Complication for Complication’s Sake

Five years or so ago, I worked at a school bus lot as an office manager for a maintenance company. It was a good job, and I actually had a career path that I could’ve followed had I wanted to take the opportunity. Obviously I didn’t, but that’s a whole other story.

My job was to handle paperwork, and in the typical day, I’d have a workflow that looked something like this:

• Receive work order
• Enter data into the system
• Attach any paperwork necessary for the work order
• Document paperwork in the system
• Staple everything on the upper left corner of the paperwork (which at this point could be quite thick)
• File according to bus No. in the filing cabinets

In my time there, I did thousands of these documents. It was basically data entry, but it paid alright and allowed me some time with my thoughts. No worries.

But the system was needlessly complex. Not only was everything stored on a server somewhere in Ohio, but it was also in three other places across the country, on everyone’s terminal and in our filing cabinet. It was a lot of work for little return, because if the servers ever blew up, we would just have to re-enter all that data from our filing cabinet into the system again. It was a bit ridiculous.

I caught myself doing something similar when I started Whipps Industries. I’d go out and shoot a feature, which gave me a tech sheet. I’d do the work, and produce an invoice which I would then attach to the tech sheet. When I was paid, the check stub went where? You guessed it, the same pile of paperwork. And it would all get filed under the invoice number, meaning there was no way to cross reference it.

Dumb. Just dumb.

I run into these systems with my clients occasionally, and it causes me to take pause. Obviously, I need to work within their parameters to deliver the product that they want to have. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be complicated on my end, right? I can make things as straightforward and easy as possible, making my life easier.

This comes to me because of a concept that I first read on a post by Aaron Mahnke in regards to writing. He’s actually extended the frictionless concept to another project, something I recommend you read, named Frictionless. Really, it’s quite good.

What this comes down to is removing friction from your life, in whatever forms it may take. But without being able to recognize what this friction is, it’s difficult to distill the process down to its barest sense.

Let’s take my old filing system, for example. The problem was that I constantly had to hunt for files in the filing cabinet because they weren’t filed under any understandable system. I might know who owned a feature vehicle, but not the invoice number. It got complex real quick, even with PDF copies on my computer. The friction here was the process itself. There was no easily searchable system, things took much too long to find, and it took a lot of time out of my day.

The fix, albeit seemingly long, starts with Paperless, a brilliant book by David Sparks. In it, he uses a filing system that uses keywords and symbols to make it easy to know what a file is before it’s opened. This makes it searchable in Spotlight or Alfred, which makes my life much easier.

I’ve adapted this system to work with my own process, and it looks like this:

invoice No. – date of invoice – customer name -> the word “invoice” – what the invoice is for.pdf

Or:

0534 – 2012–03–30 – brand x writing -> invoice – web writing.pdf

Now at first, this seems really complicated. Why add all those strings in there if they’re not needed?

Because if I ever need to find any invoice for Brand X Writing, I just have to search for that phrase in Spotlight or Alfred and all of those invoices are pulled up. Extending this to my feature articles, some files look like this:

company name -> vehicle owner – year and type of vehicle – original file name.jpg

Example:

whipps industries -> chad fincher – 50 ford car – img_7159.jpg

By doing this, I can find any 1950 Ford that I’ve ever shot in my system by searching for “50 ford.” I can also find all of the documents I have on Chad Fincher using the same search terms. That means if I’m hunting down a tech sheet for Chad, I can find the ones I’ve done on his truck or his Ford just by a quick search — chad fincher ford tech.

To make things even easier, I’ve used Mr Sparks’ technique of integrating TextExpander clips to make entering this data faster. For example, if I type the word “.wi” then the phrase “whipps industries ->” will pop up automatically. It’s awesome.

The point here is, there’s no reason to make things complicated just to do so. My new filing system is complicated on the surface, but naming each file is quick and easy, and then easy to recover later on. At the end of the day, that’s what’s important to me, not spending my time stapling miscellaneous pieces of paper together just because.

A Particular Set of Skills

There’s this line in the movie Taken where Liam Neeson says some of the most famous words in film, and it’s one of my favorites.

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want.
If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have
money. But what I do have are a very particular set of
skills; skills I have acquired over a long career. Skills
that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let
my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not
look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I
will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

There are some writers out there, who do not possess a particular set of skills. They have not earned these skills over any length of time, even though they have been writing professionally for quite a bit. Their lack of skills makes them a nightmare for someone like me, particularly when they are my boss.

Fortunately, this isn’t my current problem; all of my clients and bosses are pretty cool, no issues there at all. But the other day I was reading a piece written by someone who held a position higher than me in the writing world, and it was just horrible. It wasn’t just bad, it was bad. Like, make a Tumblr about bad writers and post it up there bad. Like, Horse ebooks bad. Like legen — wait for it — dary bad.

I didn’t like it is the gist of what I’m getting at here.

I know there are other writers who feel they’re better writers than their editors/copy editors/proofreaders/friends and all that, but that’s not where I’m coming from in this scenario. No, more often than not, I’m humbled by what my friends are able to accomplish. I have one friend who I keep wondering where they acquired their particular set of skills, because I didn’t realize they existed in Calgary. And another who’s so phenomenal and just doesn’t really know it yet. All of them are younger and brighter than me, and I’m definitely envious of what they’re able to accomplish.

So my feelings on this matter don’t come from a position of jealousy for this particular writer. It’s more a sense of disgust, really. To be a professional writer, you really need one talent: the ability to write well. And really, it’s not that important if you want to take on the shitty gigs, because frankly, some places will hire anyone with a copy of Microsoft Word and a working knowledge of what a dictionary does. But some of the things this person was doing were so bad that it defied description. Switching tenses mid sentence? Hyphenating words that don’t need to be hyphenated (ex: rail-road)? Paragraphs that are one big run-on sentence? Yup, seen it. And I’ve seen those people get promoted up the ladder.

I would like to think that these people will end up getting their due someday, and that things will eventually hit the fan for them. But it’s more likely that they won’t. They’ll probably get raise after raise until they hit the editorial ceiling and decide to go the way of marketing or sales like every other journo who wants to crack $100k a year. They won’t ever learn that they’re a really bad writer, it’s just the way things work.

Again, I’m not perfect in any way. You can ask my friend Marie — hyphens are my kryptonite, I often capitalize words after a colon and I certainly don’t get things right every time. But still, some people just don’t get it, and they never will.

But I can’t beat them, so there’s no point in trying. The only thing I can really do is work hard on improving my particular set of skills, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Quick Hits

I went to the local Checker Auto Parts (now O’Reilly) on Sunday night around 8 pm and drove the Suburban. The temperature was perfect. Windows down, driving on Northsight with the wind flowing across my shaved head and the radio playing quietly, I reflected on all the things I accomplished that day and what I was planning on doing the rest of the week. It was beautiful.

When I pulled up to the store there was a guy in a gray O’Reilly shirt standing out front smoking a cigarette, the smoke whipping up around his head. He took a long pull from his cigarette and said with smoke exiting his mouth, “Hey there, buddy.” I made a tight smile and nodded in that way that guys do when they’re acknowledging each other, and wandered into the store. Five minutes later I heard the door beep and I knew it was him returning from his smoke break.

I dropped off my supplies at the counter, and he walked up to check me out. Suddenly, my nose fills with this familiar smell and memories flooded back into my head. It was the aroma of stale cigarettes — Marlboro Reds, I believe — and Right Guard that a friend of mine used to wear back when we were working on my Civic. It was a tiny garage in Mesa where we first put that Red’s hydraulic setup in the trunk of my two-door coupe, and after a long night of wrenching and lots of Marlboro Reds, we had a car that lifted up and down and laid out like a champ. Sure, I’d break it several times in the next few hours, but it was mine and it was glorious. Funny how sense memory works.

After checking out, I instantly pulled out my iPhone to write down what happened in Simplenote so I could remember it for the book. There’s going to be a character in my mystery novel — and I don’t know who yet — that smokes and smells of Right Guard and Marlboro Reds. If my nose conjured up memories so vivid from a trip to get oil for the car, maybe someone else will have a similar experience.

*     *     *     *     *

My wife and I talked a bit on Sunday night about my work schedule and my lack of productivity during certain situations. I’m always getting shit done first thing in the morning, but if anything should interrupt that pattern, I’m done for the day. It’s the most fucked up thing in the world, but if I’m not working at 8 am on a weekday, then I might as well go to the mall for the rest of the day because my productivity is already shot. My wife has been dawdling during the mornings recently, and because I watch our son so she can get ready, it puts me in the office at 9. That leads to a day of misadventures and missteps, and inevitably, nothing of note gets accomplished.

After talking it out, she told me that she’d adjust accordingly, and Monday morning she did just that. At 7:45 I was in my chair, responding to emails from days gone by and cranking Childish Gambino on my headphones. I was in the zone. Mind like water. Perfect.

She popped in around 8:45 or so, still wearing her pajamas from the night before, and as she leaned against the door jam to talk to me I thought about how beautiful she was. And as she told me about this tart she was going to make for dinner, I flashed forward to a time that’s hopefully someday in the future where she’s at home with the kids and I’m just working in the office, the sounds of little feet running mixing with the beats from my headphones. Domestic bliss mixed with a perfect work environment. It was pretty cool.

*     *     *     *     *

Watching my son play with a truck on the floor of the garage on Saturday morning was an amazing experience. My wife was trying to repair a printer, I was sweeping up the floor and here was this little kid in gray shorts and a yellow shirt opening the doors on a toy that had spent years on display in my workspace. He made little “Vroom” sounds as it bounced along the ground, and picked it up to spin the wheels and say, “WOOWWW!” in that little kid way that he does.

I sat down and gave him a hug, which he tried to shrug off because he was quite obviously busy, so I sat down and watched him play for just a minute. I hope to spend many days on the garage floor with him in the future, but this first time, just watching him play trucks, was special.

Garage

originally written on Sunday, May 27

I turn on the same shower I’ve turned on thousands of times in my life and listen for the familiar sound of water hitting the plastic shower floor. As I step in and the water washes over my body, I look down at the floor and watch the white plastic turn a milky black as the dirt pours off of my body. I smile.

The dirt is the product of time well spent. Time spent in the garage, an activity that I don’t do often enough, nowadays. As I wash, I follow the same routine I’ve done for years after working on a car. I soap down from top to bottom, just like I’m washing my truck. I pay extra attention to the knees and this spot between my elbow and my triceps that always seems to have grease, but never comes off in the standard soaping process. As I wash I notice the square rust stain in the corner of the shower pan, the result of keeping a large tub of Fast Orange in that spot ten years prior, and errant metal shavings that were on my body collecting around the container. That time seems like hundreds of years ago now.

My body slumps against the back wall and I slide down to sit and let the water fall on my torso as I tilt my head back and sigh. The water feels good, but it’s more the reason why I’m showering that makes me feel more satisfied.

Today, I changed the oil on my wife’s car, cleaned the engine bay and inspected the front suspension for signs of wear. This isn’t some herculean task that only I can do. To the contrary, it’s a mundane chore that any shade tree mechanic could accomplish on a Sunday morning. But for me, it’s a milestone. It’s the first time I’ve worked on a car in that garage in months. It was too much of a mess to even park a vehicle previously, but yesterday I spent the morning with my son and wife in the garage just cleaning up. Between the box full of telephones and the Dub City truck that I found while cleaning, he was well occupied. Enough that I could sweep, clean and put away all the ornaments of a domestic life.

It’s not what I wanted ten years ago. Back then, a family and kids were something for Future Kevin to worry about. Then, it was about building cars and trucks. In 1999, I spent several days cutting the fenders out of my perfectly painted 1996 Honda Civic so I could lay the rockers on the ground, an accomplishment that not many other people had accomplished at the time. In 2001, I helped (in the loosest sense of the word) my friend Jai shave the body on my Ford Focus wagon, a car that would put me on the cover of a magazine for the third — and last — time in my car building career. In 2005, I worked with my friend Chad on channeling my 2004 Chevrolet Silverado, a truck that I was forced to sell when my wife was laid off in 2008. I did all that in the very garage my son was playing in right at that moment. And it felt good.

As I sit in the shower, I started looking at my hands. I notice the scar on my left hand, the result of welding on my Astro van project in the early ’00s when a piece of slag fell and stuck to the skin underneath the pinky finger. There’s a nasty gash near the webbing of my left thumb from when I cut myself doing something, and then there’s the way my ring finger is permanently misshapen from a razor blade that sliced the tip of it off back in 2002. My hands tell the story of hard work, but those scars are starting to fade. That can’t continue to happen. I need to collect more scars.

There is no next project for me. There is no frame awaiting a notch, or a body that needs to be shaved and cut up. Right now, all I have is a thought of what I want and how I want to do it, but no way to make it happen. There’s no money for trucks right now, and it’s been that way for the past few years. There’s been no hope.

But now there’s more income. More potential for that situation to change. A higher likelihood that soon there will be something in that garage that I can build. Something that I use as a learning tool for my son. A project. Hope.

The shower turns off and all the soap, dirt and grease from the day finish circling the day. As I dry off, I think about the thousands of other times I washed off in that shower, and how satisfied I was with the work I had accomplished in the garage. This morning was productive, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a day with die grinders flying and Sawzalls cutting.

It wasn’t enough.

Soon.

Memorial Day

I know I said that I wanted to post 500-1,000 words a day and be consistent, but it’s Memorial Day, and I’m taking the day off from posting. Instead, I’ll be spending it with this guy.

Have a fun three-day weekend.

All About Klout

I recently lost a potential client because my Klout score wasn’t high enough.

Just soak that in for a minute. Last count, I had or was in charge of four Facebook accounts, five Twitter feeds, one Tumblr, two WordPress blogs, two Google+ accounts, one Foursquare, an Instagram, LinkedIn, Path, Stamped, Oink — do I really need to go on? I’m an active social networker, it’s just not all in one localized spot. And frankly, I’m pretty sick of trying to set myself to some arbitrary equation that someone created that isn’t completely transparent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, so let me dial it back a tick.

Klout is a website that connects to a person’s social networks and then determines — based on their own secret sauce algorithm — what your score should be. Someone who blogs/tweets/posts a lot, gets a higher score than those that don’t, but there’s not really a whole lot of rhyme or reason why you get the score you do. You can get bumped up a point or two if your friends participate in your Klout, and you can get perks if you do well enough, but it really comes down to being active in the hundreds of social networks available today.

For perspective, Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score at 100. Soak that in for a minute.

My Klout score, as of today, is 45. This is not considered to be good enough to be a social network writer, as some people will claim, and to a certain point, I can agree. I don’t have over 2,000 tweets, which means that I’m not really that active on the site. I could be, but I have other things to do — like work. I’ve been on Facebook since 2008 I believe, and I’ve got hundreds of posts up there as well. Why isn’t my score higher?

Well, there’s a pretty solid reason for that. I currently work as a social network writer in some capacity or another for multiple organizations. Problem is, Klout only allows you to have one in each category. So I can connect my personal Facebook page or my company’s, but not the three companies that I post for plus my own. Same thing goes with the five Twitter accounts that I manage; I only can let Klout access one.

So while I may actually score quite high in this arbitrary system, I’m locked by the rules of the game. And as such, I don’t have any Klout.

Fuck that.

Wired wrote recently about what Klout is all about, and I get their angle on things because now it’s happened to me. But if you give credence to a site that proclaims that they’re still in beta, aren’t you really just fooling yourself? Maybe instead of judging someone on a score that they have little to no control over, people should do some legwork themselves and see what that person really does with their time.

Because I don’t know about you, but if I was looking to hire a guy to do my social networking, I’d feel a bit iffy if their personal Twitter account had over 20,000 posts. After all, if that person is spending that much time on Twitter for themselves, how much time could they spend working for their client?

By the way, you can follow me on Twitter here. (irony intended)

Going Full Time

It’s official, I signed the paperwork just the other day. I have a full-time job. What I do and where I do it I’m not privy to discuss (nor am I legally able to), but let’s just say that I’m still writing for a living and that my title is Writer/Project Manager and leave it at that.

Of course, I’m telling you about this, so the next question I’d anticipate would be, “Why?” Then that would follow up with, “What about your current clients?” And maybe this hypothetical conversation would then veer to, “Are you still working from home?”

The “why” is probably the most important part of this scenario, so let me spell it all out.

Back in the beginning of April, I wrote about my goals for the month. One that I didn’t mention was my personal goal to double my income by the end of April. I didn’t mention it because I felt it was a bit conceited and arrogant, and that’s something I put out there enough, no need to continue that trend. But doubling my income was important because without that, we couldn’t support the family if my wife gets pregnant and we have another child. Presumably she’ll take some time off of work, and someone’s got to fill those gaps. That would be me.

Besides, things have been a little rough around here since I left Jetset back in January, and that’s another hole I’ve been looking to fill. Although I’ve got the time to do extra stuff, I didn’t use it to my advantage, and that was eating me up inside. Getting a few more clients would help with that, plus then I could get some breathing room around our bills.

I didn’t go looking for a full-time job, however. I was answering ads on Craigslist, as I often do, when I found this ad for the aforementioned position I can’t talk about. When I received the email requesting an interview, I didn’t know what ad it was for, and a quick search showed that it was taken down. So I went into this interview blind, knowing only that they wanted an in-house writer, and nothing more. Midway through the interview I learned the deets, and that’s when I started thinking about whether or not it was a good idea.

The salary wasn’t “oh-my-god-I-have-to-have-this-job” awesome, but it wasn’t shit either, so I had that. There was health insurance, life insurance, 401k, PTO — you know, all the usual things that come with a full-time job. The only real drawback was the “in-house” part. Would I have to come in and work in a cubicle?

It wasn’t until I had the offer and was filling out paperwork that I knew for sure, and it made me very nervous. But in the end, I was told that there was no expectation for me to be in the office, which meant that very little would change in my daily workflow. In fact, now I would have some of my office supplies covered — a nice little bonus.

So really, there was no reason not to take the job. And when I look back at it, I probably should have been a full-time or salaried employee during my time at rebel and Jetset, because that’s what an editor in chief does. As for my other clients, no worries there at all. Since my work is project based, I need to be available during normal business hours, but that’s not a change from any other day for me. There just wasn’t a reason not to do this. Essentially, it’s just like I’ve picked up another client, the only difference is the legal jargon. Plus, it effectively puts me in the income goal that I was shooting for, which is very, very good news.

I think I’ve answered all of your hypothetical questions now, so it’s on to bigger and better things. This time next year, I’m hoping that my newfound income will mean a few things: the car is paid off, our medical bills are paid off, and we have a new baby in our life who comes into a debt-free family.

Huzzah.

Embracing Your Inner Nerd

I’ve always known that I was a nerd, it was just the levels of nerdom that I was at that I wasn’t quite ready to accept. Sure, I liked Star Wars more than any adult male should, and yes, my collection of LEGO was out of hand for a man in his 30s. Yet, there was something that was holding me back from really accepting it the way I probably should have at this point in my life. I have no idea what it was.

Recently, I’ve sought to amend that problem by doing the geeky things that I’ve always wanted to do but haven’t for one reason or another. One of those things was automation, specifically, on my computer. Although I had dabbled in it before, again, I hadn’t embraced the process. Like many things, I wish I had done it a long time ago, because it would’ve saved me hours of time.

The stimulus came from two primary sources. First, I had been reading about Keyboard Maestro and Hazel for a long time now, and had even downloaded demos of each. But time got in the way, and I never really utilized either one the way I should have. I decided to change that after reading yet another article about how it saved the writer so much time, and finally bought the apps.

The second stimulus came from reading Paperless by David Sparks. The basic concept of the book is to learn how to create a perfectly paperless environment for yourself using the tools you have on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Key to the workflow is Hazel, and that was just another nail in my nerdy coffin.

After reading his book and playing with some macros, I solved a problem that I’ve been having for years. See, when I send out an invoice, I copy it to two distinct locations. One is my hard drive on my MacBook Air, the other is on my storage drive connected to my iMac, the drive named Nibbler. I used to have to do this manually, but now I just drag the file into a folder named Action that lives in my Dock. Hazel scans that file constantly, and when it finds a file with the word “invoice” in it that is also a PDF, it automatically changes the icon color, moves it to one invoices folder and copies it to another. I don’t have to do a thing.

This simple process saved me precious seconds every day, and if you add all that up, that could be hours long term. It’s a huge improvement in my workflow.

As for Keyboard Maestro, here’s a simple macro I just worked up today. When I’m in my office (and sometimes outside), I often need to find a file located on my iMac, since it’s my central storage repository. To do this, I use an app named Screen Sharing and iCloud’s Back to my Mac feature. It used to be that I’d open up Finder, navigate to the iMac, open it, then click on “Share Screen.” This worked, but again, it’s a lengthy process. By just assigning a keyboard shortcut to the routine, I can now share screens with my iMac by just hitting three keys.

Another good one? An app named Rename It (another David Sparks recommendation). I have to rename image files all the time when I send them off to my editors, and this little app lets me manipulate file names in batches quickly and easily. Holy crap has it saved me a ton of time. And even better, it’s now a part of my workflow; I pick out pictures that I want to send my editor, then put them into Rename It. I then rename all the files while they’re still in their original folder, then drop them into a CD for burning. This skips a bunch of steps I was previously doing, making life much, much easier.

These are simple little routines, but it’s about removing friction from my life, and these apps do that in spades. Why it took me so long to adopt these simple little strategies, I honestly don’t know. But now that I have, I don’t know how I’d live without them.

I guess the moral of the story here, if there is one, is to stop putting off what you could do today. Every minute you waste doing something inefficiently is a minute you could have doing something else. I know I’d rather spend time with my son than manipulate folders and move files, that’s for sure.