The question is, in an amped-up, caffeine-fueled, texting/tweeting world of constant distractions, is there a place for silence in business? That is, can a more beautifully silent space lead to better writing?

Or is this a question whose answer varies by age, with time for silence or contemplation a concept that appeals more powerfully to people over 40?

Do people write better, think more clearly, if they have the luxury of doing so in an environment that screens out noise and distractions? Does focus lead to better writing, content that’s more likely to resonate with others? Can a blank canvas invoke more creativity?

It’s an interesting question, one that I think is best answered on an individual basis. It’s also possible that individual preferences are more situational, linked to time and place, or what you’re thinking or writing about. Or: who’s paying for your time and why…

A writer’s haven

If you’d like to experience the impact of distraction-free silence while writing, there’s a minimalist tool for Mac, PC and iPad users called “OmmWriter Dana.” It’s kind of a zen-like, Steve Jobs-inspired approach to the act of writing. Its Barcelona-based creators call it “a writer’s haven.”

OmmWriter Dana

The minimalist version can be downloaded for free to your Mac; a paid-version offers a broader selection of color schemes and audio themes designed to cultivate focus, contemplation and enhance creativity.

I’m using the basic version of OmmWriter to draft this blog post. OmmWriter enables me write the basic post, hiding the rest of my Macintosh environment (including turning off my secondary display where I normally scan incoming emails, tweets, etc.)

To turn this draft into a blog, I copy my draft, and then paste it into WordPress where I’ll add the appropriate HTML tags, category tags and so on. This separates the writing process from the markup process.

Whether this two-step approach enhances creativity is too soon to say definitively. What I do know is that the actual experience of writing with OmmWriter is more delightful than when writing a blog inside WordPress, LiveWriter, NotePad or any of the usual word processing tools.

Try it yourself, and see how it helps your writing.

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Since then I’ve been living on fruit smoothies and roasted garlic soup. The VitaMix has offered a refreshing way to deal with the unpleasant side-effects of a nasty cold. I’ve also tried other unconventional remedies.

My friend Jenny brought a box of Wellness Fizz tablets, Vitamin-C plus herbal supplements to dissolve in warm water. Consumed 3 or 4 times a day, Wellness Fizz claims to boost the immune system’s ability to fight back. Even so I’ve had to resort to Zicam, decongestants, restorative yoga and lots of sleep…

No miracle cures, only modest relief — but I’ve found some pleasant distractions.

With the Help of a Few Good Books

When too ill to socialize, exercise or work, listening to jazz and classical music can be wonderfully distracting. Likewise a good book or a riveting movie. Forced to slow down while recovering, I’ve found time for some fine books.

I loved Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement: A Novel.  Set in Vietnam, the story introduces an aging cook — an itinerant street vendor — famous throughout Hanoi for his pho. You learn about Old Man Hung, his history, the proper way to make a bowl of pho — and the experiences and people who’ve touched his life over the years. The story is richly embellished with the details of everyday life in Hanoi, thanks to the author’s background as a social anthropologist. You can almost smell the lemongrass and cilantro on every page…

From Vietnam to Paris, in just a few hundred pages.

This weekend I immersed myself in 1920s Paris with the Lost Generation, thanks to Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Her novel deals with Ernest Hemingway’s early struggles to become an author, and his years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, “who loved him before he was famous,” as an Amazon reviewer wrote.

Although told from Hadley’s point of view, the story sheds some light on the experiences, adventures and troubled relationships that inspired Hemingway to write his first two novels, including the ground-breaking American novel, The Sun Also Rises. You’ll meet some of the luminaries of 20th century literature such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, among others.

After a vicarious weekend in Paris with artists and famous writers, I’m anxious to re-read Hemingway’s memoir of this period, The Moveable Feast — and learn the story through his eyes.

And as for this cold — Enough, already.

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Theirs is an inspiring story.

Lala, The Warrior Princess

They fight back with love and hope, with prayerful blessings from thousands of old and new friends and family. They use social networking to channel the love and fuel my niece’s spirits. My brother keeps us posted with his blog. While optimistic, they recognize that Lauren has begun a marathon, so they’re doing everything they can to stoke her fires and guide the energy in productive forms of healing…

Last week they feared for Lauren’s life: the tumors had become so aggressive and invasive that they were choking her very breath. It was a sudden onset: she checked into the ICU 10 days ago with what might have been pneumonia, but was instead a recurrence of nerve sheath cancer, this time wrapped around her bronchia.

This is deadly serious business, but my brother and his family look for affirmations of joy and wellness wherever they can.

Thanks to what my brother calls her warrior princess spirit, my niece fought back, regained control over her breathing, and got herself discharged from the hospital. This week she’s recuperating at home, and taking calls from Lyle Lovett and other celebrities who are inspired by her story. (She reacts as only a teenager would…)

No one on her medical team would have believed this to be possible last week. Her oncologist can only ascribe it to a miracle of love and community — the power of the human spirit — rather than the wonders of medical science.

Lala Needs You

You can help too. Join Lala, “the warrior princess,” and shower her with love and hopeful blessings. Join her Facebook group… Pray for her.

Dedicate your yoga practice to her.

You’ll be amazed at what might happen.

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Dave was enchanted by a recent biography of Dylan, written by a historian and Dylan fan, resulting in a fascinating exploration of the political, social and cultural milieu that informed Dylan’s art. Somehow we kept returning to the “tangled up” phrase during our conversation.

Since then the phrase, snatches of the song and images of blue have been reverberating in my head. A pleasing form of blues obsession…

And now the concept has morphed into “tangled up in green,” sparked the visual explosion of spring green everywhere I look here in the Pacific Northwest.

After a long grey and insanely rainy winter, this verdant fire is a feast for warmth-starved eyes.

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For a single purchase transaction of 4 tickets at $68.00 each, the ticket processing service will impose a $38 fee ($9.50 a ticket). Relative to value delivered, a 14% “tax” on each ticket is way out of proportion.

So the Early Music Guild and Seattle Baroque Orchestra lost out on 4 concert patrons, because their ticket processing service is too greedy (STG).

Too bad: it might have been a great performance.

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The police required a photo on my carte d’identité, a document to be carried at all times (or risk deportation). It was not enough to have a student visa… So duplicate photos, and a trip to the neighborhood photo booth.

To live in Paris as a legally documented resident meant supplying dozens of photos to a variety of institutions. (And often multiple copies for each piece of documentation.)

Photo IDs clipped to purpose-specific documents were required by the university, for class enrollment, student meals, etc. But they also afforded access to discounts on bus and metro passes, museum entry tickets, school books and student supplies.

It kept those photo booths busy…

Some of the photos were SO ugly that all you could do was laugh. So bad they could almost be taken for police mug shots…

So when Apple introduced Apple Photo Booth, a free app for devices with a built-in iSight camera, I had to laugh. To me shots taken in a photo booth reveal people in the least flattering ways possible. And no surprise: most photos shared via Apple Photo Booth are indeed unflattering… You won’t find me using that app.

Update 3/2/2011: Given Apple’s introduction of the new iPad 2 today, I may have to eat my words. Apple has promised a “new and improved” version of Photo Booth for the iPad 2 — an app that Apple claims is both lots of fun, as well as visually compelling. If that’s the case, you may find me back in “the virtual photo booth.”

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While wading through family records, I’ve rediscovered travel documents from my time as a student in Paris. They have triggered fond memories, and led to shared stories over dinner and a glass of wine.

Now that so much of the world has gone digital, some of the nostalgic magic of foreign travel has been lost. Does this imply our personal histories will be less rich, less redolent of memories triggered by old documents?

Just look at my student visa, for example. The colorful stamps, the distinctive shapes of different countries’ imprints. The handwritten details. It’s a cultural artifact from the pre-digital modern era.

Rhapsody in Blue

From the appearance of the original document, it’s clear that the French consular clerk was using a fountain pen to write my particulars on the visa. The style and color of the handwritten details are distinctively French. When I lived in Paris, everyone used fountain pens; and almost all pen cartridges were filled with the same shade of blue ink.

That pervasive shade of blue is inextricably linked to that milieu, my student notebooks, the people of that time and place. To the love letters I wrote my boyfriend, now husband, from Paris — written with a fountain pen that often bled through the flimsy airmail stationery. Letters that appeared during my “archeological dig” into our family files.

Despite the convenience of writing on a keyboard, computer-generated documents lack the mystique of those penned letters. The foreign stamps, the sketches in the margins.

And with today’s digitally scanned and recorded border crossing protocols, my passport remains empty, no matter how many trips I take. So it’s hard to remember when I’ve traveled where…

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Case in Point: 1099 Forms

The effort of filing 1099-MISC forms is just one of the many ways that the federal government wastes small businesses’ time during tax season. The 1099 submittal process should be easy to modernize: the forms aren’t complicated, and don’t appear to change that often.

Preparing those forms should be quick and easy for business owners or bookkeepers, especially when using a good accounting tool, like QuickBooks. If you’ve coded your bookkeeping entries properly, all the source data is already stored in QB: from the amounts paid to each 1099 contractor, their name and address; to the EIN unique identifier the IRS uses for your business.

Alas, there is no intelligent link between QuickBooks and the 1099 forms.

Even though the IRS is perfectly happy to receive 1040 tax returns via an approved eFile resource, they do not allow small firms to file 1099 information forms electronically or fill in the Acrobat forms available on their web site.(There is, however, an enterprise-scale service for that.)

Here’s the friendly notice from the IRS, warning businesses not to use the Adobe Acrobat version of the 1099 input form:

This form is provided for informational purposes only. Copy A appears in red, similar to the official IRS form. Do not file copy A downloaded from this website. The official printed version of this IRS form is scannable, but the online version of it, printed from this website, is not. A penalty of $50 per information return may be imposed for filing forms that cannot be scanned.

You must file using the IRS’ preprinted forms, although there is a time-consuming method you can use with QuickBooks. The benefit of this approach is that the data will be faithful to whatever is stored in your accounting records. No risk of typos created during the form entry process.

The IRS apparently relies upon an antiquated method that was state-of-the-art back in the go-go days of typewriters and carbon paper for duplicate copies. They require firms to fill out multi-part 1099-MISC forms using a method that can be scanned easily by the IRS — or risk a $50 fine per return. It’s vital to the IRS that they receive Copy A of your 1099 form printed on their preprinted, red form.

I can’t help but wonder: if the banks can somehow manage to scan and process checks printed from QuickBooks, why can’t the government scan a form printed by QuickBooks? It’s not as if this is a design-intensive, highly variable document!

Today’s Solution for QuickBook Users

Today’s work-around is to print each page of the multi-part 1099 form separately – for each 1099 contractor – as explained here by Intuit, unless you have a continuous printer. Assuming you work out the alignment issues between QuickBooks and your laser printer, this method works just fine, but it requires considerable attention to detail and a lot of time. The more 1099 contractors you have, the more time it takes.

Be careful: the paper for all but the first copy of the 1099 form is flimsy. Your laser printer may jam if you try to rely upon automatic paper feeding, rather than printing one page at a time. Manual feeding, one sheet at a time, was the most reliable approach for my HP LaserJet P2055 printer.

In theory I don’t mind notifying the government what I’ve paid to independent contractors. But in practice I resent how much unproductive time must be spent to send this information to the IRS.

Let’s hope there’s a better way in 2012, given Obama’s call to streamline government’s impact on business.

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Although career coaching is not my forte, I’d agreed to this meeting at the request of an Apple colleague who thought I could offer some useful perspective and thought-provoking questions. Before the meeting I forwarded Alice some web links just to get her creative juices flowing. That set a great context for our conversation.

When Happily Ever After Doesn’t Last Forever

It’s the kind of situation you see here in Seattle (or the Silicon Valley, Austin, etc.): Alice retires early, thanks to an IPO from a famous Seattle success story. Marries, has kids. Happily ever after — or for as long as the stock holds its value. A fairy tale come true, or so it seems.

Fast-forward 5 years, Alice’s kids are now in school, boredom sets in, perhaps money is no longer stretching as far as it once did.

But what’s really motivating Alice is the emotional need to re-engage with what she calls “a tribe.” Reconnecting with adults, away from the playground with the nannies and other moms. Forming bonds with other like-minded professionals who love to do great work, with and for others. Learning new skills, testing oneself in the challenges of the work environment. Helping “the tribe.”

Alice had been an accomplished experience (UI/UX) designer for a local company with global brand recognition. She has some important accomplishments on her resume, but no professional achievements to speak of for the past 5 years. Her time was invested in being a mom, volunteering at the preschool, and so on.

A lot has changed technically in the world of digital experiences, online marketing, social networking, etc., since Alice left the workforce 5 years ago. For designers it’s been a virtual tsunami of change…

The First Step on Her Journey

Alice knows she has a lot to learn, so the question is where to start, where to focus her time and energies. What to do to refresh her portfolio, her personal branding, her “show and tell” materials. Should she go back to school, get an advanced degree or professional certificate, or find an entry-level role and essentially start over…

Alice’s self-esteem is somewhat fragile; she’s out of practice with “selling herself” to a prospective employer or client. She’s heard that employers or clients prefer kids fresh out of school, who command lower payscales than experienced designers like Alice. (And let’s not even go down the path of the higher value placed on developers versus designers these days…) It’s hard for Alice to imagine how to sell herself against a younger person with more up-to-date technical skills — 5 years being a virtual lifetime in the web world.

Sadly, age bias in the workplace is very real, even in liberal places like Seattle. As a Boomer it’s painful to see age bias rear its ugly head as an employment issue even for relatively young women, people in their mid-30’s like Alice.

So we talked about ways Alice could seek opportunities that might value her strengths, rather than focusing on her near-term skills gaps. Some of these areas, like the “visual thinking movement,” were off the radar screen when Alice was still working. Some offer real promise for talents like Alice’s.

At the end of a long conversation, I was able to steer Alice toward some opportunity areas that might value her strengths, wisdom and career experience. It felt good.

But what was most rewarding was seeing Alice light up, excited by notions about where she could still make a difference, even if in different forms or media than 5 years ago. I hope she finds her new tribe.

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We were talking about November rain and cloudy skies — and how we respond to day after day of cloudy weather. He was feeling sorry for me, facing an autumn storm alone on Cape Cod. But I was relishing the look of the high tide filling in the tidal meadow a few hundred feet away.

Talking about my upbeat mood, he wondered if long-time Seattleites are somehow immune to mood swings from dark and cloudy skies. Au contraire… Was I happy despite the weather because I’m used to gloom, or was it the change in scenery?
I said it was the scenery… Here’s the view this morning from a second story window: our normally grassy meadow awash with several inches of sea water, thanks to an unusually high tide. Ducks were floating nearby.

Here’s the same meadow yesterday at low tide. For this shot I was facing east (instead of the southerly view from our windows). Fall sunshine brightens Popponesset Bay. (Cotuit Bay and the Nantucket Sound are out of sight, behind the dark pine trees.)

Until last night the weather on Cape Cod has been sunny, crisp and chilly (downright frosty at nights) — a sparkling cold that’s a welcome contrast to Seattle’s warmer but dreary November.

As you can see below, the fall colors have faded but not disappeared altogether from Cape Cod, a colorful frame for nearby bays and coves.

This shot shows the cove where we beach and launch our kayaks, now empty of boats or summer vacationers.

Cape Cod’s waters are back under the control of the osprey and great blue herons. You hear seabirds calling, rather than the high-pitched drone of jet skis or motor boats. Except for the birds, the waters are quiet. The shorebirds rule until next summer…

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