Advice

Create something solely for yourself

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We spend all this time writing for audiences – from real live audiences to commissioners and producers – but have a go at doing something just for you instead.

Building small, self-contained projects is a great way to learn and expand on your skills. When you learn by building something new instead of just through reading and theory, you learn implicitly rather than explicitly, and are more likely to retain and use the knowledge you’ve gained.

“Forget the rules, and learn from first-hand experience instead. There’s so much more to be gained from not knowing how to do things the ‘correct’ way, and learning to do them your own way.” Richard Branson

Why you should make things no one will use – Belle Beth Cooper, Crew blog (undated)

It’s not a long piece but there’s a lot in it. I’d not heard of the Crew blog: I got this via 99U.

How to cope with summer

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It’s hot, you’re supposed to be on holiday and enjoying yourself, but did I mention it’s hot? You’re working but shouldn’t be. You’re not working but should be. Summer is hell and sometimes it’s as hot as there.

The Positivity Blog has a lot of advice on how to chill out in every sense. I’m not keen on all of it but I like this one about what to do when you’re not working, when you are on holiday:

Go slow. You’ll be less stressed. And you’ll enjoy all the people, sights and experiences so much more because you’ll naturally take the time to appreciate them.

10 Small Ways to Make this the Least Stressful Summer of Your Life – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (10 June 2015)

You could also bring some work with you. That’s my contribution here.

Read the full piece.

How to survive boring meetings

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This is about meetings at work. If it’s a commissioning meeting about you or you’re pitching to someone, you won’t be bored. Every other meeting, you will. Now, clearly, the most useful and productive thing you could do in a typical work meeting is to get out of it. But since you’re lumbered, do this instead.

Next time you’re in one and somebody is droning on about stuff you have no need or use or desire for, make notes as if you have need and use and desire for it all. It passes the time and that’d be enough because anything that gets you through a meeting is worth it.

But along the way, there are going to be things you spot that actually might be interesting. Usually they’re lost in the droning, but you’ve got them there and they’re standing out at you. Also, you will often get lumbered with some task you have to do. Treat these the same way.

Specifically, when you’ve written in the meeting, put this in the left margin next to them: “- – “. Two dashes. Some people draw a little cube. Some just swipe the pen down to make a large stroke before the first word.

Whatever mark you make, make a mark. Whether you’re handwriting on paper or typing into your iPad, make a mark like this and later you can very quickly see what you’ve got to do. You can very quickly pick out the tasks from the droning.

You know I like technology, though, right? I do this in Drafts 4 on my iPad and recently I’ve been using the @ symbol followed by a space, my name and a colon before the task. That sounds tedious and unnecessary but for how there is a free script you can get for Drafts. Press one button and it scoots through all the droning, finds those @ marks and pops each one into my OmniFocus To Do list.

If you have Drafts 4 – er, and also OmniFocus – go get that script here.

Don’t talk back to your boss.

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Not even that one. The one who deserves it. I’m not convinced we need actual research on this – if your boss is bad enough that you want be abusive right back in their stinking face then they are also bad enough to fire you for it – but Harvard Business Review has looked into it.

It was a quiet day.

But there are figures that suggest maybe there are times when you should bite back and then there are figures that say nooooo. I expect those latter figure are chiefly unemployment statistics but if you’re having trouble with a manager or an important client, take a read and let it out.

The alternative hypothesis [to previous studies] that would maybe help us explain why people are hostile toward a hostile boss — we called it the buffering hypothesis in this study — is the idea that if you reciprocate your boss’s hostility, it will actually make things a little bit better and you will feel more satisfied, or not as depressed and psychologically harmed.

Our reasoning behind that second hypothesis is that if you reciprocate a boss’s hostility, you are less likely to feel like a victim. Now, we had never studied the idea that a person would report that they feel like they are a victim when their boss is hostile, but it seemed to make some sense.

So maybe if you reciprocate the boss’s hostility, it will make you feel like you are asserting some control over your situation, you are responding in some way, then you will not feel as victimized.

We found a surprising result: although a person is more likely to feel like a victim when their boss is hostile toward them, they are much less likely to feel like a victim when they reciprocate their boss’s hostility.

What Research Shows About Talking Back to a Jerk Boss – Walter Frick, Harvard Business Review (9 April 2015)

Read the full piece.

Twelve Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety

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The Positivity Blog – seriously, could that name be any more Hallmark Card happy clappy? – spends its time being very cheerfully upbeat about everything but once in a while it does hit home with a smart piece. This time it has solutions to when your stomach is churning. We’re creative people, we churn for a living, so I reckon even if one or two of the dozen methods help us out, it’s worth looking into. Although one of the suggestions is to do a workout, so, you know, already it’s 11 Powerful Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety and 1 to Increase it.

1. Breathe.

Sit down, in a quiet place if possible. Breathe a little deeper than usual and do it with your belly and not with your chest. For just a minute or two focus on only the air going in and out of your nostrils. Nothing else.

This will calm your mind and body down. And it will bring your attention back to the present moment instead of it being lost in scary, future scenarios or bad memories from the past.

12 Powerful Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (8 April 2015)

This isn’t on my mind because as I’ve got three speaking engagements back to back now. I might just breathe out a little and go re-read the full piece. Mind you, advice number 2 begins “Get Good Knowledge” and that phrasing gives me pause.

Get more out of that expensive computer of yours

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I’m not saying you and I should spend more time in front of our computers. I’m saying that while you’re there, you can make these things work harder for you.

Seriously, how much did that thing cost you? And you’re just switching it on to write in Word, check out Facebook and send the odd email?

Take a minute to just look into it a bit more. You spend a lot of time writing, for one thing: start there. Start with how no matter what word processor you use, I know that it is replete with shortcuts. You know how much, much, much faster it is to open a document by pressing Control-O on PCs or Command-O on Macs? There’s more. Google the name of your word processor and the phrase “keyboard shortcuts”. You will recoil at how many there are, but learn a couple of them now and they will become muscle memory.

This isn’t about teaching yourself something, not really, and it’s not even exactly about getting faster at the repetitive things you have to do on your computer. It’s about removing obstacles. Someone asked me recently about the whole Blank Screen thing and why I prattle on in workshops, books and online. Among many reasons – you know me, I can’t be concise – I remembered that I’d shown someone how to speed up a thing on her website.

I created a button for her which meant to write something on her site, she pressed that instead of schlepping through the most tortuous series of steps to get into where she could right. The result is that, yes, it’s quicker for her, but the real result and the reason I talk to you so much, is that because it’s quicker, she does it.

She does it more. She does it a lot. It is great to see her dusty old blog become this active, sparkling new thing.

My book goes as far into this as you usefully can while keeping you awake and more specific issues have cropped up in most mentoring sessions I do. I wouldn’t want to force you to become as technology dependent as I am – but you already are, you already have that computer, get more out of it.

I wanted to say this to you now because it’s on my mind and it’s part of a project I’m working on for later in the year. But you say something and then you realise it: do take a look at my Blank Screen mentoring service as this is just one thing you’ll find it good for.

People have to change their own minds

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“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others” – Balise Pascal, French scientist and philosopher. Brain Pickings uses this as the centre of a piece about how you can’t change some bastard’s mind but you can get them to look at things differently without wanting to throttle you.

Nearly half a millennium before modern psychologists identified the three elements of persuasion — attunement, buoyancy, and clarity — French physicist, philosopher, inventor, and mathematician Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623–August 19, 1662) intuited this mechanism as he arrived at a great truth about the secret of persuasion: Pascal came to see that the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs.

How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (20 May 2015)

Read the full piece.

Ignore emails that don’t ask you a question

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That headline is the entire story. To save yourself time, to save headaches and most of all to save those pointlessly ongoing email conversations, don’t reply unless they ask you something. I don’t know that I’m capable of ignoring email but I learnt that I should try from this interview with a CEO I’d never heard of before.

She’s Kristin Muhlner who runs NewBrand Analytics. Haven’t heard of that either, but.

I love email. I’m probably a rare breed in that regard. I love it because it allows me to work asynchronously and to consume vast amounts of information rapidly across the business. But unless I’m specifically asked a question, I don’t respond. If a CEO responds, everyone thinks they need to respond back, and that kicks up a lot of dust.”

The Many, Many, Many Things You Should Say “No” To At Work – David Zax, Fast Company (1 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

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If the To Do app OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I used to go um. Now I go: take a look at this post on the excellent Asian Efficiency.

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (27 June 2013)

Read the full piece for the seven answers. As they say, none are miracles but together a couple of them might be just right for you.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…

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But apparently I might get more done. New research noodles the fact that at one level, anger gives you adrenalin and it gives you a right-I’ll-show-you attitude so you focus more.

Did you ever notice how your body tenses and how every hair in your body rises when you’re angry? How your heart pounds so hard that you can feel the throbbing in your temples?

When you’re angry, your blood pressure and heart rate go up—so do your energy and adrenaline. These physiological reactions brought by anger are the same triggers that put us in the fight or flight mode.

If our reaction from anger could spell the difference between death and survival, why aren’t we using our anger more often to our advantage?

Feeling Stuck? Make Your Anger Work for You – Cecille Doroja, Pick the Brain (15 October 2014)

More useful, I think, is the question the rest of the piece attempts to answer: is there a way to keep the anger useful and not get arrested for GBH?