Advice

Stop me. This is a bad new habit

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I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.

That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.

This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.

For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.

I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.

This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.

If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.

Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.

Why we have the 40-hour week – and why we should keep it

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I’m all for working long hours and I remain convinced that I am contributing to the work/life balance argument by not having a life. But:

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the “sweet spot” is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week – Geoffrey James, Inc (24 April 2012)

That’s the crux of it, really, but read the full piece for a little more of the history of the 40-hour figure and how it’s applying to office workers as well as Ford’s factory ones.

Caffeine Naps

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There’s a bit in The Blank Screen book where I quote songwriter Dar Williams. I’m prone to quoting her a lot but in this case it was to do with inspiration and specifically to do with caffeine.

Asked by someone about getting into the mood to write and create, she said:

You have to walk around a lot of museums, a lot of sculpture parks.
And time your caffeine so that you are in an open, wide, contemplative space for when it takes hold.

I like that and I like it a lot and I intend to do it more, but I’ve not connected it with another caffeine option before. The Caffeine Nap. When you’re tired and have to press on, drink some strong coffee, set your alarm for twenty minutes and have a nap.

Twenty minutes later, you’re woken by the alarm and the caffeine is in your bloodstream doing its wonderful job.

The other benefit of writing To Dos as if someone else will write them

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First, the original benefit. The benefit I thought of and that I explain during The Blank Screen book and workshop.

Instead of writing “Email Tom”, write “Reply to Tom re secret tryst”.

Frankly, if that’s your task then I don’t know that I’d write it down my list. I’d just do it. I might call him on an untraceable burner phone, but that’s just me.

The thing is that tomorrow when I come to my To Do list, it’s right there. What I need to do, what it’s about. See that, do it, done.

But a woman on today’s workshop pointed out an extra benefit that I like so much I’m going to use it in all future workshops and claim it’s my own. When you write out a To Do as if someone else will do it, you soon see what’s important and what isn’t. What is important enough that it would really be worth giving someone.

I loved that. I’m having that.

From today’s The Blank Screen workshop in Newcastle

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I do this Blank Screen productivity workshop a lot but I particularly enjoy doing it for the Federation of Entertainment Unions. They hire me occasionally to speak to members from their four associated unions: the Writers’ Guild, the Musician’s Guild, the National Union of Journalists and Equity.

It’s very special talking with these because all of us in the room are working full time in our creative fields. It’s especially exciting for me because actors and musicians have different needs to writers, journalists and authors so I work to find out what they need and how to help them.

I should say: to help them with this business I do of remaining the creative person we are, yet becoming a lot more productive. It’s not about knocking out work faster, it is about handling your time so well that you can do much more. That’s a subtle but an important difference.

But whatever group I talk to, there seems to be a collective mood. There’s so much in the workshop, especially the full-day version like today’s, that I spend some time at the end getting the attendees to recap. I think it helps them focus on what they’re going to take away but I know it helps me see what’s worked best.

Today what went down the best was a thing called Bad Days.

This is all about the worst times you get in our work, the time when are overwhelmed. That can be because you have too much to do, it can be exactly the opposite: you have nothing going on and have to pick which project to kickstart.

I actually have a solution. I’m proud of this and I’m proud of how the Bad Days chapter has been the most popular one in that first book. I’m fascinated by how I wrote that chapter right there during a really bad day. It was like I was writing live from the scene. The text is a little painful for me to read now: it’s clear and makes sense and does its job but I can feel the undertow.

But, hey, I’m a writer: nuts to my being uncomfortable, I’m simultaneously proud that there is an undertow.

I don’t want you to have bad days. But I do want you to have Bad Days, the chapter. Everyone I worked with today will get a copy of that via the FEU and I want you to have it too. It’s a single, blunt chapter from The Blank Screen and a PDF of it is all yours. Have it for free, use it, share it around if you think it will help people, and you’ll make me very happy.

Download it here.

I would be happier still if you fancied getting it in the book as I hope there is a huge amount of other advice in there that will help you. But the Bad Days PDF is the thing.

Making email addresses as secure as passwords

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I do know someone who deliberately picked a hard-to-remember email address, something like 9fytyth@hotmail.com because that looked professional. No, I have not one single idea either. I’d email to ask her why, but I can’t remember her address.

However, friend-of-the-blog Daniel Hardy has spotted another, better, easier-to-do way of making an address that’s hard to guess. Easy to remember, hard to guess. He tweeted:

I remember you saying you use this to combat spam, turns out it’s good for security too
Tweet – Daniel Hardy (3 September 2014)

The thing I’d use to counter spam was creating sort-of fake email addresses. They’re only sort-of fake because they really work. But they’re not your real one. What I really recommend is getting your own domain name so that you can make up any address, any time. So I might sign up for Tesco with an address of tesco@williamgallagher.com and it will work. But should Tesco ever sell out its email address to, say, an alien invasion force from beyond the stars, I can just block anything sent to tesco@williamgallagher.com.

But there is now also a very smart way to do this without the trouble of getting your own domain name. If you’re a Gmail user and your address is, say, Al.Phabet@gmail.com then you can give Tesco the address Al.Phabet+testco@gmail.com and it will work. It will work, the fine people at Tesco will be able to email you whatever it is they burn to email you, but at any time you can nobble this new address. And at no time do they know your real one.

Dan saw this on The Verge which goes on to say:

Now, this is not a security panacea by any stretch. You should still be using a password manager to help you keep track of all your different passwords — and now, different email addresses. If you forget the specific email address you’re using, you’re even more out of luck than you are if you forget your password. If you don’t even know the email address you registered with, you won’t be able to even get to those security questions. I personally use 1Password, which I like because it securely stores my data in the cloud (yes, there is an irony there), but there are others like LastPass that seem generally trustworthy.

How to make your email address as hard to guess as your password – Dieter Bohn, The Verge (September 3, 2014)

The full piece does cover the times that this can’t work. And while this particular trick is specific to Gmail, the piece goes on to at least begin covering some similar things you can do with Outlook and others.

The big idea of how to be and how to stay productive

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It’s hard, isn’t it? Even now. You’re handling a lot more than you ever did but it’s ceaseless and the more you can do, the more you get given to do. You’re the one who gets stuff done and, grief, if that isn’t a pain.

Also a pleasure, admit it. Yes, sure, you can take on that extra work, no trouble.

It is trouble and it is hard and it does take consistent, persistent, ceaseless effort.

But the way you do this always the same. The detail of your tasks and even of how you organise them may vary, yet at the heart there are just three things to keep in mind:

1) Spend time now to save time later
Invariably, just invariably, it takes you less time if you do something now than if you do something later.

There are exceptions. I’ve found I boom along at close to lightspeed when a deadline is coming but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you said the quality of what I do suffers.

The key reason for this is to do with number 2:

2) Stop churning
I know someone who was worried about a thing that was coming up at the end of the month. But he had all the information he needed to know what that thing would be. Not just whether it would be good or bad, but exactly and precisely what it would be. No doubt, no question of error, no wriggle room.

Now, he carried on worrying rather than work it out because he didn’t want to know if it was bad. But he thought about this a lot, just a lot. He churned it over and over in his mind for weeks.

You don’t churn good things. So don’t churn bad ones either.

And one way you do that is number 3:

3) Get tasks out of your head
We’re rubbish at remembering everything and coping with everything, we are fantastic at acting, working, resolving.

Use a good To Do app, get everything in there and know that everything is in there, then just do what the app tells you needs to be done now.

Out of your head and into your list, it makes all of this easier.

The 319 news stories I won’t read

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It’s 319 now, it’ll be 320 any second and by next Tuesday evening I reckon it’ll be over a thousand.

All about Apple.

And I won’t read any of them.

I like Apple, my work has been transformed by some of their products and I am very aware that next Tuesday’s company event looks pretty big. I’m aware of the rumours that it will feature a watch too.

But.

Apple has a lot of events and while I enjoy them, I’ve grown very weary and also wary of the news coverage beforehand. Afterwards, fine: there can be some useful and interesting details. But beforehand, there isn’t news, there is a smash and grab attempt to get hits on news sites. One site has been posting stories most every day for months now with headlines, written in all caps, that begin with words like “BIGGEST APPLE LEAK EVER”. Sometimes the leak is around the level of an exclusive revelation that there are two Ps in Apple.

You can argue that I’m doing something similar here: I wanted you to click on this piece and it is ostensibly about Apple yet I’m not giving you any news. But it’s really about you and it’s really about news in general. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to ignore those Apple news stories in my RSS feed and I suppose that must mean I usually enjoy reading them.

But.

I’m sick of the cycle. After an event, you get news stories saying how wonderful Apple is and you get news stories saying how crap Apple is. You get companies that make iPhone cases going giddy, you get Apple’s rivals rubbishing everything. No way anyone will ever buy an iPhone. I rather enjoyed last year’s outcry of mockery over how Apple’s iPhones have now got 64-bit processors instead of 32-bits. Now, one reason I like Apple is that they usually say nuts to specifications, they concentrate on what you can actually do with the stuff. Whereas PC manufacturers are all about who has one more Ghz or one more pixel. I’ve been in a store with a sales woman telling me that it didn’t matter what I wanted to use the computer for, this one was using an Intel Pentium 99 XX YY ZZ Top processor. QED.

Consequently this 64-bit processor bit was unusual and it was on turf that Apple’s competitors usually scrap on. Which meant kneejerk reactions, instant kneejerk reactions. This is purely and simply a marketing stunt, you see, nobody would ever need that extra performance. So said every company who has since announced they’ve got a 64-bit model come out soon anyway, so there. And so said the one company that has actually done it, a year after Apple. I can’t remember what company that is, I just remember that they’ve released a 64-bit Android phone before Android can handle 64-bits.

Fine, that was fun.

What wasn’t was the few times that journalists have slammed Apple for not doing something. That would be fine, that would be fair comment, except that Apple does not ever say in advance what it’s going to do. So this criticism was really a condemnation of Apple for not doing something it didn’t say it would. That irritates me as a reader, that obfuscates the times when Apple actually makes bad moves or poor products, and it cuts me as a journalist because it’s speculation built atop bollocks.

I thought I was immune to this but that’s like saying adverts don’t work. There was one Apple event where I was disappointed because it didn’t include a particular thing. Now, I would say that this particular thing was something I wanted and knew I would use – as opposed to the smartwatch which I’m just curious about – but I can’t.

I’m sure it’s true, I’m sure that’s why I was disappointed, but I can’t tell you because it was many Apple events ago. Each one supersedes the last so they don’t so much blur together as fade away. I have re-watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone for the first time back in 2007 because that is a rather finely done presentation. (Though Microsoft does tend to go for a quieter, more subtle approach to its presentations.)

So there is a lot of kerfuffle before an Apple event, there is a lot more after it, and in the middle there is this event which gets erased by the next one.

It’s still an event.

And I enjoy them. So I intend to watch next Tuesday (6pm UK, 10am California) and hopefully have a good time. But without any rumour-fuelled bollocks in my head. Also without any genuine facts, but.

By the way, it’s now 332 stories I’m ignoring.

336.

End of the Summer

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I refuse to accept that it is already autumn – or the Fall, I love that Americans call it the Fall, it’s such a perfect poetic word for it – and instead I am going to insist to you that this is really an album recommendation.

It is. End of the Summer is a Dar Williams album and I love it. I remember buying it on CD in Tower Records in London. I don’t think the store is even there now.

But while you’re listening to it, I admit there might be some people who might think that this might be the end of the summer, a bit. And these people have opinions about what you should do about it:

After a summer holiday slipping back into work mode can be a challenge.

Being greeted by an overflowing inbox and a hectic meeting schedule may cause you to suffer from the back-to-work blues, making it difficult to focus on that mountain of work in front of you. Business coach Robyn McLeod, says succumbing to the pressure to speed back into work can undo any benefits you may have received from taking a break.

Follow these tips to re-integrate to work after your holiday and avoid the post-vacation hangover

Summer Vacation is Officially Over, How to Ease Back into Work – Lisa Evans, Fast Company (2 September 2014)

The tips centre on taking time before you go on holiday to plan what you’ll do when you come back. Block out time the first day to talk to people, catch up on what you’ve missed and handle your email better.

Read Evans’s full feature for some practical, good steps.

And then listen to Dar Williams.