Maybe it’s okay stop working in the middle of the day. Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether it’s okay or not, you just have to stop for a time. But there may be something in us that makes it a necessity rather than a weakness. Peter Killeen, a researched psychologist, talked to Fast Company website about why it happens and what we can do about it:

One of the first keys, he says, is to recognize that you have a finite attentional window–and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints–and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays.

Read the full article. And a hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting it.

Bollocks to new years’ resolutions. I am trying my Pattern Week one (still chewing over the details, will report back) but I’ve had a poor start back to work. Bits of bad news hanging over me, nothing I can do much about but which combined with finally being in a relaxed holiday mode – it only took two weeks – meant the start has been tough.

You are part of my solution. If it weren’t for you, I hope I would’ve got to work but I wouldn’t have thought about how to do it. More, if I were to have found some way to get myself going productively, I wouldn’t have written it down for either of us. As it is, I have thought about and I am going to do something and I am going to tell you.

Consider this a live post: as I write to you now it is coming up to the top of the hour and from that hour I am going to do ten things. I can’t tell you what they are because they’re specific and they involve other people who don’t know you and I are talking like this. But I took a shower, decided on this overall idea of ten things in the next hour and realised that if I do it, I’ll feel I’ve got somewhere today. And usually that’s all I need to keep getting somewhere each day.

I wrote down a list of eight things immediately. Had to check my OmniFocus To Do list for the other two and got a bit bogged down because there was so much to choose from. But the point of ten is that it’s not easy but it is achievable. Whatever you’re working on, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that there are ten really fast things you could do right now if you put your mind to it.

And I bet at least one of those is something you don’t want to do.

I’ve got two of those in my ten.

It’s four minutes to the top of the hour. I have tea.

And go…

12:03 First one done. An important, personal and mildly tricky iMessage: lots of detail to get over in a short space.

12:12 Plan failing. Was doing the second and third thing together – how’s that, eh? – as it was a pair of emails that I realised could be done as one and CCd, when I got an iMessage reply about task number 1. Have responded, as it was urgent, but also finished those emails. So now it’s on to task 4: something a touch more creative, but only a touch.

I’m in a programme called Room 204 which currently also has a writing buddy scheme; I’ve never done one of these before but it has been working out very well for me and I’ve also just enjoyed getting to know more writers in my area. That’s my geographic area, most of the writers are not doing the same kinds of writing as me – and that also makes it interesting. So interesting.

But it is now time to swap over buddies and the first order of business is to email the new one and say what three things I’m aiming to do this month. It’s accountability, you know the idea.

So my job number 4 is to figure out the three. I’ll tell you now that this ain’t going to be the only three things I do in January. But it’s the three I think the buddying system will help. I just don’t know what they are yet, so 4 is working out the three.

Right, I’ve written those. Not one detail of which I can tell you yet I’ll send it all to my writing buddy now and that will be tasks 4 and 5 done. Getting good at this, aren’t I? Plus the iMessage conversation has continued right along with all this.

12:32 Slower than I’d like. But I sent that list to my writing buddy and in expanding a few things to give them any clarity at all, I managed to make them all clearer for me too. So that was good and unexpected. But now on to task 6. It’s a financial one.

Hate these.

12:44 Done that one and while I was in my accounts, also booked a train ticket – and forwarded the ticket to TripIt so it’s in my iPhone ready for me – which means I’ve done numbers 6 and 8.

Number 7 is also financial. Hang on a tick.

I need to raise an invoice and it will take me longer to check my database for the number than I’ve got time for. Instigating a new 2014-style invoice numbering sequence – and will include it in Evernote so that I always know what the last one was and the next one is.

12:53 Done and done. So that’s the invoice done and submitted, which is number 7 and also the Evernote invoice and job numbering thing which wasn’t part of this list of ten at all. So that’s 7 and 11.

Which leaves me seven minutes in which to do numbers 9 and 10.

12:59 Number 9 was a complicated little email and that’s now done and sent.

And you’re thinking that I have less than a minute to do number 10 but actually, you’ve been reading it. Number 10 was: “Write blog about ten things to do in the hour.”

Which means I’ve done it.

Part of me wishes I’d failed because then I could write about that and learn something from it but it turns out to be a rather good feeling. If I could show you the full list of ten things you wouldn’t be ferociously impressed but you might be a little bit. I deliberately picked ten things that I thought would be difficult to do in an hour but maybe manageable at a push and they were.

I’ll just quickly skim over this, remove anything I can’t tell you yet, and then post it to you.

Thanks for being my push to get a decent hour’s work done on this first day back in my office, this first day that has felt so tough to get going.

If you want to remember something that has happened, don’t take a photo of it. This rather goes against the fact that our memories are rubbish and it definitely makes the camera on your phone burn in your hand until you use it, but there is research on it.

Quite convincing research, too. The summary is that with some exceptions, when we take a photograph we are abdicating our memory to that digital record. Plus, we never look at the photos again, do we?

The Association for Psychological Science says so. Have a look because you’re convinced but you want to know about those exceptions.

Back on 2 January 2013, I decided to get up at 5am to write. Not just for that one day – oh, that would’ve been marvellous – but every working week day. So that is Monday to Friday, every week bar holidays. And when I’d have man flu, I could book a day off. If I were travelling or I was due to finish a talk late or early or something, then I could book the day off. But it had to be booked in advance, it had to be for a specific reason.

What it could not be is decided in the morning. Alarm goes off, I get up. No snoozing. No turning over.

I even bribed myself. Each morning I got up and worked, I would put a pound coin in a jar. And I stated to anyone who would listen – I even stated it in my book The Blank Screen – that if I ever did turn over or did lie in, I would empty the jar. Not just fail to put a coin in, not just take one out, but I would empty the lot and give it away. Probably to Angela, but certainly I wouldn’t profit from it myself.

And it worked. I got up and wrote at 5am for a total of 186 days in the year. I could’ve done another 75 and it shocks me how many fell under the allowable booking-off category. (I did have a three week holiday and I have done about 25 talks plus a couple of colds, but still, 75 is a lot.)

It has been tremendously productive for me. The entire Blank Screen project grew out of this and I wrote three books.

So I’m going to call this a success. And now I think I’m going to call it ingrained.

Which means that I need something new to ingrain for the next year. Something to add to my 5am starts which I obviously need to keep doing.

I don’t usually think in terms of new years’ resolutions because I only break them but after the 5am success, I’m going to try this.

The Pattern Week.

The term comes from US television where a drama series will have what is called a pattern budget: this is how much each episode has to spend on it throughout the season. If the producers want a big opening – and they always do – then more money can be spent on that but it has to come out of the cost of a later episode. Same with the finale. Or any special episode. This is why you always get visibly cheaper episodes at various points in the run.

For me, I’m going to set a pattern for my week with what I’m doing when. This will change as I’m away but I am going to try allotting time to the many projects I have to juggle and I’m going to see if it helps me get through the work better.

I think it will also help me coping with those wretched 5am starts: I’m going to set pattern end times for the day.

It’s all a bit nebulous now but I’m noodling through it and I am planning to make that week pattern be a replacement for the wallpaper on my iMac. I’ve tried whiteboards before and struggled to find room for them. I’ve also just never looked at them once they’re up.

When I’ve got that image, I’ll show it to you here.

I would say that this is the best Christmas present I had this year but for how I bought it myself and anyway, yesterday I was given a Doctor Who TARDIS chocolate mould. Oh, yes. I think that one is going to actually slow down my productivity for the year but in a good way. The keyboard should – no, it will – do the opposite.

It’s an iPad case with a keyboard built in. That sounds a bit like a Microsoft Surface and there were two very good things about the Surface: its name and its keyboard. I think. Certainly its name, I loved that name when they used it for the giant pool-table sized touch computers. The idea of a built-in keyboard may be better than the ones that can come with the Surface, but the idea is good.

It’s good but it’s not essential. I remember writing the first thousand words of The Blank Screen (UK edition) on my original iPad and typing directly onto the glass. Over the years, I wrote very many thousands of words on that glass but there did come a point when I decided to try an external Bluetooth keyboard. It meant carrying two things around but it did also mean that my typing went back up to nearer its normal speed and I enjoy typing, I’m good at typing and I feel I can only write when I’m kneading the keys. No matter how good the iPad’s onscreen keyboard is, I miss the feel of real keys and I am demonstrably faster with them.

I was a bit torn, though. Even when I’d decided I was going to get such a keyboard and I set aside a budget for it, my research couldn’t get me closer than two possibilities. I was equally sure that a Logitech one (the Ultrathin keyboard case) and Apple’s own Wireless Keyboard were right. The Apple one isn’t made for the iPad, it’s the same one you get with a new Mac unless you specify that you want a wired one so maybe it was a bit heavier than the Logitech, maybe not as handy in some ways, but I knew the typing action on it and I liked that a lot.

But the Logitech did have iPad keys like a home button to save you having to reach up to the screen. And it was also cheaper. Given my complete certainty that either would be right, I bought the cheaper one.

And I was right.

But I was so right that after Angela had seen how I’d done a whole New York and Florida trip, working away with only the iPad and that case instead of a laptop, she wanted one. And I saw my chance. I gave her the Logitech and I bought the Apple one.

And I was right again.

I did miss the iPad-specific keys and the Logitech one came in a case that doubled as a stand for the iPad where the Apple one didn’t but, man, the typing feel was great.

Here’s how attached we both got to our keyboards. When Angela was considering a bag and it was just a smidgeon too small to fit her Logitech keyboard in, I offered to swap. It was hard. I didn’t want to. But it made sense. Nuts to sense, she thought, she didn’t want to give up her keyboard for mine.

And that’s where we were until I bought my iPad Air. I still have my external Apple Wireless keyboard and she still has her Logitech one. But our original iPads both had cases that you can’t get any more (they are the original Apple heavy rubber ones) and this means I was carting my iPad around bare. Angela made me a gorgeous kind of pillow for it, an envelope-like padded fabric piece that I can slip the iPad Air in and out of as I need. But the old cases also had the advantage that they could stand the iPad up at an angle for you to see properly as you typed and I didn’t have that.

The iPad Air is a weird thing: on the one hand it is extremely strong and clearly very tough yet on the other, you’re afraid of breaking it. I’ve gone without cases on things before and actually I don’t like cases if I can avoid them, but I knew with the work this was going to be used for and the sheer number of hours it would be worked on everywhere I went, I had to buy a case.

I could’ve bought any case and kept on using my Apple Wireless keyboard for those times that I wanted to do a lot of writing. But in the same way that I had a burn on to try the Apple Wireless keyboard after having had the Logitech one, I wanted a case that included a keyboard.

I wanted a case that I could use to protect the iPad Air, that I could also type on a proper keyboard but which didn’t require me to take the case on and off all the time. I reckon I read and write about equally on the iPad so having to take a keyboard out of the way half the time would be as inconvenient as having to put one on the other half of the time.

That was my rationale and the start for my research. I came within a pixel of buying a Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Folio for iPad Air but fortunately the Apple Store stocks them so I was able to try one out. The keys on the keyboard are great, I’d be happy with those. But the thing is wrapped in a kind of rough rubber which feels rugged but also just feels icky to me. Getting it out constantly, holding it half the day, I didn’t want that. And it had a little flappy tab for holding your stylus. I will never have a stylus for my iPad. So that would just flap at me all the time.

It’s funny but whatever you think you’ve narrowed your search down to, there are always videos and reviews that say you’re right. Every review said this Logitech one was the keyboard case to beat – until I felt one and knew I didn’t want it. Then every review I read said actually, no, there’s this even more expensive Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard Case for iPad Air that was infinitely better.

I bought it.

I don’t know about infinitely better, but it’s very good and within seconds of snapping it around my iPad, I was sold. I very much like the fact that I can hold my iPad as I always did and read or watch anything, that I can do this while forgetting that it has a keyboard. And of course I then very, very much like that I can start typing away on the keys when I want to. Yes: everything you’ve read in this post has been written on that keyboard.

I don’t like the arrangement of the apostrophe, colon/semi-colon and enter keys: they’re taking me some while to get used to but otherwise, the feel is a lot like the Apple Wireless keyboard one – not as great but still good – and the speed difference it makes is marvellous.

It is Christmas and I’ve been very bad staying off OmniFocus, my To Do manager, and just bunging in tasks that I don’t then get around to doing or sorting as I normally do. So much so that my Forecast of things I had to do was showing 35 things I should’ve done. Listen, I have done about 25 of them, I’ve just not been ticking them off as done in OmniFocus. More distressingly, I’ve let the inbox build up until it had 31 tasks in. These are all the tasks that you think of as you’re racing around and you chuck in to OmniFocus to sort out later. That means doing them or figuring out when you will or just lobbing them in to projects: this one is to do with getting new work, that one’s for a Writers’ Guild event you’re producing and so on. Things you need to do that maybe you can’t do today but you need to make a note. Fine. That’s the whole point of the inbox in OmniFocus. But you’re supposed to keep that inbox clear because you’re supposed to work through your tasks and stop them clogging up the inbox, stop them clogging up your mind. And I had 31 tasks in there.

The trouble with 31 is that you look at them and think, tsch. Later. I’ll sort them out later. And you don’t, of course, so they build up more and it’s even harder to face them.

I faced them.

With my Belkin keyboard.

Somehow being able to tap on an Inbox task as I always do but then rapidly type that this one belongs in the Writers’ Guild project, that one is for the shopping list, that one needs some more information so let me just type a thousand words into that box, it all flew and I cleared that inbox in minutes.

A clear inbox is a happy mind.

And a good keyboard is a happy writer. At least, it is for me. I need to knead the keys and the ability to do it is a motive to do it. So it may be that this is the first thing I’ve written on this new keyboard, it may be that I’m still getting used to the apostrophe key and how I keep tapping Enter instead, but already I know that this is a boon and I know that I made the right choice.

That’s a good feeling. I should make more right choices. I think I like it.

Usually if I’m going to do some linkwrapping and point you to an article, I want to show you the original. Even if I’ve read about it somewhere else, I believe I should tell you that yet point you at the original. Not this time.

This time, the original I can get to is a bit too carefully academic and dry for me whereas a piece I came across on the way is much better:

In the dystopian future, there will only be two tribes: those with messy desks and those with orderly ones. The messy desk people will live unhealthy and inefficient lives but come up with interesting new ideas. The organized desk people will be fit and get all their work done. At least, that’s one possibility if the results of a new study hold up.

That’s from something called Healthland Time. No clue. But of all the messy vs tidy desk arguments, I am persuaded by this one. Read the whole thing and follow its links out to the original academic research work here.

Previously… I started a fairly big project to set up a way for me to record my book sales when out and about. This became the blog entry Bullet Biting #1 and after half a day’s work, it also became Bullet Biting #2 as I started over. I learned a lot, most usefully about what I really wanted to achieve and, along the way, quite a lot about Launch Center Pro, TextExpander and latterly FileMaker Go.

I ended up with one very ugly and unwieldy solution. And then I ended up with one less ugly and more wieldy solution.

Neither of which I have ever looked at since.

I’m looking at using Drafts to let me squirt a text description of the sale into a kind of rough ledger in Evernote. I’ll make one note and have Drafts append to it. I’ll still need to then process it all later so it’s no better in that sense but it’s easier to set up and good enough to use on the go.

It’s also substantially easier than any of the contortions I went through before. Still, without a contortion or two, where would we be?