Posting for no other reason than that I’m irrationally happy with the result.
The books are in complete chaos – the Library Project has become more urgent, but no nearer resolution – and the walls you can’t see remain a mess, but tangible progress has been made.
Here is the soundest of advice from Hunter Gatherer 21C’s Nicholas Bate:
Only listen to vinyl when working; a break and a walk will be naturally necessary every twenty minutes or so.
This could be the nudge I need to set up my turntable again.
Currently, I have a playlist on Sonos of mostly guitar instrumentals curated from my music collection. It runs for nearly a full day and ensures (after a couple of opening tracks with vocals) that I’m not writing with other people’s words in my head.
It’s not vinyl, but it includes some sublime tracks. Here’s a taster:
Opening vocal tracks:
Loser, The Grateful Dead (“I’ve got no fear of losing this time.”)
Hair of the Dog, Nazareth (“Now you’re messing with a son of a bitch.”)
Hello Hooray, Alice Cooper (“God, I feel so strong.”)
Thereafter, a mix of the sweetest guitar music:
Blue Valley, Thomas Blug
And The Address, Deep Purple
High Nights, Sutherland Brothers & Quiver (an instrumental from Quiver’s Time Renwick, later of Al Stewart and Pink Floyd’s touring band amongst many others)
Cloudy Day, JJ Cale
Weiss Heim, Rainbow
Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers, Jeff Beck
Samba Pa Ti, Santana
Journey of the Sorcerer, Eagles
Little Wing, Stevie Ray Vaughan
Another Place, Jeff Beck
Scandinavia, Van Morrison
Angel (Footsteps), Jeff Beck
Where Were You, Jeff Beck.
And, much, much more. Just so much great music!
Photo by Adrian Korte on Unsplash
I have new tools to play with.
I’m a writer and I work, almost exclusively, on a value basis: we agree a price and I deliver.
Charging by the hour/day or, worse, per word is a killer for both quality and trust.
However, I’ve always kept timesheets for my own analysis, so that I can see how much those value-based projects actually cost me in bloody, sweaty, teary hours. They used to be simple Excel spreadsheets, one for every project, so I could work out the actual cost per hour arising from either my poor estimating or delightful rat-holing. But, I always knew that created hidden gaps.
Continue reading “New tools for timesheets and blogs – @TimeCamp and @NewsBlur”
Kurt at Cultural Offering helps us understand why we need a home office…
Don’t you pay bills? Do you budget? Plan things to do around the house? Do you have papers scattered in drawers and cabinets?
You know you need one. The next questions are music and desk.
Photo by Steven Neumann on Unsplash.
Wells Fargo meeting the needs of non-traditional incomes.
Via the wonder of the web, an article in the Spokane Journal caught my eye.
Continue reading “Banking and freelancing – @WellsFargo”In November, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. launched a new phone app called Greenhouse, which is being marketed to gig economy workers, as well as to people who are just getting started in learning how to manage their finances.
Yet another essential Basics 7 list from Nicholas Bate:
Tip 1: ensure it captures not only what you have to do but also what you want to do.
Tip 2: ensure it also addresses a world beyond work.
Tip 3: measure productivity by pay-off not simply the tick: go beyond ease, urgency and what’s next…
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
I love this. Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have produced a font designed to aid recall: Sans Forgetica.
I think I’ve wittered many times (mostly on the Burning Pine blog) about how a little cognitive “friction” can aid learning and recall. The challenge in an commercial writing has been to get clients to accept the idea that hard equals good. The risk-averse always prefer muzak.
However, the science is well described in books like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Carmen Simon’s Impossible to Ignore.
It is designed to boost memory retention by disrupting a person’s usual reading patterns. Reading Sans Forgetica requires extra effort, unlike traditional fonts that many readers are able to scan without creating a “memory trace”.
This process, the font’s creators say, boosts engagement with the words and deepens cognitive processing, adhering to the psychological principle of “desirable difficulty”.
“It should be difficult enough, but not too difficult or too easy,” Janneke Blijlevens, an RMIT lecturer in experimental methods who also worked on the project, said. “There is an optimal level of difficulty to read which leads to the highest memory retention.”
He said that the font was ideal for highlighting important facts that might need to be recalled during an exam, such as dates, historical events and quotes. “You would certainly never set an entire novel in it,” he said. “I like to think of it as blue cheese, it works very well in small portions.”
The researchers recruited 400 students to test a range of memorable fonts and Sans Forgetica was the clear winner subverting the right amount of design rules without becoming completely unreadable. It was then tested alongside a more conventional font in a simulated exam. Students remembered 57 per cent of a section of text in Sans Forgetica, compared with 50 per cent of the text written in Arial.
A font that works like blue cheese. Perfect.
We all know it, but still startling to see the data. This from Statista:
To the camera and photo equipment industry, the rise of smartphone photography has had devastating effects. According to CIPA, a Japan-based industry group with members such as Olympus, Canon and Nikon, worldwide camera shipments dropped nearly 80 percent between 2010 and 2017. The steep decline was mainly driven by a drop-off in shipments of digital cameras with built-in lenses, the type that casual photographers used to rely on prior to the rise of smartphone photography.
Photo by Alfonso Reyes on Unsplash
For many sovereign professionals, your desk and your office will be where you do your greatest work. But, more than that, it’s your anchor, your lair and your retreat.
Invest the time to find the best desk for you, and to make your office the best possible environment in which to create your greatest work.
It may not be what you imagined. You need to balance form with function. I love the look of traditional, pedestal desks, but I have long legs and I hate the constriction of tucking them out of the way. In the end, leg space and a large, flat surface won out.
The desk should be the central piece of your office, both at home or external. It is there that you will write, read and – in a word – work. I like the mixture of old and new, of antique and contemporary: my desk is an English oak measuring 33 x 58 inches, over a hundred years old, that I bought at a local antique furniture shop.
And, here, to the all-important desk, where I learn that my personal preference is for a Bureau Plat:
On the matter of desks and offices, Cultural Offering has a long-running series on studies that you should check out, here. It includes this object of envy:
Pinterest is also, of course, a great source of inspiration.
We spend so much of our working day at our desk, in our offices, even with the liberty of flexible working and neighbourhood coffee-shops. It’s worth getting this grounding right.
If you’re a writer, you have to love proper pens and ink. It’s in the rules. Even if most of your time, and all of your product, is typed. And, these days, even my always-carry-a-notebook is more often OneNote-on-an-iPhone.
But.
But, all of the good stuff, all of the origins, all of the creativity begins on paper. In ink. From a pen.
After years of trial and error, drawers full of pens and a cupboard of opened and abandoned ink bottles, I’ve settled on these.
Great ink is a revelation. Some inks are thin, watery and scratchy. Others are as smooth and soundless as thought.
For the past few years, I’ve been a dedicated fan of J. Herbin inks:
Their standard range comes in 30 different colours. I’ve settled on three:
There is just one hitch. Herbin’s traditional bottles, as above are impossible to use, short and squat, with a long, narrow neck and a pointless “pen-rest”. The reason the bottles of blue and green are empty in the picture is because I decant them into more usable ink bottle. That said, it’s a small inconvenience for a great writing experience.
I have some every expensive fountain pens, both new and vintage, but for everyday, work-horse use, nothing beats the Lamy AL-Star.
The design is stylish, contemporary and ergonomic. They are simply great pens with user-friendly features like a window on the ink-reservoir, easy-to-change nibs and a comfortable, contoured grip.
They are remarkably cheap, too, for such a reliable and well-built pen, around £23 for the AL-Star and less than £20 for the Safari (which is the same design, but in plastic rather than aluminium).
Pens and ink. Everyday tools that deserve a little attention.