Advice

Nuts to self doubt

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This is becoming a thing on The Blank Screen: articles about doubt, self-worth, worry, all that kind of thing. Anyone would think we are writers. Here’s a 9-part guide to why self-doubt is useless bollocks. I think there’s really only a couple of parts in it that are good and like you I hold on to the thought that a bit of self-doubt is better than a tonne of ego.

But I like this one. It’s about doubting your ability to make a decision: writer Minda Zetlin argues that you should go for it because:

You will survive a bad decision. This is often where I trip up. I tend to believe that a wrong decision will drag me down along with everyone around me. But few decisions are that powerful or that unchangeable. Nobody gets everything right all the time, so we’re all sure to have some of our decisions go south. It’s what we do afterward that makes the difference.

Nine Reasons to Conquer Self-Doubt and Start Believing in Yourself – Minda Zetlin, Inc.com (8 December 2014)

Read the full feature.

Infographic on becoming productive (seriously)

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I thought this was a joke. Maybe because the only infographics I read regularly are ones on Clickhole.com but it’s genuine and it’s serious. This site has a whole series of infographics that actually do discuss getting more productive and do so in a way you’ll remember.

Do read the whole site but here’s one I particularly liked. Click on it for the full size version.

become_more_productive_think_faster

Get 1Password and then get more out of it

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You should be using 1Password. I don’t care if you’re on Mac, iOS, Android or Windows, you should be using it. I’m not a blind fan, I find fault with it, but it’s a password manager and you have to have passwords so you have to have a password manager. In my opinion, 1Password is the best of the lot. Plus, it’s free.

If you’re looking at me wondering what a password manager is and whether that’s a real job, think of the last time you bought something on Amazon. Or logged into your email. Or opened Evernote from a new machine. You have to have passwords and you can’t use “donaldduck123” any more. You also can’t use 7J8d7fdJK(** – if you use that same one for everywhere.

A password manager creates these strong passwords for you – and then it remembers them. All you have to do is click a button or press a key and it zooms you off to Amazon, say, and it logs you in.

But that’s not why I want to talk to you about it today.

By dint of what it does with passwords, 1Password is extremely useful in other ways. It’s great at being your bookmarking for websites; it is really good at filling in credit card details; and it actively helps you when you’re being good and making a note of your new software licence.

Go read all this at length on the tutorial I wrote about it for MacNN.com today.

Spread a little happiness – because it helps

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This is a piece written for management and it’s about caring. I think I read it because I don’t connect those two words and I was curious. Also suspicious. Sure enough, it’s a bit fluffy bunny but it recognises that and says no, come on, this stuff works:

“Countless studies have found that social relationships are the best guarantee of heightened well-being and lowered stress,” [positive psychology expert Shawn] Achor told me, “and both are an antidote for depression and a prescription for high performance.”

While it’s all too common in business for bosses to spot a few employees chatting it up in the halls and instinctively conclude that they’re dodging work, the research proves that the better people feel about workplace relationships, the more effective they become.

When surveying employee engagement all over the world, Gallup routinely asks workers, “Do you have a supervisor or someone at work who cares about you?” While many CEOs have asked Gallup to remove this question with the belief that it’s inherently soft and un-useful, Gallup discovered that people who answered “yes” to it were more productive, contributed more to profits, and were significantly more likely to remain with the firm.

Three Uncommon Ways to Drive Happiness in the Workplace – Mark C Crowley, FastCompany (13 November 2014)

Read the full piece. It’s long and it’s detailed but it’s interesting.

End tedious email conversations

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I don’t mean by being rude. But you’ve had an email that you’ve replied to and they’ve replied back and you’ve replied and will you just shuddup, please? It becomes like teenager lovers on the phone: “no, you hang up first”. And it is always pointless. It’s just that sometimes you can end it.

If you want a meeting with someone, don’t ask them if they’re up for it and then get into a cycle of checking calendars, of my people calling your people, instead say this:

“Are you free for lunch next Tuesday at noon?”

You’ll be startled how often people say yes. And when they say no, because you’ve asked them in this specific way, they reply specifically. “No, but I can do coffee Wednesday at 4pm.”

And then you’re off to the races.

Just get to the point right away. Whether it’s a meeting or a favour, just ask them. Be polite of course and you can go into the pleasantries after it, but ask up front for what you need and you’ll end the ceaseless, pointless cycle of email tag.

For this one thing, anyway.

You knew it: you’re not appreciated

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This is true. We’re all yay, yay, yay when something creative happens, most people just aren’t interested until the point the yaying starts:

In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst with ads recruiting “idea people” and “out of the box” thinkers. We are taught that our own creativity will be celebrated as well, and that if we have good ideas, we will succeed.

It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking – Jessica Olien, Slate (6 December 2013).

Olien had me at “it’s all a lie”. Read her full piece.

Sticks and stones are easier

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We’re writers, we know that words hurt. But they also hurt ourselves. Take a look at this:

Remember the childhood rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me?” It sounds optimistic, but it’s actually not true.

According to neuroscientists and brain communication researchers, words can do damage. In fact, negative words release chemicals in your brain that cause stress. Angry words send alarm messages through the brain that shut down logic and reasoning centers. Our minds are hardwired to worry.

But it gets worse. Just like that horror movie where the babysitter discovers the killer is calling from inside the house, some of the most damaging words are the ones we tell ourselves.

“Self-esteem is a word-based inner dialogue going on in your brain,” says Mark Robert Waldman, coauthor of Words Can Change Your Brain (Penguin Group, 2013).

How 60 Seconds And One Word A Day Can Reduce Your Stress – Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company (28 July 2014)

Read the full piece.

Lying and excuses: our route to creativity

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The always excellent Brain Pickings has an actually delightful piece about a book called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School:

…celebrated children’s book author Davide Cali and French illustrator Benjamin Chaud weave a playful parable of this childhood tendency to come up with excuses so fantastical that they become charming stories in their own right — a crucible of creativity and a sandbox for the young mind to play with the building blocks of storytelling.

One morning, the little boy is late to school and when his teacher inquires about the reason for his tardiness, he proceeds to offer a litany of imaginative excuses. Giant ants ate his breakfast! Evil ninjas ambushed him on the way to the bus stop! A massive ape mistook the school bus for a banana! His uncle’s time machine misfired and sent him back to the dominion of dinosaurs!

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to School: A Charming Catalog of Excuses and an Allegory for How Human Imagination Works – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (undated but 5 March 2015)

Go get your lunch and have a read of the full piece.

Find the Minimum Necessary Change

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The Minimum Necessary Change or MNC was a thing in Isaac Asimov’s novel, The End of Eternity. Be careful of that link: like so much of Asimov’s work, the book has astonishingly vivid and great ideas but they’re written like he’s still in school.

Still, I read it when I was in school and the MNC stuck with me. The End of Eternity is a time-travel novel that features an organisation which fixes problems. If there’s a war that kills billions, they track it back to its cause, to the specific moment, the earliest speck of a pixel of its beginning, and they change that.

I think one example is delaying someone on their way to a meeting. If you could fix their car to stop working and they therefore never get to that meeting, you can imagine how that small act could be the trigger for massive changes. Say the meeting was an interview: you don’t go, so you don’t get the job, so your life is changed.

The MNC was the minimum necessary change to make big things happen.

And I’m thinking of all this in part because it’s fascinating how a dreadfully badly written novel can still stick with you all these years later. But more because Lifehacker has a feature on finding the Minimum Effective Dose. It’s the same thing, sort of.

In medical terms, the “minimum effective dose” or MED is the lowest dose of a pharmaceutical that causes a significant change in health or well-being for a patient. To find the perfect balance of productivity and time management in your life, Dr. Christine Carter suggests you find the MED for everything you have to get done.

There’s no point in burning yourself out on things that can be completed with far less effort. You can find your MED for everything: sleep, checking email, working out, various work tasks. Once you’ve figured out your MED for the tasks you do everyday, you’ll feel less stretched out. You might even find time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, but never felt like you had time for. Determine your MEDs, stick to your dosage, and realize that overdosing doesn’t mean that you’re getting any more done.

Streamline Productivity with the “Minimum Effective Dose” for Tasks – Patrick Allan, Lifehacker (6 March 2015)

Read the full feature for what Dr Carter has to say.