Advice

Take a break even in the worst times

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A break isn’t something you win for having finished, it is a necessary tool to get things done. The site 99U has a lot to say about this and a lot of quotes from psychologists and business types.

If you start with the notion that having a quick sandwich at your lunch is productive in the sense that it takes less time, that’s true,” the author says. “But we don’t want a hard and fast rule—we want a functional rule.” The desk-lunch efficiency might not be worth it, he says, if you could gain more from stepping away.

Extreme Productivity author Robert Pozen quoted in 6 Ways to Quickly Restore Sanity to your Day – Sasha VanHoven, 99U (undated)

It even includes an acronym. I hate acronyms.

Stop what you are doing, move to a place where this state or emotion is not dominating you and THEN make a decision:

H: When you are hungry, your mind and metabolism do not work well.
A: When you are angry, your mind is reactive, clouded with irrational emotions.
L: When you are lonely, you are needy and vulnerable.
T: When you are tired, everything doesn’t work well – often coupled with hungry

All of these variables can interconnect to create a danger zone for capable decision making.

Read the full piece for this plus five more tips for remaining sane or regaining sanity in busy times.

When you’ve got nothing to do at work

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Does this actually happen? They’re paying you for 40 hours a week, you would expect that they will have 40 hours worth of work for you to do – and you might expect them to try it on with 50 or 60 hours. Plus if they have very little for you to do, boredom will be the least of your worries as no business can keep you on for fun.

However. Maybe your work year is cyclical and you spend certain months gasping for air and then certain months playing Solitaire on your PC. For the sake of your will to live and – I think coincidentally – to help you get further in your job with this company, there are things you can do. Site point’s Lauren Holliday has advice that is really aimed, I think, at freelance people but if you’re freelance and bored then the thing you should be doing is getting more work in right now.

So while I take her points, I think this is handier when you’re in full-time employment and the issue is not whether you’ll get enough money to pay the mortgage next month but whether you can top your high score in Tetris. One thing she advises that I think applies to all of us, though, is this:

Organize Your Computer. When’s the last time you actually cleaned up your laptop aside from downloading an automatic Mac cleaner app? Your computer works hard so give it the Spring cleaning it deserves during the slow times.

How to Deal with Slow Times at Work – Lauren Holliday, Sitepoint (6 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

There’s no shame in jumping from job to job now

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Well, there probably still is somewhere. If you’re in the legal profession, maybe it’s still frowned on. If you’re a footballer, maybe – no, I can’t even think of an example, I know that little about sport. If you’re a writer who can’t think of football analogies, though, then it’s fine to get out of that sport website and go somewhere else.

We all used to be told we had to stay in jobs for a decent amount of time. I did it myself. I stayed with one terrible job for exactly a year because I thought less looked bad and would hurt my career chances. It was a bad year. But it had the benefit that I then appreciated every good job I got and ultimately it probably helped me down the line toward going freelance.

There’s just no way to know whether I was right to stay or should’ve got out of Dodge the first chance I got. There’s no way unless I am a carefully-chosen representative sample of many people in many jobs across many careers.

Everyone from your mother to your mentor has advice about the best way to switch jobs. But how can you know whom to trust? Especially since what was true in the job market 20 years ago — even two years ago — is not necessarily gospel now. And the market is constantly changing.

Consider the power dynamic between candidates and employers, for example. Though it differs across industries and regions, and is dependent on the health of the economy, in the past few years, experts have described the current labor market as “candidate-driven.” Job seekers hold more power than employers, a trend that seems to be deepening.

Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 10.49.11

Setting the Record Straight on Switching Jobs – Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review (10 July 2015)

That graphic was created by Harvard Business Review and you can see it embiggened along with other data in the original article. Read the full piece for this plus an interesting examination of the age-old certainty that you should never tell your current boss that you’re looking to leave.

Good interviewing techniques

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That’s interviewing as in when you want a job, not when you want to screw the truth out of the lying bastards and get it on tape. Also, that’s good techniques as in pretty obvious stuff but people must get this wrong, so.

One more thing. I think this is a completely unnecessary video in that it takes one minute to show me words I could’ve read in about eleven seconds. I won’t be running any more Fast Company videos like this but if you like it more than I do, their site is doing a lot of them.

Rash Recommendation: Sleep Cycle Power Nap

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Okay, yesterday I got up to work at 5am; around 6pm I had to sleep. At about 7:15pm I was back up, the went to bed at 11pm, got up this morning at 4:45am, contributed to the MacNN podcast that’s recorded at that time of the morning, then back to bed at 7:10am until 8am.

This is typical and this is a bit stupid. But during the podcast, my colleagues Charles Martin and Michelle Hermark both happened to recommend an iPhone app that helps with sleep. They rate Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and Power Nap – actually two apps that I bought before they’d finished speaking.

I’ve tried the Power Nap one twice now, starting with that 07:10 nap. You leave the phone on the bed near you and it does some monitoring, I’m not sure how much, and around 45 minutes later it wakes you up quite softly. Each time it’s a curious surprise to find myself awake and each time I’ve benefited from it.

Whereas when I’ve given in and napped before, I’ve struggled because it’s hard to wake up promptly or anywhere approaching an actual nap time. It’s been more a couple of hours or so. Which is a problem and contributes to how napping makes me feel like an old man.

If I can do this 45 minute lark, that will help me and I hope I can get beyond feeling ancient. Go take a look at the app for yourself, will you?

Weekend Read: Don’t Use Beta Software

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BETA stands for Doesn’t Work, Will Break, Might Delete Everything. It’s become a more familiar term since Google labelled Gmail as a beta for years and Apple did the same with Siri. It’s familiar enough a term that people don’t understand it and that’s more than just a shame when it means you can end up losing your work.

The current iOS 9 and OS X betas from Apple are causing problems. The beta for watchOS 2.0 which drives Apple Watches is apparently driving those watches back to Apple as they become useless.

You can and I do think Apple shouldn’t have put out software in this state but that is what beta software is. When you’re first making an application, you clobber together bits and pieces until it sort of, kinda, a bit looks like one day it may work. That’s an alpha release and it’s where you see if the thing has any point and it’s the place you think, do you know, it’d be much better in yellow. Or blue. Purple and orange with spots.

Eventually you reach a point where someone says enough. You can’t change the colour any more. It’s time to get this out into the hands of people to try it.

That’s a beta. It’s software of a set colour being put out to be tried. It will break. It cannot fail but to break. The issue is over how badly. If you’re a developer, the intended audience for a beta, these crashing failures are just your day to day life. They are why there is a beta. A bit breaks, you fix it, next day you move on.

If you’re a user, it’s different. You’re using your computer or your phone to ring people up or to compute, you can’t afford to have a problem. Hence the warnings every software company gives you about how you shouldn’t try this beta on your main or primary computing device and how you should have a backup. It’s a warning to us but it’s not. It’s really a note to future litigators that the company did warn people.

Few folk pay attention to that warning and today that means some people are having to return their watches to Apple.

It’s bad and worse than it should’ve been, worse than it would’ve been if Apple hadn’t made this beta public. But betas are there to be tested and for the problems to be found. There is no better way of testing software that will be relied on by millions of people than to try it with millions. Hence the public beta and for all the problems current ones are causing people, we’re seeing more of it and we’re going to see still more.

It’s important to beta test. You just haven’t signed on to be the one who gets problems so don’t be the one who installs and runs this pre-release stuff.

By the way, alpha releases are followed by beta releases but betas are not followed by gammas. The one after a beta is known as the GM or Gold Master, it’s the version of the software that is ready to ship. It used to be that software was sold on shiny discs so the Gold Master would be sent to the pressing plant. Funny how terms continue long after what they describe is gone.

Contently: Freelance lessons from wedding planning

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This is good. The more events I produce the more I realise that my wedding worked the same way – or at least that Angela planned it the way I should do these – and I’ve also realised that the hardest part is other people. Nearly 21 years later, I still haven’t written about this thought but now don’t have to because Contently has done it for me.

And done it well. Yael Grauer writes in part:

STOP TAKING EVERYTHING PERSONALLY
Weddings seem to bring out the worst in some people, amplifying issues and personal insecurities that have been quietly simmering beneath the surface. Handling these situations gracefully is a delicate art, so you have to quickly learn how to take bad news in stride.

Likewise, in freelancing, it’s easy to fixate on rejections or read too much into brief emails from busy, overly caffeinated, or unresponsive editors.

“People will think, ‘my pitch sucked,’ when really it’s that [editors] haven’t had time to look at the pitch, or they are running something similar, or it’s not right for the market. It’s almost never that your pitch sucked, or whatever your knee-jerk scary reaction is,” James-Enger explained.

And if an editor did think your pitch sucked, remember to focus on the eight similar publications that might be interested in your idea rather than the one that turned you down. It’s just business.

7 Freelancing Truths I Learned While Planning My Wedding – Yael Grauer, Contently (14 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

In and On your Business

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You work for yourself and you run a business – even if you also work for someone else and your writing or other creative business is currently a sideline. This is just going to be a very quick thought but it’s something that was pointed out to me and which has been pinballing around my head for about three weeks now.

Every day you spend in your business is a day you’re not spending on it.

Follow. I often go into schools now and it is huge fun but it is almost always a day. If I’m on a deadline writing for you, that’s certainly hours, probably days, maybe weeks. None of which I would change but all of which means I physically can’t work at planning my business or developing my business.

I’d not seen it in this way but I had seen that on the odd occasion that I’ve taken a day off to try finding new commissions, I’ve found them. Usually quite easily and sometimes they’ve become the most enjoyable work I’ve ended up doing.

So I’m going to spend more time doing that, I’m going to deliberately and consciously take more time specifically to work on my business. Do the same, will you? I mean your business. You can work on mine, that’s fine.

When coffee doesn’t cut it: how to keep going

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“There are a few optimal windows for doing your most creative and focused work,” [Assistant Professor Christopher] Barnes says. Most people are at their best in the mid-morning and late afternoon. You might match your circadian rhythm to your schedule by organizing your to-do list around these peaks and valleys. Tate recommends doing “any type of highly detailed work,” such as writing, important decision-making, or technical coding during high-energy hours. During the lulls, you can then turn to tasks that don’t require a great deal of focus: cleaning out your inbox, filling out expense reports, or returning phone calls. “That’s when to do tasks that are like muscle memory work,” she says.

How to Overcome the Midday Slump – Carolyn O’Hara, Harvard Business Review (1 July 2015)

Are we sure coffee doesn’t do the job? It would be helpful. Tea would be even better. But according to O’Hara, moving around and then the opposite, mediation, are what you need. There are reasons and there are more ways to get yourself moving, though: Read the full piece.

What do you give people?

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I was asked this recently: if someone hires you, what exactly do they get? With my British writer self-deprecating depressive-paralysis brain, I immediately replied 120 words per minute typing.

The person asking looked at me pretty much exactly the same way you are now. And she pressed. You’re freelance, you’re a business, tell me exactly why anyone should hire you and what it is that they get from you.

As you read this, I am off in a coffee shop giving her my answer. I may or may not let you know if she looks at me like that again, but here’s what I concluded after soul- and testimonial-searching:

Lively, engaging, inspiring action. Complex issues made not just simple but something you can act on. Very sparky writing with life and verve. Enthusiasm and practical, real-world experience with a newsy approach.

It kills me saying that to you and I’ve got to stop finding it so hard. In between the knife wounds, though, it has helped me vocalising what I do. Trying to vocalise it concisely. Trying to find an actual value for other people in all these things I do that I so love doing. Frankly also searching through testimonials and paraphrasing.

Maybe it’s that last bit that has helped me and that I think it will help you: when what you do works, when what you do helps people, I do think that’s the second best feeling in the world. Understanding, comprehending, accepting that your work has helped people, that’s probably the best. I’ll let you know when I get there.