Advice

“Unschedule” to stop becoming a workaholic

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Now, steady on. Workaholism is only an ugly word, it’s a completely fine way of life, isn’t it?

The site 99U just turned this up: it’s a 2007 piece by a designer about advice gleaned from The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. I feel like I’m quoting someone quoting someone quoting someone’s book but while I think about it, this is what’s intrigued me:

I’m a very very bad person. Why? Because I procrastinate. I put things off, leave them to the last minute, or simply never finish them. To beat these lazy habits, I’m reluctantly reading Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit. I still haven’t finished it after three months, but I have hope. (I have 40 pages left.)

According to Neil Fiore and 30 years of research, procrastination isn’t the result of laziness. Rather, procrastination is a symptom, a way of coping with deep psychological self-criticism and fear. It’s because we’re taught to believe that working is good and playing is bad. To reverse this unhealthy model, Neil proposes a tool: the Unschedule.

The Unschedule looks like a normal schedule, but with a twist. Instead of scheduling work you have to do, you fill in everything you want to do.

How to Unschedule your work and enjoy guilt-free play

Read the full piece to see how you can leave out work parts of your diary and add in things you want to do instead – yet still get things done. The book The Now Habit is available on Amazon. You’re not shocked, I can tell.

Reclaim the day

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It kills me that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Then I work all the hours in the day and that kills me. Here’s an idea for getting back some of the time that otherwise fritters away on, you know, like relaxing and socialising and stuff.

Take Back Afternoons: Productivity After the Post-Lunch Slump

When lunchtime breaks up my day, I’m terrible at getting back into a productive flow. I’m not unique in struggling to work through the afternoons, though. Most of us tend to have a dip in energy in the early afternoon, often known as the “post-lunch slump”. Research suggests that our bodies are designed to have a short sleep around this time to complement our nighttime sleep.

This regular slump in energy is obviously bad news for anyone, but it’s especially bad when you work remotely (as I do) and need to discipline yourself to complete tasks.

The best way I’ve found for kicking myself into gear is to have a deadline to push up against. If you remember ever writing furiously at 11:45 p.m. to finish a school essay and submit it by midnight, you’ll know exactly what I mean. There’s something about deadlines that help us overcome our worst procrastination habits.

So I took this self knowledge and used it to hack my routine in such a way that I’m now getting significantly more done with less last-minute scrambling.

Experiments with Time: How to Take Back Your Day from the Grip of Procrastination – Belle Cooper, Zapier (17 March 2015)

Read the full piece for what she does with the rest of the day. I sound flippant here, I think, but she has good points to make and the topic occupies my head a lot.

Living with OmniFocus

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I’ve reviewed To Do apps for MacNN, and I’ve written books about creative productivity that recommend such apps. If it’s a To Do app that ran online or on Apple gear, it’s likely that I’ve at least tried it. Yet in November of 2011, I bought OmniFocus for iPhone, and while I have since bought five more To Do apps for myself, every one of them was OmniFocus.

There’s OmniFocus for Mac which I bought 21 days later. There’s OmniFocus for iPad, which I bought the day after that. This is not a casual investment: none of the three apps are exactly cheap, and while you don’t have to buy all three, you sort of do. Yet I used to often tell people in creative productivity workshops that OmniFocus is so good and so deeply, even profoundly, useful to me that I would pay that price all over again.

So I did.

Living with: OmniFocus – William Gallagher, MacNN (19 March 2015)

“Living With” is a series on MacNN.com that sees what you think after long-term testing of something. In my case, it’s over three years. That’s a bit more thorough, that’s a bit more time than you can get for any other review and time turns up things. In this case it did turn up some problems but then it turned up solutions and I turned out to be a fan of OmniFocus. Quite right too.

Do read the whole piece.

ClickHole: “The Only 31 Things Standing Between You And Your Dreams”

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Take them separately and each of the 31 is funny but, oh, wow are the depressing in a row. Here’s a particularly cutting favourite, number 5 on the list:

5. Your ex: When you broke up, your ex made some really fair points about how you didn’t have any balls and you would never work up the nerve to leave your hometown. But even though your ex had three years to intimately assess your capabilities and limitations, you’ve just gotta ignore the analysis and keep chugging!

The Only 31 Things Standing Between You And Your Dreams – Clickhole (19 March 2015)

Read the full feature, but carefully.

Free video: “Taming Email with OmniFocus”

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There’s a company called Learn OmniFocus which does lots of video training and for what I’m sure is an entirely affordable and good price if I could ever get around to looking into that. Their latest video, though, is free. Yes, it’s promoting the service as a whole but it’s not doing so by leaving you with a cliffhanger.

Take a look at this video advice on how to use the superb OmniFocus To Do software in conjuction with your email. To the advantage of all humanity.

Ignore them

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This is a piece from last August but I must’ve ignored it. Yet reddit just spotted it anew and it’s worth thinking about: the original piece argues that we must ignore some people and that the trick is to work out who.

The critical… is triage. Medical staff in a crisis must decide who requires immediate assistance, who can wait, who doesn’t need help at all, and who’s past saving. Triage for the rest of us entails not just focusing on the items that are most important and deferring those that are less important until “later,” but actively ignoring the vast number of items whose importance falls below a certain threshold.

The first step is to reframe the issue. Viewing a full inbox, unfinished to-do lists, and a line of disappointed people at the door as a sign of our failure is profoundly unhelpful. This perspective may motivate us to work harder in the hopes of someday achieving victory, but this is futile. We will never win these battles, not in any meaningful sense, because at a certain point in our careers the potential demands facing us will always outstrip our capacity, no matter how much effort we dedicate to work. So the inbox, the list, the line at the door are in fact signs of success, evidence that people want our time and attention. And ultimate victory lies not in winning tactical battles but in winning the war: Not an empty inbox, but an inbox emptied of all truly important messages. Not a completed to-do list, but a list with all truly important items scratched off. Not the absence of a line at our door, but a line with no truly important people remaining in it.

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore – Ed Batista, Harvard Business Review (20 August 2014)

Read the full piece.

Know your limits by setting them

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Today I started around 7am, I’m going to write until about 4pm, then I’ve various errands I need to do and I’ll cook at maybe 6:30pm. That’s nice.

But.

This is new. It’s new for me or at least it’s fairly new since I lost my biggest single client as a freelance writer. Wait – I’ve just looked that up: it was three years ago next month. Unbelievable. Is that really right? Only three? Feels like a decade. It seemed like such a bad day at the time but, wow, I wish it had happened sooner.

Anyway, having a big regular client gives you structure in two ways, doesn’t it? There is the time you have agreed or are contracted to work with them. That stops you doing anything else, gloriously it also removes the churning as you think constantly about what is the best thing you could be doing right now. What can you do this minute that will help you? Nothing. You’re committed, you’re contracted. Stop churning, get working.

This type of contract also defines the rest of your time: it is the bits when you’re not working for them and so therefore must get all your other work done. What is the best thing to do at this minute? Work.

When that contract goes and you’re suddenly doing much more irregular and many, many, many more jobs all at once, the structure of your working life changes. I’d say for the better: I have come to adore jumping from one job to another, switching tasks a dozen times a day. Do note that I say switching: I will always and forever do one thing and then do the other, I will not attempt multitasking. I’ve learnt that much at least.

However, switching and jumping plus irregular and many, many, many more jobs does rather mean that you can be always working. I like this. I like this a lot.

But I have felt overwhelmed this year and when I’m being close to nasty about how good or bad my work is, I can’t help but note that longer days do not get better results.

So yesterday I tried laying out one hour on this, one hour on that, plus not checking emails until the top of the hour. This is all stuff I advocated in my book The Blank Screen and it is all stuff that I have learnt to do, that I have regularly done. But somehow doing it again in the midst of feeling under water, it helped even more.

I’m trying it again today. It means I know what I’m doing for the next several hours and I know when I’m stopping. Which means that for once I can tell you I will be having a very good time tonight relaxing with a copy of Pride and Prejudice.

I’m actually looking forward to that. The evening is now a thing to look forward to instead of just a different set of numbers on the clock.

Happy for me, isn’t it? But I hope you can do this too. Right up to re-reading P&P, though get your own copy. Obviously.

Screens Are Bad

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I think we knew this. What I really want is for someone to explain that monitors and phone screens are bad for us – and here’s the solution. Er, the solution that continues to allow us to do what we do and use what we use. In the meantime:

FOR MORE THAN 3 billion years, life on Earth was governed by the cyclical light of sun, moon and stars. Then along came electric light, turning night into day at the flick of a switch. Our bodies and brains may not have been ready.

A fast-growing body of research has linked artificial light exposure to disruptions in circadian rhythms, the light-triggered releases of hormones that regulate bodily function. Circadian disruption has in turn been linked to a host of health problems, from cancer to diabetes, obesity and depression. “Everything changed with electricity. Now we can have bright light in the middle of night. And that changes our circadian physiology almost immediately,” says Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. “What we don’t know, and what so many people are interested in, are the effects of having that light chronically.”

Screens May Be Terrible for You, and Now We Know Why – Brandon Keim, Wired (18 March 2015)

Read the full piece – on your screen.

Don’t ask for permission

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There’s the old idea in writing and possibly most of all in journalism: don’t ask for permission first, just do it and apologise afterwards if you’re caught. But there is another thing you can do that avoids the pitfall of permission and the way that abdicates your responsibility to whoever said yes. There is another thing that takes this lack of permission and produces productive results:

Instead of higher-ups making decisions, often far removed from the real problems that team members face, you give the decision making power to those that are closest to the problem.

24 People, No Managers: Our New Experiment in Getting Work Done at Buffer – Leo Widrich, Buffer (6 October 2014)

I’m not sure that gives you the whole picture. But then the full piece goes into a lot more detail than I think you need. So here’s the halfway skinny: don’t ask for permission but do ask for advice.

Buffer is a technology company and author Widrich details how they go about making decisions on the way from idea to product. It’s rather empowering: have a read.

Also a hat nod to 99U for their take on this.