Advice

Fitness and Productivity. Oh Dear God.

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We all know that sluggish feeling in the morning. Your body is moving but your mind hasn’t switched on yet. Imagine the impact on your day if you had a dose of endorphins before your morning meetings?

Exercising first thing is daunting, it’s tough, but it truly sets you up for a wonderfully effective day. It gives you a positive, fresh outlook and a real head start. Adding exercise to your day means your productivity will increase because you arrive to work energised, focused and more organised than before. You will be able to think more clearly, your energy levels will be higher throughout the day, you will be less stressed, more creative and better prepared.

Just think about it – you’ve done a workout, had breakfast and are up and at ‘em, feeling amazing – and all before 9am!

Positive Fitness and Productivity – Liz Costigan, ClaireBurge.com (undated

She’s not wrong. I know. I know. Read the full piece for a lot more. Then break it all to me softly.

Weekend read: but what about you?

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I write a personal blog called Self Distract every Friday and today’s one, intended to be just an aside and a musing on things if not necessarily amusing about anything, has caused some comments. Lots of nice things but also people identifying with its topic.

That topic was about conversation and how when we talk to friends, we have to make it a joint, two-way thing. Let me set the scene:

Okay, you may have trouble swallowing this considering how I go on at you every week. But when we meet in person, I am infinitely – infinitely – more interested in you than I am in me. Have I said this to you before? I tell you everything, I must’ve mentioned it: my attitude when nattering away with someone is that I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s talk about you.

Truly, time spent talking about me is wasted and boring. I’m not knocking myself, I’m just not interested and I have plenty of time to know me, I might get only minutes with you. And look at you: look at all you’re doing, all you know that I don’t, how could I possibly waste any time talking about me?

I got told off for this today.

It’s not you, it’s me – William Gallagher, Self Distract (6 March 2015)

Read the full piece for what happened – and, much more interestingly, how it might ring some bells with yo.

Anxious people screw up

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No, really? But:

New brain evidence provides insight into why highly anxious people are worst at making decisions when things get unpredictable (Illustration by Ian Smiley)
Highly anxious people have more trouble deciding how best to handle life’s uncertainties. They may even catastrophize, interpreting, say, a lovers’ tiff as a doomed relationship or a workplace change as a career threat.

In gauging people’s response to unpredictability, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oxford found that people prone to high anxiety have a tougher time reading the environmental cues that could help them avoid a bad outcome.

Their findings, reported today (March 2) in the journal Nature Neuroscience, hint at a glitch in the brain’s higher-order decision-making circuitry that could eventually be targeted in the treatment of anxiety disorders, which affect some 40 million American adults.

Anxious people more apt to make bad decisions amid uncertainty – Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley (2 March 2015)

Read the full piece for more. And hat tip to Fast Company for it.

Do get dressed in the morning, don’t get dressed in the morning

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Whatever. I give up. It’s as if we’ve reached saturation point on articles that say writers working from home should pretend they have a real 9-5 office job and instead now we’re embarking on a round of articles saying they shouldn’t. Here’s a shouldn’t:

I polled some of my freelance friends to find out what rules they commonly break. Here’s what came up again and again:

“Work on a schedule, just like you would at a regular job. ”

No thanks, said writer Christine Hennebury: “I don’t set regular hours. I don’t set aside chunks of time. And I don’t turn off my work at a specific time. The whole point of freelancing and working from home is to blend your work and home life together a bit better.” Instead, Hennebury plans her day using author Jennifer Louden’s “Conditions of Enoughness,” deciding what she needs to get done to be satisfied at the end of the day. Then when she’s done, she’s done.

Trying to stick to a “normal” nine-to-five workday can present logistical problems for freelancers, too, as former freelancer Holly Case pointed out. “I remember one big article I was working on required me to interview an important expert. I spent nearly a week trying to reach him and never could. He finally called me at eleven p.m., explaining that he was on his way to a party in a limo and wondered if I could do the interview then. I said yes because I didn’t know if I would get it otherwise

Always Get Dressed in the Morning, and 6 Other Rules Successful Freelancers Break – Meagan Francis, The Freelancer, by Contently (27 February 2015)

Read the full piece.

Embrace the suck

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Not my words. But the idea strikes chords with me:

Embrace the suck.

Doing something hard sucks. It’s not easy, and often you’re confused about how to do it because you haven’t done it much before. So what? Hard things suck, but life isn’t always peaches with roses on top (and a sprinkle of cinnamon). It sucks sometimes, and that’s perfectly fine. Embrace all of life, thorns and pits and all. Life would be boring without the suck. So smile, embrace the suck, and get moving.

10 Ways to Do What You Don’t Want to Do – By Leo Babauta, zen habits (16 April 2014)

That’s number 5 in a series of 10 tips on how to make yourself do something you don’t want to. I’ve done better than last time, I’ve read beyond number 1, but for some reason I don’t want to read the rest. I wonder if number 6 tells me how to read numbers 7-10.

Read the full piece because you’re a better person than I am.

I know this because you wouldn’t have forgotten where you read this. I know it was on reddit but can I find the original link to say appropriate and correct thanks?

Talk more – it helps your productivity

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Also, everybody is so interesting. But as well as that, nattering is a way of thinking and focusing and learning and listening. And this all helps us as people, it very helps us as writers despite this contorted sentence. It even helps our productivity:

Increase your social life by talking to everyone

It doesn’t take a group of scientists to explain that spending time with people is beneficial for our health. Our emotions alone remind us of how relaxing and joyful it was to spend quality time with someone. Psychologist John Cacioppo once mentioned in his book, Loneliness, that, “loneliness isn’t some personality defect or sign of weakness. It’s a survival impulse like hunger or thirst, a trigger pushing us toward the nourishment of human companionship.”

We’re not immune to the feelings of isolation and despite what we think, it’s necessary to speak to a variety of people throughout the day. (Even if it has to be the weird store clerk who gives us a blank stare).

If you have a hard time expressing your thoughts to people or experience shy behaviors, become interested in what they’re saying rather than focusing on being an interesting person. Don’t concentrate about impressing someone with your intellects and instead, listen to what they have to say. Most of the time, people will always prefer talking about themselves when given the chance and you can learn a lot about them by asking questions and being genuine.

12 ways to boost your productivity – Michael Gregory II, Self Development Workshop (4 March 2015)

This is actually number 1 in a series of 12 suggestions for being more productive. I don’t know what the other 11 are yet because I came straight here to talk to you about this one. Read the full piece for the rest.

Do these three things every day

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Drink tea. Eat chocolate and – sorry? No? There are things you can do that will help as well as be deeply satisfying and rewarding?

They’re what are called foundational habits. Each one is doable, demonstrably beneficial and best of all, allows you to build other positive habits around them. If you can check these three boxes off each and every day, you’ll not only be more successful, but you’ll be healthy, happy and wise too. It’s not everything you ought to do, but it’s a good place to start.

Three Positive Habits To Practice Every Single Day – Ryan Holiday, Thought Catalog (2 March 2015)

I’d like you to read the full piece because it’s good and it’s interesting and its convincing. But I do also think it’s two things, not three.

For the three stated habits are: read a book, exercise and take a walk. Aren’t those last two at least related?

How to fall asleep in seconds

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Look, if this works for you then that’s great. I offer that exercises to make you sleep sooner at night have more of a chance of working if you’re ahead on your work and aren’t worried about your mortgage.

But there’s this doctor, see, who doesn’t agree:

You simply breathe in through your nose for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, and exhale through your mouth for eight seconds.

When you feel stressed or anxious, adrenaline courses through your veins, your heart beats at a rapid rate, and your breathing becomes quick and shallow…. [The] effect of the breathing technique feels almost like a sedative drug, because in order to hold your breath for seven seconds and then to exhale for eight—when your breath is so shallow and short—your body is forced to slow your heart rate. It has no choice. Holding your breath, and then slowly, deliberately exhaling for eight seconds, causes a chain reaction. It feels like going from a mad-dash sprint to a finish line to a slow, leisurely, calming stroll through the park.

How to Fall Asleep In Less Than 1 Minute – 99U

Read the full piece on the 99U website for more.

Get back on Facebook, Twitter and the rest

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I’m not convinced by this. Here’s my take on social media: use it for fun and if anything else happens like work offers, great. If nothing else happens, you still had fun.

Plus, this stuff is fun. There is a reason why so many of us are drawn to it and then find it hard to break the habit and the reason is that is fun. If you haven’t used any social media then it seems daunting, but then the next thing you know you are watching for those Likes on Facebook or those retweets on Twitter.

Different social media networks suit different people and also we change. I lived in Twitter for a long time but now I’m more a Facebook user. No reason. Some people love LinkedIn though the rest of us wonder why.

So use it and don’t feel guilty about it. But writer Julie Schwietert Collazo argues that we should use it more and she gives several reasons. Here’s the one that leaps out the most:

I get work on social

If you’re still skeptical about spending more time on social, consider this: At least $12,000 of my 2014 income can be directly attributed to work I landed via social media contacts. And that work consists of a variety of assignments, from a translating project I got through a Facebook group that netted $8,000 to an $800 article for an in-flight magazine I was able to write after a friend who follows me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram made a referral.

I’ve found that finding work on social networks is relatively simple and doesn’t involve any of the “strategies” that make so many writers want to bail on social media. I follow and engage with editors on Twitter, join professional interests groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and generally just try to be transparent about my needs to followers and friends on all my platforms.

Spending time on social doesn’t mean you have to constantly “brand” yourself. If you make an effort to tune out some of that digital noise and focus on bring productive, social media won’t seem like a guilty pleasure or a time-suck. My life is enriched just as much by online relationships as it is by those offline. And for that reason, I’ll be spending as much time online in 2015 as I did in 2014.

Why Freelancers Should Spend More Time on Social Media in 2015 – Julie Schwietert Collazo, Contently (26 February 2015)

Read the full piece for more.

Better copy-and-paste: the simple things that speed up everything

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They’re called clipboard managers and suddenly I have the image of a time and motion person scribbling down notes about how slow I am. A Clipboard Manager, let’s give it initial caps and explain a bit more, is a type of software that makes your copying-and-pasting better.

It’s hard to see what you could really improve there. You copy something, you paste it. Not a lot of room for technological innovation.

Except there is.

With any such app, you can copy something, then copy something else, something else. An hour later, something else. And then tomorrow paste each of those into an email. Paste them all in one big go. Paste the third thing first, the second thing second, the fourth third, anything you like.

I’ve been aware of these for a long time and paid them no attention at all. But I’ve recently reviewed two apps that happen to include this feature amongst their many others. It was the many others that made them worth reviewing but it’s this clipboard management that was most important in making me keep the software on my Mac. Here’s why. If I got to paste something, it pastes like normal. But if instead of pressing Command-C, I press a slightly different keystroke – with what I’ve got it’s Alt-Command-C – then this is what I see:

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 10.19.00

Click on that to see it full size and to also see exactly what I’ve been copying and pasting for the last few minutes. I’m hoping there’s nothing private in there.

What you see there is how the software Alfred 2 displays its clipboard manager: you get very much the same thing in LaunchBar 6, the other app I was reviewing that has this. There are others and while all of this is Mac-only, there are PC apps that do it too. Do spend some time havering over LaunchBar 6 or Alfred 2, but don’t spend any time hesitating over buying a clipboard manager. It’s that useful. I am that converted.

The Alfred 2 official website is here; LaunchBar 6’s home is there.