Advice

The end of sitting on your end

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Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.

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The research reads like a Surgeon General’s warning: Prolonged periods of sitting can lead to obesity, heart disease, blood clots and spinal compression, according to the latest medical studies.

To combat this modern office horror, an artist and an architecture firm from the Netherlands have re-imagined the office with all the chairs pulled out from under us. The exhibit, called The End of Sitting, is a geometric landscape of surfaces of varying heights on which to lean.

Standing room only: Startup office of the future promises ‘end of sitting’ – David Pierini, Cult of Mac (3 December 2014)

Read the full piece where that photo comes from too.

Just do an hour

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I’ve said this before but it keeps working for me and it worked again today. After lots of long days and the loss of a lot of hours to meetings, today I just wanted to sleep.

But I took my own advice and did an hour on one job. And hour on another. And a third. I was rubbish: I did the hours but with huge tea-drinking gaps between them. Tea with ginger biscuits. I was rubbish.

And probably getting fatter.

But even under these conditions I’ve reached the end of the day and am further ahead on everything.

So just try an hour, okay? It’s only an hour, it can’t hurt anything / and for me it gets stuff moving and it gets me working.

Tell me about it

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I spent the day hours behind and carrying a ferocious headache because I entirely cocked up my sleep last night.

Coffee, late night email and the snooze button sap people of energy, compromising an employee’s overall performance at work. Though these things seem innocent, an evening cup of Joe, one quick reply to a colleague and an extra 15 minutes of shut-eye in the morning can drastically diminish the quality of one’s sleep.

9 Sleeping Habits to Enhance Your Productivity

Read the full piece for things we can do.

Use your alarm for going to bed

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You’re familiar with the concept of setting an alarm to wake you up. You’ve come across this before. But I think this is new:

Set an alarm for when you have to go to bed

We all stay up later than we should given how early we have to rise tomorrow. And this tells you when to go to bed. It’s not ever going to be a shock to you since you choose the time but still, it works.

It’s like the alarm switches you into going-to-bed mode. Switches your head into it, switches your head away from whatever’s occupying you.

Yeah, yeah, put the phone down, all that

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Unconvinced.

I was a mobile junkie. The phosphorescent glow left me mesmerized and needing more. Each Snapchat or push notification fueled my need for news, updates, and winning the battle against boredom. At my worst, most conversations with friends and family would start with “do you have a charger?”

I remember the turning point. I had just returned from a camping trip where I ‘witnessed’ a beautiful sunset. As I was reminiscing over the dozens of photos I took, I barely had any recollection of ACTUALLY being there. I was so focused on eternalizing the moment through my phone, that I hadn’t taken the time to eternalize it in my brain. I accepted my addiction and decided to make a change.

This is your brain on mobile — Jeremy Vanderhey, Medium (10 August 2014)

Read the full piece.

I’m listening. The case for a comfy chair

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By reserving his desk for work, and his comfy chair for leisure, Jack was able to create a new habit. Knowing that, should he want to check his emails or Twitter, he’d have to move across the room, gave Jack that little push he needed to stay at his desk a bit longer and get things done.

Workplace Hack: The Distraction Chair – Kylie Whitehead, Contactzilla (26 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Five habits that hurt your productivity

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This is a Globe and Mail article that I think sounds shocked at the stunning idea that multitasking could be rubbish. Ignore that and see this as a refresher and I think it’s useful.

Entrepreneurs are expected to do everything and be everything at all times. It’s part of business, especially when you’re first starting out.

However, there are some seemingly productive habits that you may have formed that are actually killing your success in the long term. The candle that burns brightest, burns fastest, and while it’s crucial for you to be productive with your time, you also need to focus on not burning out.

You’re actually hurting your business with these five ‘productive’ habits – The Globe and Mail

Read the full piece.

New: OmniFocus Video Field Guide by David Sparks

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I would tell you that I am an expert OmniFocus user but it’s a lie. I am expert at the specific bits of it that I use daily. (Hourly.) (Minutely.) David Sparks knows the whole thing and now shows it to you.

He’s done this before with the original OmniFocus in a whole series of screencast videos but now he’s done it more in the form of his Field Guide books. These are all very good, very excellent books that seem to cut through complex issues and just tell you what’s what and what you need to know now. Somehow they are that relaxed and yet by the end you know everything. The books are particularly fine pieces of work and now there’s a video one for OmniFocus.

It’s about all the versions from Mac through iPhone and iPad. And it’s 2.5 hours of video: 150 minutes. You can watch a sample on Vimeo or just go buy the whole thing from Sparks’ site here.

As expert as I think I am, I know about this new video because I’m on the guy’s mailing list and it can’t have been above four minutes since I got the email, checked the sample, bought the whole thing and came here to tell you.

Time and place

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Go back. Go back to where you once belonged. It’s fantastic.

I’m heading to the Writers’ Toolkit event and have found myself walking by a place I worked at twenty years ago. It was Apricot Computers on Vincent Drive – I wrote manuals for them – and it’s now something to do with Birmingham University. The odds that any of this could mean anything to you are zero.

But it means a lot to me. I look at this building and even at that road sign and the first rushing feeling I get is that I knew nothing when I was there. Which must mean I know something now. That’s rather a good feeling. I’m not used to that.

Part of it is the surprise of coming across this place so unexpectedly. That’s definitely a big part of it.

You can’t really manufacture surprise, though. Not about a building. But I also get and clearly recognise that I get a similar thing every time I work at the Library of Birmingham.

It’s new and most of this is the coincidence of it being recently opened. I loved the old Central Library but I associate it with all the research work I did there for Radio Times.

Central Library was where I worked for someone else. And now I work so much and so often at the Library of Birmingham yet every time it is for me. It’s for my business.

I’ve been freelance since the 1990s so I shouldn’t just be feeling this now. But I am. And it’s because of the places I go and the times I went there before.

And the times I had there too.

Go back, okay? Take a look at your old places and take a look at yourself there. It’s pretty good.

You just tell yourself you’re entitled

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Generally considered a negative trait, entitlement, in small doses, can actually have the positive effect of boosting creativity, according to a new study to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Various studies have found that those who feel entitled are less likely to help others or apologize and are more likely to want special privileges, break rules, treat their romantic partners selfishly and make unethical decisions.

Entitlement boosts creativity – Jim Patterson, Vanderbilt (18 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

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