Over the last year, I've gotten away from some important things. Specifically, I've gotten away from simplicity. My life is an order of magnitude more complex than it was one year ago.
This is so wrong.
Just a short couple of years before that, i made a conscious decision to simplify every aspect of my life. It was relaxing. It was freeing. It was wonderful.
Why, then, would I move away from that?
I have no idea, of course. But that's OK. I can't change what I've done, only what I've yet to do.
The Question. I hate The Question. Someone you know introduces you to someone you don't know. I'm not a fan of meeting new people, but I'll go with it. After exchanging names, The Question always pops up.
So, what do you do?
Do not ask this question. I hate it, and let me tell you why.
My first reaction to The Question is to ask questions of my own.
"Why do you care what I do? Will it make you think of me differently? If I say I'm a doctor, will you think better of me? If I say I'm a janitor, will you think less of me?"
"Oh I clean shit for a living."
Uncomfortable silence follows.
Well OK then; nice to meet you. BYE!
It's a good way to weed out people who you don't want to talk to. It's not a good way to meet people, though. No one wants to talk about shit.
Everyone wants to talk about being a doctor. Doctors save people's lives for crying out loud. Who wouldn't want to talk about that?
Hopefully you see my point. Within seconds of meeting me, this shiny new person has already decided that I am what I do. If I clean shit, I am shit. If I save lives, I'm the greatest person in the world.
This shiny new person doesn't know me, yet he has already formed a very strong opinion about me.
As for what I actually do, it's difficult to answer in a sentence. I like it, but it's complicated. It also sounds boring. I prefer not to answer The Question honestly because it's hard. It's also usually met with a blank stare.
I'm left with three choices.
Option 1 is out. I've been answering The Question honestly for too long, and I'm tired of it. Option 2 would be great, except the Person I Know is usually my wife, who I like. She's introducing me to people she knows, and I'm sure she doesn't want them to think she's married to a janitor.1
Option 3 is the only reasonable choice. So here's my new answer to The Question:
I'm an assassin.
That's my new answer. When someone I just met asks me what I do, I say that I murder human beings for a living. That's an easier answer than the actual answer. It will also be interesting to see how people react. Disbelief? Repulsion? Interest?
There's nothing wrong with being a janitor, of course. But the perception issue is a real one. ↩
The precious sound of silence. You know the sound. The world around you has stopped, gone quiet. Minutes pass and still no sound. Suddenly, your brain comes alive. Synapses begin firing one after another, ever faster. Silence is all around you, but your mind is moving at the speed of light.
The greatest ideas are formed in the midst of this silence. There are no distractions to lead you astray. There is nothing between you and brilliance. Embrace the silence and let your mind work it's magic. Be sure to capture the magic, though. Once the world starts back up, the moment will be lost. What a shame.
The weekly review is a pretty core part of on OmniFocus. It helps keep you on track and moving toward your goals. It's also a great time to clear out tasks and projects that you just aren't going to do.
The longer I use OmniFocus, the more I break my lists up into separate projects. That's great for organization, but terrible for reviews. At last count, I had over 50 active projects. That is an awful lot to review each and every Friday.
There is a fix, though. It lies in using the review interval setting in OmniFocus for OS X. Simply select the project that you want to change and CMD+SHFT+I to bring up the inspector. Toward the bottom of the pane, you'll see a setting that says "Review every:". Here's where you can set how often to review this project. Let me give you a few examples:
Set the review period for long term projects to a much slower interval. Depending on how long term, it could be monthly, quarterly, or even yearly.
I have quite a few monthly repeating projects for my job. For the most part, I look these over once a month to make sure everything is in order.
I stick with a weekly review on all short term projects.
For my someday / maybe list, I simply review every quarter. These items aren't pressing, or they wouldn't be on this list.
That's the gist of how I handle my reviews. I know some people, like David Sparks for instance, have taken to doing a daily review. I don't have the patience or discipline to review my projects daily, even in bite-size chunks.
My fingers haven't had any good words in them lately. I wonder if they're broken. Maybe I need to buy some new ones. Or maybe I can borrow someone's fingers.
That's stupid. No one is going to let me borrow his fingers. Besides, how would that even work? Even worse, what if the new, borrowed fingers have even worse words than my own?
No, no. There will be no borrowing of fingers. I'll have to figure this out with just the 10 fingers I have. I wonder though — if I had 11 fingers, would they have better things to say?
Everyone has had their say about the Retina iPad. 1 I won't bore you with an overview of a device I don't even have. But I am really, really excited about it. Sure, you may be looking forward to super high resolution photos. That's great, of course. But it doesn't matter to me. The real killer feature is good old fashioned plain text.
Just like the iPhone 4's Retina Display gave new life to mobile text, so will the iPad's Retina Display. Text looks fine on the iPad 2, of course. But it will be absolutely sublime on the new iPad. Websites built mainly out of simple, plain text will look better than ever.
I design all my sites to focus on the text, so this is a big deal for me. I have a feeling that large text will be particular drool-worthy on that magnificent screen. I think I've made my feelings on large text pretty clear by this point. If I haven't, it's the greatest thing ever.
So the latest and greatest iPad will give new life to boring, old plain text. I can get on board with that.
Yes, I know that's not what it's called. But you know which one I'm talking about. ↩
It's pretty barebones, as expected. I love the typeface, too. It's the same Nitti Light that looks so great on the iPad version of iA Writer.
I'm not too sure about the bar above the keyboard. It includes common punctuation — a hyphen, colon, question mark, period, and apostrophe. It's there to keep you from having to access the secondary keyboard for punctuation. I'm trying to use it, but it doesn't stick for me. I activate the secondary keyboard and hit the punctuation needed without thinking. I don't need to hunt for the period or comma. My fingers know exactly where they are. I don't need a new way of writing punctuation. I'd rather have the additional line of screen space.
Speaking of additional screen space — just flick the keyboard down and off the screen. It hides easily, giving you tons of screen space. The ( few) options do appear at the top of the screen when you do this. You can email or copy the text, or print1. You can also create a new document, or switch documents.
Really, though... I'm not sure I would change anything else. The app is simply beautiful, and the iCloud syncing is both as simple as possible and flawless. I've been a fan of Simplenote for a long time, and that's quite easy to set up. But this? There is no set up. Open the app and write. Pick up where you left off on your iPad. It could not possibly be any simpler.
No fancy Markdown converting or text manipulation here. In a way that's a real shame, since I write exclusively in Markdown. But it's also not the end of the world. When it's time to convert from Markdown to HTML, there are a hundred different ways to handle that.
iA Writer will not become my primary writing app. I'm too firmly attached to nvALT and Simplenote. That said, I've already written several pieces in iA Writer. The typeface is really, really great. It probably shouldn't matter, but it does.
With an AirPrint printer. ↩
Andrew Marvin on mastery:
But there is a prerequisite question that must be answered before we can start putting in our 10,000 hours: What do I want to be extraordinary at?
No one can master everything. Choose carefully.
Sometimes quitting something that you love is the only reasonable choice.
It's not ideal. It's not what you want. You want to keep doing the thing – you love it after all. But sometimes that thing lies. Sometimes that thing isn't good for you. Sometimes that thing is really getting in the way of the other thing. You know, the thing that's really important.
So. Thing One and Thing Two.1 How do you know when the thing you think you love, the thing that you enjoy, is actually the problem? That's tricky, of course. It seems like the Right Thing. Maybe you're good at it. Maybe it feels right when you're doing it.
Deep down, somewhere... you know the truth. You know that Thing One is not the Right Thing. The thing you love is the Wrong Thing. Or, it's the wrong thing for now.
So.
Thanks Dr. Seuss. ↩
Complete silence is the best aid to getting work done. This is especially true for any type of creative work. The absence of any unexpected sound allows magic to happen.
The absence of unexpected sound.
Real life, at least in the modern world, doesn't allow for many silent times. It does allow for many nearly silent times. It will be quiet for a minute or two, and then a sudden noise will break your concentration. Maybe a car drives by out front. Perhaps it's laughter from down the hall. Or maybe someone asks you a question, because it seems as though you're not all that busy, after all.
Near silence is absolutely deafening.
With constant, random noise breaking your concentration, you aren't likely to get any good work done. You can't actually do anything about the random sounds, though. The only way to get past them is to drown them out.
Hit play on your favorite playlist and crank the volume up. Remember — silence is the best, but it's unexpected sounds that kill your concentration. You already know the words and sounds of your favorite music. Nothing in this playlist will be unexpected. Now get back to work, and enjoy your new silence.