Advice

Productivity lessons from Strictly Come Dancing

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You’re thinking oh yes, really, there is productivity to be learnt from the UK’s version of Dancing with the Stars? Yes.

Such as this. Right now as we speak, it’s the gap between the two episodes making up this year’s final. It’s about an hour, just shy of an hour, and it’s short enough and the timing is awkward enough that there isn’t a whole lot you can usefully go do before the show’s back.

But you could write.

I would be writing if I weren’t talking to you. So this is definitely a case of very specifically do what I say rather than what I do.

And this is what put the idea in my head. But once it was there in my noggin, I realised that there are productivity lessons aplenty.

Maybe it’s not a shock. Strictly runs for, what, 16 weeks? Once it starts, it is a train and there must be hundreds of people working flat-out on it. Every person vital – this is the BBC, they ain’t paying for people they don’t need – and that means everything they each do is crucial. Vital, crucial and time-dependent. Tina Fey has a great line that I remember a lot when I’m vacillating over projects I’m writing:

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”

Tina Fey, Bossypants

We spend a lot of time as writers going around in circles over whether something is ready and whether something is good. Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. Sometimes that is what makes us writers and makes our material sing. But sometimes: let it go. It is done, get it gone.

I believe in debating what needs to be debated and finishing what needs to be finished. And the deadline of a live show every week is like cement-lined evidence to me.

But do you follow Strictly? I don’t watch The X-Factor because it seems the same every week to me. Someone comes on and they can sing or they can’t. Next week, they can sing or they can’t. No difference. With Strictly, people are visibly transformed. They’re transformed by many things but one is confidence: facing up to dancing in front of millions changes them. And always, always, when a celebrity’s personality comes out, they dance better.

Drama writing requires us to dig deep. Dancing requires letting go. But both require us to listen to the music and that’s productivity to me. Hear the rhythm, the beat and get going.

Can’t see, won’t see

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I’ve got to tell you this. Quick story from Paris? Actually from the Eurostar train going there. We were sitting opposite a miserable young woman and her resigned looking boyfriend. She was permanently miserable. Hard-wired. But she was also young and it is a new world. She called a hospital to cancel an appointment. I could tell you what it was for. I could tell you which hospital, what department, which doctor, what specialism. I could tell you her name, full address, phone number and National Insurance number.

But I won’t because clearly I’m so ancient I’ve twigged that this is enough information to rob her blind. If not from the easiest-ever identity theft – I might have to strain to sound young and female but otherwise, doddle – then from the fact that I knew how long she was going to be away from home. I do own a lock pick set. (Seriously. Research. Also a bump key. Never got any of it to work, officer.)

Anyway. After she’d given us all this information by way of phone and a loud voice, she started wondering how far it was across the Channel. When learning from her iPhone that it was 31 miles, she sneered. Is that all? It’s just 31 miles? What’s all the fuss about?

Hundreds of years of trying to dig that tunnel. The political, cultural, economic and artistic effort made by generations and she sneers.

I realise I’ve clearly got old enough to be disappointed that there are people who can’t see effort but what struck me more is that she won’t. She will never see the industry that went into that Channel Tunnel: not appreciate it, not even see it. It’s her loss.

Email is great, now leave it alone

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There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that email addiction leads to stress and unhappiness. Now, for the first time, researchers have tested this idea directly and found that, yep, there are probably positive psychological benefits to intentionally ignoring your email whenever possible. In a new study in Computers in Human Behavior, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia took a group of workers and, over the course of two weeks, assigned each to one of two conditions: One group was told to keep their email program closed, turn notifications off, and check their email only three times a day, and the other was told to leave notifications on and check their email as often as possible. After the first week, each group switched into the other condition, and each group was regularly surveyed about how often they were checking their email, how stressed they were, and how productive they felt.

To De-Stress, Check Your Email Less – Jesse Singal, Science of Us (December 4, 2014)

Read the full piece. Via New Republic.

Got it: an iPad app for transcribing interview recordings

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Excuse me while I do a spot of SEO: interview, interviewee, interviewing, interviewer, journalist, ipad, audio, sound, recording, transcribe, transcription.

There. Hopefully this means the next poor sod searching for this type of app can avoid spending the ENTIRE EVENING on the hunt. Here’s the thing. I have to be away from my office tomorrow but I have a very pressing job where I need to transcribe an interview I recorded some weeks ago. I hate transcribing with the same passion that EVERY SINGLE WRITER EVER does and I just wanted some help.

Specifically, I wanted an iPad version of Transcriptions, a freeware app for Mac that simply lets you play back audio while you type out what you hear. Missed a bit? Tap a keystroke and the audio scrubs back 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds. Nothing in all this land will make transcription fun but this helps. My great regret is that I didn’t discover it until I’d transcribed fully two thirds of the interviews I’d done for a Blake’s 7 book.

Now I just need that on iPad, please. You quickly start throwing your hopes out of the window when you can’t find something so I was reduced to thinking I’d have a notetaking app that just played back audio. A bit. Enough to save me having to skip back and forth between two apps.

It turns out that there are three types of application that get returned when you search for terms like “best ipad audio transcription” or “best iOS apps for journalists”. The first and most common search result is the transcription service. For various prices and with various different trial periods, you can record audio in the app and send it off to a human being somewhere to do your transcription job for you, for a fee.

Fine. Not what I want, but fine.

The second type of app does what I want but only to audio that you record with the app. Nice, fine, but useless to me with my existing recording.

How long has it taken you to read this far? Did you skim? Good for you. The answer is that the best option available is Notability for iPad. It costs £1.99 for iPad and iPhone together. It’s only £1.99 but it’s also a lesson to get good apps when they fall free, even if you don’t want them. I got Notability last May when Apple made it App of the Week. I downloaded it, tried it, saw why people liked it so but felt it wasn’t for me and I deleted it.

Now all these months on, I can just re-download it. And I did so after a couple of hours of trying everything else.

Notability is not perfect. But I can import the audio from Dropbox, I can play it back and there is a 10-second rewind button. I would like a way to skip back 10 seconds from the keyboard as reaching up to tap that button does break the flow of my typing.

But tomorrow I will be sitting in coffee houses alternating between transcribing interviews for a book and writing a script. I could do without the hell that is transcription but otherwise that sounds like a pretty good day to me.

Know when you need help

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When the Wright brothers made their historic first flight in 1903, lots of other inventors were trying to fling their own shoddy little planes into the air. And in 1977, when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple II, there were a zillion other nerds working on building a personal computer.

But Woz beat them to it, and Jobs knew how to sell it.

The Apple II was the product that turned Apple into Apple. It was the iPhone of its era, the product that redefined every machine like it that came afterward.

Its real magic was Wozniak’s minimalism. He integrated many technologies and components that no one else had put together in the same device, and he did it with as few parts as possible. It was, as Wozniak wrote in his autobiography, “the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.”

But as genius as Wozniak was, the Apple II almost didn’t make it out of his brain and into a product that the rest of the world could use.

Apple’s first employee: The remarkable odyssey of Bill Fernandez – Feature – TechRepublic

Read the full piece.

Get over it. By writing about it.

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I’ve only fairly recently discovered this for myself: when I’ve had a particularly bad time, especially if it were my fault it was so very bad, then writing about it helps me. The two times I’m thinking of, I wrote to friends. One of whom didn’t want to know and I wish to God I’d never sent it, but the other asked – and I didn’t send it to her. I wrote out a long email explaining everything and, the writer’s mind kicks in, the end result was far more structured and comprehensible than the whirlwind in my head. I wrote that, read it, understood it and had no more need to send it to her. “I’m fine, thanks,” I wrote instead.

Of course, things that upset and paralyse me are as nothing compared to what happens to some people:

In one of my leadership development workshops, we invited participants to write up and present an account of a difficult experience. We ended up with more than we had expected when Simon, a senior executive at an oil company, told the group about a harrowing experience that he had never properly digested.

On an assignment in Nigeria, Simon and five colleagues visiting one of the company’s oil rigs had been taken hostage. Two of the other hostages were killed in front of him almost at once and he was only released after long and drawn-out negotiations on the size of the ransom. He told us that he had never been able to put the experience behind him and was still plagued by nightmares.

But he also told us that writing up an account of this experience for the workshop had been somewhat cathartic for him.

To Get Over Something, Write About It – Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Harvard Business Review (26 November 2014)

Read the full piece for a quite academic but thoughtful exploration of how this works for us.

Talk to your phone and have it whisper back one task at a time

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I was going to point this Harvard Business Review article out to you because it’s about using your phone to capture all those stray thoughts you have. I do this constantly. Especially when driving, I will now many, many, many times per drive say aloud “Hey, Siri, remind me to…”. Sometimes I’ll tell it to remind me at a certain time or a certain place. And I knew I wasn’t alone in this but I wanted you to hear someone else saying it, hence:

Throughout the day, I tell my phone to “remind me to follow up with Sarah about the Warren account next Tuesday morning,” “remind me to pack my phone charger when I get home,” or even “remind me to buy gum tonight at 9.” Yes, I come in for a certain amount of mockery (as when a friend overheard me dictating that gum reminder), but I’d rather be mocked for my voice dictation than for my tendency to forget commitments.

Conquer Your To-Do List with Your Phone – Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review (1 December 2014)

However, Samuel makes a hell of a good point that I had not thought of.

Creating reminders on your phone also means that you’ll be triggered to act on the tasks you’ve captured at a certain time, wherever you are. I’ve never been diligent about reviewing to-do lists, largely because they quickly get so daunting that I can’t bear to look at them. Instead, I now rely on reminders that feed me one thing at a time – instead of facing the long list of everything I have on my plate.

She’s right, isn’t she? Read the full piece.

Quick notes: get meetings faster and get out of them quicker

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This is mostly for when you’re meeting a colleague. It doesn’t work so well if you ring up Steven Spielberg and ask for a meeting when he’s never heard of you.

But when they have heard of you and you can get meeting with them, do it like this. Say immediately, right up front, now when exactly you want it. So rather than get into the “can we meet? when’s good for you cycle”, ask: “Can we meet on Tuesday at 11am to discuss X?”.

The first and most startling thing you’ll see is that it is preposterous how many times people say yes. But even if they don’t, the next most likely thing is that they’ll say no, how about Wednesday? You already a step or three down the line. But above all that, this also tells them that you’re serious, it therefore tells them that this is genuine and purposeful meeting, and it can start to train them to be the same back.

When you get them, make meetings shorter than you think you need and also be very clear about that. When you schedule a meeting, email everybody saying what the start and end time is, plus a list of things that will be covered.

Then cover them, assign each task to somebody (though it’s usually you), and end the meeting. Get out to your next thing and you’ll train people (including you) to cut out the nonsense vocal exercises that are most meetings most of the time.

I recommend 15 minutes and the fewest number of people you can manage. Also, as well as sending everyone that start-and-end-time kind of agenda, email them after the meeting too. This like the news thing: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them it, then tell them what you’ve told them. Those headlines again: short meetings, specific actions, reminders afterwards.

When I run a meeting and also take the minutes, I do send them around as an attachment the next morning but I also append a text task list to the email body. Few people read the minutes to any meeting in any organisation but this way they can see what they’ve promised to do.