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Work From Home with These 9 Tools

It’s been a year and a half since I started to work from home. Our team spans several time zones, and the variance in daytime hours means we’re not all working on the same 9 AM – 6 PM clock. We get the freedom to clock in however we wish, as long as we get our minimum 40 hours and weekly tasks done.

Sounds great, right?

It is, in many ways, but it’s also a huge test of initiative and self-motivation. The New Yorker ran a piece called “I Work From Home” last year, and it’s as hilarious as it is devastating in its accuracy. How many people working at home haven’t had to beat away the temptations of all-day pajamas and endless snacking?

Starting out, I barely had any idea what to do with myself, let alone how to be a consistently productive team member. Not having the usual workplace markers makes it far too easy to lapse into unproductive self-deception. When you don’t need “outside clothes” for your day job, you can park your laptop on top of your blankets and claim that you’re working up to tackling your to-do list. If you’re not careful, that mantra can carry you through a funny YouTube video, a series of Buzzfeed quizzes, a cool Twitter link, and so on—until you emerge, dazed, at 10 PM on a workday without a single item crossed off your list.

A year and a half is a long time, though. Over those weeks and months, I’ve tested various tricks and tools for keeping temptation—-and that end-of-day abashment—away. No workflow is ever perfect, but mine has become much better than before, and that’s all thanks to these apps and programs.

Momentum

Momentum gives you a clean, focused dashboard to replace your browser’s default New Tab page. The dashboard consists of a clock, a random inspirational quote, a soothing background image, and, optionally, reminders for your day.

Momentum’s brilliance stems from its simplicity: it turns each tab you open into a fresh slate. That’s it, and what a powerful effect it has. I think of my Momentum dashboard as a gentle landing pad. Rather than being thrown down a grubby new rabbit hole teeming with links, apps, bookmarks, and last night’s most recent bedtime puppy video, I find space to breathe and a few quiet seconds to do so. Then I proceed with whatever it is I opened the browser tab for.

There are great touches like a weather widget, a to-do list, and the option to strip away productivity reminders once you’re off the clock. Premium users get additional features like custom fonts and more widgets to enhance functionality. But all of that’s window dressing, literally and metaphorically. Momentum’s main purpose is to give you a much-needed pause, and Premium subscription or not, it does the job well.

ColdTurkey

ColdTurkey locked me out of my computer once. True story. I mention that not as a criticism but as a commendation. Many “distraction blockers” are too easy to circumvent, and most focus on browsers and distractions found on the internet. Cold Turkey recognizes that VLC Media Player or Steam can be just as time-sucking as Chrome or Firefox, and it gives you a way to block all of those while you’re working.

Cold Turkey has broad and powerful blocking abilities, but its flexibility keeps it from being unwieldy or annoying. You’re monitored via a program that runs in the background and an extension that tracks regular and incognito browsing. This means Cold Turkey neutralizes both Internet distractions and the time-sink apps and programs lurking in your computer. For easy organization, you can create different block lists, as well as a recurring schedule for when these lists apply. Alternatively, you can allow yourself a certain chunk of “distracting” time each day, and Cold Turkey simply deducts from that pool whenever you visit something on your active block list.

When I first tried Cold Turkey a few years back, it was a barebones program. I don’t mean it was any less powerful—it blocked my designated distractions effectively. So effectively, in fact, that it drove me up the wall, and I found myself restarting my laptop several times to try and wrench some entertainment back out of the program’s forbidding clutches. It didn’t work, and I uninstalled Cold Turkey because I felt shut out of my own computer.

These days, though, Cold Turkey wields its power with a bit more grace. Pages get blocked with inspirational quotes; granular scheduling gives you more say over how the program structures your work hours. Other distraction blockers hardly put up a fight; the old Cold Turkey sometimes felt like it beat you into submission. The latest iterations have settled on a good compromise: the app isn’t a domineering taskmaster so much as it is a responsible companion.

RescueTime

If there’s one thing Cold Turkey sucks at, it’s collecting activity data. That’s where RescueTime comes in. RescueTime takes a similar approach with a background program and a browser extension tracking your computer activity. It recognizes programs and, within your browser, different sites, so you get a detailed view of where your time goes. Each activity slots into a category that can be weighted from “Very Productive” to “Very Distracting.” RescueTime then calculates your average productivity score (per day, week, month, year), with the option to view hourly or per-category breakdowns.

RescueTime comes in free and premium versions. I first tried the Premium version for a couple of months to test extra features like more detailed reports and offline activity logging[You can basically self-report work that doesn’t involve your computer]. It’s great, especially if you want to see the specifics of your time use and working habits. But I’ve since switched back to the free version, which works fine for people who just want a fuss-free tool for keeping themselves accountable.

Wunderlist

Remote work denies you the advantages of sharing a workspace with colleagues, who can remind you of pending tasks or keep you updated on all the projects you’re working on. To-do lists aren’t quite as personable, but they can help fill that gap.

There are tons of to-do list apps out there, so this is more a matter of personal preference. I like Wunderlist because it has excellent mobile and desktop apps that sync seamlessly. I’ve used it on Android, iOS, and Windows, and I can switch from phone to laptop and back without a hitch. Adding tasks to Wunderlist is a simple process, but the app can handle more complex demands like nested lists, sub-tasks, or recurring tasks if needed. The interface works smoothly and never feels cluttered. There’s a premium version, but the free one has served me well so far.

Stretchly

Tons of productivity routines incorporate the Pomodoro technique, and mine is no exception. Writing and programming involve hours sitting at a desk and staring at a screen; folding short and long breaks into those hours staves off fatigue and burnout.

There’s no shortage of Pomodoro timers out there. I’ve gone through focusbooster, Tomighty, various online timers, and even Workrave, which isn’t so much a Pomodoro timer as it is a periodic break-time reminder. I’ve only been using Stretchly for a few days, but I already like how it handles timing and reminders. This simple, lightweight app uses unobtrusive reminders and gentle suggestions for each micro- and regular break. You can also customize break durations and frequency, as well as the alert sounds and the interface color scheme. It’s an app that you can set and forget—at least until the next micro-break rolls around.

Scrivener

Right now, I’m writing this post in Scrivener. In fact, I wrote most of this blog’s posts on Scrivener. If I’d had the money for a Scrivener license in college, I would’ve written my thesis and research papers on Scrivener. It’s that good.

I first fell in love with Scrivener in high school, when I tried the free trial on my Macbook. The program was macOS-only then, so when I switched to Windows laptops, I didn’t even bother fretting over the price of the full version. A few years on, I learned that Scrivener finally had a Windows version. Armed with a NaNoWriMo discount coupon and part-time job wages, I bought a license. It’s one of the best purchases I’ve made since I started earning my own money.

What’s there to say about Scrivener that other users haven’t already said? It’s a well-designed, robust writing tool that conforms to most purposes, workflows, and writing quirks. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but the conveniences of Scrivener’s many wonderful features are worth the effort.

OneNote

All the gushing over Scrivener notwithstanding, OneNote is my content workhorse. It houses all my web clippings, meeting and progress notes, pitches, research, and correspondence for projects current and future. I have separate notebooks for different projects, some of which might fall under higher-level section groupings. It’s a great repository for more utilitarian bits of information, especially those that aren’t connected to a specific writing project.

OneNote’s OneDrive integration and excellent mobile/web apps add points in its favor. Everything gets synced automatically with my OneDrive account, giving me local and cloud copies of my work. I can access all of that data from my phone; if I have to work on a different device, I can just sign into the web service to browse my notes. By serving as an accessible central hub for crucial project data and updates, OneNote simplifies my workflow and unshackles it from my desk and laptop with little consequence.

Pocket

Pocket lets you save content for later reading. This is more of an indirect aid to maintaining focus: instead of diverting attention to a new, interesting link, I can save the material to Pocket and read it at a more convenient time.

What I love about Pocket is its ubiquity: I use it on my browser, on my phone, on my Kindle. The content you save is tied to your account, not to a particular device, so you can store and access material regardless of what gadget you happen to be using. Pocket supports tags, sorting, and search, so the Pocket List (your library of saved items) doesn’t turn into an incomprehensible link-dump.

Granted, the risk remains. Luckily there are web apps like Pocket to Kindle, which automatically forwards Pocket List items to the Kindle. This was the missing link in my Pocket usage. I used to forget to go back and read my Pocket items; now, I can just check my Kindle for the day’s selection.

Boomerang for Gmail

Boomerang straightened out my email. If you lose hours wrestling with your inbox—or several inboxes—every day, as I once did, this extension deserves a spot in your browser. Boomerang for Gmail lets you “boomerang” emails, i.e., take them out of your inbox to return at your preferred time. It also lets you schedule messages, which is the feature I use most: I can write work updates, inquiries, pitches, and so on ahead of time, then have Boomerang send the emails later when my colleagues expect to receive them.

For people who need more email-fu in their lives, Boomerang offers other valuable features like Inbox Pause, which halts email arrivals for a specified period, or response tracking, which reminds you to follow up if one of your emails hasn’t received a reply yet.

2018-02-25
RWBY Volume 5: Ending with a whimper

RWBY, the Rooster Teeth series about plucky school-kids wielding hyper-cool weapons in a fight to save the world, is the animated version of a comic-book “BANG.” Read that description again—how could it not be? Between the clashing personalities and backgrounds of its motley group of heroes and the animé-inflected designs and jaw-dropping action that constitute much of its visual vocabulary, RWBY seems designed to speak almost exclusively in bombast and explosions.

But RWBY Volume 5 is, in many ways, about how to proceed in the aftermath of an explosion: if Volume 4 was the protracted settling of dust following the fall of Beacon, then Volume 5 is an extended reflection on the “What now?” that’s left behind. Grappling with this question spurs welcome growth in both writing and animation/production values, but despite all that, Volume 5 still finds the show fumbling to square its stylistic and narrative register with the stories it wants to answer with.

Nothing encapsulates this more than the last third of Volume 5, which spans Episodes 11-14 and revolves around the defense of Haven Academy.

Well, that looks awkward.

After a season of spinning their wheels with uncharacteristic docility at a Mistral safe house, Qrow, Ozpin/Oscar, Ruby and the rest of RNJR have answered the plot’s—er, Headmaster Lionheart’s—summons to a trap laid down by the villains. They’re accompanied by Yang and Weiss, who have spent most of the volume getting up to speed, literally and metaphorically, with the A-plot involving Salem, Maidens, and Relics. The impending showdown promises to bring together the Mistral arc’s various threads, but it also turns out to be the culmination of the shortcuts and contrivances that have hobbled an otherwise promising volume.

Right off the bat, there’s a disconnect between action and, well, everything else. For a show that made its name on exhilarating fights, RWBY makes the baffling mistake of treating the finale’s fight scenes as extraneous to story: something to break up expository dialogue or emotional beats with, nothing more. Characters break off into separate skirmishes, but other than a few perfunctory digs or declarations (Mercury snarking at Yang, for example, or Emerald warning Ruby away from Cinder), the character connections and histories seeded in prior volumes hardly inform the details of each encounter.

The fights, therefore, feel bland and inconsequential, and the stilted choreography and unimaginative staging don’t help. Most of the time, the episode drops in at the last second before a fight stops—in time for the character in focus to deliver a cookie-cutter line—then cuts away right before the action resumes. Consequently, the final confrontation is a disjointed mess that lacks texture and rhythm.

No, Ruby, I don’t know what’s going on there, either.

Putting everybody in one beige, empty room does no favors for the finale visually, either. Worse still, it draws attention to characters’ unfortunate tendency to vanish from existence the minute they cease being the main focus of a scene. (Watch Oscar confronting Lionheart, for example, and tell me there are other people in that room.) Each skirmish seems to be taking place in its own bubble, left in stasis until the plot cues it back in.

Hear that, kids? That’s the plot coming to put you on hold.

With the finale essentially scripted as one big fight stretched out over four episodes (itself a questionable writing choice), these contrivances are difficult to ignore. More so when these visual shortcuts have numerous counterparts in the narrative corners that the finale chooses to cut.

Consider Blake’s confrontation with Adam Taurus.

Their last traumatic encounter confirmed—as Weiss pointed out to Yang in “Alone Together”—many of Blake’s worst fears, sending her into a spiral of guilt and self-blame. Her Menagerie arc centered on Blake learning to confront her fears and lean on her support system, but it did comparatively little to address the specific issue of Adam as a longtime threat and a major source of hurt and fear in Blake’s life.

This was Blake just 3 episodes ago when Ilia said she would be sent to Adam.

When she dispatches him at Haven with a quick knockdown and a dismissive “I have bigger things to worry about,” it feels unearned: for a long time, Adam was Blake’s biggest personal demon, and what progress she’d made since their last encounter concerned relationships (e.g., Ilia, her family) and areas (e.g., the White Fang) too oblique to yield such a drastic shift in their particular dynamic. It’s a too-pat “resolution” that glosses over character history and forgoes emotional logic to tick off another box on the list of plot beats to hit.

A similar clumsiness pervades other pivotal scenes, undercutting their intended impact. Jaune’s Semblance, for example, has been a dangling thread since the first volume. But the build-up to its reveal is so ham-fisted that the payoff hardly seems worth it.

Here’s how the show primes and sets off the trigger: Jaune, understandably furious about the events of Volume 3, confronts Cinder. To spite him, she arbitrarily impales Weiss with a spear, the whole sequence even framed in a way reminiscent of Pyrrha’s final moments.

Annoying—but it does make for an excruciating cliffhanger.

Taken out of context, it’s not a terrible scenario for provoking a Semblance reveal. But Cinder’s story post-Volume 3 had been written to emphasize her obsessive grudge on Ruby. Ruby, for whom the visual callback to Pyrrha’s death would have had a more visceral impact since she, and not Jaune, saw Pyrrha die. And Cinder targets Weiss, who happens to be Ruby’s partner and best friend. Never mind that Ruby is a title character and of greater narrative importance than Jaune. By all accounts, the strongest reactions still ought to come from her, because Ruby has the deepest narrative and emotional wells to draw from.

Except this happens. Tough luck, Little Red.

Instead, the show chooses to knock its main protagonist out just moments prior, conveniently clearing the emotional stage so that Jaune’s response gets sole focus. (Yang, arguably a closer friend of Weiss’, gets little more than a split-second reaction shot.) Sure, Jaune’s Semblance activation is the whole point—but disregarding the moment’s context for convenience’s sake is a disservice to all the characters involved, Jaune included. Ironically, all these storytelling gymnastics occur to cement Jaune’s acceptance of a supporting role in the group, as evidenced by his “They’re the ones that matter” declaration and the nature of his Semblance.

Some fans blame these problems on unwise fight budgeting. Maybe so; the Raven vs Cinder showdown definitely looks like it devoured Rooster Teeth’s time and resources.

There, but for the gift of prudence, goes the season’s fight budget.

But whether or not that’s the immediate explanation, stumbles like Blake’s rushed encounter with Adam or Jaune’s belabored Semblance activation point to broader missteps of vision and planning. Bad budgeting, if that was the case, would just be another symptom.

If the Volume 5 finale tells us anything, it’s that the show still struggles to marshal its disparate elements into a cohesive language that can convey the stories it wants to tell. Volume 5 has made great strides in polishing individual elements like animation, voice acting, and certain characterizations, but the finale falls short of combining and deploying these with true fluency.

What’s baffling is that Volume 5 did manage that fluency early on, and with remarkable self-assurance, too. This is clearest in Yang’s arc (especially the development of her relationship with Raven), which proves to be the volume’s highwater mark.

Consider how the first section of that arc played out. At first, Yang’s choice to find Raven contradicted the deep love for her sister that’s long been a core aspect of her character. The subsequent revelation that Yang sought out Raven for her portal-generation Semblance (i.e., a faster way to get to Ruby) resolved that in a way that enhanced Yang’s character—fleshing out her practicality, smarts, and devotion to her sister—while expanding the world (with the Mistral bandit camp) and adding more dimension to a new character (Raven Branwen, whose actions up to that point were wildly antithetical to the nature of her Semblance and the outlook it implied). Along the way, we got an excellent fight scene that demonstrated Yang’s character growth and said a lot about her emotional state and mindset. It’s the first of several satisfying payoffs in a plotline driven by Yang’s established characterization, catalyzed by a choice she carried out.

“All we need’s a miracle,” as the opening says

Unsurprisingly, Yang’s conversation with Raven in the Haven relic’s vault is one of the finale’s best moments, and not just for lack of competition. What’s frustrating is that the finale was designed to offer tons of competition. But unlike much of Yang’s arc, the finale—and much of the build-up for it—suffers from a readiness to cleave to the expedient and a mistaken belief in the separation of story and action, of plot and characterization.

RWBY may be best-equipped to speak in flash and awe, but Volume 5 nevertheless tried to extend that register and tell weightier stories. While the season isn’t without its successes, especially in earlier episodes, its sure-footed writing and execution both falter by the volume’s second half. What should have been an explosive conclusion relies too much on contrivances and shortcuts for its fuel, and the result rings hollow—more soundbite than indelible statement, a sputter instead of a bang.

2018-02-15
Star Wars on the brain

Star Wars has been top of mind here lately, thanks to the upcoming Han Solo movie. I’m as excited about a new Star Wars film as anyone, but there are other characters that could’ve made for more fascinating solo-movie material than Han.

Case in point:

If you don’t know her, you need to watch Clone Wars, stat.

That’s the blessing and curse of having a “paracosm” of a universe, as Wired puts it:

Possibly because of the nostalgia Lucas built into his very first movie for the days before the dark times of the Empire, the Star Wars universe feels like it exists even when you’re not looking at it. In the language of psychology, Star Wars is a paracosm, a complete world populated with autonomous characters. […]
That paracosm is so vivid, so enduring, that Kennedy and Lucasfilm can continue to pursue an aggressive release schedule, one movie a year, for … well, forever, actually.

It makes commercial sense for Lucasfilm to make a movie about one of the series fan favorites, but that’s it, exactly: A Han Solo movie feels more like a commercial decision than anything else. Moreso when the universe brims with characters who present what strike me as richer opportunities to broaden the canon and bring new dimensions to the universe established on film.

Then again, it’s the Star Trek franchise that’s premised on boldly going where nobody has gone before. I suppose, as with most massive pop culture properties, it’s up to the fans to do most of the remixing, reimagining, and rejuvenating of canon—which is what Nikolas A. Draper-Ivey does in this set of The Force Awakens redesigns inspired by feudal Japan.

2018-02-07
The universe sings sometimes

A friend recently sent me a link to the 2014 Playfest performance of Jeremy Zuckerman’s Legend of Korra Suite. It’s a beautiful synthesis of the series’ music, but the Season 4 finale’s closing track remains my favorite:

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium begins with Ilúvatar and the Ainur weaving the universe from song. I think about that every time I hear music from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. Some people might sneer at the notion of pop culture soundtracks being any kind of exquisite, but these scores make a damn good case against that view.

Here’s Zuckerman discussing this track on an episode of the excellent Song Exploder podcast.

2018-02-04
Postscript: Sarah Charlesworth on Photography

I stumbled upon a talk that Sarah Charlesworth delivered in 2010. The video was uploaded by the Guggenheim Museum as part of its Conversations with Contemporary Artists series archive on YouTube.

Highlights include Charlesworth’s opening manifesto on photography as art, as well as her brief insights on some of her work. She talks about “Stills” at the 15:14 mark, describing it as an exploration of the narrative capacity of photography. The whole series, she says, asks this: What is our relationship to events via news and newspaper imagery?

That nugget recalls Charlesworth’s statement about how she came to understand art as a concept and practice:

“Art for me was defined not by the medium it employed but by the questions that it asked.”

It’s a perfect encapsulation of Charlesworth’s own work, which she built around photography precisely because she saw photographs as “central to the questions of [her] time.” For her, photography is “the dominant language of contemporary culture” — and as befitting somebody linked to a group inspired by the French deconstructionists, she turned that language in on itself in a reflexive interrogation.

I can’t help but connect Charlesworth’s talk to a Harvard PolicyCast episode I listened to recently. In it, scholar Claire Wardle and journalist Hossein Derakhshan discuss the information disorder plaguing the world. About halfway through the episode, Derakhshan talks about recognizing the extra-communicative aspects of disinformation. He mentions two approaches.

First, there’s linguist George Lakoff’s notion that emotion is fundamental to language, and how that idea leads, in turn, to the notion that language influences how we think (the famous Metaphors We Live By, among other works). Second, there’s the communication studies scholar James Carey’s idea of communication as a concept that goes beyond “mere transmission of messages” and denotes, instead, the process of constructing a shared symbolic reality.

What’s interesting is that Wardle and Derakhshan later single out images (specifically, memes) as “the most powerful vehicles for disinformation.” Images, Wardle argues, work outside the established grammar of news; cognitively, we’re not conditioned to parse them with the same scrutiny.

Popular disinformation techniques, in turn, hinge on abusing that cognitive “exemption.” Images are crafted to arrogate to themselves the dense extra-communicative associations we’ve formed with the particular language of legitimate news — but they bend all that towards, well, unsavory agenda. All this means we can understand today’s disinformation better, Wardle and Derakhshan claim, by evaluating visuals as another language, and by viewing language as more than just information exchange.

That brings me back to Charlesworth and how she works with photography. Her approach carries much of the Lakoff-and-Carey-inflected perspective that Wardle and Derakhshan are advocating. Charlesworth’s interrogation of imagery and representation is driven by an understanding of images’ ability to convey (if not cement) beliefs and shape viewpoints. There’s a whole galaxy of meaning swirling around a photo, its creation, its viewing. As Charlesworth states in her talk, photography isn’t mere documentation.

“All art is political,” blah, blah. Sure, it’s probably nothing we haven’t heard before. But it’s always fascinating to consider why an artwork’s particular politics strike a chord when they do, you know?

2018-01-31
Read Harder #12: Wishful Drinking

#12: A celebrity memoir – Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher gives readers a glimpse at the woman behind the famous Princess Leia. She mentions several times that the book takes, in part, from her show of the same name, and the writing proves it: Fisher takes a conversational — sometimes bordering on sloppy, but always clever — tone as she charts her colorful life, from her unusual (and occasionally tumultuous) childhood to her struggles with bipolar disorder and substance addiction.

The book is a breezy, scattershot read. Fisher jumps from vignette to vignette, sometimes with only the barest of narrative themes to facilitate the transition. There are lots of asides, too, but they don’t weigh down the writing; in fact, they buoy it, injecting sharp humor into a collection of otherwise bizarre and/or grotesque anecdotes. (I love the absurdity of her stories about Cary Grant as earnest LSD interventionist.)

If Wishful Drinking has an overarching theme, it’s Fisher’s fierce and gamely self-deprecating sense of humor in the face of difficulty; if there’s an emotional throughline that pulls it all together, it’s the deep love and rich relationships binding Fisher and her loved ones, especially her mother Debbie and her daughter Billie. The memoirs of people who grow up privileged often run the risk of descending into the entitled, affected whining that gets hashtagged #firstworldproblems. On the other hand, the outsized, alienating, and often-grotesque nature of a life lived under perpetual spotlights resists any approach that isn’t soaked in angst and anger. Fisher sketches out a life that is ostensibly both, but she manages to avoid the expected pitfalls with warmth and a winning aplomb.

Unfortunately, part of that’s due to the breathless way Fisher chews through her stories. Each gets mashed with rapid-fire quips and washed down with a wry, sometimes-too-pat summation, and whatever emotional weight the story has barely gets time to sit before the next round comes. This is not to say that Fisher is insincere: she acknowledges the surreality of her life while nevertheless surfacing the humanity in it. But for all her candor, she doesn’t give readers much time to dig into the travails she so airily mentions or the people who serve as constants in her whirlwind of a life.

I’m inclined to view this gloss as deliberate. Wishful Drinking carries the voice of a woman who’s gone through too much shit to let herself — and her readers — harbor any more illusions about who she is. But maybe that’s an illusion in itself: Fisher lays out her life behind a glass pane, though she pounds on that glass with a forcefulness that almost makes you forget it’s there. Considering how much detail she does give about the weird shapes that fame has given her life, that’s understandable and not at all surprising.

The portrait Fisher paints of herself here, in her supposed attempt to rebuild following ECT-induced memory loss, likely hews closer to reality than the likeness that pop culture will remember. What’s funny is that the further Fisher seems to get from the Princess Leia image, the more the similarities stand out: the strength, the resilience, the refusal to be ground down. But as Fisher points out, Princess Leia (and all the glitz of that role and Fisher’s own pedigree) is hardly hers — in fact, is pretty much public property. Wishful Drinking reads like Fisher letting us know what is hers and refusing, with signature sass, to hand that over to us, too.

2018-01-28