I’ve not mentioned my home internet connection for a while now, since we had the FTTC fibre upgrade. The main reason is that is just works. With roughly 30Mb/s download and 9Mb/s upload speed I feel I am back, in terms of internet speeds, where I was in 2012 at our old house before we moved.
A good example is how streaming video across multiple screens just works with no buffering, whereas on our previous ADSL connection a single stream struggled. Services such as iPlayer, Netflix and Amazon Video both stream in HD with ease. We never use to be able to watch the trailers on the Apple TV, but now no problem.
When working from home I often download and upload large files, this is so simple that I don’t worry about it any more.
So I am really pleased with the FTTC connection, it just works.
I’ve had some interesting feedback when it comes to my previous blog post on my approach to Inbox Zero.
So is it really necessary to have an empty inbox when it comes to inbox zero?
No, despite the name, Inbox Zero is not just about having an empty inbox, nor is it about deleting all your e-mail so that your inbox is empty.
For me, the core principle behind Inbox Zero is about “doing” and “processing” your e-mail rather than just “checking” and “reading” your e-mail.
You can see the aim of having an empty inbox as a goal in doing this, not as an end in itself. Its about doing what needs to be done and then moving onto the next thing.
For me this is also about making the time to do the e-mail and where required I will close down Outlook (or whatever e-mail client you are using) and focus on what I need to do, without the potential interruptions of new e-mail.
A secondary aspect is having a better understanding of how e-mail can be used and when it is better not to and use a different tool.
There are lots of examples of this, moving all staff information to a tool like Yammer for example. Or instead of having a conversation through e-mail, picking up the phone or actually visiting the person at their desk or in their office.
One thing people often say to me is that they don’t have time to “visit” these other tools or spaces. It might be because they’re too busy checking their e-mail, however my view is that if they are too busy to read the Yammer feed, then they probably don’t value what is there. Sending it as an e-mail instead (or as well as) is a flawed assumption, because if they aren’t going to read it on Yammer, then why on earth will they take the time to read it as an e-mail – they’re too busy! The assumption that if it is in an e-mail people will read it, is often the rationale behind sending it as an e-mail, but talking with people, the reality is that these e-mails often get ignored or deleted. At least with a Yammer posting it’s still there and can be read later when you do have time. Similar things can be said about tools like Slack.
You aren’t always going to be able to change people’s viewpoints on e-mail, but I certainly recommend modelling the behaviour you want in others yourself. If you aren’t willing to change then how can you expect others to change.
Back in 2007 I was listening to a podcast on the TWiT network, MacBreak Weekly, and one of the podcast participants, Merlin Mann, was talking about productivity and mentioned Inbox Zero. Following the links I found the video Merlin was talking about when he talked about Inbox Zero to Google.
I wrote a blog post about this on my e-learning blog. Since then I have often thought about doing Inbox Zero and occasionally I have reached that point of an empty inbox in previous jobs, however usually I would lose the initiative and momentum to maintain Inbox Zero over the longer period.
In my current job, I have managed to reach and importantly maintain Inbox Zero for sometime now. Reflecting on this I realised that part of this is down to following the Inbox Zero process, another aspect is using different tools to reduce the quantity of e-mail in the inbox instead of using e-mail for things which it isn’t designed or suited for.
Inbox Zero is quite simple and easy to remember and follow. The core though is ever check your e-mail, but do your e-mail. What this means is that constantly checking and re-checking e-mail means you aren’t actually doing anything productive, you are spending time reading e-mails more than once.
So rather than check e-mail across the day, decide to spend time on the e-mail and for each e-mail undertake one of the following five actions:
Delete or Archive
Delegate
Respond
Defer
Do
Here is how I interpret these five actions.
Delete or archive,
With e-mails that fall into this category, rubbish stuff or notifications are immediately deleted. One of the misconceptions about Inbox Zero is that some people think it’s about deleting e-mails and that e-mail history can sometimes be useful. However that is a misconception, as well as deleting unwanted or unneeded emails the other option is once read is to archive the email. So in my inbox I have a whole series of folders which I archive into. This means I never lose an e-mail and all e-mails on specific subjects are grouped together. Occassaionlly I will copy an e-mail into more than one folder if it is appropriate to do so. Every so often I rationalise my folders and move them around or aggregate them.
An example of this is an e-mail about an event that I am not attending or relevant to my work, so it gets deleted.
Delegate
Whatever the e-mail is asking , then pass whatever action or work needs to be done to someone else or another team. I used this action as a manager a lot, less so now. What it means is to pass the e-mail to someone else, this could be a member of your team, passing it up to your manager or management team, passing onto a different team.
An example of this is when I get a request about being a pilot in a project, I pass the e-mail (forward) to the member of the team who has responsibility for pilots for them to action. I may respond to the original sender to let them know I have done this.
Respond
Simply write a reply and respond straight off. It could be a request for information, a request about something you have or haven’t done. The key here is not to procrastinate and think too long about this, or leave it, just do it, respond and get it done. I then usually archive the email to a folder. One useful thing to do is to create templates for stock answers and informations, so that you can respond more quickly.
Defer
Sometimes you can’t do something until something else has happened, or you need a response from someone else. Sometimes you need to defer as the request or task is too big 90% of the time I defer by creating a relevant task in my task management software (JIRA). Deferring should be seen as a last resort, otherwise you find your inbox will start to fill up again. If you really don’t have time to do stuff, then you should really stop “checking” your e-mail as you certainly don’t have time to do that!
Do
Just do it, go on do it, don’t wait, don’t defer, just do it and get it done. So asked to tweet something, tweet it, fill in a form, fill it in. Someone wants some text in a blog post, write the text. Someone wants a meeting, organise it. This is the powerful aspect of “doing” your e-mail rather than just “checking” it. Checking means looking, thinking I need to do that, but I don’t have time to do that. If you really don’t have time to do stuff, then you should really stop “checking” your e-mail as you certainly don’t have time to do that! Making time for e-mail means making time to get things done. One of the key messages form the video, is don’t check your e-mail, deal with your e-mail. So unless I have actual time to do stuff, I don’t check my e-mail.
Wasting time
I know that a lot of people “check” e-mail in their “dead” time, whilst waiting for a train, on the train, waiting for a meeting to start. I think this is wasting that time. It might be better to deal with a single e-mail then just going through the whole list and doing noting about them. I also think on those dead times, why not make better and more productive use of that time, listen to a podcast for example, or read a journal article instead of glancing through your list of e-mails.
Displacement
I think another factor that impacts on checking over doing, is that checking means going through all the e-mails and then deciding which ones to deal with. Often you will choose the ones that you want to deal with rather than the important or urgent emails. Using an Inbox Zero approach you deal with ALL the email you don’t pick and choose. You can use rules to flag emails and these can be dealt with first, or you can just go through them in the order they arrived.
Other tools
I find it interesting how often we default to e-mail as the main communication tool, to the point where it replaces other forms of communication or discussion. People also often use e-mail for various activities that really e-mail wasn’t designed for. So the other thing I am doing is trying to move the majority of my e-mail conversations to tools such as Slack, Confluence or Skype for Business. I find myself engaging less with email as we start to use a more diverse set of tools. A lot of internal conversations and other things people use to use e-mail for, have moved to these new tools. To a lesser extent, the same has happened for some external conversations. For many of these external conversations, Twitter and Google+ seem to have replaced some e-mail discussions and conversations. The same for other kinds of activities, such as task management and auditing. Need an update on work done so far, go to Confluence (a wiki) to have a look for example. Often people say they don’t have the time for other tools, probably because they have too much e-mail, however using other tools can be more efficient and more effective. Just think about a tool like Doodle for planning and scheduling meetings? So using the right tools in the right way means a lot less e-mail as a result. Yes you need to check those other places, but the end result is more effective and often more efficient.
So I never “check” my e-mail I always (try) to DO my e-mail.
One of my favourite iOS apps that I use on a regular basis is Snapseed. There are certain effects and image adjustments that I use to make images brighter or more dramatic.
The user interface, which I initially found challenging, I now find really simple and easy. I like how it takes advantage of the touch interface of iOS. You can swipe left and right to change the intensity of the filters and up and down to change aspects of those filters.
The one filter I use quite a bit is the HDR filter to add drama.
This is the original image
This is the processed image that has been through Snapseed.
I realise that the HDR effect is somewhat subjective, but for me the key question, is do I like it, if so then I will keep it. There are images I work on that don’t work for me and these don’t get saved or uploaded to social media.
In a previous blog post I talked about how I had reset my iPad Pro to see if that made a different to the problems I’ve been having with the Smart Keyboard.
Every so often the iPad seems to think that this Apple Smart Keyboard. isn’t a proper accessory and “isn’t supported”.
In a previous blog post I talked about the issues I was having with my iPad Pro smart keyboard. It got to the point where it rarely would work and I would get a consistent stream of messages saying that “this accessory is not supported”. I knew that if I went to the Apple Store that I would get a “have you reset the iPad” question, so pre-empting that I did a partial reset.
In the reset menu in settings you can reset the iPad completely or you can just reset the settings. I went with the reset of the settings.
This though somewhat a pain, as your iPad forgets your Apple ID, forgets all your wifi settings, amongst many things, it did initially appear to have the result I wanted. The smart keyboard does now work most of the time. I still have the odd “this accessory is not supported” error, but this is usually rectified by disconnecting and reconnecting the iPad to the keyboard.
I am hoping that in the future this stays like this, otherwise it will be a full hard reset of the iPad.
Over the last twelve months I have published 26 posts, many of these were about my return to fibre. So it is nice to see that the tenth most popular post on the blog this year was from nearly a year ago. We will have fibre in “12 months”! I said back then that according to BT Openreach we would have fibre within twelve months, I was slightly sceptical, but nine months after publishing that post I did get fibre.
The ninth post was about when my iMac Fusion Drive Failed and had to have it replaced.
The post at number eight was another post about my fibre journey, Still checking… was when the cabinet was activated, but alas wasn’t accepting orders.
The seventh post was from 2012 when my HP Photosmart printer died. My printer is dead! was a sorry tale about how replacing the ink cartridges on the HP B110a resulted it in destroying the print head.
The post at six was about Dusting off the Pogo my old Polaroid Bluetooth pocket printer. Still going strong.
The fifth post was how I don’t like BT FON which was originally published in 2011.
The third most popular post was about the free wifi (or lack of) on my holiday, Haven no wifi
The post at number two was Comic Book Fonts which was about the amazing comic book fonts from Comic Book Fonts.
So the most popular post on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars, Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then.
Back in 2010 or thereabouts when buying movies, I would generally go for the what the trade called triple play movies, these sets contain a copy of the film on Blu-Ray, a copy on DVD and a digital copy for your mobile device.
With most of the films I bought the digital copy was in an iTunes format. This was fine with me as I already used the iTunes ecosystem for music and video. Since December 2011, I noticed that the trend was to use Ultraviolet DRM.
I blogged about the challenges I had with this back in 2013. Eventually I did manage to get the login processes sorted out with Ultraviolet and Flixter. Over the years I have built up a collection of films on Flixter. However compared to the user experience in iTunes it was never a smooth journey.
I had major challenges with my version of Edge of Tomorrow, resulting in being unable to play the downloaded film on my iPad. This was sorted out after numerous e-mails to Flixter support.
Another annoyance for me was that the Flixter app wouldn’t remember where I had got to in a film, if I had not finished watching. I would then need to work out where I was.
I also found it frustrating that I couldn’t play my Flixter films through an HDMI cable (via an adapter) to my TV or use Airplay. I suppose they thought if you wanted to watch on the big screen you would use the Blu-Ray disc.
The end result was that, I generally stopped specifically buying versions with a digital copy so would buy the Blu-Ray only. Also many studios appeared to stop selling the triple play format. I often found it easier to buy films from iTunes direct or more recently using Amazon Video after a good experience with Amazon Prime Video.
I had gone out and bought the DVD version of the film and had stored the Blu-Ray version of the film aiming to sell it at some point. However feeling guilty that the Blu-Ray disc may be “corrupted” I had never actually done this, I didn’t want to sell a dud disc to anyone, so was wanting to check that it wasn’t a dud disc by using someone else’s Blu-Ray player. This I never got round to. This Christmas though, the family present was the XBox One S which can play Blu-Ray discs. Receiving the new Planet of the Apes film reminded me that I had Dawn of the Planet of the Apes so tried it out and it worked. I then decided now I had both discs out to redeem the digital codes.
So I started Flixter on the iPad, followed the instructions, which meant searching for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in the Flixter library and entering the redemption code (a much simpler process than it was back in 2013). I then checked the code for War for the Planet of the Apes. I followed the same instructions I had done for Dawn, but I couldn’t find War for the Planet of the Apes. Okay lets read the instructions… it said to go foxredeem.com and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could download War for the Planet of the Apes in an iTunes format (which I did).
Now I am not sure when 20th Century Fox stopped using Ultraviolet, but though still DRM, the iTunes format has worked much better for me than Ultraviolet.
So what about War for the Planet of the Apes, well I’ve not watched it yet…
Ever since I upgraded my iPad Pro to iOS 11 I have been having problems with my Apple Smart Keyboard. Every so often the iPad seems to think that this “accessory” isn’t a proper accessory and “isn’t supported”.
Sometimes it’s a simple matter of detaching the iPad from the keyboard and re-attaching. Sometimes I have to shut down and hard restart the iPad.
A Google search hasn’t illuminated any clear solutions to the problem.
I recently wrote about the battery problems I have been having with my iPhone. A recent incident and a chat in a restaurant has made me rethink the issue. It may not be the age of the battery which is the problem, but the recent iOS software update.
So there I was in the restaurant having taken some photographs of my food (as one does) and the battery life was very low on 5%, so in order to conserve battery life and ensure the phone counted my steps on the way back from the restaurant I turned the phone off. When I turned it back on the battery life was back up to 29% even though I hadn’t charged the phone in between.
So I think in future if I find my battery apparently draining fast, I am going to turn it off and then back on again.
![Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [Blu-ray + UV Copy]](https://i0.wp.com/technologystuff.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/10978699-1414085339-78304.jpg?resize=480%2C600&ssl=1)
