number, dial, speak, finish call, breathe out. (I shouldn't have chosen Anne as that example. She's lovely, you’d like her.)

So I game this: I arm myself with all the tools to make the call so that I can't prevaricate and then I set this inviolate time to make the calls – because that makes every other time the opposite. I cannot make phone calls outside that hour. (I do, it's often necessary, but the rule is the rule, I don't make these things up.)

The thing I've changed this week is that I've stopped ringing people on Mondays and Fridays. Again, not true. I had to ring someone on Monday this week in order to hit my thirty total for the month so nuts to the new plan.

But the new plan is to do 11-12 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

You may think that's an excuse, that I'm creating more specific times to call in order to create more times I don't have you.

You caught me.

But it's again down to what is working and how often I am reaching people. Mondays and Fridays are bad days to try to get to speak to folk. It must be nice to work in an office where you can relax on a Friday just because it's a Friday and it must be hell to work in one where you cannot do anything on a Monday but panic about catching up, but it's what happens.

And it's what works.

Or it's what works for me.

If you have the same problems with cold calling that I do, give this a try. If you don't, please tell me your secret.

Chapter 60

Produce your phone calls to make them easier and quicker

I’ve only got three phone calls I have to make today but I started at 11am and as I write this, it’s 11:13 and I am finished.

As you can expect and fair guarantee from any round of phone calls, they aren’t all finished and done with: right now I’m waiting for a call back from two people with more information and an email from the third. But the calls are all made and these issues are all underway and the response rate would be no different if I’d spent the day fretting over them.

And I do fret. Given that I’m a journalist and it is routine to phone people up, I find it really hard calling for myself. So I do several things to make it better. To make me do it, really.

There’s quite a bit about this in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) but since writing that I’ve been focusing on one particular piece of advice I learnt for it. I’ve made making calls be my thing, be the work I have to get better at. And I’ve done it by making days like this. All of which boil down to this:

Produce the calls.

You don’t go into any meeting and you don’t ever pitch without knowing who you’re talking to and what it’s about. So I take some time during the morning to build up a list in Evernote of who I am calling. I run my life through the To Do software OmniFocus and it’s very easy to use that to get a list of calls to make: I just tap or click on a button marked Phone and it shows me every call I have to make in every project, ever. But if I then start writing that out in Evernote, I can build up this:

Who I’m calling at what company

What their phone number is

The specific aim of the call and the most recent conversation or correspondence we’ve had about it

All obvious stuff but each line does something in particular. The first one, who I’m calling where, that acts as much as a heading as it does a To Do. Then the bit about their number is crucial – I know that sounds obvious, I know you’re thinking that without it I won’t have much luck calling them but it’s more than that. The point is having the number right there. See the name, ring the number, go. That’s the plan.

Then the specific aim is equally important to both sides. Usually there’s just one thing you can get done in a call so I pick that and we’re off. Knowing it, knowing it precisely and having written it down focuses me on it so that I am right on the topic and they get a quicker call out of me.  And similarly, how we last left something means I sound like I am on top of things, I am fully aware of what we’re doing and also that I’m moving this stuff on, I’m not hanging about, I’m not kidding. Without being rude or abrasive, you know I am working and this is business and as much as I may like nattering with you, today we’re doing this thing.

So I’ve spent the morning building up that Evernote note in between other jobs, then it comes to 11am and I start. See the first name, see the number, I’m dialling it before I can hesitate and it’s ringing while I’m fixing the rest of the information in my head. Ring, speak, done, next. See the second name, see the second number, I’m dialling.

I do also use Evernote to make notes about the calls and that’s not brilliant yet. What I find is that I will build up a lot of information under a call but then the next time I have to call them, that information is back in the previous day’s call list. I need to get more organised about copying the information out and into a single place per person or per project or per something. Not sure what yet.

But it’s surprising how much sheer data you can write up about a call. I record just whether I got them or voicemail, I make a note that I said I’d call back and perhaps when if I said a particular time. Also any numbers they need to tell me like fees or contracts or purchase orders. The list goes on and on.

One extra is that I also record the time of the call. I do that in Evernote but using a TextExpander snippet. As the phone rings and as I’m reading, I will type the words “Called at…” and then the TextExpander snippet ‘ttime’ – the word ‘time’ with a deliberate double t pops in the current time. If it’s a long call or I’m routing through a hundred service desks who keep me waiting, I’ll log the time along the way because why not?

Then the last thing I do after all the calls is I make a note of them in a separate Calls Made list in Evernote. This has no function at all except to make me want to make more calls. It’s showing me that I’ve made 162 phone calls so far this year and, hand on heart, I wish I hadn’t looked because I thought it would be more impressive than that. Just 162 in five months? I promise to do better.

Starting now. I’ll just add today’s 3 to the list and I’m on 165. That’s a bit better.

Chapter 61

Decision paralysis

When you're faced with two choices and you have to decide right now, the correct answer is… either of them. It is better to do either than neither.

I was at the Library of Birmingham all day today doing writing sessions with schoolkids. But my slot was 45 minutes where I usually get an hour and as the start time ticked closer, I was paralysed over a decision.

It was because I have a writing exercise I love. If I'm working with adults, it spins off into all sorts about radio drama and if I'm with children, it becomes a Doctor Who writing session. I'm not always happy about the jump to Doctor Who, it isn't as obvious and necessary a step as the radio writing one seems. So, faced with a shorter running time, I held my head in my hands trying to decide whether to skip it and go straight to Who or not. Once you skip, you’ve skipped: there’s too much in the first exercise that directly leads to the second, you can’t go back.

It’s not like I was surprised at the 45 minutes: I knew and I’d been thinking about this for around ten days. But at 10:25 this morning, I was alone in a room with my notes in my iPad, still trying to juggle times and even – I'm only completely ashamed – using an online random choice generator to try to decide. Start with the usual exercise or go straight to Doctor Who.

Truly, this is not a hard decision.

But I could not make it.

And then the first group came in half an hour early and I had to decide in the space of time it took me to stand up.

I did the intro exercise. I love it. I'd tell you every detail but I hope to try it out on you some time.

The thing is, none of the kids or their teachers would've known if I had gone straight to Doctor Who. Nobody would've known any difference, except I'm adamant that they'd have lost out by not doing this introduction bit.

So I did do it but I could have as easily chosen not to. And neither would've been wrong, so either would be correct.

The only thing that would have been wrong is standing there for another half hour throwing a coin in the air.

Chapter 62

Make it worse for yourself

There are jobs I don’t like doing.

Wait.

That’s not actually true. There isn’t a single thing I’m working on that I don’t relish. That’s nice for me, isn’t it? But nonetheless, there are always elements of most jobs that I really just don’t enjoy doing. Things that I put off for one reason or another. You’re the same, I can see it in you, so let me suggest something to help.

Find a thing you hate even more.

If that’s hard for you, bugger. I mean, it’s good that you can’t find bad things, but it’s a bugger because I need you to. For me, for instance, I don’t like invoicing and I don’t enjoy cold-calling. (I’m not a salesman who relies on cold calls but so many successful pitches and projects have come from my just ringing up a firm that I am compelled to keep doing it. Compelled. But still, I don’t like it.)

So I try to rig my time such that my choice is between doing an invoice or making a call.

Invoicing wins.

More than that, invoicing becomes the lesser evil at first, then it’s a near-as-dammit a pleasure because it’s the thing that means I don’t have to do this horrible other thing. I start looking for more invoicing to do so that I can postpone phoning people.

You may think I’m stupid and I will not disagree with you. But at the start of this, I hated invoicing enough that I wasn’t doing it, I was at best postponing it for as long as I could. And now at the end I’m looking for invoicing to do.

Chapter 63

Emotional intelligence

I once went to a seminar about emotional intelligence. The first hour or so was rather good: I’ve forgotten it now because the rest was so bad that I walked out, but there was something interesting and appealing about an idea that alongside regular intelligence one can have an emotional one. I think I was expecting it to be an empathy or maybe street smarts.

It was bollocks.

This fella had lots of great ideas but then he did the science trick: stick the word science in there in order to make your concept sound better. He even put some maths up: he put a formula up that proved EQ was better than regular intelligence and when I took it apart and questioned the variables, he didn’t know what they were.

He then proved that emotional intelligence was real by revealing how science could detect people’s hearts from a few feet away. “How?” I asked. “Heat? Electrical current? Sound?” His eyes flicked to the assistants at the back of the room. “Also, the heart is only the seat of emotions in fiction. In reality, the heart is a pump so what precisely is your point here?”

“Next question?” he said, looking around the room.

I shut up. But soon he was being very forceful about how emotional intelligence is so strong that if you have it, you cannot be beaten by anything or anyone. Somebody else in the room asked what happens if such a person meets someone else with emotional intelligence. Apparently it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be defeated. A third person asked what happens if one such person meets two or ten or a hundred such people.

“Anyway, time for coffee,” said the guy.

I make it sound as if the group was against this guy and there were a few of us but that was a day-long workshop and I was the only person who didn’t come back after the break.

And I didn’t mean to go off on this with you, I was just going to point you at a piece by Creativity Post that I thought you might be interested in: “What makes some people more successful in work and life than others? IQ and work ethic are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. Our emotional intelligence — the way we manage emotions, both our own and those of others — can play a critical role in determining our happiness and success.

“Plato said that all learning has some emotional basis, and he may be right. The way we interact with and regulate our emotions has repercussions in nearly every aspect of our lives. To put it in colloquial terms, emotional intelligence (EQ) is like ‘street smarts,’ as opposed to ‘book smarts,’ and it’s what accounts for a great deal of one’s ability to navigate life effectively.”

That’s from How Emotionally Intelligent Are You? Here’s How To Tell on Creativity Post. But see? They said ‘street smarts’. I really think the fella I argued with had some good material that he torpedoed by being stupid. Which is entertainingly ironic. And nothing to do with the Creativity Post which I do think is worth a read.

Chapter 64

Must do better

If you had to criticise someone, you’d probably use what’s called the criticism sandwich. “That was an excellent idea, admittedly the execution was unbelievably amateur and I wish we’d hired someone else, anybody else, but you know, you typed it up beautifully.” That kind of thing. But when you’re criticising yourself, you don’t look for any bread to wrap it up in. 

Sometimes you refuse to eat the baloney in the middle and sometimes you wish you’d started this with a more robust analogy that could stand any chance of lasting the distance.

So I could’ve chosen my analogy better but let me take that criticism and change it to how I’d address anyone else being as slack with their writing. “We got the point you were making, you made it clear and obvious, but you should really have got out of Dodge at the end of the first paragraph.” That’s what I’d say to them whereas what I just told myself was “I bollocksed that up, didn’t I?”

You can see the difference, can’t you? It’s not that just one is fairly positive and one is damned-to-hell negative, it’s that one is third- and one is first-person. 

I’m not one for patting myself on the back, neither to praise me or to say ‘there, there’. I am one for getting on with it and I believe that I do that better when I am critical. I recognise, too, that I am more prone to self-criticism than perhaps I should be. I’m not sure you can tell that: you now know me rather well and while I can’t tell whether I come across as confident, I sure as all hell don’t come across as timid or constantly self-doubting. But we’re writers, we self-doubt. The collective noun for us is a doubt of writers.

Nonetheless, we press on. But while I think our doubts help make us who we are, that doesn’t mean that we should always listen to them or that we shouldn’t sometimes take a break. Or that sometimes we shouldn’t just bloody well lighten up. This first- vs third-person lark helps me: it’s a specific thing I can do, it’s a writing exercise. After I’ve slapped my forehead about something I’ve done, I will now consciously think: “If someone else had done that mistake, what would you say to them?” Then I say that to myself. And it actually helps.

Well, it helps when I do it and I don’t always. I’m just crap at that, it’s typical of me, can’t do a single thing right, pointless git, go back to bed, let someone good do this.

Or, you know, shrug: that William fella should’ve done it better, he will do it better next time.

Technology

Chapter 65

Introduction: I can stop any time

There’s a very nice review of The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) on Amazon where the writer comments that the technology advice in it is bound to get out of date soon. True. I worked to make it as open-ended as I could and so far nothing has happened to make me want to rush out a second edition with updates. But what has happened is that there are new tools to use, there are old tools that I’ve learnt so much more about, there are more and more ways to use these costly computers and smartphones that we buy.

I said right at the start of this book that you’re reading the best 100 or so articles from the first 1,000 pieces on The Blank Screen news site. Tell me you didn’t wonder if that meant the other 900 were rubbish. In the end, choosing these was easy because I did it from the site statistics of what was the most popular, I did it from the emails I got after asking for opinions and I did it from what I knew was both useful and significantly new, what added to rather than duplicated things in the original Blank Screen book.

But I also ignored all the videos, that took out a lot.

And I specifically ruled out a gigantic number of technology pieces because they were no longer timely. Very many of those were to do with short-term sales and special offers that I’d found. I’d only feature those when the software and hardware on sale was worth buying even at full price but still, the point of the text was where you could get what offer and without exception those have all ended now. There will be more, you can guarantee that, so do check out The Blank Screen news site, would you?

Beyond saving you cash today, I feel the most useful technology articles were ones where you or I covered how some software applications or hardware device would help you today, tomorrow and in the future.

I hadn’t realised this until writing to you now, but there are very few hardware pieces on The Blank Screen news site. Even typing that has just given me a flashback to working on computer magazines where it was very exciting to have the latest machine come in for testing. For a while. It was surprising how quickly it became a chore that the latest machine had come in for testing: “Already? I just did one”.

What interested me then and I see still does is the search. The few hardware pieces on the site are all the result of specific needs I had and particular hunts I made finding what was best for me. 

Whereas software is different. Software has the same hunt but there is so much more of it and I am just naturally attuned to exploring new apps that I can barely help myself. Plus, I think hardware is straightforward now: if you enjoy computers, get a Windows PC; if you just want to work, get a Mac. Done. Software is infinitely nuanced and the impact it can have on your work and your very life is rich and transforming and a little bit scary.

I want to cover that fact, I want to talk to you about this impact and how we can use it, how we can ride it. So we’re going to begin now with a section called I Can Stop Any Time.

This is a lie. Just look at the next section, Apps. It is replete with advice and information, from detailed examinations of certain key pieces of software that I run my life with and which I don’t just recommend, I don’t just evangelise, I actually gush. In comparison, Hardware is a tiny section. Really tiny. But I hope useful.

Then let’s talk about using this stuff. We began with the overall idea of using software and technology, we end by getting specific and even dirty. There’s a special part dedicated just to using email: there’s so much to tell you that is so useful that it warrants a section. Then Exploit That Expensive Computer and Exploit That Expensive Smartphone do exactly what they say.

Chapter 66

But I hate computers

Writers tend to think I am very technical. Every technical person I know thinks I'm an idiot. I'd like to say that the truth is between the two, but that suggests it's in the middle whereas I suspect I'm only a pixel away from the idiot side. But it's a significant pixel to me because whatever I am capable of ever understanding technically, I did also choose to walk away. I chose to leave computing and go into first journalism, then media, then drama. And I wouldn't change that.

But you don't forget any dabbling you do in technology. And it is certainly true that I spend my days surrounded by this stuff and might even be said to wallow in it all.

Except it's not technology. It's not computing. At least, it isn't to me.

There is a very easy way to say that, for instance, this morning I have been heavily using iTunes Radio, Pages, Numbers, Excel, Word, Mail, OmniFocus, Editorial, Final Cut Pro X, iMessages and possibly more. Reeder. That's another one. Pocket, a bit.

But I had to think about that. If you had asked me what I'd done so far today I'd have told you I cooked breakfasts, drafted a radio proposal, emailed a lot of people about a lot of things, did my regular financial stuff, got up to date with everything I'm supposed to be working on. I put the bins out and emptied the dishwasher. I would never imagine, never conceive of telling you the make and model number of my dishwasher. It's my dishwasher and I cannot remember what type it is, I just know dirty plates in, clean plates out.

When I like technology, it is enabling me to do something more interesting than play with technology. Yet telling you any of this always sounds like a list of software and hardware – usually iPads more than dishwashers, but there you go – and I'm thinking that's a barrier.

Yes, if you use all these tools they will help you stay creative yet become more productive. Guaranteed.

What I can't guarantee is which tools will help you: for something as abstract and technical as software, applications are vividly too personal to make grand recommendations or rules. I know this, you know this, but in the talking about it all and what might help you most with what, I end up sounding like a geek rather than a writer. I'd be okay with that if I thought I were and if I knew it would be of use to you, but I geek out and imagine every real technical person I know stepping away from me.

Use this stuff. Start with whatever you've already got: you're a writer, you write on a computer, there is no question but that it can do more for you than you realise or you let it. And when you've poked around a bit with that, then start looking into other applications and tools to help you more. You will find them, at some point you will become addicted to them, and you will find that they are not just useful, they are transforming.

I'm not kidding.

Chapter 67

Eating the dog food

So I’m after telling you that you should use more apps, I’m not done yet telling you to work more and to stress that yes, you can can work more. That you can create more time to work and to write. I may rarely have been so annoying in my life. But, just because this has been an unusual day, I want to show you that I do this too.

You’re reading the fifth posting today on The Blank Screen and all five were written on buses or while waiting for buses. I can do this in part because I am in Birmingham which has a good transport system. (Didn’t stop me getting lost and late, but.)

And I can do it because I have my iPhone with me.

One of today’s stories, was borne of my own experience and an idea I had for a particular friend who has that problem. Once I knew I wanted you to have this solution too, it was a matter of writing it up. (Spoiler: it’s Coffee With[Out] Me and is in the last section of this book.) I could’ve written in the WordPress iPhone app and without exception every one of the stories ended up there for posting. But I just more enjoy writing in the app Drafts. So I did. Drafts is comfortable and somehow relaxing so I write in that, then maybe tap a button.

If I tap a button, it is to squirt the text to somewhere specific like OmniFocus. But I just as often copy and paste the lot over into WordPress.

Once it gets there, I may edit but I really just set the tags and search keywords for when I might want to find a story again. Otherwise, it’s just copy and paste into WordPress, then, wallop, published.

Once published, the stories here get automatically promoted in various places but if I really like a piece, I’ll go promote it with love too.

That writing step, that publishing and that promotion are the same for every piece. The rest of today’s went through exactly that going from me to you. But they also had steps and apps before then

I read a lot of news on RSS through the app Reeder 2. I search around a lot as I think of areas of interest and that’s all done through Safari. Any time I find or I think of something that might be useful, it goes into Evernote. I have a notebook (actually a shared entire account) that I can email in to. That applies as much to the odd stray thought that I email in via Drafts as it does to whole websites in Safari or forwarding actual emails I receive.

I use Safari again when getting a link to a previous story of mine. I use Apple’s iTunes Link Maker website to get me links for apps that work internationally. One irritation is that Apple only shows you the price of an app before you buy it. If I buy a pile to test before recommending one to you, I can’t see its price. So I use the website Appshopper.com which tracks these things.

And – full, whispered disclosure – I use Amazon Associates for links to books or DVDs. If you buy those or take a look and then buy something else, some pennies come my way. I reckon it’s better that I get them than Amazon does, but.

To get iTunes or Associates links like that, you have to log in to your account on those services and I do that repeatedly via 1Password.

So that’s, what? At today’s prices, I’m using:

Drafts: £2.49, $3.99

Evernote: free to try up to a generous limit

1Password (£12.99, $17.99 universal version)

WordPress for iOS: free

Reeder 2: (£2.99, $4.99)

Safari: free and preinstalled on iOS

As ever with these things, if you were to set out doing it today perhaps you wouldn’t rush to buy three apps and use them alongside three others. Put like that, it does sound like overkill.

But these things grow. And then when you are on buses all day, you’re glad they did. Except for finding all the links, that’s five-biscuit job.

I should also say that my iPhone battery would’ve died from all this I’d it weren’t that I have a gorgeous Mophie Juice Pack recharger plugged into it right now. I bought mine at the Apple Store in Grand Central station but I reckon you can get a cheaper deal here in the UK.

Chapter 68

The five tools you need for writing, definitely

Actually, you could do this with three and those would be:

1) Computer

PCs are cheaper, Macs are better. I vote Mac because I put a big value on the time I no longer have to spend piddling about getting Windows to damn well work. But Macs don’t suit everyone; if you like piddling, save yourself some bucks and get more geeky enjoyment with a PC.

But.

If you’re buying a PC, you have a million options and every one ends up with you having to make a choice between models that have some clear and obvious difference like a 1Mhz speed increase or something. Ignore salespeople, they will – seriously – just read you the spec sheet you were already puzzling over. Instead, ask a friend who has one, get their recommendation and then see if you can find it on the end of this Amazon UK link. That way, if it all works out for you, I get some pennies from your having bought this way and if it doesn’t, it’s your friend who gets your support calls. Everybody wins and it costs me nothing.

If you’re buying a Mac, you’ve fewer options and they always end up with you needing to make a choice between two very similar models. In all cases, save money by buying the cheaper processor speed and spend money on extra RAM and extra storage space. You’ll thank me later, which is nice as I am going to suggest an Amazon link – here it is, do check this out – but I also think you should go into an Apple Store and ask there.

If you’re looking at me like that for the bit about processor speeds and RAM, Apple Store staff will just tell you straight what Macs are good for and not so good for. They’ll ask what you expect to be doing with Mac: be honest. Tell them straight that you should be writing but you’re going to distract yourself with a photography habit that you only do to be social, that you can stop any time.

They will translate processor speeds – actually, no, they won’t bother translating, they’ll just tell you what it means in terms you can use. And Apple Store staff are not on commission so they’ll push this stuff but it’s more from genuine enthusiasm.

Last, if you’re havering between a laptop, desktop or tablet computer, they all work, they all do the job. You will just typically get more done on the desktop, you will be substantially freer with the laptop and the iPad will do everything, everywhere but you need to think about it more as you go.

2) Word processor

Microsoft Word if you have to, if it’s already on your computer or if you know you like it. Google Docs is fine, if a bit clunky looking. If you did buy a Mac, you’ve just got yourself a word processor called Pages and the odds are that you may never need anything else.

3) Email

How else are you going to deliver work? It’s also great for pitches. Just for god’s sake make sure you get a sensible email address.

Get and use these three and you’re away to the races. But I’d recommend two more:

4) Somewhere to track what and where and when your work is

I track invoices in the Numbers spreadsheet and jobs in Evernote. I track tasks in OmniFocus and I keep an eye on my week with Calendar in Mac OS X.

So this would be one of the five tools and I’m saying it’s – wait, counts on fingers – four different applications. Yes. You could do it all in your word processor though. And the time it would take you to pick up and figure out all these applications would probably be better spent at first on learning what your word processor can do. You’re smart, you can use anything but they all have nooks and crannies that are worth exploring for how they may be able to speed up your work.

When you know your word processor well, though, then start branching out into these others.

5) Kettle

Enough said.

Apps

Chapter 69

It’s when an app fails that you realise how much you

There are bad apps that you either ditch or tolerate. There are good apps that you use a lot. Then there are great ones that you use so much you forget that you’re using an app, it’s just the way things are. (I would offer that there are then even greater apps that are melded into your DNA: if I’m being harsh then I’d say only OmniFocus is like that with me, but isn’t it great that a tool can become so much a part of your life?)

Right up there in the so-great category for me is TripIt and I only appreciated that this week when it failed on me.

This is what is supposed to happen:

Make any travel booking anywhere and get an email ticket from ‘em

Forward that email to plans@tripit.com

TripIt parses the ticket and pops every detail into your TripIt account

When you’re travelling, see everything you need on your iPhone

That last doesn’t sound so great but, seriously, it is. I had a thing where I was travelling from Birmingham in the UK to a village in the deepest part of southern France and it meant a lot of train rides and a lot of connections. Many of them were easy and great – I especially loved that I got a couple of hours in Paris both ways – but some were very, very, very tight. There was one where I had six minutes to get across what turned out to be a giant train station on multiple levels and though the guard I asked turned out to speak fantastic English, he also told me the wrong thing. Please picture me running, running and eventually sliding, sliding, sliding Charlie-Brown-like onto my train.

I do remember stopping on the way to help a woman carry an enormous suitcase up some stairs. So, you know, give me credit there: I may have made a mistake booking trains too close together but I’m a mensch under pressure.

What helped me throughout the whole journey was that I could look at TripIt on my iPhone at any time and be shown exactly what I had to do next. What the next train was, where it was, where it was going, what my seat reservation was, any booking references I needed, all that. I could choose to look at any or all of the steps in my journey so if something came up I’d be able to judge if I had the time to do it.

I’m not going to say that it made the journey pleasant when in fact the whole journey was great anyway, but it was a help and a guide and it became automatic that I would check TripIt along the way.

However.

It gets all this information from your email ticket. It parses that ticket: goes through it looking for departure times, train or airline reference numbers and so on. Fine. It’s handy that you just forward your ticket email to plans@tripit.com. (And clever that it’s always that same address: I can show you that address. It’s not a secret one like Evernote or OmniFocus use to let you email details in, it’s a big wide-open for-everyone email address and the smarts are in how it also parses who sent it. If I forward an email to plans@tripit.com, the service sees it’s from me and the details are popped into my account.)

Ticket emails differ between companies, though. TripIt is really good at this parsing but it gets thrown by two things: firstly a company it hasn’t parsed before and secondly if a company changes the layout of its emails. TripIt is an American service and I’m based in the UK so I’m not surprised that I occasionally hit companies that it doesn’t know. When that happens, TripIt sends you a warning that it couldn’t do anything with this stuff and that it has instead kept a copy of that entire ticket email in your account’s notes section. So at least you can see that.

But this week I booked a flight via Tripster and TripIt fell over. It believed it had parsed the email correctly, I got the regular TripIt success confirmation rather than any warnings, but it hadn’t. It believed my flight was tomorrow, it believed there was no seat or airline or reservation number. It was as close to a blank item in my travel itinerary as could be.

But TripIt is so useful when you’re travelling, so very useful, that I’ve taken the time to enter all the details for this trip by hand. Man, it was boring. And the knowledge that I will rely on this detail later actually made me nervous of entering it all, of not making any mistakes.

TripIt usually enters all my details for all my trips and it usually never goes wrong. I know I’m telling you of a time that it failed and that it was a boring time because of that, but it’s made me appreciate how good this app and this service is.

Let me quickly tell you that you can join the TripIt website for free and that there is a free app. I used that free app for years even though I don’t like ad-supported ones: I’d rather pay than have ads, I find them that intrusive. For those years, the choice, though, was between an ad-supported free app or a Pro version that required an annual subscription. I seem to travel more and more, but it’s still not enough for that.

However, at some point the company caved and released an app that you pay for but only pay that once. No subscription. It’s got an ungainly name: it’s called TripIt Travel Organizer (no ads) (seriously, the actual name includes those brackets and the words ‘no ads’). But it costs only 69p UK or 99c US. When I bought it I paid £2.49 and I still paid up before I’d reached the end of the sentence telling me it existed.

So: I thoroughly recommend, verging on urge you to use the TripIt website and this particular TripIt app.

Chapter 70

Why it’s worth grabbing free apps

The rule is that Android users get free apps, iPhone users pay for them. I am an iPhone user and I am more than fine with paying for apps. The amount of use I get from them, the pitifully cheap prices, it’s not a debate. But I do get free iPhone apps and specifically I do often grab paid ones that are briefly on offer as freebies. I’ll do that in part because all those 69p purchases add up and I’ll do it mostly because I’m often poking around an area, looking for a type of app rather than a specific one. And then I also do it because there is a specific advantage:

Free is cheaper than paid.

Okay, there are two specific advantages:

Once you have an app, you have it forever

Actually, three:

Once you have an app, you typically get free upgrades

So if an app that I definitely want then I’ll just buy it. But if there’s one I fancy trying or that I think I will need at some point, I’ll grab it when it goes free – and I may even delete it immediately. Without opening it even once. Because downloading it or even just starting to download it means it’s yours and it’s yours forever. 

Once you have officially bought the app, you can delete it and know that you are always able to get it again whenever you want. For free. Even after the price goes back up, most of the time also after the app has been upgraded later. Some companies make their new versions completely new apps that you have to pay for again and there are apps that do vanish forever. You’re out of luck with those but otherwise, this all works. So, for instance, Lonely Planet made a lot of its travel guide apps free last year and I grabbed the lot, deleted the lot because they were huge and I was out of space – then I brought back specific ones when I was actually going travelling to those places.

Quick story? I once advised on an app that was so bad I gave the maker a list of 19 reasons it could not be released. They ignored me, submitted it to Apple, and Apple rejected it with 20 reasons. I still kick myself over the one I missed. But the maker sort-of addressed those 20, enough to get it on sale anyway, and I was required to have it on my iPhone. But it was so bad, I mean it was still so embarrassingly bad that I deleted it. Whenever I’d be in a meeting when I was asked a question about it, I’d just re-download it from the App Store, slog through trying to work out the answer, then delete it again. One day I was asked a question by one editor in the company and couldn’t get it back: another editor had approved it being removed from the App Store forever. I don’t know who that was, but he or she made me look bad in that meeting. And I applaud him or her for doing it. That’s how bad the app was.

But you want to know how to find when apps go free. Try an app way: download AppsGoneFree for iPhone.

Chapter 71

Review: OmniOutliner

I am still tickled that the one thing I am currently dragging my feet over is writing a review of the productivity tool OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I use this constantly. I waited a year for that to come out. But still I haver. I did write several thousands words about it but threw them away: I felt it wasn’t a review as much as it was a manual for using it. There are plenty of places that tell you how to use OmniFocus, I need to get my head straight over what I feel I can usefully tell you.

And getting your head straight is what OmniOutliner is for.

The clue is in the name – actually, the two clues are in the name. OmniOutliner is an outliner made by The Omni Group, the same company that does OmniFocus. They make many applications and, truth be told, the only reason I looked at OmniOutliner first was that I adore OmniFocus so much. It also helps that OmniOutliner is affordable where the other products are expensive. Well, the graphics package and the project planning one are cheap for what they do, they’re just expensive if you only want to play with them. I’d play with the trial versions but I know that before long I’d be convincing myself to buy it.

This is what happened with OmniOutliner. I got the trial of version 3 and before the end of the day had bought it. Before the end of the week there was a beta release of version 4 and I switched to that. Fortunately for my wallet, when version 4 came out officially, I was able to get it for free because I’d bought 3 so recently.

I am going to rave about OmniOutliner, I think there’s little chance you hadn’t twigged that yet, but it isn’t an unqualified hymn of praise and I think I am a very low-level user of it. I now use it extensively but, for instance, there are close to myriad options for doing outlines that look pretty. I don’t mean that dismissively: there are design tools that make outlines clear and easy to read even when they are swamped with information. I’ve had a play but I keep coming back to the plain and basic outline.

It’s just that I keep coming back to it for so much. I used to be a determined explorer, always writing to see where the writing would take me. I write Doctor Who radio dramas, though, and those require a treatment outline before you get the gig. And I wrote a 170,000-word book about Blake’s 7 which was the biggest single project I’d ever done and it needed support. I needed support. Then I had a project that required me to deliver ideas to a company. When I agreed to that I thought it would be a doddle but their definition of an idea was 1,200 words of fully worked out story. To do it and to hit the deadlines, I found I was slapping down a thought in OmniOutliner and then seeing how I could expand it. If the story had this, what would come after it? What do I need to get us to that moment? The story would grow from a thematic idea, a one- or two-liner thought into a detailed beat sheet that I would then follow as I wrote up the idea.

That’s the bit I’ve always loathed: having such a detailed plan makes me feel as if I’m not writing, I’m typing. The story is told, so far as I’m concerned. But in that case I fashioned stories faster, I groped toward them quicker. And then there was longform prose in Blake, I think I got into the habit of going to OmniOutliner.

The day I realised I had a problem, though, was when I turned to it on a domestic project. Not writing, just something I needed to do. Usually I’d have done that in OmniFocus but I needed to think through the steps and I found myself writing it in OmniOutliner.

Then in the last 18 months I seem to have grown a new career in public speaking and in producing events. For both of them,  I rely on OmniFocus but I get to my task list through this outliner. Truly, my heart is still an explorer yet I can’t deny that outlining is helping me now with many events and I think a giant part of that is down to OmniOutliner. I’ve piddled about with outliners in, say, Microsoft Word, and it’s been a shrug. OmniOutliner has become a pal.

Last week I did a gig in a college, I took over a three-day writing course and it was an interesting combination of their existing course outline and what I could bring to it. The course outline was rather good, I thought, so I didn’t change any of that, I just worked to see what I could do that would fulfil what they needed and what the students wanted. I planned the three days out in OmniOutliner and you should see it. I can’t show you because so much of it is confidential and I’m just always wary of discussing any detail that’s to do with education and students.

But it started as a copy of the main headings and main times from the college’s existing plan. Then I prefixed it with questions for the college staff so naturally it then also included their answers. I have several writing exercises I particularly enjoy so I have those already outlined in other plans so I dropped them into this outline and moved it around. Added more, deleted bits. Made it fit. Then during the three days I wrecked that lot apart, moving things around, splitting things, adding, deleting. And making huge amounts of notes right there in the middle of the outline. About the one thing I didn’t do was record anything but I could’ve done. There is a button for recording audio. It’s right there.

And speaking of being right there, I did most of this on OmniOutliner for iPad as I ran around but I could also check it and change it on OmniOutliner for Mac.

That was flawless: the outline was just there, whichever machine I went to.

But I did get display faults on the iPad. I have a Belkin keyboard case that when you pop up the iPad in just the right way it links to the external keyboard and takes away the usual iPad one. I found several times that as I broke the connection to the keyboard, because I was folding it away to let me walk around, OmniOutliner would get confused. I wouldn’t get the Apple on-screen keyboard the way you would expect but I would get a toolbar across the middle of the screen where it would be if the keyboard had appeared.

I had no way to fix that in OmniOutliner, I would work around it by quitting and relaunching.

But I look at this outline now and it’s got that glorious feel of a book you’ve worked on for a term. It no longer makes any sense to anyone but me, it is crammed with details even I will forget. And those details meant I was able to write up the student feedback very, very quickly: everything I wanted to say about them I had already made notes about right there in the outline.

I was accused tonight of using too many apps and I think my considered response is just you try to take them away from me. OmniOutliner is now in the tool bag, it is part of what I do, part of how I do it. That’s quite rare: OmniFocus has a permanent place there too but I’m a writer and I haven’t settled on one word processor yet. So you don’t get in easily. But then you can’t take these tools away from me easily, hard-ily (is that a word yet?) or in any way at all.

You can get OmniOutliner for Mac from the App Store but don’t. Get it directly from The Omni Group instead because that’s how you get major updates for free or cheap. On the official site, OmniOutliner 4 for Mac costs $49.99 US (equivalent to £28.90 UK). There are family and education discounts, see the site for details, but there is also an OmniOutliner Pro 4 for Mac that costs $99 US (£58.33 UK). I have no idea what the difference is with the Pro version but the site explains.

Then you don’t have to get OmniOutliner 2 for iPad but you will want to. That’s on the App Store where it is £20.99 UK or $29.99 US.

Chapter 72

How to pick the right To Do app for you

Let me do the joke first: if you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad, buy OmniFocus. That’s it, we’re done, thank you for coming, I’m here through Friday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details, try the veal.

OmniFocus is so good that I’ve been asked whether the makers pay me to say that. And I really would offer it up as the one-stop, suits-all solution except that you can’t just stop once and it doesn’t suit all. It’s pretty close. Two things held me back from recommending it universally and one is that the Mac version has been hard to use. I’m sure I can’t say anything in detail about the beta release of OmniFocus 2 for Mac but I will certainly tell you that it is really good and much easier to use than it was. I’m saying easier, I’m not saying easy. But OmniFocus 1 was always worth the effort it took to learn it, OmniFocus 2 gets you its powerful features much more readily and clearly.

The other thing that has held me back from universal recommendation, though, hasn’t changed. And it won’t change. OmniFocus only runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads. There’s no Android, Linux or Windows versions and seemingly there never will be. I’m fine with that. Better the company stays great on one platform than it becomes okay on a few.

But it does mean I have difficulty recommending To Do apps. Actually, I won’t blindly recommend specific ones – not even OmniFocus when it comes down to it – because everyone is different and the best I can do is point you to some great and good To Do apps. In my latest The Blank Screen workshop, I discussed specific To Do software and hit a snag. To Do apps for iPhone: legion. To Do apps for Android: myriad. To Do apps for Windows Phones: hello?

Try this yourself. Do a google search on “best to do apps for Windows Phone”. You will get many results and several will be articles that state they include such things as To Do apps – but they don’t. I’ve read many top tens, top twenties, top something else and found not one single To Do app in there.

At the other end of the scale, if you have an iPhone, you’ve already got a good To Do app. It’s called Reminders and it’s very basic but what it does, it does very well. Reminders invented the Location Reminder idea – the way that when I leave a certain client’s office, my iPhone will tell me to send them an invoice – which I think should be mandatory now for all To Do apps.

Mandatory is a hard word. To Do apps are also a great example of when the word specifications is bollocks. I do recommend that you try many different apps but if, in so doing, you decided to write up a spec sheet of what they all did, it wouldn’t help you. Remember the Milk would score high for being on the web as well as Macs and iOS; OmniFocus would score low for being limited to Apple’s gear. Yet Remember the Milk isn’t right for me and OmniFocus is. Though I love the name Remember the Milk.

You can’t quantify experiences like using the right To Do app. But you can try.

Picking the right To Do app for you means testing out a lot. But you can limit how many you have to try or buy with this one simple thing: don’t look at a To Do app for mobile phones and tablets or for desktop Macs and PCs or for using online, if it doesn’t have Start Dates. These may be called something else like Defer Until (that’s what OmniFocus calls them and I don’t like that). But when you enter or edit a task, you must have the ability to prevent yourself seeing it until you need it.

Follow. I’m doing The Blank Screen at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I do not need and I do not want to see that on my To Do list until it’s time to prepare for it in about mid-April. So I don’t. “Prepare presentation for Stratford” is in my To Do list but it has a Start Date of 15 April and until that day, I won’t see it. I can look for it, I can see it when I review all my tasks, but each day as I look to see what I’ve got to do, Stratford will not be one of them – until it’s supposed to be.

Start Dates are as vital as Due Dates and if you use them, they are gold. But even if you don’t and never will, the fact that an app has them is a good indication that the app is powerful. Maybe you don’t need powerful features, probably you do, but it’s better to have them available, isn’t it?

Chapter 73

Review: OmniFocus

Here's the thing. I like this software a lot, I won't try to build any suspense over that. But when one rates something highly, I think it's most normal to say why and then end with reasons you might disagree. Things you should watch out for in case your mileage varies. Persuade first and maybe even evangelise, not to say gush, then when I've sold you on it, point out any niggling little points that might take the shine off for you.

But I like OmniFocus 2 for Mac so much that I'm reversing this. It is too good and too useful for me to enthuse about it and then drop cold water over you because there's a reason you may not be able to use it. There are reasons you may not like it, of course, but the killer reason for telling you bad points up front is that you may physically not be able to run it at all.

Why you shouldn't buy OmniFocus

Chiefly this reason. If you are a Windows or Android user, stop reading now. OmniFocus is not available for these and won’t be. 

I should also say that OmniFocus costs more than many or most or possibly all other To Do apps. That's true across the board but there's another thing: there's a board. There is OmniFocus 2 for Mac, OmniFocus 2 for iPhone and OmniFocus 1 for iPad. They're all separate and you don't need to buy more than one of them, but you will.

Price details at the end since there are few duller things than a list of numbers and currencies.

So.

Why you really, really should buy Omnifocus 2 for Mac

I've taken a hugely long time to write this review in part because I keep not being sure where to start. OmniFocus 2 is a greatly updated version of software that I liked tremendously but which was also hard to use. So on the one hand, the interest for me was in how improved it is, how different the new version is. But if you're looking for a To Do app and you've heard me speak above ten seconds, you've heard of OmniFocus and I want to justify how wedded I am to this software. I want you to get it and to get as much from it as I have.

So I'm going to mix and match a bit here: I'll tell you the things I think you need to know or will especially enjoy as a new user, then I will frankly squeal a bit about the improvements I see as an existing one.

Get yourself a biscuit and a mug of tea, will you?

To be useful, I don't think there is any question but that a To Do app needs to help you enter new tasks very quickly. Then it needs to help you work with them, add to them, change them, maybe group them in some clever ways, it needs to everything it can to help you actually do the tasks. To this end, OmniFocus 2 has a big plus button to start you off but then you can just keep typing. Type in a task, hit return, type another one, hit return, keep on going. 

Everything goes into an inbox and you could stop right there. Pop your To Do tasks in, go do them and just tick 'em off when you're back. 

You can also email tasks into the OmniFocus inbox. Get an email, forward it to a particular address and it appears in the inbox. When you're working on your Mac in any application in any way, you can also tap a couple of keys and be entering a task that will pop itself into your inbox.

None of this has changed in OmniFocus 2 for Mac but it's smoother and easier enough to see and understand that I think you do it more. Certainly I have a lot of tasks in my inbox now where I used to be better at staying on top of them all.

That's the thing, you stay on top of your inbox tasks. You do it by saying okay, those three are to do with work, I'll make a Work project and bung them in there. Then that one's the task about getting a plumber in, I'll add that to a House project. And so on. You end up with a lot of projects and you haven't done a bleedin' thing but actually you have. You've made it so when you're at work, you can just open that Work project and see only what you need to do there. You don't see the one about the plumber because you don't need to do anything about that until you're home.

I relish entering a lot of tasks into OmniFocus 2 now because, first, it's so easy to just keep bashing at the keys and entering task after task after task. As fast as I think of them or remember them, wallop, they're in and I'm writing the next one. But, second, it is gorgeously easy to say this task is for that project. If I type "Phone plumber re sink leak" I can then type House to get it automatically put into my House project.

If I just typed the letter H it would do the same. If I've also got a Holiday project then typing H would bring up both and I could either choose right there or just carry on typing h-o-u and then it'll have only the House one.

I used to work a lot for Radio Times so I had a project for that and if I typed a task and then RT, you're not surprised that it would go into the Radio Times project. But I could type "dio" or "imes" and it would work it out too. It's not like I try finding obscure letter combinations to get me into projects, but it is that I sometimes can't remember what I called it.

While I'm there adding a task to a project, I can look at when I need to do these things. I can say I want to start working on it on the 3rd March but must deliver it on the 6th of June. Fine. I especially like that ability to set a start date. But in both the start and the deadline date, I can write things like "1w" and OmniFocus pops in the date for one week from now. Tomorrow, next Friday, three months from now, it understands so many of these. I can think about tasks the way I think about them, I don't have to stop to check my calendar and enter in specific dates. Unless I want to.

I can also choose to add what's called a context. Think of this as a tool you require, a place you have to be or someone you need to help you. I have a Phone context, for instance. I've got one for home. And I've got one for my wife, Angela. You can only have one context per task and I'd sometimes like to have more but if it's something I want to discuss with Angela, I choose her as the context. If it's something I need to do when I get back home, that's what I'll pick. And most often I'll just say that it's a phone call.

All of which sounds like tedious extra detail and it can be. You could ignore all of this and live a full and happy life.

But because I do very often use this stuff, when I'm waiting for a train and it's been delayed by ten minutes, I can ask OmniFocus to show me all the phone calls I've got to make. Doesn't matter that this one is to the plumber, this one is to a publisher, that one is to do with a catering event, all the calls are listed there under the Phone context. So I can and I do start ringing.

Equally, you can imagine that a lot comes up in my life that I want to discuss with Angela. I would hope that I'd remember the big stuff but there's always myriad tiny details or issues where I know she'll know more than I do. So while I don't sit across the dinner table with OmniFocus in one hand and an expectant look on my face, I will often take a quick look at the Angela context to see whether there's anything I want to talk over.

Last and in so many ways the most impressive, there is that Home context. Not only do I have a list of things to do at Home that I can check, I can tell OmniFocus to remind me when I get there. And, sure enough, as I stroll up the road to my house, ping. OmniFocus sees where I am and it reminds me of what I've got to do as soon as I get home.

I cannot tell you how much I love that. It's a feature called Location Reminders and was invented or at least introduced to the world by Apple in its free Reminders app. OmniFocus takes that and uses it alongside all its other power features so I am pretty much life-support-dependent on it now.

But you can't use that for everything or you'd go spare. Reminders that pop up every time you stepped into a client's office. Or the supermarket. Or my mother's. Give me aspirin. So I use it carefully.

Most tasks don't have a location context or any context at all so and I only see them on my list when their date comes around. That's the kind of normal, day to day To Do list checking that you do. And if the most marked change in OmniFocus 2 is the overall look and feel, the most obvious appearance change is an entirely new feature to do with daily To Do list checking.

Well, sort of entirely new. It's been in the iPad and iPhone versions of OmniFocus for at least some time but now the Mac has got Forecast. 

Forecast

The Forecast is the main view on OmniFocus and it has a calendar on the left, all of today's tasks on the right. That's it. But the calendar has the number of tasks waiting on each day too. So I can look at mine right now and see that today is bad. Well, actually, today itself isn't awful per se: OmniFocus says I have 7 things to do. But it also says I've 34 things I should've done before today.

(Quick aside? This isn't true. The thing with OmniFocus is that you do not keep using it, you do not do a task, look up the next one, do that, look up the next and so on. I know for certain that I will have done a lot of this 34. Actually, hang about, let me prove it. Okay. Not so great: I've done 16 of them, leaving 18 still to do. But also one of them I tried: it was to ring someone and they're not back until Thursday. I can see that another one is actually something I need to do this coming Friday. So that's 16 left to do. Still pretty bad.)

That phone call I can't make until Thursday. Let me drag that task onto Thursday in the calendar. Done. The thing for Friday, drag to OmniFocus calendar, it's now on Friday. The reason that some of these aren't done yet is that a much bigger and more urgent project came through like a ship in a harbour and the day to day tugs got sent to the side in the wash. But they're still important, I just need to think about them. Looking at them now, I think three may have been superseded but I need to check with Angela on Friday about them. So I'm changing the context to Angela and I'm dragging them both to Friday.

Ooops, just seen another one that I've done. Tick.

Now we're on 12 in the past. I can also see that Thursday is showing 8 tasks and Friday is now up to 13 so I'm going to take the biggest or at least longest of the overdue tasks and drag that to Thursday. It's got to be done this week and that's visibly the best day for it. Even though right at the foot of each day's tasks I can see a swift events calendar and Thursday has an hour's meeting in the afternoon so it's going to be a squeeze.

Last, for now, there are two things there I can see that I can do right this moment. Excuse me for one moment. Right, I'm back and I've done three things. If you're counting on your fingers or are just better at this than I am, you're reckoning now that I have 8 overdue things, 7 today, 9 tomorrow and 15 on Friday.

Nope.

You're right about the past and the future but today OmniFocus is now showing me that I have 16 things to do.

And it's right.

Because there are several things I have to do every day of the working week, there are a couple I do every single day full stop. When I tick one off as done yesterday, that tells OmniFocus to show me the next one. I think you can make an argument that it should've shown me today's one anyway as I have to do it, but if it did that, it would really have to show me all of them. Every day's everyday tasks from now to the end of time. As it is, it shows me the one I need to do, especially if it's one I should've already done.

OmniFocus is just superb at letting you dump myriad tasks into it as you think of them and then only showing you the ones you need to know right now. I learnt when I was away on holiday that these tasks really mount up, I'm having to knock off hundreds per month and honestly if I saw them all ahead of me, I'd quiver. I quivered enough at the sight of 34 overdue ones.

But just as I now feel better that I've got the 34 down to 8, so I feel able to do today's 16. What's 16 tasks compared to five hundred for the month or, what, something like 6,000 for the year? It's manageable, that's what it is. I do these 16 and I will feel great for the day. I will be right to feel great for the day.

I will be right to take the evening off. 

I think that is what OmniFocus gives me that I didn't get from other apps. There's plenty to enthuse at you about ways to get tasks in, ways to slice up those tasks to see what you can do in the time you've got today, but it's this one thing that really sells me. I know what I'm doing now. I know what I'm supposed to be doing. Instead of a ceaseless list, I have today's jobs and I do them. Usually.

As I've said in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition), I am now busier than I have ever been and that workload is far more comprised of tiny bits than before, but I have never felt more on top of things. I've never felt lighter.

If there’s one feature that helps this, it’s one that has also been improved in OmniFocus 2 for Mac. It's the Review.

Review

You do all this bunging of tasks in and then you do all this processing of them, reckoning that this belongs to the House project and you can do it on Friday, that sort of thing. As you can tell from my day today, when other things come along they can radically change what you're able to get done and things have to be revised. If you had every task neatly sorted onto a day and date, well, I think you'd be far too organised and you'd also be booking a hospital appointment for stress. Every task with a due date, your ulcers would be throbbing because you can bet pretty much every single one of them has to keep being changed.

The answer is to give a due date only when there is a due date. A real one. I can make a case that I shouldn't have moved those tasks to Thursday and Friday, I shouldn't have dates on them at all. I did partly because they are thing that genuinely must be done this week so while there isn't a specific deadline, next week is too late. I also did it because even after a couple of years of using OmniFocus I slip back into adding dates to things out of habit.

If you don't have a date on something, I think you fear that you will never do it. That's a very reasonable fear but it isn't true because of this one OmniFocus feature, because of this Review thing.

Review is a Getting Things Done term. This GTD system is a huge, practically cult-like thing that has its legion of fans and very many software To Do apps work with it. OmniFocus is not related or affiliated to the official GTD lark but it does work very nicely with its principles, a key one of which is this Review.

Throw every task in any way you like, deal with what you deal with and let the rest sit there festering in the House project without any dates. But then at regular intervals, go into the House project. Go into every single project you have and look at every single task. I said that would drive you stresswards if you did it but that's if you do it every day, if you are doing it every time you open your To Do list. This is different. This is a positive choice to go look at everything.

This is best done with a coffee and sitting somewhere away from your usual work. I tend to go to my living room to do this but wherever I am, I will start at the top and go through every task, every project. With each one I'll do pretty much what you just saw me do: I'll tick it as done if I have finished it, I'll maybe give it a new date, that kind of thing. I'll also delete a lot. A lot. I throw everything into OmniFocus and sometimes that is just to get me to think about it rather than to do something. When I review, I look at it and often think nah, that's not for me, delete.

And the most common thing that happens during a review is that I will do the task there and then. It's for that reason that I can spend a long time on reviews, why I'll drive through them doing what tasks I find. 

By the end, you know everything about everything you are doing. Then you can forget it. Get it out of your head and trust that it is in OmniFocus. It'll pop up when you need to do it or you'll catch it again on your next review.

What's new about this in OmniFocus 2 for Mac is that it works so easily. Previously I did find it a faff on OmniFocus 1 for Mac and its tedious and awkward issues were made more noticeable because OmniFocus for iPad does Reviews so much better. I would routinely postpone doing a review until I could go off to a corner with my iPad. 

Now the Review in OmniFocus 2 for Mac has all the best features of the iPad one and is, I think, the better. That dragging tasks to a new date is new and I nearly forgot to tell you it is because I am now so used to it, so dependent upon it. In reviews and in day to day work, I drag away and it is another reason I tend to leave OmniFocus work until I'm back at my Mac. 

(While OmniFocus is available for Mac, iPhone and iPad, you can't do reviews on the iPhone one. I think that's a failing and I wish it would change.)

What's also specifically new is that as you work on today's list and the calendar, you can see a Review icon and it will be highlighted if there's something to review. 

Another quick aside? You could review every project and every task every day, if you wanted to, but again it's only going to help the bottom line of your local pharmacy if you do. So instead you slice it up a little. Every project and every task will be reviewed, must be reviewed, but you can spread the work out and you will. For instance, I have a shopping list in OmniFocus. Because it's a project, I cannot ignore it, cannot say I don't want to review it, but I can say I only want to review it once a year. Then I have certain crucial tasks: I say I want to review those every three days.

And most of the rest of the projects are somewhere in between. I do my reviews on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and on any day I'll have 20 or 30 projects to review. Today I have 40 – because I skipped Monday's review while I was on a big deadline.

But when we're done talking today and you're gasping for air, I'll trot through those 40 over a mug of tea and I will feel on top of things again.

That really, seriously is the big thing with OmniFocus: the way it makes you feel and specifically how much better, how much lighter. I look back at the various To Do apps I've tried before and I can well argue that any one of them was better than when I didn't use any, but still, they were torture tools. I used to feel crap at the end of every day when there was all this stuff I hadn't done. I used to spend the end of the day moving each task to tomorrow and reinforcing that I was a failure. Bollocks to everything I'd done, the fact that I hadn't put the bins out was crippling me.

Now I don't sweat this stuff at all and I still get the bins put out on time. Actually, this week I put them out a day early but that's my mind gone awry at 5am, I don't feel I can blame any software for that.

You've finished your biscuit and I haven't finished talking about OmniFocus but I'm going to stop. Remind me to talk to you about Perspectives some time, okay? And in the meantime, let me tell you that you can see it in action over on the official site: there's a pile of videos there. 

Pricing takes a moment to explain. You can buy OmniFocus in the Mac App Store but don't. If you must, then it's here and costs £27.99 UK or $39.99 US.

But the reason you shouldn't buy it there is that you will get a better deal from the official OmniFocus site. You wouldn't realise that, though, because the price is the same. The deal is partly that you can get various family packs or, if you're an existing user, cheaper upgrade prices. The same thing will happen to you with future releases of the software: the Omni Group is rather excellent at providing free updates and options.

However, there is now another reason and it's OmniFocus 2 Pro. It's roughly twice the price at $79.99 (the official site only lists prices in US dollars) and it doesn't have twice the functionality but what it has is very good. You can only get the most from this Perspectives feature I mentioned in this version. I'd suggest that if you are brand new to OmniFocus, get the standard edition. If you used OmniFocus 1 a lot, get the Pro.

If you're set on buying through the App Store – I do like App Store, it's just not right for this – then you buy the Standard edition first and subsequently an in-app purchase to get you the Pro one. 

I hesitated over Pro versus the Standard version because as much as I talk about it, I don't think I'm the most thorough OmniFocus user. But because I'd bought OmniFocus 1 from the official site I was offered an irresistible upgrade price so I went Pro.

Last thing. OmniFocus 2 for Mac works all by itself but there are these separate iPad and iPhone apps. Hopefully very soon I will just be able to give you a blanket recommendation to buy the lot but right now, August 2014, there's a reason to hesitate. We've got new OmniFocus 2 for Mac and OmniFocus 2 for iPhone but we haven't yet got version 2 for iPad. As very, very good as the iPad one is – it really was the best version until this new Mac edition – you would be mightily annoyed at me if you bought it today and they upgraded it tomorrow. There won't be upgrade pricing: you can only buy iOS apps from the App Store, the Omni Group can't offer discounted versions. Maybe there's a clever way around this with in-app purchases again but there wasn't for OmniFocus 2 for iPhone.

But OmniFocus 2 for iPad is definitely coming. I will buy it the second it's out, just as I did the iPhone and the Mac ones. Hit Buy and read about the new features later. It's that key to my work now and I am that sure that each new version is tremendous. 

But we don't know when it's coming. So buy the Mac one and become a fan of that while we're waiting.

Chapter 74

OmniFocus clone on Android

OmniFocus – have I mentioned this To Do manager recently? Like, in the last hour? – is solely available for Macs, iPhones and iPads, nothing else. But now there is AndroidFocus: a completely unofficial Android version.

It’s not really OmniFocus, it’s more a quick way to enter or to see OmniFocus tasks on your Android phone. It has fewer features than the real iPhone one and it depends on your having an account with the Omni Sync Server. That’s free but you get it when you buy a real OmniFocus. So if you are, say, a Mac user with an Android phone, this could be for you. Note that the Omni Group isn’t trying to get the clone removed but it does warn: “An app named AndroidFocus recently appeared in the Google Play Store. This app calls itself ‘An OmniFocus client for Android’, and can connect to an Omni Sync Server account in order to sync with the OmniFocus database that is stored there. To be clear, AndroidFocus is not an Omni Group product and we are unable to assist customers with using the app.

“We believe that you should have control of your own data, and OmniFocus therefore uses an open file format just like the rest of our applications. Customers need to be aware, however, that reverse-engineering sync in the way that AndroidFocus appears to have done can make for unpredictable results. That means it’s theoretically possible that using AndroidFocus will cause data loss which our Support Humans are not equipped or able to help you recover from. For this reason we can’t recommend using AndroidFocus.”

So it doesn’t do a lot and it could well break the next time the Omni Group changes anything or updates anything in the real OmniFocus. Yet still I would be buying this now if I had Android.

AndroidFocus official site: £4.10 (UK), $6.99 (US)

Chapter 75

Windows alternatives to OmniFocus

Pity me. I go around doing workshops about being a productive writer and I've even written a book about it (The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers, UK edition, US edition). You may have heard of it. And it all makes sense, it all works – I promise you that and I have such gorgeous tweets and emails from people telling me so – but there is a big problem. It's the To Do list.

When I started this, the problem was that I'm on a Mac and quite a few people go for that there Windows thing. And my To Do manager of choice only runs on Macs. Actually, I say it's the To Do manager of my choice, I think it's more the To Do manager of my heart and soul. It used to be that in a workshop I would put up a slide showing you OmniFocus and where to get it. And then I'd say: “If you know a Windows equivalent, it would be a huge help for me to hear about it.” Or something like that.

I ask about that and about Windows and so far so far nobody has ever piped up with an answer during the workshop, during the after-session nattering (possibly my favourite part) or over the many emails I get later.

That's not a scientific or statistically valid sampling of people to call from. For the most part, I don't presume any computer knowledge and I don't ask anyone in advance what equipment they prefer to use. But most festival or university blurbs that describe my talk use one of the many texts I give them and they they invariably include the phrase “make your computer work harder for you”. If you were deeply into Windows software already, or Mac for that matter, I don't think that line would sell the workshop to you. So very broadly, I think one can expect fewer than average power-users in a typical workshop. Which means we can equally expect fewer people to know Windows software well enough to tell me what they've got that is as powerful as OmniFocus.

I know I'm right in all this but I want to tell you that I doubt it matters. I doubt that there is actually an equivalent to OmniFocus in Windows. But telling you that now, six years into this post, feels a bit rich. So let me show you what I've been working on for the workshop I'm doing next week. This is a special limited-number workshop for a specific group of writers that I work with on Writing West Midlands' Room 204 programme. I know them so I have an idea of how they like to work and what kit they use. Many are PC fans and I will ask them for advice but I think it's time I stepped up.

So I've been looking into this in detail. Or at least as much detail as you can without owning a Windows PC. I've checked reviews, I've tried all the online web versions I can find and I've downloaded iOS companion apps. No Android, I don't have the facility to test that nor the patience of Job to go through all the Android permutations.

There is nothing in Windows that is as strong as OmniFocus for Macintosh.

However, there are these good options. The following are all Windows apps with web versions that work crossplatform: if there's one you fancy, see whether it has a companion app that works with your phone.

Toodledo

As with every To Do service, people who like Toodledo tend to love it. I’ve only briefly tried it out during my search for the right one for me but I do very much like how it includes start dates for tasks. Not by default, you have to switch the feature on. But go to Account Settings and look for the many fields you can choose to switch on for a task. One of them is start dates and once you've ticked that, every task you enter has the option for a start date.

Appigo To Do

I was a big Appigo To Do user until I found OmniFocus. Since then it's become a little suite of programs including a web client and I'm honestly a little confused over what option gets you what. But as of a few months ago, Appigo To Do includes Start Dates.

It's rather poorly done on the iPhone version: you have no way to realise that this icon is for setting the end date and that one is for setting the start date. None. Do what I did: press everything. When you know which button it is, though, you're set.

Well, nearly. Appigo doesn't have the same control as OmniFocus so it's a touch less refined in what does and doesn't show you. But a task with a start date that isn't today will get separated from more urgent tasks on your list.

Asana

This is team-wide To Do management and that would put it outside my usual sphere of interest: I want to make you, personally and specifically you, more productive. Not companies. I reckon if everyone in a firm is as good as you then that's great, but it's you I'm working with.

It also tends to mean complex. Enterprise-wide software takes some learning and I haven't done that. But Asana promises start dates. It's even an automatic thing. Yet I couldn't figure it out.

There's a line somewhere between To Do apps and Project Management software. I think it might be here.

Remember the Milk

It’s not that I am obsessed with start dates for tasks, it’s more that I think To Do app makers should be. So I’m disappointed that there are no start dates in the best-named To Do software ever. Going by the chatter on its support forums, there never will be either. So I'm afraid that means RTM is out for me.

They all are, I suppose: I've said before that you'd need Primacord explosive around my waist to get me away from OmniFocus on a Mac, iPhone and iPad. But there is Primacord, it is possible and I thought – I still think – that it will happen that some day there's going to be a better To Do manager. But it isn't today and it unquestionably isn't on a PC.

Chapter 76

The wild and strange world of using Mac Keynote on a PC

I knew you could do this or I wouldn’t have even tried, but this afternoon I wrote and presented a talk using my favourite presentation software, Keynote, and I did it on a PC. Keynote is on Macs and iOS only, but if you go to icloud.com on any computer, you can use it as if it ran on your machine.

Same with Pages the word processor and Numbers, the spreadsheet. They’re all on icloud.com, along with Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts.

But it’s one thing knowing this, it’s another doing it. And this ability is just crazy good. If it weren’t that the keyboard was clunky plastic, I could’ve been on a Mac. Now, I’m a Mac user so naturally I prefer this to PCs but it was the flawless ability to do what I would’ve expected to do, what I am used to doing, that made this wild.

Keynote is just a very good presentation application, pretty much infinitely better than PowerPoint. I had the choice of using PowerPoint locally, as in actually on that PC’s hard drive yet I chose to run Keynote over iCloud. This was in all ways stupid: what if the internet connection had failed?

But it was also in all ways sensible. I was twice moved to different lecture rooms and because I was doing this on icloud.com, I just logged back on to there in each room and carried on exactly where I was.

And though the college I was at had PowerPoint, the first time I ran it, it came up with lots of messages that – read at great speed and in a rush to click my way through – gave me the impression that this was a trial version of PowerPoint. Not the full one. So it would have all the features but it would gripe at you a lot.

I’ve seen Microsoft Griping. I saw a fella use a PC to give a presentation so gorgeous that I was willing change my mind about Macs vs PCs – until he turned to face the audience. The instant his back was to the screen, there was a ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ error message. Basically, the internet connection had gone down and even though he wasn’t using the internet, Windows chose that moment to check something online and because it failed, said so in big letters.

Very amusingly, the connection must’ve come back because just as he turned around to change the slide, the error vanished.

I don’t care whether you like or dislike Apple, you know they wouldn’t interrupt your presentation with a system error.

So my choice was between a trial version of PowerPoint that would gripe and anyway was PowerPoint, or Keynote which was online at icloud.com and so at risk of losing the internet connection.

I chose Keynote.

And I tell you, I always will. Right now I tend to produce my presentations on Keynote for Mac or iOS and at the very end convert them to PowerPoint. I then arrive wherever I’m going with a USB thumb drive containing one Keynote version and two PowerPoints (the old and the new formats). I also have the same files on Dropbox. And I often bring my MacBook with all versions on too.

I think I still will. But I’ll also make sure I’ve got a copy on iCloud.com.

Keynote is a pleasure to use on Macs and iOS, I had thought it was a cleverness that you could run it on PCs via icloud.com but it’s more than that. It’s a pleasure to use it even there. And to be able to present directly from it, that’s huge to me.

Try Keynote on iCloud.com yourself. If you have an iPad or an iPhone – it’s not wonderful on an iPhone but it works – then get the iOS app here. And if you’re on a Mac, it’s waiting for you at the end of this link.

Chapter 77

Review: Beesy, the bionic productivity app

This is going to be like reviewing a car by detailing how good the radio is. I’ve been using Beesy for a few weeks and I like it but I’m very aware that I’ve used it to scratch just one specific itch.

I have been, I remain and I suspect I will long continue to be an OmniFocus devotee but I have two problems with that. The first is a minor one, for me, in that OmniFocus is designed for individuals so whenever I have to delegate a task out to someone, it’s a bit convoluted. Beesy is more project-management-like with its ability to assign tasks to people.

Two or three times a month, though, I also have meetings where I come away with a lot of tasks. When Beesy approached me, I was struggling with how to both make notes during meetings – I’m secretary for some of them – and collect tasks. I’d ended up with a process whereby I’d make lots of notes and interrupt them with lines like this:

– William to phone Acme re delay

Then at the end of the meeting, I’d look for every line that began with those two dashes and I would copy them into OmniFocus. It works, and I have a Drafts thing that lets me send a pile of them into OmniFocus in one go, but not always successfully and always with a bit a of a fiddle.

Plus because I was writing all the notes, I found that my own little tasks got written so briefly that I would later struggle to know what they were about. Which particular delay? Who at Acme? When has this got to be done by?

So Beesy came along with its ability to take meeting notes and tasks simultaneously. Fairly simultaneously: I still have to break off from the minutes to tap a task button but, for instance, with that Acme one I’ll tap the Call button and the task goes in as that, a phone call, rather than me having to specify it. Since this is my To Do list, I can presume that all tasks as mine unless I say otherwise so that’s another time saving.

I find I use those moments to make the task clearer: “Tell Jeff at Acme that Project Diatribe is waiting on test results”. That kind of thing.

I found that very quick and rather useful. It’s taken me a time to get used to where everything is in Beesy: there is so much you can do with entering tasks, assigning details, managing projects, managing calendars that it is overwhelming and you will not pick this up in twenty minutes.

But if you dive in with a particular need, as I had, then I think you pretty swiftly get to use that. Then you can expand out to the rest. You need to devote some time to this and I think you really benefit from jumping in completely. Don’t try to run your life through both Beesy and OmniFocus, as I have, make it your only system. It is more than capable of that, it just does take some effort.

However, I think it’s effort that pays off and that over time you will become immersed in it to the point that it is both easy and automatic to use. The company has a nice line about how Beesy is really a note-taking app, that you just use it to make notes and then everything else comes from that. It handles tasks, it produces proper meeting minutes for you, it’s the To Do manager for people who loathe To Do lists.

I think the complexity of Beesy comes from the volume of options and that the ease of it comes from how those all work together. Look at your projects, look at your calendar, look at your tasks and you see the same things in different ways. You don’t tend to have to think about much when you’re entering a task, you just know that it is in the pot and that when you need it, it’s there.

It’s also got a true Dwight Eisenhower grid view of your tasks: Eisenhower used to divide jobs into Urgent, Non-Urgent, Important and Non-Important. I’ve not been a fan of this, I think the time spent assigning priorities is usually better spent on doing the things but when you have a lot on, it’s a neat view. It’s just your tasks written out in squares but it works simultaneously for visual thinkers as well as word ones.

That’s in the app’s Dashboard view and, oddly, I’m least keen on this. It’s a simple overview with your calendar and that grid but I found I was always tapping on Project, People or Actions just to move on to those screens. It’s only an aesthetic thing: I’m not taken with how the app shows notes as pieces of paper at the foot of the screen. That’s a lot like the way Evernote used to do it and actually Beesy integrates nicely with Evernote. (So much so that the Evernote company wrote a blog post about it.)

Very nicely, Beesy is being worked on extensively. I took a lot of screenshots as I was learning how to use it and then the software was entirely updated to an iOS 7 look. I was thinking about how you need your iPad always with you to use it – and then the company released Beesy.me, a web-based service that you can use anywhere.

Not to make this a Beesy vs OmniFocus scrap – they are both powerful, both take some learning but both are aimed in different directions – but it has been a common criticism of OmniFocus that it doesn’t have a web version. That doesn’t bother me but it does others and I see the benefit of a web version.

Beesy for iPad costs £3.99 UK or $5.99 US. If you want to manage just one project you can use the web-based Beesy.me for free otherwise pricing starts at 5 Euros per month. It’s in Euros because Beesy is based in Paris: if I’d looked up their website while reviewing the software, it turns out that I could also have just looked up and seen them. I spent much of the time using Beesy in Paris myself, coincidentally just a couple of miles from their offices. This doesn’t help you or matter at all, but it tickles me. I love Paris and it’s good to see a French firm doing well internationally.

It’s interesting that it is so firmly an iPad app. I’d like there to be a native Mac and PC one as well but I suppose that itch is served enough by the online version. It’s also interesting that it’s so cheap. This is the kind of software tool that would’ve cost businesses hundreds of pounds in the past and I would call its £3.99 UK or $5.99 US a bargain if that weren’t such a huge understatement. Pricing helps you get noticed on the App Store but I do wonder if Beesy is undermining its own worth by being so cheap.

Still, that’s the firm’s choice: grab it now before they change their minds. See the official site for more details and videos.

Chapter 78

NowDoThis and take it seriously

There’s a new online To Do service called NowDoThis. Go to a website, type in your To Do list right there and watch it look at you. It sits there, the list on your screen in a nice font. And if you’ve included a time – such as “I will do press ups for 1 hour” – then it will also automatically include a countdown clock.

You can hit Done early or you can wait until the clock runs out but then it’ll sit there with a Time’s Up reminder and a ping. Click and you’re on to your next task and it sitting there on the screen, watching you.

If you’re wedded to something like Things, Asana or OmniFocus then it won’t work for you, it just looks you in the eye and backs away, defeated. But for fast turnaround tasks, it’s a strong prod. So long as you take it seriously and don’t do anything like this:

Excuse me, I’m off to make tea. I have to. It’s right there on my list. What, you thought I’d really do press-ups? You’re adorable, thank you.

Chapter 79

Me and NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages

Last Friday, I went to open a Microsoft Word document someone had sent me and found that I didn't have Word on my machine. It was a true shock: I've had Word on everything since the 1980s when I began writing about word processors in various computer magazines.

What's more, I realised why I didn't have it. When I'd installed OS X Mavericks on my MacBook Pro it had found some problems with the hard disc. Serious, creaking, get out fast problems. So I had it reformat the whole drive and sort things out. I'd backed up everything, I backed it all up again just in case, fine. But apparently I hadn't remembered to put Word back on afterwards.

And here was the reason that the shock was the slap it was: it must be a month, it could be six weeks since I installed OS X Mavericks. So I'd not needed Word in all that time, not needed it or wanted it or assumed I should use it, for at least a month.

What's more, I looked at this document and it was open. My MacBook had seen that I'd didn't have Word and so it had just opened the document in the word processor I did have, Apple's own Pages. I now had the choice of schlepping off to find my Word installer or just getting on with my work so I just got on with my work.

Now, this was one Word document in a project that had involved slightly over fifty of them and I'd done the giant part of the work on my iMac which does have Word and I did use Word. This was just one last document that came through late and I was going to have to send it back as Word; if there had been all fifty left to do this way, I'd have installed Word. I think. But for one job, I just accepted that there would be a final convert-to-Word step when I was done.

I like Pages. I've always liked it. I was on a bus when I got the idea for writing a book about productivity for writers and I wrote the first thousand words of it right there on my iPad in Pages. Perhaps because I'd started it there, I carried on. There was also the fact that mentally I was associating my iMac with the massive book I was writing about Blake's 7 and I was associating my MacBook with a Doctor Who audio script that was due at the same time. But whatever my psychological reasoning, it was still that I'd pick up the iPad to carry on writing The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) and that meant it was still the case that I'd write it in Pages.

At that stage, the project was chiefly about getting the ideas down and exploring how to convey it. I later moved all the text to Word to send to my proofreaders, I then moved it to Apple's iBooks Author to do one version. I moved it all to Adobe InDesign to make the paperback and the Kindle versions. But for bashing in the words, Pages on my iPad was perfect. The best word processor is the one you've got now but Pages did that Apple thing of staying out of my way while I concentrated on my writing.

So I did go from liking it to being quite the fan and I was aware of this. I didn't notice that it had supplanted Word on my MacBook. I'm trying to think how much else I must have written in Pages on that machine without thinking about it. Certainly a few radio reviews for Radio Times magazine. Definitely several invoices. Must be a lot, but I just can't remember the word processor I used for what.

All of which is nice for me and I could just recommend Pages to you in the certain knowledge that you already have a word processor and have no need to move to a new one.

But Pages just went through a big change. It became free for new users, for one thing. I've said before that I find the free Google Docs a bit clunky and ugly yet I like it more every time I see that price. I do wonder at the decision to make it free: it's obviously very nice for new users and I've no problem with the fact that I bought my copies because I've had a huge amount of use out of it. Yet if you make something free, you do devalue it.

I remember a friend complaining that Word, at the time, cost several hundred pounds and saying why on a Earth would it? “It's only a word processor!” I suggested that she try making one and she'd then see what an enormous job it was. She didn't appreciate the brilliance of the work that had gone in to just a word processor that cost hundreds of pounds. She didn't believe me when I reported that Microsoft had up to then spent a billion dollars developing it. (True.) How much less would she now regard a free word processor?

Curiously, the word free gets people buying, so to speak, and I'm sure it gets people devaluing the word processor, but it doesn't stop anyone bitching about problems. In this case they were right: the new, free version of Pages for Mac in particular had issues. 

The key aim of Apple for this release was to make Pages on the Mac work the same and work with the same documents as Pages on iPad and iPhone. Fine. It also has this thing now where I can send anyone a Pages document and they can open it – not through conversions, not through any fiddling and actually not just opening the document either. They can open Pages. Whether they've got it or not. Whether they're on a Mac or a PC. Click on the document I send you and, if you want, you're reading and editing it in Pages in your Web browser.

It is startlingly marvellous to all of us who get what is happening and can see how hard it is to do – but, infinitely more importantly, for those who do not happen to understand all that's happening, it is just a Pages document. They have no need to tell the difference between owning Pages the application and running Pages in their browser. That is a truly remarkable accomplishment and it is how computers should be: our work is what matters first. It's also a true sea change from the Microsoft approach which makes everything just difficult enough that you appreciate and you value all the company is doing for your money.

And the problem many people had is that in order to get this new feature, to get the ability to work across platforms, Apple has stripped Pages down and lost key features. That's what it felt like: really it's more that they started again and haven't built it back up to all it was.

The only thing is, I've no idea what the missing features are. For me in my current work, the only thing I've hit is that it's slightly more of a pain switching on the word count. (The same cross-platform good stuff and missing features bad stuff has happened to Pages' stablemates Numbers and Keynote. I've seen the difference in Numbers and that's more annoying to me.)

Apple promised that it is bringing all this stuff back and, actually, I believe them. And I did before they started being true to their word. But I believed them for a reason: this is just what they did with the video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. And since it's not causing me problems at the moment, it's easy for me to carry on believing them.

Plus, I like the new look and feel of Pages. I like how I get on with my writing and then if I need something, if I need some tool, I look up and find that tool just about exactly where you'd think it should be. Contrast that to Word where you have a thousand icons and have to hover over them all to see what they do.

When I started writing this to you, I didn't realise how much I wanted to say. I'd found an interesting article in the New York Times that compared Pages and Word and I wanted you to see it. So I wrote the headline “NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages”. Having now blathered on at you at this length, I've just gone to change that headline to “Me and NYT” on it. And I'm mithered over whether that now sounds as if I wrote the Times article. Sorry for any confusion there.

But still, if you haven't had enough of musings about Pages vs Word, do take a look at the New York Times article.

Hardware

Chapter 80

Snap review: Belkin Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad

I would say that this is the best Christmas present I had this year but for how I bought it myself and anyway, yesterday I was given a Doctor Who TARDIS chocolate mould. Oh, yes. I think that one is going to actually slow down my productivity for the year but in a good way. The keyboard should – no, it will – do the opposite.

It’s an iPad case with a keyboard built in. That sounds a bit like a Microsoft Surface and there were two very good things about the Surface: its name and its keyboard. I think. Certainly its name, I loved that name when they used it for the giant pool-table sized touch computers. The idea of a built-in keyboard may be better than the ones that can come with the Surface, but the idea is good.

It’s good but it’s not essential. I remember writing the first thousand words of The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) on my original iPad and typing directly onto the glass. Over the years, I wrote very many thousands of words on that glass but there did come a point when I decided to try an external Bluetooth keyboard. It meant carrying two things around but it did also mean that my typing went back up to nearer its normal speed and I enjoy typing, I’m good at typing and I feel I can only write when I’m kneading the keys. No matter how good the iPad’s onscreen keyboard is, I miss the feel of real keys and I am demonstrably faster with them.

I was a bit torn, though. Even when I’d decided I was going to get such a keyboard and I set aside a budget for it, my research couldn’t get me closer than two possibilities. I was equally sure that a Logitech one (the Ultrathin keyboard case) and Apple’s own Wireless Keyboard were right. The Apple one isn’t made for the iPad, it’s the same one you get with a new Mac unless you specify that you want a wired one so maybe it was a bit heavier than the Logitech, maybe not as handy in some ways, but I knew the typing action on it and I liked that a lot.

But the Logitech did have iPad keys like a home button to save you having to reach up to the screen. And it was also cheaper. Given my complete certainty that either would be right, I bought the cheaper one.

And I was right.

But I was so right that after Angela had seen how I’d done a whole New York and Florida trip, working away with only the iPad and that case instead of a laptop, she wanted one. And I saw my chance. I gave her the Logitech and I bought the Apple one.

And I was right again.

I did miss the iPad-specific keys and the Logitech one came in a case that doubled as a stand for the iPad where the Apple one didn’t but, man, the typing feel was great.

Here’s how attached we both got to our keyboards. When Angela was considering a bag and it was just a smidgeon too small to fit her Logitech keyboard in, I offered to swap. It was hard. I didn’t want to. But it made sense. Nuts to sense, she thought, she didn’t want to give up her keyboard for mine.

And that’s where we were until I bought my iPad Air. I still have my external Apple Wireless keyboard and she still has her Logitech one. But our original iPads both had cases that you can’t get any more (they are the original Apple heavy rubber ones) and this means I was carting my iPad Air around bare. Angela made me a gorgeous kind of pillow for it, an envelope-like padded fabric piece that I can slip the iPad Air in and out of as I need. But the old cases also had the advantage that they could stand the iPad up at an angle for you to see properly as you typed and I didn’t have that.

The iPad Air is a weird thing: on the one hand it is extremely strong and clearly very tough yet on the other, you’re afraid of breaking it. I’ve gone without cases on things before and actually I don’t like cases if I can avoid them, but I knew with the work this was going to be used for and the sheer number of hours it would be worked on everywhere I went, I had to buy a case.

I could’ve bought any case and kept on using my Apple Wireless keyboard for those times that I wanted to do a lot of writing. But in the same way that I had a burn on to try the Apple Wireless keyboard after having had the Logitech one, I wanted a case that included a keyboard.

I wanted a case that I could use to protect the iPad Air, that I could also type on a proper keyboard but which didn’t require me to take the case on and off all the time. I reckon I read and write about equally on the iPad so having to take a keyboard out of the way half the time would be as inconvenient as having to put one on the other half of the time.

That was my rationale and the start for my research. I came within a pixel of buying a Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Folio for iPad Air but fortunately the Apple Store stocks them so I was able to try one out. The keys on the keyboard are great, I’d be happy with those. But the thing is wrapped in a kind of rough rubber which feels rugged but also just feels icky to me. Getting it out constantly, holding it half the day, I didn’t want that. And it had a little flappy tab for holding your stylus. I will never have a stylus for my iPad. So that would just flap at me all the time.

It’s funny but whatever you think you’ve narrowed your search down to, there are always videos and reviews that say you’re right. Every review said this Logitech one was the keyboard case to beat – until I felt one and knew I didn’t want it. Then every review I read said actually, no, there’s this even more expensive Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad Air that was infinitely better.

I bought it.

I don’t know about infinitely better, but it’s very good and within seconds of snapping it around my iPad, I was sold. I very much like the fact that I can hold my iPad as I always did and read or watch anything, that I can do this while forgetting that it has a keyboard. And of course I then very, very much like that I can start typing away on the keys when I want to. Yes: everything you’ve read in this post has been written on that keyboard.

I don’t like the arrangement of the apostrophe, colon/semi-colon and enter keys: they’re taking me some while to get used to but otherwise, the feel is a lot like the Apple Wireless keyboard one – not as great but still good – and the speed difference it makes is marvellous.

It is Christmas and I’ve been very bad staying off OmniFocus, my To Do manager, and just bunging in tasks that I don’t then get around to doing or sorting as I normally do. So much so that my Forecast of things I had to do was showing 35 things I should’ve done. Listen, I have done about 25 of them, I’ve just not been ticking them off as done in OmniFocus. More distressingly, I’ve let the inbox build up until it had 31 tasks in. These are all the tasks that you think of as you’re racing around and you chuck in to OmniFocus to sort out later. That means doing them or figuring out when you will or just lobbing them in to projects: this one is to do with getting new work, that one’s for a Writers’ Guild event you’re producing and so on. Things you need to do that maybe you can’t do today but you need to make a note. Fine. That’s the whole point of the inbox in OmniFocus. But you’re supposed to keep that inbox clear because you’re supposed to work through your tasks and stop them clogging up the inbox, stop them clogging up your mind. And I had 31 tasks in there.

The trouble with 31 is that you look at them and think, tsch. Later. I’ll sort them out later. And you don’t, of course, so they build up more and it’s even harder to face them.

I faced them.

With my Belkin keyboard.

Somehow being able to tap on an Inbox task as I always do but then rapidly type that this one belongs in the Writers’ Guild project, that one is for the shopping list, that one needs some more information so let me just type a thousand words into that box, it all flew and I cleared that inbox in minutes.

A clear inbox is a happy mind.

And a good keyboard is a happy writer. At least, it is for me. I need to knead the keys and the ability to do it is a motive to do it. So it may be that this is the first thing I’ve written on this new keyboard, it may be that I’m still getting used to the apostrophe key and how I keep tapping Enter instead, but already I know that this is a boon and I know that I made the right choice.

That’s a good feeling. I should make more right choices. I think I like it.

UPDATE: Long term review: Belkin Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad Air

At the end of last year, I wrote a snap review of how great the Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad Air was. Now after seven months of use, it’s not so great. But what was good continues to be excellent, it’s just that the build quality is poor. As shipped, the case includes rubber protective covers over magnets in the case. Mine came off within a week or so and I complained to Belkin via their 24-hour guaranteed response support service. After a week of no reaction, I went to their twitter and Facebook pages and that got attention. Eventually, it got me a replacement keyboard.

It just took weeks.

I opened it up, snapped the iPad Air into it and began emailing them a thank you.

But.

The spacebar didn’t work.

I tell you, you know that when a company makes thousands of a device there are going to be some that are wrong. It’s a pain when you’re the one who gets a fault but it happens and the company will replace it. Sheer statistics mean it has to happen and the fact that my second one had an even worse fault was just another fluke. That’s the attitude I had when I began the social media chase again and when I got into long phone calls but by the end I was the disgruntled, annoyed and I’m embarrassed to say also rude customer that I hate being.

They wanted to know if I were sure that the space bar didn’t work. They were willing to take it into their lab and if their technicians agreed that it didn’t work, they’d get me a replacement. “If your technicians don’t agree that it doesn’t work, fire your technicians,” I said. “And I have already been without this for longer than I’ve been with it, why should I wait for you to prove what I already know?”

They promised to skip that whole step and just replace the keyboard. If they did skip it, I can’t tell because it took longer for the third keyboard to arrive.

That one had a working spacebar and the rubber protective feet lasted a fortnight. Three faults in a row means a design fault to me so I don’t see a point going back to them. I’ve continued using the keyboard and just accepted that it looks awful with bare, exposed metal.

But it’s good enough. I am disappointed that what was an expensive Christmas present for myself has proved less than satisfactory but before it all went wrong, I did recommend the keyboard to a friend and she’s happy with hers. I’m not happy with mine but I use it a lot. I’d like to enjoy using it more than I do, but.

Chapter 81

If you only buy one productivity aid this Christmas

…make it an iPad Air.

I used to think I relied on my old, original iPad but it was a toy compared to the new iPad Air. Mind you, I did give my old one to my mother about two months before the new model came out so I had a lot of time to notice how much I was missing having one. 

Understand, I knew my iPad was useful and I knew how much I used it, but I also knew how old it was. There were just things that had come along and that had come up that I couldn’t do on that original iPad. Some software required certain hardware that just wasn’t in the original iPad. So since I was having to think more about what I could and couldn’t do on it, plus Apple was a pixel away from bringing out another new one, I gave her my old iPad. And then learnt first that a pixel can be a lot longer than it sounds: it took months before Apple brought anything out.

(Quick aside? Never base a decision on when you think Apple will do something.)

During that time, the most critical thing of all was that my OmniFocus work fell off badly. Today the Mac version is so good that I tend to defer to it but the iPad one is handy and at the time this was going on, it was also the best version. Especially for reviewing all your tasks. I stopped reviewing all my tasks. 

My working life fell over completely when I gave away my iPad.

So the first thing I installed on my new iPad Air last month was OmniFocus. I swear to you that I breathed out. And I thought that would be something to tell you, I thought that would be enough to tell you, all by itself.

Except you may already know that iPad Airs have a ten-hour battery life. What I did not expect is that I would use up that battery life almost every day. The ten hours is true, actually the ten hours is conservative, but I use the iPad so much that I have had to charge it up again nearly every night. Don’t take that as a criticism of the battery, take it as a gulping assessment of how very, very much I use this machine.

Most of what you may have read on The Blank Screen blog was written on that iPad Air. I’ve written thousands of words on it in just the three or four weeks I’ve had it. 

And yesterday, Angela needed my bag as a prop for a play and that meant I couldn’t carry my iPad around with me all day. (As sturdy as it is, it’s also so light you can’t believe it’s strong so I’m looking for a case but haven’t found one I like yet.) I swear to you I got itchy. 

And that’s when I realised I am now life-support-dependent on my iPad Air. 

Have a look at them yourself. If you happened to choose to go through this Amazon link and then bought an iPad Air or maybe a car, I’d see some cash coming my way. But check it out on Apple’s own store instead: they have a lot more detail and some particularly well-made videos about the product.

Go to a real-life Apple Store too: just walk in and pick one of these up. I was working in Paris the day they came out and I tried one in a store there but wasn’t all that impressed with the apparent lightness. I was by the speed and the gorgeous display. Now that I have one, I’m very impressed with the display, the speed and the lightness too. Maybe I was wearing thick gloves that first time. I don’t know.

Email

Chapter 82

Don’t put people off with your email address

The one thing everybody can do is have a decent email address. Don’t share one with your partner, especially not if that’s really clear in the address. At best, it’s confusing because you’re both getting the emails and are bound to miss one that’s for you. But at worst, you look like you don’t use email much and today that equals you not being professional, mr-and-mrs-hullabaloo73@hotmail.com

The very best email address to have is one that ends in your own or your own company’s name, so something like @myself.com. You get those by having your own website, which you need to have anyway, and when you do, then @myself.com is an advert for myself.com every time you use it.

If you like your email service and your address, you should still at least think about leaving it if you’re on hotmail or the like. Actually, there’s a technical reason here for moving away from certain email services. If your email solely lives on the web rather than on your computer, if you can’t read your old email without an internet connection, move to somewhere that lets you.

It’s convenient to have the emails online but it’s inconvenient to have them only online. Plus, if that service closes down for any reason, you’re at best scrabbling to copy it all off and at worst you’re screwed.

But back to email address snobbery.

To be harsh about it, @hotmail.com says you’re playing at email; @outlook.com says you’re playing but you signed up too recently to get a hotmail account. Then @aol.com says you’re an occasional email user who only sticks with AOL because you’ve given that address to so many people.

If you’ve an @btinternet address then that’s okay but its an ad for BT and if the address is one of those @myself.btinernet.com then either you look sponsored or that you can’t make up your mind.

Similarly, older Apple email addresses are @mac.com which is just an ad for the company’s Macs; slightly newer ones are @me.com which is doesn’t advertise them, doesn’t advertise you and looks a bit egotistical. Currently all new Apple email users have addresses that end in @icloud.com which is fine enough: at least you look like you know what the cloud is.

But unless you’re really invested in an older address, if you can’t get @myself.com, then go for Google Mail. This @gmail.com is best because it’s short, it’s modern and it tells anyone who knows about these things that you may be a power email user. Gmail comes with a huge array of tools for managing immense numbers of emails and for something that’s easy to use and even easier to sign up for, it still has that faintly geeky air that you may or may not like.

Remember, too, that nobody says you can only have one email address. I have the one I’ll give you here for when you want to complain over my being snooty about your address. That’s wg@williamgallagher.com.

I also have a personal Apple address and I keep it because I like it, so there. But I also have any number of other addresses you like, specifically because I own williamgallagher.com. Yesterday I set up a new address for an author I’m working with to send me text. Earlier in the week I used a Groupon offer but I signed up as groupon@williamgallagher.com. If I get a sudden spike in spam and it’s all to groupon@williamgallagher.com, their mailing list policy is rumbled and I switch that address off.

So you can use your address as a tool but the one you choose to send people can reveal much more about you than you’d hope.

Chapter 83

Why and how to lie about your email address

You've done this: you've gone to a website because you fancied something there and the site required you to register before you get it. So you haver a bit but eventually figure that you want it enough that it's worth handing over your email address.

No more.

If I choose to give Tesco, say, my email address then what I'll do instead is claim that it is tesco@williamgallagher.com. You know how they always send you an email asking you to confirm your address? It works. I get that and I can reply.

Is there a need to sign in to NASA? Then I'd be nasa@williamgallagher.com. You can see a pattern here. And yes, it's because I own my domain name williamgallagher.com and yes, I can write anything. And yes, I have told a site that my address is bollocks@williamgallagher.com.

And yes, if you emailed bollocks@williamgallagher.com I would get it.

Except.

I wouldn't, actually. Anything at all @williamgallagher.com is routed out to my real email until it causes a problem. If I signed up for a shop with something like supermarket@williamgallagher.com and then, what do you know, look at that, my spam rate booms up, I'll look at the address that spam is sent to. If all the viagra adverts are going to supermarket@williamgallagher.com then, flicks a switch, that address is gone. Send anything and everything you like, it will never get through.

And that did happen with wherever it was I registered as bollocks@williamgallagher.com. So I switched that off.

All you need is your own domain name – which is great because it also means you're not tied to @hotmail or @aol or anywhere else – and the ability to fiddle with its email settings. That'll be part of your control panel wherever good domain names are sold.

One thing against all this. I have sometimes registered with a site I was certain I'd never come back to again – and I was wrong. I suppose I should change that registered address to my real one, but I can't even remember what it is because I log in to most things through 1Password or through Safari and they both pop the login details for me.

But come on, it's fun being able to look someone in the eye and say yes, my email address is dippydippygumdrops at williamgallagher.com. Wanna make something of it?

Chapter 84

The good, bad and dangerous of email signatures

Automatically putting your contact details at the end an email can be great, handy, daft, silly or even sometimes a little bit dangerous.

You want to know about the dangerous bit, don't you? And I want to tell you. I'm going to be a little circumspect because the person involved could conceivably read this and I don't to either upset her or open the story back up again.

It's like this. I'm a freelance writer, it is handy for me to give you a way to phone or email if you have some work you think I'd enjoy. So a long time ago, back in the 1990s, I used to include my mobile phone in the signature on all my emails. All my emails. That's the point, isn't it? You write this automatic block of text called a signature, you write it once, you never think about it again. I never thought about it again. Until a woman saw it – I'm going to do that anonymous name thing and call her Pentangle. No idea why.

I knew Pentangle but it had been a gigantic number of years since we'd been even in the same city, I believe, so whatever way we found each other online, I was glad and it was fun. Except I sent her a cheery email and it included my phone number as all my emails did.

She went quiet.

And after a few days emailed back saying she'd been in some turmoil about my giving her my number like that. Did I expect her to give me hers? What would her husband say? If you're reading this like it's a joke then I'm doing a bad job: she was serious and it was a big thing for her. I'm ashamed to say I joked it off: it didn't occur to me that she could really be this serious. I tell you, nobody fancies me, it just doesn't happen, I wouldn't notice or understand if it did. But something like it was happening then.

I hadn't met her since those years before, this was all innocuous email stuff and actually I didn’t meet her during this time. To this day I have yet to meet her again. But it spiralled off into her consulting her minister for advice about what to do, it went to late night phone calls from her, it went to my being CCd on emails about me that she'd sent to her friends.

It only stopped when she went in to hospital to be treated for some mental health issues. I don't know what, I didn't really dare ask her for fear of exacerbating whatever was happening, and it's now a long time since I heard from her. I often think of her and hope she's okay, but.

So that took longer to tell you than I expected. Sorry about that. Let me skip straight to the happier, sillier, dafter end of things. There is a tremendous spoof of legal email signatures written by the site McSweeney's which includes the line:

“This disclaimer is not unlike the ceaseless blaring of a distant car alarm—a once-sincere warning that has evolved into an unpleasant nuisance, rendered meaningless by its own ubiquity. This disclaimer exists in a country where the demand for legal services is substantial enough to provide gainful employment for more than one million lawyers, virtually all of whom make liberal use of disclaimers purporting to protect themselves from the very litigiousness that pays their bills. You do the math.”

Yet you and I probably don’t have a need for legalese and could argue that we do have a need for certain people to have our phone numbers. You want them to. And you can say that to them in one email, you could tell them, but nobody remembers which email you mentioned your number in. So whacking it at the end of them all, could genuinely be useful.

The issue is not the usefulness, it's not the bit about it being at the end of your email, it's the word 'all'. That's where this goes so very badly wrong.

So right now, I have no signature at all. Not one. Not a pixel. I've certainly deleted the “Sent from my iPad” and not just because I was emailing someone who believed I was working for them on the Mac in my office. Instead, most emails I send out get no signature – and all the ones that could use one, do.

I do it through TextExpander from Smile Software. When I'm at my Mac and I'm emailing you, if any part of the back of my head thinks you could use my contact details, I type “;sigw” (without the quote marks) and, wallop, it's all there. An entire signature with contact details and a couple of links. That's my work signature; I intended to do a “;sigp” with my personal signature, but I've never bothered.

It's great on my Mac because even though I type very quickly, that just means I've rattled off “;sigw” at lightspeed and the rest of the text is there within a beat. It's not so good on my iPad and iPhone: there is a TextExpander for iOS but it can't insert itself into Mail in the same way. If I'm that fussed, I will go to the TextExpander app, type “;sigw” and copy-and-paste it into the email but generally I don't tend to be that fussed.

But I am fussed enough, especially on my Mac, that I do this TextExpander lark a lot – and it has paid off as an email to one person gets forward to another and suddenly I'm getting work from strangers.

Chapter 85

How to email the person you want

Be careful with this. People who keep their email addresses quiet usually do so because otherwise they get writers like us bombarding them. But if you and I are the only ones who figure out their addresses, we’re not a bombard.

Nonetheless, use this when you are sure it is your best way to reach someone. Also, it won’t always work. And, last cautious bit, this is how to find their address: it isn’t what you should say to them.

Are you still here?

Right, do this.

You’re looking for Alan Phabet and you know he works at Dewey Decimal Ltd.

Google up the company’s website and go there. Look for Alan’s email address as, afterall, if it’s there, your job is done. Most likely the only email address you’ll see is a generic enquiries@deweydecimal.com. That will be the one they push in front of you. If they have the company phone number, ring them and ask for Alan’s email address.

Again, if that works, job done. Assuming it doesn’t, though, go back online and google exactly this, including the quote marks:

“@deweydecimal.com” at www.deweydecimal.com

That searches for every email address listed anywhere on that particular site. Yet again, if you find his address, your work here is done.

Most likely, you will get a few different addresses and none will be the one you need. But you’ll see that Noreen Umber’s email is number@deweydecimal.com, for instance, and Edward Xavier Cel’s is excel@deweydecimal.com. If I saw that, I’d take a shot at Alan Phabet’s address being alphabet@deweydecimal.com.

It might not be, though. Maybe you will have to try it and hope, but you can check it out a little bit more. Go back to Google and this time search thisaway, again including the quote marks:

“alphabet@deweydecimal.com”

That searches the entire web for that email address and sometimes, there it is. Alan’s written extensively in some professional journal and he’s given his email address because he wants those readers to contact him.

Professional journals or anything like that can be useful in this stuff. LinkedIn is surprisingly good too: you’re meant to use that service to find who you have in common and get them to introduce you but sometimes you also get a lot of detail from a straight search.

I’ll not say this all depends on luck because it’s really about how you and the person you’re trying to reach works. But if you are very unlucky and the sole thing you can find is that tedious enquiries@deweydecimal.com, there are still two things you can do.

I’d say the first thing is to phone the company back and this time ask to speak to Alan Phabet. Be ready to make your pitch, whatever it is, in case you do get him. But more often, you’ll get an assistant. Pitch to them, if it feels like they’re willing to spend a moment with you. Ask them for Alan’s address. They might give you their own address in which case email them immediately with thanks and your pitch for Alan.

And last, if they won’t give you any address or if whoever answers the phone won’t put you through, go back to the website and that tedious enquiries address. You never know, it might work for you.

One quick side tip: when you’re first checking out a company’s website, if you find a newsletter or anything where you can sign up to be notified of things, sign up immediately. I had a thing where I did that and when I phoned the company a moment later, the producer said something like “Oh, hello” – because she’d just been reading to see who this guy was who had signed up on her site. By the time I rang, she was on my website and that was like she was pitching me to herself.

Chapter 86

Email your To Do tasks right into OmniFocus

I can’t keep telling you that I am obsessed with OmniFocus and then go away. Equally, I can’t ram a thousand enthusiasms down your throat. So let me compromise by giving you one reason, just one, that OmniFocus works for me.

Emailing tasks. 

There’s a feature called Mail Drop and it is extremely simple yet transformative. Do I mean the word ‘yet’? Maybe it’s so useful, maybe it became so instantly part of my work specifically because it is simple.

I’m a writer so I spend a huge amount of time at the keyboard and easily the majority of things I have to deal with come via email. So I’ll read the email and if I can deal with it right then, I’ll deal with it right then. Otherwise, I forward it. 

To my secret OmniFocus email address.

I’ll tap or click the forward button, Mail will auto-complete the address as soon as I type the first couple of letters, and then wallop, sent.

And then the next time I look in my OmniFocus To Do list, there it is. The task is the subject heading of the email – so I might well change that to something more specific either when I’m forwarding it or now as I poke about in OmniFocus – and the body of the email is a note within the task.

Many, many times I will get one email that has several tasks in it. Highlight one of them, tap forward and Mail creates a new message that has only that text in it. Then whack it off to OmniFocus. Go back to the original email, highlight the next bit, whack and wallop.

You could also set rules to do this automatically: any email from your biggest client gets routed straight into OmniFocus for you. I have never once tried this. But you could.

What I have done very often is email in to OmniFocus from wherever I am. OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear but if you’re at a PC or you’re on someone’s Android phone and need to note down a task, email it to your secret address.

Last, if I’ve got an email where I need to reply right now saying I’m on the case, leave it with me, I will add my OmniFocus address to the BCC line. So with one email, my recipient gets his or her reply and I have that task in my ToDo list. 

Mind you, once I forgot to BCC it and the secret address showed up in the email I sent someone. Next time I went in to OmniFocus, there was a task waiting: “Pay Jason the £1 million you owe him”.

Harrumph.

I can’t remember a time when Mail drop wasn’t a feature in OmniFocus or when I wasn’t using it. I don’t just mean that as a way of saying cor, it’s great, it’s indispensable. I do think that, although I wish it could do more, but I also mean it literally: I’ve not a clue when I started using it. Which is a huge shame because if you can be bothered to poke about a bit, OmniFocus will tell you how much you use the feature.

I just went to check for you and it says: “Used 1801 times, most recently 11 hours ago”.

And the very big surprise for me is that it’s a whole eleven hours since I last used it.

Chapter 87

Email hacks – create a temporary group in OS X Mail

File this under I Needed To Know But Couldn’t Find It On the Internet. I actually had to work it out myself, can you believe that? What is this, the Stone Age?

My problem was that I now have to regularly email the same group of about 25 people, a good dozen or more of whom are not in my address book. I’m not intentionally being rude to them: most are people who I solely need to email about this particular thing. Plus, OS X Mail remembers who you’ve emailed before, whether or not they’re in your address book and that is remarkably confusing. I’ve just been slogging through this now and discovered the strangest people are not in my address book: people I email often, people I like enormously, they ain’t in there.

They are now.

Side tip: in Mail, choose the Window menu and the entry for Previous Recipients. You get a long list. A long list. But if somebody is in your book, you get a little contact-card-like icon next to their name. And if they aren’t, you don’t. Click on the first one who isn’t there then option-click on each other one you want. Thump the Add to Contacts button and you’re done.

But with my group, I don’t actually know that many of them. Certainly not enough that I could glance down that list and know who was in the group, who isn’t. So I thought I was faced with adding each one separately and then collecting them into a group.

I was. Except I had a Damascus moment: I’ve got TextExpander.

So this is what I did – and I apologise for how geeky it sounds, I promise that it took seconds.

1) Found the last email to the group

2) Hit Reply to All

3) Selected all the names in the To: field and dragged the lot into the body of the message. They turned from the familiar blue-button names into names plus email addresses. They looked like this: “William Gallagher <wg@williamgallagher.com>” except with twenty-five more of them, all in one massive lump with commas between them.

4) Copy and paste into Word.

5) Search and replace “>, ” (the closing bracket, comma and space that is at the end of every address) and replace with “^p” (Word’s code for a paragraph)

6) Set a tab halfway across the page.

7) Search and replace ” <” (the space and opening bracket that is at the start of every address) and replace with “^t” (Word’s code for a tab)

8) That got me what looks like two columns: the first with people’s real names, i.e. “William Gallagher” and the second with their addresses, “wg@williamgallagher.com”

9) Option drag to select the column of names and the white space over to the start of the addresses.

10) Delete.

11) I was left with one column of addresses.

12) Search for “^p” and replace with “, ” (comma, space)

13) That got me back to one massive block of text that was every email address separated by a comma. Select and copy the lot

14) Open TextExpander and create a new snippet, a piece of text I want to use often. Paste my massive block of addresses and commas in to that and set a short key combination for the lot

So now whenever I’m writing an email message, I can type “;group” (with the semicolon but without the quote marks) and the To: field is filled out with all of these nice people.

Now, truly, if you read out the above at the standard speaking speed of three words per second, it would take you a minute and forty seconds. I’ve just worked through the instructions again to check and the whole shebang took me… oh… a minute and 35 seconds. Okay. That was rubbish.

But next time I want to email this group, it will take me a seventh of a second. No searching for the last one, no adding some from the address book, some not, just “;group” and wallop.

There is the downside that the people who weren’t in my address book still aren’t in my address book. As I talk with any of them individually, I’ll have to remember to add them. And I could have continued to just find the last email and Reply to All. I definitely could’ve done that and I have done for a month or more now. But each time I do it, I have to check the list because some people have asked to be taken off the group. Now I can forget that and just email everyone in one go. If anyone new asks to come off the list, it’s a moment’s work to edit the TextExpander snippet.

No, face it, William, this was a five-pound hammer for a one-cent problem. But it’s done now, get off my back.

If you’re a Mac user, do take a look at TextExpander: as much as I actually enjoy typing, it frees me to do the typing I like. The official site is here. If you’re on a PC, there’s a similar thing called PhraseExpress though I haven’t used it myself.

Exploit that expensive computer

Chapter 88

Quick productivity tip – don’t search for questions

Speaking with someone who is new to computers and especially to Google, it seems people believe the search engine answers questions. What it really does is search. Specifically, if you type a question in to Google it is going to search for anywhere on the web that has that question. The difference between these two can be so small as to be semantics except sometimes it's a huge difference.

It’s also changing. Google now does try to answer questions and there is a tremendously powerful website and app called Wolfram Alpha that is strong on this stuff.

But still, most people, sitting in front of most computers, typing in to Google, they expect that it understands the question and that it answers it. Whereas if you asked Google “Who is the Prime Minister of the UK?” it would start by looking for pages that had that exact question in – so you're likely to first see lots of people on discussion boards or political websites asking this. Not necessarily answering it, either.

Whereas, if you searched instead for the answer, Google would look for pages that had the answer. Follow: search for the words “The Prime Minister of the UK is…” and you'll get every article that includes this sentence.

It is often better to search for the answer than to unknowingly be searching for the question because it is always more useful and sometimes it is gigantically more likely to get you what you want.

Mind you, be careful. If you start typing something like “The Prime Minister of the UK is….” into Google, it might autocompete your search with some choice words. I’m just saying.

Chapter 89

Stop visiting websites. Make them come to you

It genuinely astonishes me how many people haven't even heard of RSS. If you have then I've got nothing for you: move along. But if you haven't heard of it before, you have now and I want to evangelise you into trying it yourself.

This is what happens when you try it, this is what I do every day. Sometimes many dozens of times a day. Waiting for the kettle. Standing in a queue. Taking a break from work. I'll just read the news on my iPhone or my iPad or my Mac, whichever is in front of me at that moment. And whatever news has broken since I last looked. There are websites I read every single article on yet rarely go to. There are others whose headlines I read every day and often then go to in order to read the full article.

It definitely means I read more websites than many people, but I don't take any longer doing it.

To do this, you need an RSS newsreader. There are eleventy-billion newsreaders in the world and there are ones for PCs, Macs, iOS and I presume also Linux and Android. Windows, OS X, anything. Everything. There are free ones aplenty but I bought one called Reeder 2 for iPhone/iPad which cost me a whole £2.99. I would be surprised if I haven't read a million words in that app.

But just Google “RSS” and your computer or phone of choice and take your pick.

Then go to a website you like and look for the RSS button. It's that orange one with white stripes like radiating waves and it's often the orange one that says RSS next to it. Click on that and you'll either wallop off automatically to your RSS newsreader with the site just waiting for you to say yes, add this one forever – or you'll get a new webpage. Copy the link, open that in your RSS reader, say yes, add this one forever, and you're done.

RSS isn't the friendliest concept: you understand it but some sites make it hard to find and then offer you options you're not interested in. If you're given a choice of RSS links, one will be called Atom and one will be called RSS. I truly have not one single clue what Atom is: I've never tried it.

And I have tried a lot of sites. Since I don’t tend to get around to ditching any, Reeder tells me I currently read something like 300 sites.

Two quick things. You'll notice I've now said RSS umpteen times and not told you what it stands for. I think it's like DVD; you know what it is and you watch a billion DVDs but you may not know that it stands for Digital Versatile Disc (or was going to stand for Digital Video Disc originally). RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Exciting.

Second, there is a Mac version of Reeder that I use a lot too. Can’t get me enough of that there news. 

That's it, carry on. And see you in my RSS feed. I've got two. Oh, yes. Two. Get me. Actually, yes, get me: my personal Self Distract blog has an RSS feed at http://williamgallagher.com/selfdistract/feed and The Blank Screen is on http://williamgallagher.com/feed

Chapter 90

Minimise support delays

This is not the way it should be, but it is the way it is. So far this year I have had three issues with companies where things weren't done or went wrong and each time the solution has been the same. Bollocks to their own support systems.

Use them, sure. If you can find a customer support email on the site – and well done if you do, they are always hidden – then send them a message and start a clock. Each of the three I had problems with claimed some quick turnaround; I think two of them promised 24-hours and in one case I was specifically paying to get that speed.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't work. If they say 24 hours, leave them for a day and get on with anything else you can do. Then on hour 25, hit social media. Obviously you're always going to be polite but actually, there is such a thing as weaponised politeness. If you're a nutter in twitter, nobody notices and nobody cares. But if you're calm, rational and stating how a firm has failed, that gets you support immediately.

Seriously, immediately.

I was doing this across twitter, Facebook and Google Plus for one recent issue and before I'd finished, I had direct messages from support teams. Two of them.

One of the cases is still ongoing and as much as I understand that problems happen, this one enrages me because it is entirely the firm's mistake and they've accepted that. But I'm still having to pursue it.

Still, I have got human contact there now because I went public. And the other two issues from another two firms are resolved.

So while your instinct and assumption and normal reaction is to contact a firm's support, don't see it as a reasonable thing to do and definitely don't assume it will work. Instead, the email to the firm's support is step one and you are going to be taking step two in public.

It's tedious and it's aggravating and it is a waste of time, but as long as you know it's the way things have to go, you can schedule it and hopefully get on with something else. You've had the support email where they say they're escalating your problem: that's all you're doing too. They get their shot at fixing it privately, then you escalate it through social media.

I don't like this, I loathe complaining about things that I know are just happenstance but since they're happenstancing to me and they have to get sorted, I now have to be the one to get them sorted. And the way to do that is as quickly and thoroughly and widely as possible.

I wanted to say this to you because the third of these businesses is making me eat my desk in madness and I need to know I’m not alone.

Chapter 91

Tweet in your sleep

This came up at a couple of recent The Blank Screen workshops: how to send tweets or Facebook messages when you’re not around. Both times it came up, it was evil people who’d just learnt I start work at 5am and they wanted to send me a tweet to check. But weren’t so keen or so evil that they wanted to be up at that hour to do it to me.

If you have nicer reasons to do it, try one of these two possibilities:

HootSuite

Free for personal use

Log in once to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and/or Foursquare and write a message for it to send to any or all of them whenever you tell it to.

Buffer

A free iOS app and a free website. It doesn’t have Foursquare, so far as I can tell, but does the others easily and reliably.

I use Buffer for my personal Self Distract blogs that I write and publish on Friday mornings. The first tweet is live but then I always intend to send another one around lunchtime. And then that evening. And a last one the following Monday. Buffer lets me write the lot one after another and know that it is being sent for me at the time I say.

I do this because I regularly forget to send the tweets live. Now I regularly forget that they are going to be sent live and I suddenly get a unexpected notifications of retweets from the various tweets Buffer has sent for me.

Chapter 92

Zipping files doesn’t do what you think

Yes, if you zip a file, you are compressing it. You are making it smaller for emailing to someone. So far, what you think is right.

But zipping does absolutely nothing – at least nothing useful – if what you’re sending is a JPEG image or an MP3 file. Because those are already compressed. If they could be compressed further, they would’ve been.

What you’re doing by zipping an image or a MP3 audio is making it tougher for the recipient to open. I just had a thing where I had to unpick why an audio file wouldn’t play on an iPhone: it was because it was sent zipped. All zipping did was make the audio unplayable until I’d unzipped it and resent.

So you are always better off sending JPEG images and MP3 files unzipped.

But.

There is one specific situation when you should zip anyway.

It’s when you’re sending many files to someone at once. Zipping produces one file and it does so regardless of how many things you’re trying to send. So, for instance, I just delivered 40 images to a client and did so by sending them one zip file containing the lot.

They get one file and it has everything.

Now, what I actually sent them was a Dropbox link to the zip file, I didn’t try to send 100Mb of zip to them over email. But the zipping part was the same.

So.

Zip to compress files like word processor documents and zip to gather up lots of files into one.

But don’t zip a JPEG or an MP3 because that’s just a chore.

Chapter 93

¿ Best calendar tip ever ?

You noticed that headline, didn’t you? It’s because of that ¿ and how remarkably it stands out. Except possibly on certain Kindle devices in which case, sorry, the weird symbol you can’t see is a Spanish-style upside down question mark. But if you can see it, you can use it and it’s remarkably useful in calendars.

I have more and more events or meetings to go to and it’s rare that I know immediately when they’re on. If it’s that the meeting will be ‘in a few weeks’ or ‘early in June’ then I’ll put a To Do reminder in OmniFocus to find out and confirm the date then. But the most often thing is that I’ll either offer or be offered a particular date and time and it has to be confirmed later.

You can’t risk agreeing to a date and then double-booking yourself but where possible you also don’t want to block out some time that may not be used. So I’ll use a ¿ at the start of the name.

I did this just now: went to Fantastical, tapped the + sign to add a new event and typed this: “¿ Yasmin tea 1-4pm tomorrow at Yorks Bakery”. There are two elements there: I know the range of times I can get to a meeting with Yasmin, I’m waiting to see if she can do any of those. So that’s why it’s “1-4pm”. But the key thing is that ¿ because, wow, it stands out.

¿ Yasmin tea 1-4pm at Yorks Bakery

See? You can’t miss that.

If you’re on an iPad or iPhone then the ¿ is on the standard keyboard: just press and hold on the regular ? key to get it. (I use a Belkin external keyboard on my iPad and on that I need to press Alt/option and ?.) On a Mac it’s Alt-Shift-? and if you’re on a PC, hold down the Alt Gr key (to the right of the spacebar) and on the keypad type the number 168.

This idea is stolen, by the way. I believe I got it from David Sparks and Katie Floyd on MacPowerUsers who I believe may have got it from Merlin Mann. Now you’ve got it too.

Chapter 94

How to add Facebook events to your normal calendar

Facebook is all about sharing – until you want to go outside its walled garden. It is a right bugger trying to get anything out of the Facebook app and into anything else and nowhere is this more ragingly painful than with events.

If I get a notification on Facebook that someone has invited me to an event, sometimes I will avoid reading it until I know I can do something about it. Until I know that I will be able to check my calendar and know whether I'm free. Until I know for certain that I can make the decision and say yes right away, I will sometimes come off Facebook rather than do it or lose the notification.

And other times I just say bollocks to it all, I don't know if I can go so I'm going to say I'm not going.

It is possible to link Facebook to your regular calendar. That's certainly true on a Mac or iOS where Facebook is baked into the operating system, I'm sure it must be easily possible on PCs and Windows too.

I will never know.

Not because I won't bother to try it on a PC but because I will not do it on anything. Most especially not on my Mac.

Because that setting links your calendar and your contacts: every bleedin' Facebook person you know is then automatically added to your phone book. There are people on Facebook I can't even remember adding as friends and my Contacts book is long enough already. I'm not doing that.

Now, because I won't do that – you try undoing the addition of hundreds of people to your phone book – I can't test out what happens with calendars. It seems highly, highly likely to me that if you give Facebook the keys to your calendar, it will use them. It will add every Facebook event to your calendar.

But have you seen every Facebook event? Tonight I decided to sort this out for good and in doing so poked around a lot. I saw my complete list of Facebook events and there are dozens upon dozens of which I am going to one. And of which I had heard of two. Dear god in heaven, keep Facebook away from my calendar.

So.

I did this so you don't have to: I worked through how to tease a single event out of Facebook. I was invited to something, I fancied going but wasn't sure I could make it, so I got it out of Facebook and I added it to my calendar. I did so prefixing it with ¿ (just as I recommended here) and I'll look at later at whether I can make it. I'll look later because I can. Because it's in my calendar and I chose to put it there.

It's a measure of how frustratingly locked down Facebook is that this feels like a victory. And a defeat that I could only pull this off on a computer, I could not prise it out of the iPhone or iPad Facebook apps.

So on your computer, here's how to do it.

1) Go to the Events page on a web browser, not the Facebook app.

2) Find the event, click or tap to go into it

3) Look for the … option toward the top and click that

4) Choose Export Event

5) Choose Send to Email

There may be several email addresses available to you there in a drop-down menu: choose a real, non-Facebook address.

You'll get a calendar invitation file, a .ics, in your email. Click on that and you'll see more details than you ever care to know (like the list of everybody who's said they're going) but also an option to add it to your calendar.

Does that sound like a faff? Imagine figuring it out like you're searching for an Easter Egg in a game. That was me tonight. Also, update, the very next time I had an event invitation I wanted to go to, I had to go find this article and read up on what I said. Memorable, much?

It's a waste of time, having to get an emailed .ics before you can do anything about it, but at least it works.

Chapter 95

Tag. You’re it

In the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, you would save a document and never find it again. I used to spend a lot of time split between PCs and Macs and regularly I would struggle to understand where something had been saved. (Especially with downloads: where the hell d they go?) More recently, we've had Spotlight on Macs and Windows Something on Windows 7 that mean you can find anything you like pretty instantly.

I know the Spotlight stuff the best: I regularly use it to search for, say, the word “invoice” and tell it that I want to see only Word documents created between April 2012 and March 2013.Wallop, there they all are.

That one feature, which so many people simply do not know is right there on their 'puters, has undone two decades of how I work. And it's undone it for the better. I no longer spend time creating chains of folders so that I can find, say, all Acme invoices done for copywriting in February 2013. I just save all my invoices in one place and they're waiting for me. If I want a particular one, Spotlight finds it. If I need to compile something about them all, I just open that one folder.

I think that's probably saved me a gigantic amount of time and effort. So much so that I'm very glad I listened when I was told about it, I'm certain that I have no need for any other solution – but I am also willing to listen again if you've got something better.

And people are saying they have something better. Hand on heart, I do not know if it’s better or not. And I have ignored it for years. But now this thing is built in to the OS X that I use most days and it's right there. Doesn't make me use it. Doesn't require me to do anything. I can continue ignoring it. But it looks at me. It looks. Like that, that's what it looks like. And all the time I'm hearing people talk about how great this thing is. They say it's so great that it is about bleedin' time that Apple added it.

It is tags.

If I save that Acme invoice, I already have a habit now of calling it by a fairly descriptive name so that I can see what it is right away whenever I open the invoices folder. I stole this idea from David Sparks and his extremely good Paperless book wherein I learnt to name files like this: “2014-01-10 Acme invoice 0001”. (To just nip off the subject of tags for a second, because this has proved so useful, Sparks also recommends using TextExpander to put that date in. So I go to save and instead of checking the date, I type the letters “;d” with the semi-colon and without the quote marks, and TextExpander pops in today's date for me. If, as usual, I'm playing catch up, I will then change that date but it's still faster. Now, carry on.)

So I've got Spotlight, I've got this descriptive filenaming system which without my doing anything is always sorted into date order. I don't know that I need anything else.

But still there are tags.

If I save my invoice “2014-01-10 Acme invoice 0001”“ then before I hit the actual Save button, I can type in some tags. I can type a row of words like invoice, Acme, copywriting, difficult client, bad day, don't do this again, paid really well, used the word purple, invoiced, not paid yet. And on and on and on. I can type these, they are tags, and so far I have never done it.

Except I guess that's a lie. Tags are new to OS X Mavericks – they're already in Windows, at least since Vista, and that would be great except I read Microsoft's advice on how to use tags and I glaze myself over – but they've been in other things. There are tags in Evernote. And I have used them there.

Just inconsistently.

Hang on. Let me check. How do you check how many tags you've used in Evernote?

Apparently it's 316.

I truly do not remember typing more than one. I remember typing 'recipe'. And I remember that because I spent some time thinking, have I already typed 'recipes'? It turns out I had. So now I have two and I don't know which to use when I search for a recipe. Instead, I just go to my Food notebook or I use Evernote Food. Or I use Paprika, an entirely different recipe app altogether. ("An entirely different recipe app.”)

I told you I don't know. Hand on heart, I said. Are tags any use to me? If they're not, why have I written 316 of them in Evernote? If they are, why have written zero in OS X?

I can tell you one reason for that: if you create a tag in OS X Mavericks then every folder you open includes that tag in a list on the side. Brilliant: tap or click on that tag and you only see the files that have it. Tap or click on several tags and you'll see all those files that have both. So with a couple of clicks I could see all invoices sent to the bad client who pays well. But I have 316 tags in Evernote, if I did that in OS X Mavericks, how long would the list of them be? It would be 316 long and by the time I've scrolled through, I could've found the documents.

Oh.

Consider this a live blog.

Because right now, this moment, exactly as I reached for an example to tell you and then wrote it out, I've just changed my mind.

I do think having 316 tags listed out on the screen is ugly and a chore to read through, but I do suddenly see that being able to pick out invoices from a bad client who pays well is something that I would like. And it is something I would use.

I may have to look into tags a bit more, then. I was telling you all this by way of showing that time spent knowing how you can find things on your computer will help you save a lot more time later. And recently I seem to have been in many conversations with fellow writers who complain they can't find anything. But now I'm thinking I should spend that time myself to understand more about tags.

Thanks.

Also, I was telling you this in order to then point you at someone who knows what they're talking about or at least doesn't write to you until they know what they're talking about. That won't catch on. But here's a particularly interesting take on it all from Lifehacker: I've Been Using Tags All Wrong.

Chapter 96

My future is here. Your mileage may vary

First, dictation and voice control of computers and iPads and everything seemed to be something from science fiction films. No, not seemed: they were from science fiction films and nothing like that happened in the real world. Then the future came to our PCs and Macs and dictation could do anything. Except it couldn't do anything. Not a thing. Voice dictation was rubbish and it never, ever worked the way it said it would on the box. That box, by the way, could be equally the software box the things used to coming or the telly in the corner. They both claimed the world, they both lied.

Perhaps that just put me off for a long time but I really think it was also the fact that were voice dictation to work it would mean dictating by your voice. That sounds sensible, but I'm a writer and I don't have to be sensible. I like writing. I like using keyboards. I actually love typing.

So the knowledge that it just simply never worked coupled to the fact that I just simply never wanted voice control, meant I would’ve sworn to you that I’ve ignored it all.

Until last night when my wife Angela accused me of having entire conversations with Siri on my iPhone. The thing is, she's right. I do. There are regular things I do with Siri that have taken over the way I used to do things. It's quicker now to search something online by Siri than it is to type into Google, for example. I can no longer find any of the weather apps I've downloaded to the phone because it's become just so much quicker to ask Siri. “What's the temperature?” – that's been a very common thing for me to ask recently as it got very cold. “Is it going to rain?” is another regular. In the end, that is actually pretty much all I ever need to know about the weather. So it's Siri in, apps out.

Then today I had a thing where I was driving and an email came in from a friend. An email I had been waiting for, an email I'd been hoping to get. I asked Siri to read it. That was new and it was good. It wasn't like having my friend in the car but it was like having a conversation.

There was a problem, though. There appears to be a limit on how much Siri will read of your email. It seemed to read about a third to maybe half of a fairly short email. Unless my friend was sending me cliffhangers.

And now I'm finding another problem: it will only let me dictate a certain amount of text at one time. Because, yes, I think you guessed this already, this entire piece has been dictated through Siri. I do and I don't like it. I'm finding I have to compose an entire sentence in my head before I actually say it. I'm more used to exploring on the keyboard, letting my fingers find the words and then if necessary just deleting. So my flow is different and I think you see that in the writing style: I'm a little bit more staccato, maybe a little bit longer. And I can see that the paragraph structure is different.

It's easy enough to get a new paragraph when you want one but still I find my thought processes are different and I the writing looks like it’s by a different person. Only a writer would care about that but I'm a writer, I care about that.

I think I'm less of a non-fan then I was before. Put it that way. I'm feeling a bit grotty today and being able to say this instead of type it has unexpectedly proved a boom. Thank you for being a test subject as I write to you.

The thing is, it seems to work. I like Siri, I know many people don't, and I do find Siri seems to have good and bad days for no apparent reason. But it's an amazing piece of technology. I am regularly astonished by what it gets correctly when I'm speaking just as much as I am occasionally bemused by what it gets wrong.

I need the keys. I actually need to knead the keys as I write. What this is telling me is that I think I crossed a line, I've crossed a little hurdle, where I now actually accept that voice control and dictation is possible and it does work. If nothing else, I'm going to be happier continuing to have conversations with Siri.

And in fact, as I said that last paragraph, a text came in from Angela and I told Siri yes I wanted to reply. This is becoming science fiction. I am becoming used to controlling my iPads and iPhones with Siri. Part of me still doesn't believe it. But, wow.

I don't think that it will make me more productive, necessarily, at least not yet. But the combination of being able to speak one thing while typing another, that would. That has, actually. Now I think of it, I remember a time quite recently on my Mac when I was so busy typing I couldn't add add something into my calendar so I told Siri on my iPhone to do it instead. That meant it automatically came to my Mac as well. This is the kind of voice control or dictation that would make me faster, would make me more productive, and yet let me keep doing the thing I like doing most: writing on a keyboard.

At long last, wow.

Chapter 97

Go Fucking Do It

What it is this, Nike on a bad day? Go Fucking Do It is a new productivity – well, I don’t know what to call it. There’s definitely a website but it’s more an ethos. More a gorgeous slice of wickedness. Sign up to this and state what you’re going to do: you’ll write that book, you’ll run this marathon – and then you put a price on it. A forfeit.

Here’s a real example:

I will surprise my girlfriend every day or pay $100

That’s live on the site right now, as are these:

I will run a marathon or pay $50

I will organise my life or pay $50

The key thing, is where the money goes if you fail to do what you vow and instead have to pay up. There is a debate going on about this but I am fully in favour of the cash going to the people who run the website. Some argue that it should go to a charity but that’s nice and this is about making you do your task. If you fail knowing Macmillan Cancer Research is going to get your money, you’re far more likely to fail than you are if it goes to some stranger running a website somewhere.

Despite the ongoing debate,  currently 153 people have gone ahead and registered. They have pledge-vowed a total of $14,718

And it is a great idea with one massive flaw.

The people who are signing up for it don’t appear to be as smart as the website owners.

Take those three examples above.

I will organise my life

When? How exactly will your life be organised? If it’s by buying The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) today, you go right ahead.

I will run a marathon

When?

I will surprise my girlfriend every day

Really? Every day? How long before the surprise is that there is no surprise? Who adjudicates over whether she is actually surprised or not? If you get married, do you have to find a new girlfriend to surprise?

The principle of having to pay money if you fail is like my own Brutal £1 Pot Trick where I made myself get up at 5am by rewarding myself with a pound coin – and throwing away all the pound coins so far if I failed. I never failed.

Take a look at the Go Fucking Do It website to see what you think and if you want to despair about humanity, go check out that debate about where the money should go.

Chapter 98

Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

I’m a very visual kind of man but, awkwardly, what I visualise is text. I can see words. If you and I are talking, I can choose to see your words as text. Squint a bit and there it is, word by word, white text on a black background, right in front of my eyes. It’s great for transcriptions. But text is so much a par of me and I am so much a writer through and through that I have ignored other visual ways of looking at detail. Okay, maybe I can see scenes visually when I’m reading or writing a script, but when faced with a problem, I used to always just think it through. More recently, I’ve written it down and thought it through.

But then last week, I had a meeting that was intentionally nebulous. It was clearly a chance to pitch something, but I didn’t know what and I was fairly sure that there were no specifics behind the invitation either. It would be up to me and what I could bring to the meeting.

And I mind-mapped it.

Slapped down everything I could think of that even considered crossing my mind in the week before the meeting. I used MindNode for iPad (£6.99 UK, $9.99 US) so it was with me wherever I went and by the morning of the meeting, I had a completely useless mess. But it was a big mess. Lots of things on it. And I started dragging bits around. This stuff sorta, kinda belonged with those bits over there. This one was daft. That one was actually part of my shopping list and I’d just put it in the wrong app.

And then I’d find one that ignited another small idea so I’d add that.

After a bit of adding and subtracting and moving around, I had three or four solid blocks of ideas that were related. I exported the lot from MindNode to OmniOutliner for iPad (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US) which picked it all up and showed it to me as a hierarchy of text lines instead of a visual bubble of blogs. I work better with text, I may have mentioned this, so that was perfect for me.

Nearly perfect. I really wanted to then hand the lot on from OmniOutliner to OmniFocus, my To Do manager, (iPad £27.99 UK, $39.99 US). I wanted to be able to tick off the ideas as I got through them in the meeting. I wasn’t able to do that on the iPad; I suspect that it’s something that needs me to use OmniOutliner on my Mac (from £34.99 UK, from $49.99 US). I’ve got that and I use it ever increasingly more, but I wasn’t at my office.

So instead I stayed with the text in OmniOutliner. Made some more changes and additions, moved some more things around. And then I worked from that list in the meeting and it went really, really well.

The whole process went well: the mind mapping on to the meeting itself. Enough so that afterwards I tried mind mapping again, this time to figure out what I’m doing with everything, not just this one meeting. I’m still working on it. But it’s proving useful. And while I can’t show you the meeting mind map as it’s naturally confidential, and I obviously can’t show you this new mind map of everything so you’ll just need to trust me. But one little coastline of this mind map ended in the words “Compile best 100 articles from The Blank Screen into a new book” so, see, it works.

Chapter 99

It’s not enough to have all your work with you

It has to really be with you and you need to know what it all is.

Follow. Earlier this week, I did a trio of writing workshops at a university and I think it went great: I had a tremendous time. (Quick aside? It was all for school kids who were being shown the university and I learnt afterwards that as well as the main schools I’d been told were coming, there was a small contingent from my own old one. I found out far too late to ask who was from there so it is a little bit freaky. I have this week taught Year 10 kids from my own school and I don’t know who they were.)

After all that was done, though, there was a presentation and if there had been enough time, each of us writers working there that day could’ve performed a piece of their work. I usually write books and scripts, things far too long to rattle off in a couple of minutes. But while Cat Weatherill told a story and Alan Kurly McGeachie recited a poem with verve and gusto, I searched my iPad.

I’d been asked during the presentation if I had something I could read and I did say yes.

But.

There was no internet reception in that hall.

So even though I could see some items in Evernote, I couldn’t open them. (If you are a Premium Evernote user, if you pay a subscription instead of only using the free version, then you can choose to make a notebook and all its contents be permanently available on your device. But you have to be connected to the internet when you say that because otherwise how is it going to download all that stuff to your device?) I found the start of a novel in Pages. It’s a bit violent but I reckoned it worked. I found a short story called Elite Death Squirrels which fit a lot of the things I’d been talking about with the kids all day.

But both were pretty long, even the excerpt from the novel was just too long. So with time pressing, I didn’t get to perform.

I would’ve liked to. But what narks me is that I wasn’t able to provide what was asked of me. It wasn’t a big deal from their point of view and it came up unexpectedly, yet that is a big deal from my point of view and I imagine I’m always ready. When you’ve done a few workshops you end up having this little mental toolbox of things you can reach for. Mine wasn’t full enough.

What narks me even more, though, is that I did have something the perfect length and which would also have spoken to the points I was making during the day. It’s a two-hander script I wrote during a young writers’ session and I rather like it.

I know I wrote it, I remember the lines, I’m wondering if I even kept it. Because it wasn’t on my iPad and even now, sitting here with full internet, it took me hours to track it down. That is unusual and disturbing.

But the take away from all this is that you need to keep your work with you and make sure you can actually get to it. Plus, know what you’ve got before you just say ‘yes’ to anyone who asks.

Exploit that expensive phone

Chapter 100

Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like

Sorry to play fast and loose with Betteridge's law – which says the answer to any headline question is no – but of course it is. Of course Facebook is draining your iPhone battery. Everything you have and everything you use on your iPhone drains it, that's what the battery is there for. But a new claim says it is draining it a lot. Far more than you'd expect and actually far more than it really needs to.

But there is a very persuasive article online called The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain and it says: “Apps that can make or receive calls, like Skype, Viber, Tango, Whatsapp, and Facebook are able to check for incoming calls without notifying you. I believe these types of apps sometimes abuse this exception and could have possibly influenced Apple to add Background App Refresh as the sanctioned method for this type of behavior. I think this is why disabling Facebook's background services is so influential on battery life: I speculate they are abusing the fact that they have VOIP call features to run in the background more than they should. It would provide a better experience for people using Facebook, sure, but people would never know Facebook was the cause of their battery life issues, and would definitely blame the device or iOS itself.”

I hadn’t heard of the writer Scotty Loveless before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I've immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

He's more of the school where he says what something is for so you can decide whether you need that feature or not.

With the two Facebook ones, I don't need either. You don't need either. The location service lets Facebook say your post is from New York City or wherever – and if I were there, I'd be writing that in the update. Background refresh has nothing to do with you getting notifications of messages and comments: they work completely separately. So there is no reason to have it on. None. Not for you or me – but seemingly there's an advantage for Facebook. I am okay with denying them this.

That's the thing that makes me pause: it's oddly appealing to think a genuine problem I'm having is somehow Facebook's fault. But I'm trying all the things the article says and we'll see.

UPDATE: I’ve now tested out what he says and it’s true. Here’s Loveless’s test: “[Write] down your usage and standby time, press the sleep/wake button (or lock button, as some call it) to put the device to sleep, and set the device down for five minutes. When you come back, take note of the change in time. If your device is sleeping properly, then the Standby time should have increased by five minutes and your Usage time by <1 minute . If your Usage time rises by more than one minute, you have a drain problem. Something is keeping your device from sleeping properly, significantly shortening the time it will last.”

I did that and found that something was using my iPhone for up to two minutes of the five I could keep my hands off it. Then I switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook (and not for anything else) and here’s what the same test got me: no usage time in the next five minutes.

I’m convinced.

Chapter 101

Use location reminders for work you don’t like

It’s not that I don’t like invoicing. It’s that I don’t do it. I’m far more interested in doing the work. Today, for example, I am infinitely more interested in the fact that I’m working with a group of young writers as we create a play. Infinitely.

But it is an unfortunate fact that if you don’t get paid, you stop being able to eat and that rather stop you being able to do this work. I really want to survive to the play’s performance, so I have to get paid. And being freelance, that means I have to invoice.

I am full of good intentions to do with everything financial. Fortunately, I don’t have to be. I’ve set a location reminder.

I’m working in a library today. When I leave that library, my iPhone will bleep with a reminder that I need to invoice for this work.

That’s all. I may not do it right there and then, but I have a train ride after it so I probably will. I think I may come across as very mercenary, invoicing within ten minutes of finishing a job, but if I don’t do that, I don’t invoice at all, so.

If you have an iPhone, you have location reminders. They are in – and they were introduced to the world in – Apple’s free Reminders app. Every good To Do app since then has taken that idea and so I use the one in my beloved OmniFocus.

Chapter 102

Location, location, location – in IFTTT

Oh, I will never cease to be impressed by location stuff. You can’t believe the number of times I now use location-based reminders on my iPhone: “Remind me to phone Angela when I leave here”, “Remind me to buy milk at the supermarket”. On and on and on it goes. How did we get by without it?

And today IFTTT – don’t you always have to stop to count the Ts in that? I should set up a TextExpander snippet, hang on… right, I have now, thanks – where were were?

Yes, IFTTT (used my TextExpander snippet there, so I did) has added location features. You have to be using iOS but you can now have IFTTT see when you get somewhere and then make it do something. Their examples are:

“Nearly home? Direct Message the person who should know [via Twitter]“

“When you arrive in New York City, send yourself a map of the subway”

That first one reminds me of the days when so many of us believed we were alone in giving three rings and hanging up when we needed to tell someone that. And the second makes me shudder at the thought of the download cost. I’d want a “Before you leave the UK, send yourself all the big stuff like PDFs and images”.

But the idea is there and it’s a gorgeous addition to IFTTT. Learn much more about it and have a free go on the official site.

Chapter 103

How to get a refund on the iOS App Store

If you blow a whole 69p on an app that end up not using much, live with it. If it’s a few pounds or dollars, come on: the coffee you drank at lunchtime cost more than that and you ain’t getting the money back from that.

But.

It is possible to buy apps by mistake. It is also possible to be misdirected into buying an app that isn’t what you thought.

So when you do feel the need for a refund, this is how you do it.

1) Go to iTunes on your Mac or PC

2) Go to the Store

3) Sign in and click on Accounts

4) Click on Purchase history

5) All your purchased apps are listed in lines grouping them together by date

6) Click on the arrow next to the one that includes the app you want a refund for

7) You get a detail page for the apps on those dates plus a Report a Problem button. Click.

This is easy to miss. The page with the Report a Problem button changes to a new page that is almost exactly the same: close enough that you can believe it hasn’t changed. But now next to each app on the list, there are the words “Report a Problem”. Click on that.

8) You get to choose one of the common reasons for a refund and there is space for you to write your reason.

Hit Submit and away off it goes to Apple.

Thanks and other stories

Chapter 104

Coffee with[out] me

Right. You’re now great at starting things, you’re ace at finishing them and you wring more out of your computer and your phone than you ever thought possible. And yet still you’re not writing.

Your problem is that you don’t get enough time. And when you do, when you could devote a chunk of time to writing, you either feel obligated to do something else – or you feel tempted. Faced between setting aside a couple of hours to write or having a coffee with a friend, well, sometimes that’s easy but sometimes that’s very hard. 

So let’s fix that. Let’s get you some writing time.

Put this in your diary, please. This coming Sunday, from noon to 2pm, you’re meeting me. Write it down: 12-2, coffee with William.

For this to work, the coffee must be at your place and I must not come.

If you schedule this, I promise I won’t turn up.

I do feel a bit rude there but, hey, if I fail to show – and you know in advance that I will – you might as well write for the two hours.

Deal?

Chapter 105

Lessons from Filling the Blank Screen

It’s not that I think you can learn life lessons from anything you do. I don’t see profound eye-opening education everywhere I go. But once in a while, doing one thing does teach you something else. In this case, compiling Filling the Blank Screen did this to me twice.

Full disclosure: I wasn’t surprised at one of them, that was more a confirmation of something I’ve suspected for a long time. But the other was a bit of a jolt. Only a little jolt, I don’t want to overplay this, but nonetheless jolting was involved.

Let me do the confirmation one first. 

I believe that best way to learn how to do something is to rig the situation so that you absolutely have to learn it. Arrange things so that you need to learn it right now. Today, for instance, it would be handy if I learnt how to code iPhone apps in Swift but I don’t have to so I won’t. I just won’t, it won’t go in to my head. I’ve watched a video, I’ve got Apple’s documentation and I’ve skimmed that. I’ve not exactly ignored Swift but still, I don’t know it. But I guarantee that when this project moves on, I will have three to five days in which to do the job and I will do it.

Simply because I need to.

Now, this isn’t the usual writer thing of only being able to work when there is a big, scary deadline. It is a genuine way to learn something new: the need to use something in order to achieve a goal is the way that you fix it in your head.

Have a deadline, yes, but also have a very specific itch you need to scratch. When you’re just studying something in general, everything has equal weight and nothing is more important or urgent than anything else. When you specifically need to achieve a particular thing, you are shovelling everything else out of the way. Yes, yes, how do I do this? Fine, fine, what do I need to do right now? Good, got that bit, I’m having that.

You can see that this determination would get you the answers you need. You would then also think that this would make you an expert in exactly one job, one type of task, one sort of lesson. That you’d be no further forward in anything else to do with the overall subject.

But that’s wrong.

Somehow.

Focusing on the particular teaches you the general too. I think this is like drama writing where you appear to be describing a very particular set of people yet you’re really describing us all. There’s a television play by Jack Rosenthal called The Knowledge which is only and solely and specifically about a group of people learning how to be taxi drivers. Still, I remember being enraged at a review that said you need to be a cabbie to enjoy it. No. All human life is in that play and it is wonderful. I’ve watched it many times, I’ve read the script more. (It’s out of print now but here’s a link to an Amazon search for it. If you can’t borrow my copy, as I’m mean and anyway it’s falling apart, have a look every now and again to see if the book appears on Amazon Marketplace.)

Anyway. This business of learning by doing. You’re nodding, you’re willing to believe this, you know it sounds plausible, but you’d like a bit of an example. Okay. Here it is: Scrivener. It’s yet another software application for me.

I bought Scrivener for my wife Angela Gallagher maybe 18 months ago. I’d played with the trial version, I could see that it would do a thing she needed, and I’d heard all the constant praise this writing studio (aka word processor) has got. It is so praised and so persuasively praised by people I rate that a few months ago, I bought my own copy too. I just didn’t use it.

Until last Friday when I had the idea for Filling the Blank Screen. I needed a way to grab all the text from the site that I might possibly want to use, then I had to find a way to compile it, re-order it, edit it, join bits together, split some stuff apart. I could’ve done this in Word or Pages but then I think I’d have had to hold the whole project in my head while somehow focusing on just one or two pages at a time. In Scrivener, I could make each article a separate short section and choose to focus on a page or look at the whole picture. Read a detail, write new material to update or replace or just, cough, improve the piece. Or step back and think these five pieces are better in that sequence, those ten don’t belong in the book at all.

Full disclosure: I worked out the sequence in OmniOutliner. But I did so after adding all the text to Scrivener and naming each bit so that I had something to outline. Then I rearranged everything in Scrivener to match the outline and after that it was a really clear and understandable job of editing and rewriting from the top to the bottom.

This book you’ve got works out at about 73,000 words of which around 20,000 are new. That’s not insubstantial. It was quite a big project but it had a very specific aim and I had a really clear goal. Which means I have just spent a week hammering the bejaysis out of Scrivener. Previously I have recognised its advantages and what type of projects it would be good for, I have liked what I’ve seen and I have very much liked the company name of its maker: Literature and Latte. But now I feel I know Scrivener well. I’ve joined the ranks of Scrivener fans.

Which means I am now obligated to chant the mantra of every Scrivener fan everywhere: Scrivener is fantastic but we want an iPad version too.

Let me give you one more link out to software. Scrivener is available for Windows and Mac and costs £31.99 UK or $44.99 US. You can get the Mac one on the App Store and both the Mac and Windows versions are on the official Literature and Latte site where you can also get a very generous trial period. There are occasional sales; I bought my copy in one because it was down to some irresistible price. I can’t predict when that will happen again and it isn’t every day, plus I now know the software is more than worth the full price. But it is worth googling for Scrivener sales.

Hand on heart, I didn’t expect to become a Scrivener evangelist within a week but I did expect that I would become proficient in it simply and specifically because I needed to. It’s how I would say I’m good with Photoshop now: that is less a single application than it is an entire world but because I’ve spent twenty years needing to do this or that specific thing, I now feel very comfortable in it. Same with OmniFocus, I suppose, same with every software application I start out needing and end up becoming attached to. So no jolting surprise there.

No, the jolting surprise was this. I’ve written all of the The Blank Screen website, I’ve refused all paid submissions from advertisers and while I am currently considering one freelancer’s pitch to me, I’ve not taken any yet. So of the 1,000+ articles, I wrote all 1,000+. Of the 250,000 words, I wrote all 250,000 words. So naturally there couldn’t be any surprises for me as I re-read the whole site and chose articles for the book. 

Yet there was.

Just one. Back in July, I wrote a piece about songwriter Dar Williams and how she basically disagrees with everything I say. 

I’ve said this before: I wouldn’t kill to write like her, but I’d maim. She has a fine and long body of work, a now substantial discography but interestingly, she’s against forcing herself into being terribly disciplined and productive about her writing. And there she was saying exactly that: “I don’t force lines, and I don’t force myself to write every day, and somehow out of that came seven albums that don’t, to me, feel forced. And that’s the only thing I’ll boast about is that there’s nothing about it that to me sounds like I said, ‘I have to write for 2 hours a day,’ with lines where there were no inspiration.”

That quote did and still does tickle me: a woman whose writing I admire and rate and love, an artist who has produced a considerable body of work, fundamentally disagrees with what I say about getting on with it. I like being disagreed with, I liked thinking about this and whether I’m paying Williams more attention because I rate her so highly. I liked thinking about how of course I am, of course I would, of course I should. 

Except now, just five weeks later as I write to you, I re-read that and it’s like it’s a completely different piece. Every word is the same and if I didn’t write every word per se, since it’s got a lot of quotes, I at least typed every word. Yet it is completely different.

Because instead I have glommed on to this other quote in it from Williams: “Well, when I was in college, I put a stick-it on my computer, which was huge, that said, ‘Whatever you do is enough.’ I had totally lost my mind, and I was coming back from that. So I would say to myself, you know, you’re supposed to do a ten-page paper, if you do one page you’ll get a D+. If you do two pages, you’ll get a C-, or if you do three pages you’ll get a C+. So that’s all better than an F, so why don’t you do a page?”

She’s right, isn’t she? At times I don’t do anything because I don’t think I can finish it or because I don’t think I can do it well enough. But she’s right. Doing something is always better than not doing anything.

When I was solely a journalist, I believed that writing was about getting information to you. It’s not wrong. Even now, even yesterday, I took on a job where it’s clear to me that my best role is to get out of the way and let my interviewee speak as directly to the readers as I can arrange. But the more I write drama, the more I write to you, the more I’ve learnt that writing changes. It’s less an information funnel from one person to another, it is a conversation. What you bring to the page when you read is important. What I bring to it when I write, what I bring beside the facts and the detail, is important.

This is tangentially related but it’s become key to me: journalism is about facts, I recently decided, and drama is about truth.

Clearly, I’m writing to you from a coffee shop on the Damascus highway. Want a muffin?

Chapter 106

Acknowledgements

I’d like you to think of this as the book that keeps on going. Certainly I talk a lot. But also these 100+ articles are from the first 1,000 on The Blank Screen news site and now that you know what they’re like, remember there will always be more to read online. That’s a slightly weird thought for me: the notion that since I started compiling this book we’ve gone beyond 1,000 articles on the site. I’m not sure why that can be weird when I’m the one who’s written them all, it’s not like any appear without my expecting them.

Yet it still is weird and it’s a rather good kind of weird, it’s a good kind that I’d like you to have too. I have written a book this year but then without intending to or consciously realising I was doing it, I wrote this one too. But alongside that intentional work there was this other and I like that plus  I love what I’ve found on the site. In my other work during the year, I’ll be working online and come across an article of mine in a Google search and think actually, yes, that’s handy, I’ll do what that says.

I tell you, it’s weird.

But if it feels as if this all keeps going without me, you know that I wrote this book from scratch. You also know that it is a sequel to The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition). What you most probably don’t know is that all of this – the now two books, the workshops, the literary festivals – all began with Writing West Midlands. I am rather proud to be associated with this charity that supports writers in my region. These Blank Screen books, the website and the workshops all came from a single chat with them when I was on their Room 204 writing programme. So let us all blame Jonathan Davidson, Sara Beadle, Joanne Penn, Sian Buckley, Chris Swann, Abigail Campbell, Hayley Frances and Emma Boniwell. Do please check out their website writingwestmidlands.org because you cannot believe how much this team does for writing and writers. They casually ignite entire Blank Screen productions in their spare time between running over 300 events annually and I’m trying to find a way to twist your arm into supporting them.

I’ve argued in this book and on the site that a great part of becoming productive is working with people like this. But at least an equally great part is working by yourself, is getting on with it. So shall we do that now? Both of us?

See you on The Blank Screen website and thank you for reading.

ISBN 978-0-9926569-6-6

Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada

September 2014

William Gallagher

Dark Ride, Birmingham, England

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to William Gallagher at wg@williamgallagher.com