Yes. Or is it no?
It’s going to be one or the other, really. Pick a side and a biscuit, then have a read of 99U’s feature on the topic.
Advice
Do it now
Listen, I don’t know what you’re working on – you could tell me, I’d so much like to know – but because it’s you, I can guess that you’re taking some chances here. You’re trying to write something you’re not quite sure about yet, you’re feeling your way, you’d exploring. And it’s a lot safer to not do any of those things. It’s a lot easier to just fire-fight the current job, the current problem. We all have current work problems and they are always urgent, nothing will change that. However.
Try that new thing and try it now. No waiting. Definitely no waiting for other people. You’re a writer, you’re a creator, go create, go write, go make. I’m all for being productive but there has to be a point: being productive just to get the cash in the door today is maybe enough for now, but you need more and unlike a giant number of people, you have the talent to get more. Hopefully to get more money: I’d like you to have enough that money isn’t a worry any more. But definitely to get more created, to grow in your field and in your heart.
That’s a bit arty-farty. Try this instead for harsh pragmatism: that thing you write is likely to be rubbish, that risk you take is likely to fail. If it is rubbish, if you do fail, you are still pretty close to infinitely further ahead than you were. You’re not still sitting there thinking next summer I’ll do this great thing, you’re standing there having done it. That’s even if it went wrong. Even then. Still ahead, still better, still taller.
Just fail fast so that you can get on to the next version or you get on to the new things you can only see from having gone through this process. Pixar got this “fail fast” rule for the same reason: they’re experimenting and they are rejecting. Samuel Beckett nailed it: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Mary Pickford nailed it better: “Supposing you have tried and failed again and again. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
Okay, wait one more day to buy from Apple
Strictly speaking, you could wait as long as you like: it’s less that there was anything so compelling that you must wait for it, more that what was announced is much better than what you’d get in the shop yesterday.
You can’t get any of the new products today, nor really tomorrow either. But from Friday 9 September you can pre-order the iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus. Usually I twitch if I don’t immediately tell you a price but with phones it’s complicated: many or most people buy them subsidised on a contract and not always predictably so. But as a quick guide, whatever you would’ve paid for an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus on Monday, that’s what you’ll pay for the 7 range from Friday.
From a productivity perspective, the significant improvements are in the battery life, performance and also capacity. In reverse order, the old small 16Gb model is no more and this can only be good. Then performance is fast. Faster than last time. Do you like the level of detail you’re getting here? And lastly the battery life is claimed to be two hours longer, on average, for the iPhone 7 and one hour longer on the iPhone 7 Plus.
There is also a radically improved camera which doesn’t happen to make much difference to what I work on but your mileage may be very improved.
Have a look at the official Apple site for all the details I’ve skimped on, all the other details I’ve skipped, and also the changes to the Apple Watch. I am placing a call to Ms Bank Manager and Mr Claus in order to get myself a jet black iPhone 7 Plus and a ceramic Apple Watch Series 2 but the big advantage in the new Watch is coming to the old one too. The Apple Watch on my wrist is already improved because I’ve been testing watchOS 3 which will be released in public shortly and genuinely makes the watch feel like new.
The new Series 2 Watch appears to be faster and to have a brighter screen: I’m not fussed about the screen, the old one is fine. But you know how it is with Apple gear: if it doesn’t look great in the demos, it does when you hold it in your hand.
Don’t buy anything from Apple today
Apple is making an announcement later today – 18:00 BST, 10:00 PDT – and apparently you can find out pretty much everything already by reading rumour websites. I’ve got an easier solution: just don’t buy any Apple products until after the announcement.
You can wait until tomorrow, you know you can. In the meantime, I will be watching the announcement because Apple puts on a bit of a show. It’s exactly the same show every time but it’s usually well done and I usually end up at least wanting to spend some money afterwards, if I don’t actually end up spending some money afterwards.
Times being what they are, ie September, though, you can be sure that iOS 10 will be included in the show and that’s free. It’s been in beta for some months and I’ve grown terribly keen on almost all of it.
You can watch the Apple announcement direct from the company itself right here. One thing about it does give me pause: the last time Apple made one of its announcements I was writing for a website called MacNN and had a really good time covering it. It was like being back in a newsroom. Now MacNN is closed and so I’ll be watching today’s Apple news like a viewer again. That won’t change the news and it can’t matter to anyone but me, but it matters to me.
A year in the making: new blogging book for writers
Buy The Blank Screen: Blogging guide for writers on Amazon
Previously we’ve all faced the blank screen and we’ve filled it with our writing – now it’s time to blog and to blog right. The Blank Screen: Blogging is the writers’ guide to creating a blog, keeping it going and getting an audience. More than that: it’s how to do it all in a way that you’ll enjoy. Because you know this: if you enjoy something you’re writing, that comes through to your readers.
Buy The Blank Screen: Blogging right now on Amazon.
Look me in the eye
Let me guess. Either you keep hearing that you should be writing a blog and you’ve resisted – or you tried one and it was hell. Floundered. You haven’t looked at it in ages and anyway, blogs are dead, Twitter is where it’s at now.
Yes. Twitter is where all the storm of bloggers rushed to and are now happily playing around. Thank goodness. For ages there when blogs where the Next Big Thing, everyone had a blog whether or not they should have. Most were technically perfect with every whizzy web feature you’ve ever heard of and most you’ve never bothered to use. But what they didn’t have is the thing you do.
You’re a writer. By far, by infinitely far the majority of kitten-picture-fan bloggers are not and so, okay, we got some pictures of kittens. We just got nothing else and it was impossible to see blogs as anything but an ego trip for the writer. Certainly they weren’t for the readers.
Cue you. Whatever type of writing you do, however deeply introspective you have to get in order to write it, you are a writer and you write for audiences. That doesn’t just make you qualified to write a blog, it means you will create one that is worth reading.
The reason you keep getting told that you need a blog is that you need your audiences to connect to you but if you write one of those fatuously egotistical blogs, they’ll only come once. I want you to get audiences, I want those audiences to go through your blog to your other writing but I’m also selfish. As much as I’m thinking of you as the writer, I’m thinking of me as a reader: I want to read interesting blogs. I just happen to know that this means I want to read you.
If you’ve already got a blog that you loathed and abandoned, come read my book and you’ll not only revive it, you’ll enjoy reviving it. Honest. If you haven’t done one yet then great, we can start afresh. That does mean starting afresh with the very few technical questions about blogging: there are things you need to know but I want you to know them quickly so that we can get on with the real job and start writing.
The Blank Screen: Blogging has all that technical advice but you will learn that so quickly. It’s really much more about how to create a blog that works for you because it works for your readers. How the blog our editors and commissioners and agents want from us is a fast route to putting off your readers and making you wish you’d got an ordinary job. How exploiting that writer brain of yours is the faster route to a blog you’ll enjoy so much it will take over your writing life.
Okay, we’ll stop it before it gets that good. But only just.
Read how some of the best bloggers walk that line, how some of them have created entire new worlds for themselves with book deals and entire online communities. And read how some of the very finest bloggers write to express and to explore issues that grow them as writers.
Go get the book, okay? There’s a paperback and Kindle edition for the UK right here and the same for the USA over there.
Can’t we just write?
From An Introverted Writer’s Lament:
Despite the fact that the introvert is a romanticized figure, in practice the introvert is reviled and pitied. (And offered pharmaceutical cures for her unfortunate existential defect.) But what if the reticence of the introvert isn’t about stage fright, or isn’t just about stage fright? What about those of us who don’t want to self-narrate all the time? It’s exhausting to always be making and talking, whether in front of people or behind them, synchronously or asynchronously. Now, when every popular technology is just another doorway opening onto the ever unfolding dormitory of life—the one we’re all expected to drift up and down with casual curiosity, looking in on each other for the latest bit of gossip or distraction—not even our desks are our private domain. We’re always just a click away from leaving the workbench for the forum.
Read the full piece.
Take notes on paper instead of laptops
But iPads are okay, right? Right?
This final test clarified that the simple act of verbatim note taking encouraged by laptops could ultimately result in impaired learning. “Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears,” said Mueller and Oppenheimer.
Read the full piece for exactly what was tested and the – to me – rather distressing reasons for the conclusions.
The Great Experiment: getting up at 4am
Don’t do it.
I’ve now got up to work at 5am on weekdays exactly 350 times and yesterday I tried 4am instead. It was brilliant until about 1pm when I struggled, then 4pm when I was underwater. Grabbed thirty minutes nap somewhere around 5pm when I got home and the day was done.
That feels like such a waste: finishing my day by, what, 5:30pm. I know I can argue that I did a lot from 4am to 1pm and that this is officially the length of a working day.
But now this morning I am struggling again, the 5am lurch was harder than ever and I’m somehow feeling it all in my stomach.
I’ll try it again and I’ll have to try it again sometime soon but for now, I think I’ve found my limit. It’s 5am and no earlier.
How do people manage any earlier?
You must, must, must use outlines
Must you bollocks. Fast Company has a good feature on creative discipline, this business of creating things in the haphazard crazy way we do but simultaneously being focused and actually finishing things. I like a huge amount of the piece but its thing about must, must, must outline is making me twitch.
I do use outlines on certain jobs – I’m contractually required to often enough and there are times when it is definitely a quick route to a goal, just not necessarily the best one. I’m pretty much as addicted to OmniOutliner as I am to its sister app OmniFocus but I use it with care, I use it with wariness. Because exploring on the page, writing something to see where it goes and being willing to throw it away afterwards is still what I believe to be right for me.
See what you think:
Outlines are the tool of fast and productive writers. They help you say what you want to say, before you’ve figured out what it’s going to sound like or you’ve wasted time and energy writing about the wrong things. Outlines help you see if your plot makes sense, if your arguments stand up, or if your blog post is going in the right direction.
Before you start your next writing project, take five minutes to create a writing outline. For example, if you’re writing a blog post, break it into five or six sections and an introduction and a conclusion. Each section should contain three to five bullet points corresponding to a point you want to make. If you’re writing a book, write an outline for each chapter using headings and bullet points. For larger projects, write your outline on index cards. Laying these out on your desk or on a wall will give you a visual overview of your work that you can rearrange.
8 Essential Lessons in Creative Discipline – Bryan Collins, Fast Company (11 June 2015)
I like that he’s clear about what it does, I’m not keen on the certainty behind it. But he has other advice that I’m less precious or prejudiced against, so do read the full piece.
Reddit advice on filling the odd spare minute with work
In summary, don’t. Or do, but. This is what was asked on Reddit’s productivity site:
I find myself doing nothing between classes, meetings, etc. How can I make use of these 10-30 minute breaks to do something productive? I often feel like it’s too little time to actually do anything big…
The discussion isn’t exactly bursting with responses but it is continuing and one of the more sensible comments is this from someone called Orangemenace13. (There were 12 Orangemenances before him-or-her-but-you-know-it’s-a-him?)
Yes, but you could be doing some productive / proactive that you still find relaxing. I always have a book and/or magazine on me for these moments of down time, for instance.
Sometimes sitting and “doing nothing” is great during these moments, too – and breaks may make you more productive. But it seems as if more often then not people spend this kind of time screwing around on their phones, checking Facebook and playing Candy Crush.
Read the full discussion.