Author Archives: mhick255

Save Time in Your Job Search with TextExpander

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TextExpander from Smile Software

TextExpander from Smile Software

When you’re applying for jobs, you find yourself entering the same information into online forms over and over again: work history, contact information, names, etc. A few forms allow you to import information from an uploaded resume or from your LinkedIn profile, but even these don’t always get all of your details correct. It isn’t easy to stay motivated during the job search, and entering the name and phone number of your supervisor from seven years ago for the 50th time doesn’t help any.

This is where I use TextExpander to save time and stay focused.

What is TextExpander?

TextExpander does what its name says: expands text. At the simplest level, the program allows you to create custom shortcuts — called snippets — for text that you have to type repeatedly. For example, I have a snippet for my cell phone number. I can type:

ccell

anywhere I need to type my cell phone number, and TextExpander changes the string into my number. Not only is “ccell” shorter than my 10-digit number, but it also takes less time to type on my non-number pad-equipped Macbook.

There are more advanced features — I’ll cover one of them below — but you can read more at the TextExpander website.

Note: TextExpander is a Mac-only program, though there is an iOS version for iPhone and iPad. There are similar programs for Windows, and if you use one that you recommend, tell me about in the comments.

Basic Examples: Work History

How does this work in practice? Let me share a couple of actual examples that I use for entering my work history. Perhaps this is more helpful to me than to other people, because I have a history of long job titles at organizations with long names. Let’s take one of my former positions as an example: Director of Foundation Services at the Cincinnati Better Business Bureau.

When I type:

.cbbb

TextExpander expands it to “Cincinnati Better Business Bureau.” (The period at the beginning is a trigger that distinguishes the Snippet from the initialism CBBB.)

A couple more common snippets related to my CBBB position. The following two:

.cbtitle
.cbphone

expand to “Director of Foundation Services” and the CBBB’s main phone number, respectively. You get the picture. Snippets can expand to much longer text, too, so I could create Snippets for the CBBB’s address, my job description there, or even my full resume.

Advanced TextExpander: Cover Letter Templates

Now for a more advanced example. One of my deep dark shames is that I hate writing cover letters. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I really don’t mind writing one cover letter, but by the third or fourth or twentieth, I’m a bit weary of the procedure. So I’ve created a cover letter snippet that saves me a great deal of time and mental energy. All I have to do is type:

.coverletter

and a small pop-up window appears.

TextExpander Window

Click for a clearer image.

Notice the blanks in the text. This is a generic cover letter, with spaces for the address, salutation, and some custom language about my experience and expertise. (Today’s date is automatically generated by TextExpander.) When I’ve filled in the blanks, I click “OK,” and the new text is inserted into whatever program I’m using.

I’m still not done with the cover letter, as this is only a template to help get me started. But the hard work of getting to a first draft is done. Now I can revise, reword, and craft the cover letter to fit the specific position, much faster and much more easily that if I were starting from scratch each time.

TextExpander is one of the three apps I immediately install on a new Mac. It syncs with Dropbox, too, so that my snippets travel with me from computer to computer. TextExpander offers several pre-defined snippets (e.g. special characters, HTML coding), and smart people like Brett Terpstra and David Sparks have created bundles of TextExpander snippets that are much better than anything I could come up with. TextExpander also allows scripting within snippets, enabling even more powerful shortcuts. One of my current favorites is a script snippet from Brett Terpstra that pastes in the current URL from Safari.

Do you have any tips for speeding up job applications? If you use TextExpander, do you have any favorite tricks?

We Wait and Watch: A New Hymn for Advent

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Advent Candles

Advent Candles

As part of my master’s thesis at Regent College, I wrote a Good Friday hymn cycle based on the Seven Last Words of Christ. In the years since, I’ve written a song or two for Easter musicals, but I’ve not written any more congregational hymns. This year, my family and I began attending a new church with a strong hymn tradition, and the idea for a new hymn formed.

As with several of my Good Friday hymns, the tune inspired the lyrics. My friend Tom Trevethan introduced me to the hymn “We Rest of Thee” several years ago, and his love for the hymn and its history became my own. I later learned that the hymn had a strong connection to InterVarsity, in addition to being the hymn sung by the missionary Jim Eliot and his companions shortly before their deaths. Even though I previously had little knowledge of the hymn, after I heard Tom speak so movingly about it, I often found myself tearing up whenever I had the opportunity to sing it.

The tune is “Finlandia,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s symphonic poem. The melody is beautiful, though one with its own challenges for lyrics. Each line is relatively long by hymn standards (10 or 11 syllables), and the 1st, 3rd, and 5th lines end with a rising motif that doesn’t fit all words. In the words, I tried to bring together several different images and themes from traditional Advent readings and things that Jesus said about his Second Coming. Many thanks to Anthony Palm for arranging and conducting the hymn for the church, as well as making some good suggestions about word choice, to the Hebron Lutheran Church Choir for singing it this morning, and to Pastor Dave Shockey for giving me this opportunity.

I hope this hymn will be a blessing to you this Advent.

We Wait and Watch

1. 
We wait and watch for our Lord Christ’s returning;
  We stand alert, like watchmen on the wall. 
We feel him near, our hearts within us burning,
  At any hour, prepared to give our all. 
We wait and watch; our hope is in his hand. 
Soon we will see, and all will understand. 

2. 
We wait and watch, like virgins did by twilight. 
  Five filled their lamps, the others left theirs dry.
Their drowsiness laid claim to all their might;
  Their eyes fell closed, until they heard the cry.  
The wisest five also rose at once to follow;
Those unprepared were left behind in woe. 

3. 
None know the hour the Father has appointed.
  Christ will appear as sudden as a thief,
Riding on clouds, revealed as God’s anointed:
  Soon he will come, confirming our belief. 
None know the hour; no one will know the day. 
We wait and watch, and in our hope we pray. 

4. 
Come quickly, Lord; your reign endures forever.
  Our Father’s will, be done upon the earth, 
The lion and lamb lay down in peace together,
  And New Jerusalem be given birth. 
We wait and watch for the whole world restored,
When every heart proclaims you as the Lord.

Cloud Atlas, Science Fiction, and the Origins of Religion

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I just finished reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and I liked this remarkable book a great deal. The book is structured as six “nesting doll” stories, each with a different cast of characters, written in a different genre, set in a different time. Each story is, in turn, interrupted by the next one; after the sixth story is told in full, the stories resolve in reverse order. As I wrote on Twitter,

I won’t write a full review, but I wanted to comment on one element. The sixth story, set in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii of the far future, features a religious system that regards as divine a character from an earlier story. This is a common trope in science fiction: some remarkable, but ultimately reasonable and nonreligious event or person becomes the basis for a religion after centuries of distortion, misunderstandings, and half-remembered truths. Half-remembered truth + time + distortion = religion.

Science fiction that uses this formula shares the same assumptions as classic Liberal Christianity of the 18th and 19th centuries. Both assume there’s something true, more or less, at the core of religion, but that truth can be explained in purely naturalistic terms. The “religious” elements of religion, meanwhile — miracles, belief in the divinity of the founders, metaphysical claims, prayers and other rites — accumulated slowly as the original truths were forgotten or misunderstood. While the religion may have begun as a new philosophy or social movement, it was never intended to be a “religion.”

This strikes me as exactly the opposite of how religions are actually founded. Whatever the event or teaching that launches the religion, its religious nature is immediately apparent, and the movement is regarded as a religion during the lifetime of the founder or shortly thereafter. Whatever truth or falsehood these movements possess is there from the very beginning. If anything, the passage of time tends to make the religions less mystical, as they move away from the ecstatic experiences of the founding generations and settle into systematized belief.

Let’s set aside older religions for the moment and instead just consider religions whose origins were well-recorded by outsiders, such as Sikhism, Bahá’í, Mormonism, and Scientology. Each of these featured a founder who made radical new claims about the nature of reality and claimed to have received these insights through an otherworldly experience. Religious elements and rituals were present from the very beginning (and were usually the innovations of the founder), and the sacred texts of the religions were written by either the founder or his followers. Though their origins are less well-documented by outside obervers, I think the same basic pattern would apply to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other older religions. Hinduism, classical paganism, and traditional animism may fit the “time + distortion” model, but their origins lay so far in the past that theories about their foundations can only be conjecture.

By the way, I also enjoyed David Mitchell’s 2011 novel The Ten Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I’m adding the rest of his novels to my “to read” list.

What Books Should Young Christian Scholars Read?

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Later this month, I’ll be representing the Emerging Scholars Network at Urbana 12, InterVarsity’s triennial student missions conference. I’m leading a seminar called “Serving Christ as a Professor,” and I’m looking for books to add to our recommended reading list for undergraduates. From my post at the Emerging Scholars Blog:

One of my favorite things about conferences is learning about new books — or, even better, old books that I somehow hadn’t known about. Most of the attendees at Urbana are undergraduates, so the conference is a great opportunity to send them away with a fresh reading list for the new year.

What books about the life of the mind, the academy, and spiritual formation should we recommend?

Visit the Emerging Scholars Blog to see the list of books we recommended at Urbana 09, as well as the great suggestions we’ve received from the ESN community.

GTD to GJD: Getting Things Done to Get a Job, Darnit!

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In my recent posts on searching for a job, I’ve mentioned Things a couple of times. You might be wondering, “Things? Can you be more specific?” Yes. Things is the Mac program I use to track my GTD (Getting Things Done) system.

Why Do You Need to Get Things Done?

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done by David Allen. Doesn’t he look relaxed?

Just because you’re unemployed or underemployed doesn’t mean you don’t have things to do. Further, just about virtually everything you’re doing is self-directed and self-organized. No one’s calling a status meeting to check on your progress with cleaning the garage or checking in to verify you’ll chaperone the 1st grade field trip on Monday.

You may think that this is the worst time to set up a new organizational system. Wrong: this is the perfect time. You need to be organized to find a great job, and you probably have more control over your schedule now than you have in years. Additionally, this is a great time to start (or restart) personal projects that you always want to do, but never had time to pursue. Guess what: now you have time.

Now that you have some extra time, it’s also likely people will begin asking you to do more stuff: volunteer at school, take on more child care duties, work on long-delayed projects around the house, etc. Simply keeping a house in order is a full time job. If you’re serious about finding a new job, you need some way to organize your efforts. That job ain’t gonna find itself.

If you’re having the opposite problem — thinking you have nothing to do — think again. In case you need ideas or motivation, check out this terrific blog post about 9 things to do in your first week of unemployment that my wife sent me a few weeks ago.

What is GTD?

GTO

A 1969 GTO. Maybe you can buy one after you get that awesome job.

In case you don’t know GTD from a GTO, it’s a system developed by David Allen for collecting, organizing, and track everything that you have to do get done in your life. That may sound stressful, but the goal is actually to reduce stress while enabling you to move beyond merely maintaining your life to achieving your goals.

Here are a few places to learn more:

Additionally, one of my favorite podcasts, Back to Work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, has recently started a series introducing Getting Things Done. If you like productivity discussions sprinkled liberally with comic book references and silly voices, subscribe to Back to Work.

There’s a cottage industry of software to help people with GTD, though you can actually use the system with simple notebooks or even plain text files (as Merlin Mann does). A few of the apps I’ve used include:

Things is what I’m using right now. Why? Because I own a copy. Don’t spend a lot of time choosing the right software or the perfect notebook. Trust me — I’ve tried them all, and the most important factor is your own willingness to keep on top of the system.

How I Apply GTD to My Job Search

In Things, I have project called “Find a new job.” Perhaps even more importantly, I also have all of my other projects and areas of responsibility set up as well. While it’s important to stay focused on the job search, life goes on and you need to focus on the rest of your life, too.

Here’s GTD in action with a situation that actually happened to me.

  • Capture. I record everything I need to do related to this job search and put it in the project folder. Most GTD apps now have phone versions, so it’s easy to jot down something anywhere you are. I also like to keep a small notebook and pen with me for the same reason. Just make sure to consolidate your written notes with your software ones. Example: at a friend’s house, I met a person — let’s call him “Bob” — who happens to work in one of my target industries. I recorded his contact information in my phone and made a note to email him for lunch.
  • Organize. I convert my random notes into clear Next Actions with specific contexts. A context is anything you need for the specific action. It might a piece of equipment (phone, computer), a place (hardware store, library), or a state of mind (high energy, low energy). At this point, high/low energy is one of the most important contexts for me. You can also use contexts to specify how long a task will take – five minutes, an hour, all day, etc. (If it takes an entire day, however, it’s probably a project, not a task.) Staying with the example above, the only context I need to email Bob I met is, well, my computer. It would only take a few minutes and require almost no energy. So I might give it the contexts “computer,” “5min,” and “low.” (In reality, because this was a very quick task, I did it as soon as I saw in my daily review.)
  • Review. Perhaps the most important step, and the one I struggle with most. You should be reviewing your GTD system daily and weekly so that you always know what you need to do next. It’s something I’m getting better at. On Tuesday, I reviewed Things and saw that I had “Email Bob for lunch” as a to-do item.
  • Do. When you have the time, context, and energy for a task, do it. I emailed Bob for lunch.

GTD is much more complex and robust that this, so I encourage you to read the book and try it yourself.

Do you use GTD? Have you used it or another system to find a new job? Do you suggestions for how I improve my system? Tell me about it in the comments.