Advice

One (I Mean Six) Better Alternatives to Coffee

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Guess which of these appeals to me most. If you’re needing a productivity or energy boost, do you:

a) work out at a gym
b) eat chocolate

If you chose c) Drink Tea then I knew I liked you.

Productivity blog Procrastinate Away argues that you should have green tea and I turn my face against them for that. Real tea, please. Is there a Campaign for Real Tea? Strictly speaking I would like a Campaign for Real Yorkshire Tea in a Teabag No Sugar and Just a Little Milk.

Excuse me while I go register the website www.cfrytiatnsajalm.com.

It’s not that I disagree with Procrastinate Away’s reasoning, they’ve just transgressed my religion, so.

Read why they say gym and chocolate and green tea and three more things – including one surprise about temperature – are so much better than coffee.

Pardon? Breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day?

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But it’s when you break your fast. It’s the one when you eat after the longest gap since your previous meal. If food is fuel, that is when the tank is at its emptiest. Yet:

That’s reasonable, sure, if apathetic. Nutrition science as a field has in recent years been bisected over the importance of breakfast. The research speaks with more nuance than the lay breakfast pusher. But the new studies land a weight of evidence thoroughly outside the realm of “most important meal.”

In one study, 300 people ate or skipped breakfast and showed no subsequent difference in their weight gained or lost. Researcher Emily Dhurandhar said the findings suggest that breakfast “may be just another meal” and admitted to a history Breakfast-Police allegiance, conceding “I guess I won’t nag my husband to eat breakfast anymore.”

Breakfast Downgraded From ‘Most Important Meal of the Day’ to ‘Meal’ – James Hamblin, The Atlantic (22 August 2014)

Mind you, I do lurch to my desk with just a mug of tea at 5am. I’ll make breakfast for us around 8am. But sometimes I am actually in pain from hunger by then, I just don’t notice for a long time.

Read the full piece for just how split the vote on this is but also with reasons why you might want to skip breakfast. Just do it on your own recognisance, okay? No blaming me.

The other best way to learn something

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Seriously, have a need to solve a problem or achieve a thing, that will get something into your noggin better than anything. But if you can’t do that, if you’re doing something general like studying for an exam, you can also do this:

When you’re studying something new, think of somebody you know and plan to teach it to them. Fellow students, a colleague, your significant other, anyone. As you go over the material, detail specifically how you would convey the knowledge to that person so they could understand it just as thoroughly.

Learn More Efficiently by Planning to Teach What You’re Studying – Patrick Allan, Lifehacker (14 August 2014)

Allan’s full piece is a report about an academic report and drilling down through the piece can only get you to the official abstract without subscribing. You’ve got the idea anyway.

My favourite entry on The Blank Screen

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Well, it’s my favourite today. As we approach the 1,000th article on The Blank Screen – and as we have exceeded 250,000 words – I’ve been compiling a book. You’ve nominated articles, I’ve studied the statistics and I’ve just re-read everything. It’s been rather fun but sometimes you read something now in a very different way to how you saw it at the time.

That’s happened with one particular piece and right now this is one reason I’m calling it my favourite.

Originally, I wrote this short piece about how writer Dar Williams basically disagrees with everything I say:

I’ve said this before: I wouldn’t kill to write like songwriter Dar Williams, but I’d maim. She has a fine and long body of work, a now substantial discography but interestingly, she’s against being disciplined and productive.

Dar Williams: I don’t force lines, and I don’t force myself to write every day, and somehow out of that came seven albums that don’t, to me, feel forced. And that’s the only thing I’ll boast about is that there’s nothing about it that to me sounds like I said, “I have to write for 2 hours a day,” with lines where there were no inspiration.

Dar Williams on Productivity and Creativity – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (15 July 2014)

That did and that still does tickle me: a woman whose writing I admire and rate, an artist who has produced a considerable body of work, fundamentally disagrees with what I say about getting on with it.

Except now, just five weeks later, I re-read that and instead what has had me thinking all day is this other quote from her in the same piece:

Dar Williams: Well, when I was in college, I put a stick-it on my computer, which was huge, that said, “Whatever you do is enough.” I had totally lost my mind, and I was coming back from that. So I would say to myself, you know, you’re supposed to do a ten-page paper, if you do one page you’ll get a D+. If you do two pages, you’ll get a C-, or if you do three pages you’ll get a C-. So that’s all better than an F, so why don’t you do a page?

At times I don’t do anything because I don’t think I can finish it or because I don’t think I can do it well enough. But she’s right, isn’t she? Doing something, it’s always better than not doing anything.

Easily distrac- what?

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When I need to concentrate, I switch my iPhone to Do Not Disturb, I tell Siri to set a timer for one hour and maybe I put on headphones. Write until the hour alarm goes off, done. It works for me.

But right now, this moment, I am finding it hard to concentrate because I’ve been working on one big project all week. The one-hour bursts are fine for that but it’s like I’ve reached a limit. I am full of that work, my head is folding over, there’s no room for anything more to do with it. Consequently even though I am right on deadline, I am actively seeking out distractions.

Naturally, then, the first thing I find is this about not being distracted.

Knowing what you have to do during the day, and scheduling time slots for each task, will help you to break you workload into manageable chunks. Prioritising the more important tasks first will ensure these get done and aren’t impacted by the less important tasks over running.

Purchase a calendar with enough space on each day to write in your workload. As you work through your day, tick off the complete tasks to show what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve left to do.
If you’ve any items that are flexible in terms of deadline then these can be moved to a different day if required and it’s always a good idea to leave some time during the day free for any unplanned things that might arise.

Easily Distracted At Work? Here’s 12 Ways To Fix That – Barry (no surname given), Ciphr.com (1 July 2014)

Barry “No Surname” Given also proposes eating well and sleeping, amongst – hang on, counts on fingers – nine other ways to keep you focused.

Fortunately, he mentions one way to be distracted: YouTube. I’m off there right now.

Why you kill your own ideas

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You’ve done this. You’ve thought of something that might be the Next Big Thing – or even is just the Thing You Long To Do. And you don’t do a thing about it so it just never happens. Since we’re writers and it’s often as if there is just something in the air, quite often it does happen and it does get done, just by someone else.

Fast Company writer Courtney Seiter claims there are typically six things that stop her, starting with this:

1. BECAUSE THE IDEAS AREN’T FINISHED
The No. 1 thing that keeps me from creating is that the idea doesn’t feel complete yet. It lacks something, or I need more examples, or I’m not sure if it’s clear.

A former editor of mine called these “glimmers”—a little spark of an idea, not fully formed but on the cusp of being something. Sometimes you need to let a glimmer sit for a while before it becomes a fully formed idea. Sometimes you can smush it together with a few other glimmers to make something.

The main thing is that idea glimmers need nurturing, which can be hard to do. When ideas are still developing, they can feel embarrassingly incomplete or tough to explain to others. What if my little glimmer is misunderstood or turns out to be nothing at all?

How to fix it: It may seem counterintuitive, but I’ve learned that this is the time to talk about ideas most, so they can grow from a glimmer to a real idea. You can even post it on social media to give it a quick test. So what if the idea might fail? I’ll be able to get feedback right away and know whether to keep thinking on my glimmer or let it go.

6 Ways Your Brain Tries to Kill Your Ideas and How to Fight Them – Courtney Seiter, Fast Company (18 August 2014)

The other five ways include ones you’ll recognise as well as I do: the idea is too hard, we’re too busy, we’re too distracted. The full piece is a meaty examination of these and more with a lot of good ideas for beating them or at least making it more of a fight.

Dear Diary moment: a man admits he doesn’t know something

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I’m a man and I regularly say “I don’t know”. Maybe too often, maybe I should know some more things. But I promise that I don’t fit the stereotype of a guy who blusters through saying yeah, yeah, ‘course, everybody knows that, easy, done it twice this morning myself.

It’d be good to think that I was just a superb human being but the truth is that I get a little kick out of seeing people’s faces. Especially in teams, especially with editors, most especially – to be fully honest about it – with women. People tend to blink a lot at me. You can see the cogs processing. Occasionally, yes, the cog is saying “So why are we paying this guy?” but most of the time it’s a much more positive surprise.

There was one editor I had who blinked at me quite a bit at first. Later she told me that I’d done what she’d asked me to do and that when it wasn’t right but she’d explained again, I’d changed it until she was happy. “Yes,” I said. “And?”

“Just not used to it,” she said.

I’ve always recognised that the real benefit of admitting you don’t know something is that it is ferociously easier than pretending you do and then having to answer detailed questions. I’m slightly schizophrenic about this because I’ve often said yes, I can do something, when I’ve not done it before but am confident. Still, when it comes to a fact or to my opinion about something, if I don’t know it, I tell you.

What I’ve been told today is that it has one more benefit. The blog 42 Floors – continuing the honesty theme, I’ve never heard of it before thirty seconds ago – includes a piece recounting the story of an interviewer named Kiran asking a difficult question and being told “I don’t know”:

[H]e smiled and responded back, “I was waiting for that. I like it when people say I don’t know.” Kiran explained that he likes it when people say I don’t know because it lends credibility to everything else that they’ve said.

I don’t know – Jason Freedman, 42 Floors (2 March 2014)

Tip of the head to 99U for the link.

Three years of checks and balances

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I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve realised more about it. One of the key things I recommend you do is to check your bank balances every day. That’s it. It keeps you focused and, moreover, it keeps you really aware of how what you do pays off.

Now, that’s not to say that you can or should only measure your productivity and worth by how much money you earn. I’m a writer, I’d be insane to do that.

But it is a measure you can see and now that it is so easy to check our accounts online, it’s a really fast and handy measure.

The reason I’m telling you this again today is that I’ve now been doing it since 2011. Today is my third anniversary of checking all my accounts every single day: I have checked without fail 1,095 days in a row.

And this is what I have just realised: while I might want those balances to be healthier, the fact is that whenever I doubt I’ve got the discipline to do something, I can now look to 1,095 days in a row where I did.

“How many days is it since 26 November 2013?”

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I’m just after telling you that it is 265 days since The Blank Screen news site launched – but I didn’t tell you how I knew that.

It’d be good if you thought I was some incredibly organised savant type but, no, I just know about Wolfram Alpha.

You’ll think it’s a search engine when you see it but rather than looking for websites that happen to have something like the answer you want, Wolfram Alpha does its best to work out that answer. It’s easier to give you examples so here are the last few questions I’ve asked it:

How many days is it since 26 November 2013?
How deep is the English Channel?
What percentage of 2Gb is 250mb?
What is the date in 934 weekdays?
How far is New York from here?
What is 16% of 919.86?
When is mother’s day?

I need to explain that last one: mother’s day is on different dates in the UK and the US and I get easily confused. I’m sure one year my mother got two presents though, curiously, she didn’t complain.

I’m not saying that Wolfram Alpha is flawless: I asked it what the tourist population of Paris was and it threw up its hands. (I worked it out from a combination of tourist board information and general Paris statistics though, maddeningly, I can’t remember it now. I do remember looking out across from a café and being sure that something ridiculous like four out of five people I could see would be tourists.)

I am saying that not enough people know about Wolfram Alpha and when it’s the right tool for you, it is superb. Plus it’s free – with an option to pay for a premium version – which you can go to right now on the web at the official site. You can also get an iPhone or an iPad app for it.