I really enjoyed making the recent package for BBC Click all about productivity - and I got to meet some real masters of the art, which was eye-opening and rather inspiring!
click the pic to go to the BBC's site and watch the feature
RSS Readers /can’t see the link? If you want to watch it, click here.
This blog has links to everyone featured in the segment, and below that some hints and tips, both from the feature and also stuff that I couldn’t fit in. Between them, this lot shamed me into going through my inbox and sorting through all my stuff.
Featured Interviews
Professor Richard Wiseman, Psychologist, University of Hertfordshire www.richardwiseman.com
David Allen, Author, Getting Things Done www.davidco.com
Michael Sliwinski, Founder, Nozbe task manager www.nozbe.com
Websites mentioned in the feature
Productivity Blogs
Goal sharing
Task services
Processes I use to keep my inbox empty and my tasks under control
NB these are not compulsory – I’m a big fan of whatever works.
General tips
- As mentioned in the package, it’s impossible to respond to every single email you’ve been sent. But mark it as read or add it to a task, and your brain will know you’ve processed it.
- Spend a day clearing your backlog, or process 100 emails a day if you have huge amounts, then you’re treated to a lovely clean inbox.
- Close down your distractions – If I’m working on a script, then email and twitter have to be closed down – sadly they won’t help with the task at hand. Every now and again, I’ll take a physical break from my work area to refresh my brain. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t…
- Rediscover the telephone as a means to get things done quickly – instead of 5 or 6 emails back and forth over 20 minutes, try a 5 minute phone conversation which gets it done in one go.
Finding stuff on your computer
Folders are useful for grouping similar files together in one place to copy, share and store, but not so much for finding stuff. I use my computer’s inbuilt search function instead, and name my files by thinking “What would I type in to search for this file?” – so far this has worked quite well.
Multiple inbox set up for Gmail:
A feature in google labs called multiple inboxes can be configured to send unread items to the top of your inbox. If I mark an item as “read” it means I’ve read it, dealt with it, replied to it or processed it in some way, like adding a Star or a label. Starred email is stuff I know will take more than a couple of minutes to deal with. I find it makes my inbox a lot more manageable.
- Enable labs in the top right hand corner of the screen, then scroll down to Multiple Inboxes. Click Enable and then Save changes at the bottom of the screen.
- Go to settings in the top right hand corner of Gmail
- Click on Multiple Inboxes
- Set up by typing the following into each pane to set it up to send Unread and Starred emails to the top of your browser screen.
Pane 0
is:Unread under Search Query, and Unread under Panel Title
Pane 1
is:Starred under Search Query, and Starred under Panel Title
- Select number of conversations to display – mine is set to 30
- And set the inboxes to “Above the inbox”
- Save Changes and go back to see your starred and unread messages above your normal inbox.
TASKS: Any emails that require doing something move to tasks by clicking on More Actions
MARK AS READ KEYBOARD SHORTCUT: Mark an item as read by hitting Shift+i
Note on labels in Gmail: Increasingly, I use the very powerful search function over the folder structure. However, I still label a few emails to make them more search-friendly, such as “internet registrations”, “receipts” and “travel tickets”. This is so that if (for example) an internet registration email doesn’t have the word “user ID” in the body of the email, I can still find it.
Viewing Unread items in one place in Microsoft Outlook
Seeing all your unread items in one place in MS Outlook is easy.
Look in the Search folders under your folder list – one will be named “unread“.
TASKS: Drag an email to the task icon to turn an email into a task, and then you can set due dates and more options.
MARK AS READ KEYBOARD SHORTCUT: Mark an item as read by hitting Control+Q.
Note on folders in Outlook: I have only a few folders in my work outlook system, one is called “Important Reference” for stuff I keep having to refer back to, one is called “Current Ideas”, and one is “Personal” – I use the search function to find everything else.
Let me know…
- if you have some hints and tips you’d like to share, favourite keyboard shortcuts or productivity tips on these or other software
- if any of these tips helped!
Good luck 
Everything stems from something before it – after all, you couldn’t have Oasis without the Beatles, you couldn’t have the Beatles without Elvis, and you couldn’t have Elvis without … you get the idea.
Click to Go to the BBC site: Analogue Computing, Polaroid's Back, Cockney Singing
RSS readers / can’t see the link? click http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/8710938.stm to go to the Beeb’s Site:
This is the piece I did for BBC Click all about analogue tech, and it was such a pleasure to do.
Some interesting behind-the-scenes stuff
- The computer behind Kevin Murrell in the picture is an old analogue machine from the 1970s, it’s modelling a damped mass, i.e. adjusting the suspension on a wheel so it bounces properly. The oscilloscope shows the trace on screen.
- The Analogue Computing Room is one of many fascinating places within the National Museum of Computing - there’s a working 2nd world war Colussus machine there, and a bunch of old kit including the beloved ZX spectrum – a lot of the stuff is hands on – you can touch and play with it!
- The room was quite small, so the camera is right up against one wall, and Kevin is sitting down next to the machine – the camera’s tilted to get that shot.
- The Polaroid brand has gone through some very interesting times and the name is now licensed out. After an FBI raid, the owner of the holding company will now have to do time in prision.
- The Impossible Project sells reverse-engineered film for the old cameras. There are some lovely videos on their site and a tour of their factory
- Adrian Tuddenham from Poppy Records has been given very strange artefacts to play in his time, including magnetized wire and paper. If he doesn’t have a player, he’ll make one. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of microphone technology.
- The band in the piece are very charming, and called The Men That Would Not Be Blamed for Nothing – they describe their music, roughly, as “Victorian Cockney Grindcore”.
- Andy Heintz, one of the band members, has 4 cats, the non-ginger cat is called “Ginger”.
- Andrew O’Neill, another band member, is a stand up comedian and charming telly crasher, smiling in the background and remaining in shot throughout another person’s interview in the green room of a New Zealand TV show. He also hosts Jack the Ripper walks.
- To find out more about the Steampunk movement, you can build your own stuff, pop over to http://steampunkworkshop.com/ .
Righty ho, back to work – my next piece is all about Fitness, and I’ll tell you all about it when I get my breath back …
Eurovision Hits and Misses
This year, I analysed the Eurovision 2010 song contest musically for The 63336… it was great fun (apart from having to listen to all the singing) and the bum notes survey picked up a few lines of coverage in the press. Below is a breakdown of how the analysis was done, along with a few extra facts about this year’s contest.
We worked from a google document, and I set up the spreadsheet as follows:
Insanely Complex Cloud Spreadsheeting
We actually filled it in in entry order , though the snapshot shows the worst pitched performers and points in descending order -after the event.
I counted the bum notes while someone else timed the performance in seconds, that’s how we arrived at the “bum notes per minute” stat. I based my assessment of what counted as a “bum note” on whether the singer was in tune with the backing tracks. Ad-lib note sliding (a la Mariah Carey) was not counted as out of tune unless it was truly out of tune.
The most entertaining thing to do was the “additional observations” tab, where I entered song similarities in. I’m not surprised about how many songs sound like other songs – in real life if I hear something, I can generally think of a tune or two that fits quite snugly. I was surprised that in Eurovision this year, Queen, Sting and Roxette were all quoted from rather heavily.
Listen Here to samples of the Eurovision finalists for 2010, and you’ll find that
Cyprus = Torn by Natalie Imbruglia
Russia = Verse: Slightly Mad by Queen, Chorus: the Piano song from Big
Denmark = Verse: Every breath you take by The Police, Chorus: Simply the Best by Tina Turner
Serbia = Chorus: Whenever, Wherever by Shakira
Albania= Verse: Womanizer by Britney Spears
Greece = Sexy Back by Justin Timberlake
Belgium= Baby I love your Way by Peter Frampton, Walking in Memphis by Marc Cohn, Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan
Azerbaijan, Moldova, France = Listen to your Heart by Roxette
Georgia = Every Little Thing She Does by The Police
Israel = The Show Must Go On by Queen
Iceland = Bridge: The Show Must Go On by Queen
Romania = Middle 8: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
UK = Verse: Kids In America by Kim Wilde, Chorus: last line “sounds good to me” = same chords and melody as kids show theme tune “Postman Pat” ( lyric “that sounds good to me” = “(pat feels) he’s a really happy man” - 37 seconds in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9KnR_9wpl4 )
Critical Analysis of musical commonalities
OVERALL COMPETITION STATS
14 out of 25 songs were in Minor Keys
Key Distribution:
The most popular key was C with 4 songs out of 25. That’s the scale made from all the white notes on the piano – thought of as the easiest key to play in if you’re a piano player. The least popular keys were C# and Bb – with no songs in those keys.
Key Distribution for Eurovision 2010
Most C=4, D=3, Eb=3, G=3, Ab=3,E=2, F=2, F#=2,B= 2 A=1, C#= 0 Bb=0 Least
Key Change count for Eurovision 2010:
Only 9 countries went for the traditional dramatic key changes.
Spain and Portugal had 2 key changes, contributing to a total of 11 shocking key changes for the evening – 13 including Spain’s Retake.
Scoring Commonalities
Top 3 songs were in Minor Keys
Bottom 3 songs were in Major Keys
Top 3 songs were all contemporary
Bottom 3 songs were conventional
Top 3 songs had simple chord structures
-Top German Entry had only 4 chord sequences in the chorus
-Bottom UK Entry had an 11 chord sequence in the chorus
Would anyone have won if they chose a folky contemporary pop song with simple chords in a minor key?
Not necessarily, although Norway’s 2009 entry last year had all these attributes, and they hit the top spot in 2009.
This year the winning songs were already popular and well known across the voting audience – so repetition and heavy airplay can also give a song the Eurovision Edge.
Roll on next year!
I was asked by BBC Technology to help with their Tech Know segment about making a wax cylinder.
And if you ever wondered what would happen if you put together cockney grindcore band “The Men That Would Not Be Blamed For Nothing“, genius sound recordist Adrian Tuddenham from Poppy Records and of course BBC Tech’s Jason Palmer and multiskilled producer Andrew Webb…
… you end up with around 4 minutes of enjoyable mayhem.
RSS Readers/ Can’t see the link? Watch the video by clicking here.
The Wax Cylinder is how audio was recorded before iPods, before MP3s, before CDs and even before Vinyl.
What does the future hold for audiophiles? Do you think the new cloud-based music model will be the next big thing? I’d love your thoughts on the future of audio consumption…
Another look at the week in tech
http://bit.ly/clickbits14
includes the wondrous Twestival
here’s episode 10 of the programme, oh dear sorry this is such a short post… this is what happens when you blog before a proper breakfast.
Apple’s Adult App store purge, 3d streamed fashion week, Google Maps gets Labs feature and the twitter worm.
/LJ x
A two-fold post for you this time:
Part 1: More about the Blogging feature on BBC Click
Part 2: Why do we Blog?
Part 1.
This week was busy – the latest episode of Click Bits -the little 3 minute tech newscast – is now online… Click on the pic if you want to watch it.
(RSS Readers/can’t click on the pic to view? link here: Http://bit.ly/clickbits006 )
…and my blogging piece on BBC Click is on this week’s show.
Thank you very much Judith Lewis , Mike Robinson , Marko Saric, Clare English and Andy Bargery for their cameos. They each gave me about 20 seconds’ worth of blog tips on video, which I integrated into the piece.
I took a few 3 second shots of some blogs at the beginning of the package
They are listed here:
- Going Underground eccentric blog all about things that happen on London’s transport system
- cat-fest I Can Haz Cheezburger and its sister site failblog
- unchained guide showing the best independent shops in cities,
- Black Phoebe, a beautiful photo blog
Below are a few more blogs I’ve enjoyed reading in recent times:
- Something to be said - breathtaking prose and inventive fiction – with teeth
- Dead Hub – raw music and rock blog
- Rocketboom – internet culture blog
You’ll be able to read the whole transcript of the blogging feature here.
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part 2.
Making the segment got me to thinking about when I first started blogging, so I went back and read my “Hello World” post i.e. the first post I ever wrote, which was about 90 posts ago.
(If you absolutely have to, you can read it here. <cringe>)
Then I wondered: What makes us blog? What drives us to leave a mark of our mundane existence on the internet? Who do we imagine writing to when we’re typing?
So, of course, I came up with a thoroughly empirical theory.
As a human, I normally spend a lot of time thinking, but my mouth blurts any given thought out after little (if any) moderation from my addled, overworked, overclocked brain. I’m assuming that other humans experience this too.*
If that is the case (and if we have the desire to do so) then writing could give us the freedom and time to craft a sentence, play with the words, and get a sense of perspective we can rarely access “in the moment”. We can proof-read our thoughts in type, then adjust that thought until it “makes sense” – to us, the authors, as much as any reader. This crafting of ideas into concrete might even result in learning something about ourselves we didn’t know until we saw it on the page. Or of course, it could be nothing of the sort. We could just want to post pictures of cats because we love cat pictures.
Incidentally, the above paragraph took 35 minutes to write, and included moving the sentences around, working out what I wanted to say – then making it sound nice to read in my head. I’m now doubting whether or not it’s a self-indulgent paragraph of pointlessness, and now I’m thinking it’s dinner time soon, and I should probably turn the computer off and deal with this later.
Indeed, none of the above musings touch on the obvious love of story that permeates our very existence – mythology, fairy tales and even documentaries – but that is most definitely another post all on its own.
So, please leave your comments: Bloggers, Why do you blog? Readers, what do you read? I’d be honoured if you left your thoughts below.
*to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams, and probably a few others, the worst assumptions are the ones you don’t know you’re making.
They say work expands to fit the time available – and in this case, the 3 minute tech round up on the BBC’s website takes the better part of a day to make.
This post is really to chronicle the 3rd and 4th episodes so I can remember where I put them on the internet… Click on the picture to get re-directed to the BBC’s site.
Clickbits Episode 4 – can’t see the link? click here: http://bit.ly/clickbits004
The really bonkers one to do was Episode 3 which I pushed down from Las Vegas during an evening where every other technology person there was also trying to send video. Once the video was sent back to the UK, Zoe and Gary put the pictures together on the other end.
It was very strange sending down raw material and seeing a put-together programme emerge at the end of it.
Clickbits Episode 3 – can’t see the link? click here: http://bit.ly/clickbits003
These links were filmed next to the Intel touch-wall, which was a giant interactive cube pulling pictures down from flickr. It was being run on what looked like a normal laptop – which surprised me – the graphics card in there must have been rather tasty.
If you want to see some pictures from CES 2010 , pop over to my flickr site here for a look round some of the weird and wonderful gadgets on display here.
Pilot show Click Bits - Episode 2!
(RSS/Can’t see the link? here you go: http://bit.ly/clickbits002 )
This is what I’ve been up to the last month, as well as doing quite a bit for bbc click recently… including working with the marvellous Maggie Philbin on our futurology piece. She’s done such a brilliant post here about our visit to Kingswood Warren that I don’t need to add anything…
OK, I will add that we both turned up on the ShiftRunStop podcast last week.
Here are some behind-the-scenes pics of the birthing of ClickBits.
My bag with script in - and an impressive amount of useless stuff
- yes I did eat that twirl. And I didn’t bother taking pics of the usual tv stuff including filming pieces to camera, script wrangling and finding pictures to fit. Unless you want me to next time?
Also the madness of only having a finite amount of time to do an infinite amount of work is the sort of thing is familiar to techies everywhere. Editors, I’m thinking of YOU when I type this.
tape of episode 1 ! yes, tape! Click on this if you want to see episode 1, but episode 2 is better Click on the top pic for that.
The grown-up edit suite was double booked for our first episode, but it didn’t stop us – we squeezed into a small office and crowded around a desk and computer meant for 1 person. Final Cut Pro, in case you were wondering. And yes, we ate a LOT of choccy in a room so cramped all our knees were touching.
on its way into the BBC system?
This was our 2nd attempt to ingest 3 mins of video into the BBC, we were thwarted by technology many times! It’s always worse when a BIG machine borks – I always (illogically, irrationally and incorrectly) expect computers with 4 screens to be, I don’t know, cleverer.
Humans 3, Machines 2
Finally, the wondrous Zoe (who is producing this with me and is the illustrious @zsk on twitter) came across this hidden terminal and executed some kind of Harry Potter spell that meant the machines had to obey her – and they did.
As I’m off to CES Las Vegas 2010 next week, Zoe and I will be attempting to make the 3rd Click bits episode a few thousand miles apart… we’ll be using yousendit and psychic powers to make that work, but if anyone can do it, it will be the 2 most stubborn people at the Beeb – us!
If only I could defrag my brain this easily- Time to get organised
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I faffed about with pointing CNAMEs in the right direction etc and used the help pages quite a bit. Now your domain hosting service should be able to help out if you’re thinking of doing this too, and they will be the people to talk to if you’re having a spot of bother. It all worked fine after I’d sorted out the settings, but took AGES to run as there was so much email to upload. Happily, after leaving it to do its business, I now have a fully searchable online email database.
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Only problem is that it’s still pull, but I’m not too bothered about that at the moment.
Goosync
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Dropbox File Holder
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How clever – and great if you are on a work or shared computer and you don’t want to download your dropbox there.
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nozbe project manager
Nozbe Project Managment
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This online project management tool will give you your “next actions” across projects. This means that once you’ve entered your various (and copious) things to do in different areas – say “music composing”, “home admin” and “holiday planning” - you can see what needs to be done on each project THAT DAY. Really good if you are working on a few different things at once
Zyb contact sync
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Now for some chocolate.
