Make Your Life Easier: Ensure Clarity

How often have you come away from a conversation at work feeling like you think you know what is required, only to arrive back at your desk with a haze in your brain and unsure as to what was agreed? In fact, this can apply not just to work, but also to situations outside work: in relationships, casual meetings, social arrangements – in fact, pretty much at any time or in any scenario.

Obtaining clarity is particularly pertinent for me at the moment, hence deciding to share a few thoughts. The nature of the work my team does means that each assignment generally brings with it numerous strands and a variety of required outcomes; picking your way through that minefield to deliver what is required can be hazardous and often treacherous, to say the least.

A primary source of stress is confusion, and where you find confusion you will also find impeded productivity and inefficiency. When deadlines are missed and objectives aren’t met it is an easy response to blame the task-setter for not being clear, and often that is the case, but blame doesn’t make what has been produced right, more relevant, or on-time, so the consequences remain unchanged. In fact, blame simply increases stress and introduces despondency, as it brings with it a sense of helplessness.

There is a responsibility on those of us to whom assignments are given to take control of the situation. I am encouraging my team to ensure that they do not walk away from a meeting with a fresh piece of work without also taking with them a clearly defined, and agreed, set of outcomes – primary and secondary, and a clear deadline. While this doesn’t eliminate the task-setter deciding what has been produced is not what he or she wanted, it does ensure that the task-doer is able to deliver what the work-giver agreed he or she wanted.

One thing that obtaining clarity is not about is abdicating responsibility. Nor is it about being able to throw your hands in the air and say ‘well you said…’ in an attempt to cast blame. Of course, if both parties agree on the goal into which the ball is to be struck then it is not the fault of the task-doer if the task-setter then decides it was the wrong goal in the first place. However, having said that, the task doer can take steps to ensure that shooting into the ‘wrong goal’ is avoided; all this requires is a little pro-activity.

Obtaining clarity is not a one-off exercise – it is a process; it is about setting a route to a successful outcome. As well as achieving clarity in that first meeting, there is a requirement to proactively manage not only the task, but the person giving the task right up to the task deadline. Things can change – sometimes we need to see a draft of something to realise that what we asked for was not what we wanted – and so ongoing review is integral to clarity.

Obviously, each task needs to be assessed on its own merits, and the approach taken needs to be relevant to the scale and scope of the assignment: clearly a task requiring a couple of hours work will be tackled differently from one that will span days, weeks or months. But there are certain principles that apply across the board.

Firstly, do not leave that first meeting without knowing at least the primary objective, the deadline, the required outcome and the parties with an interest in the task. Where possible look to identify any secondary agendas and any dependencies. Dependencies are, unsurprisingly, things required to complete the task for which we depend upon others – for example data that we need to obtain from another team. Identifying dependencies is not about establishing a potential scapegoat, but rather about ensuring that the task-setter realises that the task may depend on input from other parties, and that there is, therefore, an inherent risk within the task that may or may not hinder delivery.

Secondly, set up review milestones. Whether the job is a couple of hours or a couple of months, build in review points. If, for example, a task is given to you at 11am with a deadline of 2pm, arrange to meet with the work-giver to review progress at say 12:30 (if sufficient progress will have been made by then). What this does is ensure that the originally set trajectory is still the right one, and avoids the 2pm deadline arriving and the provided ‘solution’ being thrown out as not being what was required, even though it does meet the requirements as they were originally stated. If your task spans a longer period of time then set up regular review meetings – the shape and direction of a task can change as it develops, and timelines can be affected by factors internal to the project (dependencies, sickness etc) and external to the project (additional ‘urgent’ work arriving etc).

Finally, do not leave that meeting, or any subsequent review meetings, without agreement as to the way forward, including objectives, secondary objectives, outcomes and deadlines. Ensuring that every party with an interest in the task is in agreement goes a long way to achieving a good outcome. With one particular task-setter I often say three or four times and in three or four different ways what I believe we are looking to achieve, how we are looking to achieve it and by when; and, generally speaking, this is very effective in ensuring we both stay on the same page.

Ensuring clarity will not eliminate stress, nor will it guarantee a successful outcome – anything with a human factor is inherently fraught with danger in that respect – but it will help manage stress and deliver good quality outcomes that have a very good prospect of hitting the mark.

iPhone: Apps – Relax Alarm Clock

Relax Alarm Clock for iPhone comes in 2 versions: the ‘Lite’ option, which is cut down and cut price at £0.59, and the full option, which will set you back £2.99; both are available at the App Store.

As you may expect, the Lite version is, well, lightweight. That said, depending on your needs it still offers an excellent alarm clock. You can choose colours, fonts and one from 10 available sounds (including an acoustic guitar, bamboo chimes, birds, rain, wind and a piano) to rouse you from your slumber. You can also choose one of the tranquil options to fall asleep to, using the timer function to automatically stop the sound of the ocean, or a bubbling brook or whatever you choose from the available list of 10 after a time you determine (in increments of 1 minute). If you would prefer a different sound from those within the application you can record your own sounds using the ‘record’ function built into Relax Alarm Clock .

I started off with the Lite version, but it lacked a few features I wanted, which, needless to say, were available in the full version; who’d have thought it . As you’d expect, the full version includes all of the features in the Lite version and more. Read more

iPhone: Apps – The Daily Telegraph

I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, but I don’t generally have time to sit and read a newspaper. TV and radio news is OK, but on occasion it’s good to go deeper and get some editorial comment. BBC Newsreader for iPhone is OK, and it is certainly much improved since its latest release, but the angle of stories on the BBC tends to be much more ‘straight-bat’ than in a newspaper. And that’s where The Telegraph for iPhone comes in.

As a personal aside, I prefer comment that’s apolitical, but I’ll always take a broadsheet over a tabloid, and if I had to pick a broadsheet that had a bias it’d be The Daily Telegraph. So, in the absence of an iPhone app from The Independent, one from the Telegraph is the next best thing.

In fairness, the app gives you nothing you can’t get from the paper’s own website, but what it does do is offer you all of that content in a neat, quick, easy-to-navigate, pleasing-on-the-eye interface at a price-tag of £Free.

Whomever designed this app gave it some thought, and it has a genuine ‘Mac’ feel to it, and for that reason alone it deserves to be on every iPhone. Tap the icon, a tell-tale calligraphic ‘T’ on a blue background, and the app appears as a blue screen onto which the a larger version of the aforementioned black ‘T’ fades in and zooms into view, spinning as it does.

Once loaded, the app presents a menu that offers ‘News’, ‘Sport’, ‘Finance’, ‘Travel’, ‘Motoring’, ‘Technology’, and ‘Telegraph TV’. Tapping the main heading that you want will bring the spinning black ‘T’ on a blue background into view, and a counter that alerts you to the progress of the story downloads. Each section will load the last 51 (no idea why ’51′) stories in that section.

Once your section is loaded, which is generally done pretty quickly, you are presented with a list of stories in chronological order, each with a heading, a thumbnail picture and a quick intro paragraph, all looking rather smart with white text on a black background. Tapping the ‘In Full’ button will load the full story, which is given to you in the more traditional back text on a white background.

A major advantage of this application is that it is not simply a neat portal into the Telegraph’s own website, but rather it is a stand-alone news-source, with stories being available from within the app itself, making it quicker and easier to use than some news readers. The flipside, however, is that you don’t get a breadth of opinion – you get the Telegraph’s view and that’s your lot.

I use this daily and find that it allows me to be targeted in my reading, keeping abreast of main headlines and going deeper into the stories that interest me without having to scan page after page of a newspaper. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in tracking a single news source.

iPhone: Apps – Twittelator Pro

At a cost of £2.99 I ‘ummed and ahhed’ over Twittelator Pro for quite a while: did I make enough use of Twitter to justify buying an app; were its features enough to justify cost over free; would I use Twitter more if I had those features? It’s rare for me to agonise over £2.99, but these things are all relative, and in the world of iPhone apps, £2.99 is no small outlay!

Ultimately it was my good friend Rob GT‘s constant eulogising about this app that wore me down and I decided to part with some hard-earned; and I’m glad I did – this app simply rocks.

I don’t ‘tweet’ a great deal, but that was, in part at least, due to the faff created by using some of the free offerings; don’t get me wrong – some are great – but I don’t really have time to tweet all day, so if I am to engage with the ‘Twitterverse’, then simplicity of operation is key. In Twittelator Pro you get a feature-rich, simple to use and generally appealing vehicle with which to navigate the world of Twitter, and whether you ‘Tweet’ once a week, once a day, or, as some people I follow seem to do with ease, once (or more) an hour, Twittelator Pro will not disappoint you.

In terms of appearance, the default display is a charcoal grey, which looks efficient without being harsh, and the text is clear and easy to read. The use of shadow provides a smooth aesthetic, making each tweet easy to identify and read. Scrolling is smooth and switching between screens is quick and done by tapping the buttons at the bottom of the screen, which offer the choice of: friends, mentions, messages, settings, and more.

Writing tweets is easy and efficient, and made even better by being able to compose your posts in landscape mode, offering an easier to use keyboard. But the niceties don’t end with a widescreen view: auto shortening links; auto shortening tweets; automatic adding of hash tags from a saved list; and copy and paste of links, tweets and more. All of these features make tweeting quick and painless. Add to that the fantastic interface for choosing response options, such as whether to retweet, reply, message, copy tweets, copy links to tweets, make a tweet a favourite or e-mail a tweet and it really doesn’t get much better.

Reading tweets is equally easy, with a simple tap on the ‘tweeter’s’ picture bringing up that person’s profile, or tapping their name bringing up the response options. Links are easily accessed and can be viewed within the app itself or in Safari, depending upon what option you have selected, and thumbnails of tweeted images are displayed with tweets, allowing easy access to full-size versions with a simple tap.

The app is highly configurable with three colour schemes, options for font size and numerous other tweaks available: number of tweets to supply in view, link shortening service to use, whether or not to display your location, display order, refresh rates, how to treat images, and the list goes on. But perhaps the killer option is the option to add a Safari bookmarklet: following the simple instal procedure adds a java applet to Safari that allows you to send any page you visit directly to a tweet. Using this feature is easy-peasy: arrive at a page you want to share, call up the bookmarks, tap your Twittelator Pro bookmark, wait a few seconds while Twittelator Pro launches, and get writing in the pre-prepared tweet that included the URL you just visited.

And if all of that was not enough, even the app icon shows a great attention to detail, an attention which is plain for all to see right through the app. If you use Twitter already then this is a must-have app, and if you don’t use Twitter you should start jut so you can use Twittelator Pro

Why I: am not buying an iPhone [yet]

Don’t get me wrong, I want one, I’m just not buying one; not yet, anyway.  I love all things Apple, and generally speaking the only thing that stops me spending ridiculous amounts of cash in the Apple Store is the need to feed and clothe my wife and kids (personally I could starve and run around naked, but they don’t share that view ).  However, when it comes to the iPhone, I wouldn’t buy one – even if someone gave me the cash for it.

They are cool, there’s no getting away from that, but that hardly separates them from any other Apple product.  That they take functionality in cell phones to a whole new level is hard to dispute.  And there is no denying that for perhaps most people, there would be no need to carry another gadget to achieve mobile multimedia and communication heaven.  But for me they take the whole form over function argument a step too far, and cool just doesn’t cut it far enough to make me even think about parting with cold hard cash.

In reality, it’s a bit of a non-issue: I’m tied into a contract on a T-Mobile Blackberry, and I don’t have a spare hundred plus quid to spend on a new phone, even if I wasn’t contractually crippled.  However, let’s assume I had the cash and I was in the market: what would I do?  Noting, that’s what. For now.  In fact, I wouldn’t do nothing at all – I’d wait; I wouldn’t tie myself to another phone or contract, but instead I’d wait for the iPhone to evolve into what it should be.

Version 2 of iPhone is an improvement for sure – 3G is the functionality version 1 should’ve had – but where are the video capabilities?  Where is the improved storage capacity?  Where is the decent camera?  Where is the choice on contracts and providers?  You see, I’m not especially a fan of O2, and I carry an 80 gig iPod with all but 10GB of its capacity used, I use my phone for pics and I want to be able to take video.

Here’s my take on what Apple did with the iPhone: they developed ground-breaking technology, couldn’t keep a lid on the leaks and had to go to market fast so they got there first.  As a consequence, what they took to market was light on features, but they knew that it was cool enough (and indeed feature-rich enough) for a big-bunch of eager consumers to buy one, thus establishing a presence in the market while they perfected it.  Version 2 needed to be an improvement – and so it was – but couldn’t be so much better than version 1 that Apple alienated all the version 1 early-adopters.  Now here’s my prediction – version 3 will be all that iPhone should be.

So, until iPhone grows up and gets iPod levels of storage, a proper camera and video, as a minimum – essentially until version 3 comes out, which based on Apple’s release schedules, should tie nicely with the end of my current cell phone contract – I can live with my Blackberry. 

When it does grow up, however…….