Advice

Work in 90-minute bursts for best effect*

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*One caveat: I found I work better in hour-long chunks. Many folk do 20 minutes on, 20 off, and so forth. But the thing is to do it in concentrated blocks of time and maybe 90 minutes is a good one.

The theory boils down to the fact that we can’t increase the hours in the day, but we can increase the energy with which we make the most of those hours. Taking short, scheduled breaks throughout the day rejuvenates and restores us physically and mentally, helping us plow through those assignments and to-do lists in a third of the time.

The coolest take away from the article concerns what I now call “work blocks.” In short, after that 90 minutes of work, our bodies and minds need a break. But our 9-5 (or 7-7) work culture demands focus for much, much longer blocks of time, so many of us fight that urge to break by filling up the mug with more coffee, rubbing our eyes and refocusing on the screen.

No more.

Inspired by [New York Times writer Tony] Schwarz and the studies he cited, I created a Daily Schedule that broke up my day into 90-minute Work Blocks, separated by 30 minute Breaks and, in the middle of my day, a 2-hour lunch. I know some of you just spit your coffee out. But you read that right. I take a 2 hour lunch to get a long run or workout in, eat and read from a book or write a few lines in my journal.

During the 30 minute breaks I read, clean, walk to the post office and complete those little, once distracting tasks that now actually kill two birds with one stone. Sometimes, if I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, I’ll even knock off for a cat nap.

Do Less = Do More: The Art of Being Creative and Productive – Chase Jarvis, own blog (27 March 2013)

As always, the full piece is worth a read: particularly so this time, I think, as I just got rather absorbed reading it. Hat tip to 99U.

Interrupt a meeting with a two-minute silence

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Everybody shut up. Just think:

Seems counterintuitive to plan silence into a meeting, doesn’t it? Alexander Kjerulf, author of Happy Hour Is 9 to 5, has found silence to be an ideal way to encourage deep thinking and ideas, right in the midst of a meeting.

“The purpose of meetings is not to talk–the purpose of meetings is to arrive at ideas, solutions, plans and decisions.”

Since few of us can think deeply while we’re talking, the two-minute silence break gives a chance to mull over a decision, issue, or stalemate.

9 Science Backed Methods for More Productive Meetings – Kevan Lee, Buffer (undated but approximately 17 July 2014)

As ever, I choke on the word ‘science’ but at least they mean this idea and the other eight have some solid research and statistics behind them. Most of the ideas in the full piece are pretty familiar – limit meetings to who really needs to be there, make them quick and so on – but they’re all good and well worth your time reading.

The wild and strange world of using Mac Keynote on a PC

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20140721-221214-79934747.jpgI knew you could do this or I wouldn’t have even tried, but this afternoon I wrote and presented a talk using my favourite presentation software, Keynote, and I did it on a PC. Keynote is on Macs and iOS only, but if you go to icloud.com on any computer, you can use it as if it ran on your machine.

Same with Pages the word processor and Numbers, the spreadsheet. They’re all on icloud.com, along with Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts.

But it’s one thing knowing this, it’s another doing it. And this ability is just crazy good. If it weren’t that the keyboard was clunky plastic, I could’ve been on a Mac. Now, I’m a Mac user so naturally I prefer this to PCs but it was the flawless ability to do what I would’ve expected to do, what I am used to doing, that made this wild.

Keynote is just a very good presentation application, pretty much infinitely better than PowerPoint. I had the choice of using PowerPoint locally, as in actually on that PC’s hard drive yet I chose to run Keynote over iCloud. This was in all ways stupid: what if the internet connection had failed?

But it was also in all ways sensible. I was twice moved to different lecture rooms and because I was doing this on icloud.com, I just logged back on to there in each room and carried on exactly where I was.

And though the college I was at had PowerPoint, the first time I ran it, it came up with lots of messages that – read at great speed and in a rush to click my way through – gave me the impression that this was a trial version of PowerPoint. Not the full one. So it would have all the features but it would gripe at you a lot.

I’ve seen Microsoft Griping. I saw a fella us a PC that give a presentation so gorgeous that I was willing change my mind about Macs vs PCs – until he turned to face the audience. The instant his back was to the screen, there was a Windows Genuine Advantage error message. Basically, the internet connection had gone down and even though he wasn’t using the internet, Windows chose that moment to check something online and because it failed, said so in big letters.

Very amusingly, the connection must’ve come back because just as he turned around to change the slide, the error vanished.

I don’t care whether you like or dislike Apple, you know they wouldn’t interrupt your presentation with a system error.

So my choice was between a trial version of PowerPoint that would gripe and anyway was PowerPoint, or Keynote which was online at icloud.com and so at risk of losing the internet connection.

I chose Keynote.

And I tell you, I always will. Right now I tend to produce my presentations on Keynote for Mac or iOS and at the very end convert them to PowerPoint. I then arrive wherever I’m going with a USB thumb drive containing one Keynote version and two PowerPoints (the old and the new formats). I also have the same files on Dropbox. And I often bring my MacBook with all versions on too.

I think I still will. But I’ll also make sure I’ve got a copy on iCloud.com.

Keynote is a pleasure to use on Macs and iOS, I had thought it was a cleverness that you could run it on PCs via icloud.com but it’s more than that. It’s a pleasure to use it even there. And to be able to present directly from it, that’s huge to me.

Try Keynote on iCloud.com yourself. If you have an iPad or an iPhone – it’s not wonderful on an iPhone but it works – then get the iOS app here. And if you’re on a Mac, it’s waiting for you at the end of this link.

Quickly find something on a website

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Google searches everywhere, pretty much, and the search within a particular website is often rubbish. Often seriously rubbish. But you can combine the two to get straight to what you want.

For example, if you wanted to find every mention of OmniFocus on this site, The Blank Screen, then you would need hours of reading but practically no time searching. Just go to Google and type”

OmniFocus at williamgallagher.com

That’s it. Google will now search williamgallagher.com for the word OmniFocus. The search page will go on and tell you more from other places, especially if anyone’s linked to my blathering on about that To Do software, but the top results will be the ones you want on the site you’re searching.

Roll your own Popclip extensions

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If you understand every word of that title in order, off you pop to Brett Terpstra’s website to get it.

If you don’t, then here’s the thing. You know how on an iPhone or iPad when you tap a word, you get a little black bar appear with options like Copy, Cut and Paste? Popclip is a utility that gives you that same thing on Mac OS X – but adds much, much more than those three choices. Popclip can send text to OmniFocus, it can paste plain instead of styled text, it can do oodles.

And now it can do more. You can do more with it. Terpstra’s begun building an add-on that lets you define what else you want this Popclip to do. It is early days but if you’ve become a fan of Popclip, this is where you need to be going.

If you’re not a Popclip fan, the odds are that you haven’t used it. In which case, take a look at this:
20140721-134040-49240390.jpgAnd now go buy it.

You can be Siri-ous

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Hand on heart, I love Siri. I use it continually for setting timers when I’m cooking, for scheduling or rearranging meetings, for sending text messages and always, forever, constantly for adding tasks to OmniFocus.

Hand on heart 2, though, it is as if Siri has good days and bad days. There are times it just won’t work for me and they are exasperating. So far the days it has worked well have outnumbered the problem ones and the new discovery of something else Siri can do has kept me using it a huge amount.

I use it so much that there isn’t anything in Re/code’s top ten Siri tips that I haven’t used but still it’s a fine list and if you’re only ever aggravated by Siri, take a look at their full article for ideas big and small.

And as much of a Siri fan as I am, I can’t resist this:

Look, it’s like this…

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When you have bad news to tell someone, just tell them. There’s no need to be cruel about it but also don’t keep them hanging: the sooner you tell them the sooner they can handle it.

I learnt that recently when there was a cockup over an event and I was sure I’d blown the whole thing. I put off talking to people about it for no reason other than the fact that until I did, the event was still notionally going ahead. And I wanted the event to go ahead. But eventually I had to do the deed – and within moments the reaction I got was completely okay. We won’t do that thing, we’ll do this instead. Sold.

I was relieved but also embarrassed that I hadn’t just got on with it.

Now I’m even more convinced because the Harvard Business Review says get on with it too:

Here’s what I’ve come to realize: I almost always overestimate how difficult it is for the other person to hear what I have to say. People are resilient. I’m usually more uncomfortable delivering a difficult message than the other person is receiving it.

Next time you have a conversation you’re dreading, lead with the part you’re dreading. Get to the conclusion in the first sentence. Cringe fast and cringe early. It’s a simple move that few of us make consistently because it requires emotional courage. At least the first time.

But the more you do it, the easier and more natural it becomes. Being direct and upfront does not mean being callous or unnecessarily harsh. In fact, it’s the opposite; done with care, being direct is far more considerate.

How to Start a Conversation You’re Dreading – Peter Bregman, Harvard Business Review (7 July 2014)

Actually, whenever something like this is done to me, when the person puts off telling me something, I am always put in mind of She’s on the Roof. Apparently it’s an old gag, but I heard it first – and I hear it again in my head every time this comes up – delivered by Sam Waterston in Capricorn One. Here’s a poorly done clip with an irritating watermark (it vanishes a minute in) of the scene in question. Waterson is one of three men being pursued by helicopters:

Read faster, if you must, but retain more

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I don’t believe in speed-reading techniques but then I don’t have to: I naturally read at around 600 words per minute and I also type at around 120wpm. But my retention is poor: I am fantastic at scouring for information but if you ask me detailed questions about the whole text I’ve just taken in, I will be below average.

So that’s what makes me interested in advice that says you can read faster yet retain more by visiting Wikipedia first. Hold on. Wikipedia. O-kay. I’m listening, warily…

There is a relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension. The more you understand about a particular subject, the more “hooks” keep the facts in there. So if you are going to read a book on a subject you don’t know much about, check out the Wikipedia article on it first to prep your brain to retain more.

How to Become a Faster Reader – Ryan Battles, RyanBattles.com (17 July 2014)

That’s the one bit that interests me in an article that (ironically) takes a long time to read. But if you want to read faster or you’re just curious to see if Ryan Battles is his real name, do take a look at the full article.

“It is usually pretty easy to become a happier person”

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Is it bollocks. How’s that deadline coming along? Going to make your next mortgage payment, are we? Oh, let’s turn that frown into a smile!

But I wouldn’t point you at some happiness articles just to snipe about them. Not just to snipe. In among the less bearable parts of The Positivity Blogs feature on 7 Small Habits That Will Steal Your Happiness there is a near-gem:

It is usually pretty easy to become a happier person.

It is also quite easy to rob yourself of your own happiness. To make yourself more miserable and add a big bowl of suffering to your day. It is common thing, people do it every day all over the world.

So today I’d like to combine these two things. I’d like to share 7 happiness stealing habits that I have had quite a bit of trouble with in my own daily life (and I know from all the emails I get that many of you do too).

But I’d also like to add what you can do instead if you find yourself being stuck in one of these destructive habits.

7 Small Habits That Will Steal Your Happiness – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (24 July 2014)

The seven habits are good – and I recognise far too many of them – plus Henrik does offer some solid advice about coping with each of them over on the full article.

To succeed at something, get these three types of people

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A politician, a journalist and a priest.

Okay. Scratch that. Start again. Get yourself a mentor, a believer and an accountability partner:

No one ever accomplished great things alone. You won’t be a first. You need to build a good network of friends to succeed at anything. The reality is, no matter what you want to accomplish, if you surround yourself with the right people, you will succeed. If you want to learn more about how to find and develop relationships with these people, sign up for my email list.

I have several people in my life who act as a mentor, but my first mentor has to be my dad. I actually wrote an entire post about why everyone loves him. I’ve written an email to my email list about one of my accountability partners. And my biggest believer has to be my mom. She’s a good one.

The 3 Types of People You Need to Succeed at Anything – TJ McCoy, The TJMcCoyBlog (undated)

Did you pick up on the casual references to McCoy’s mailing list? I would never do something so unsubtle. I’m not clear what you get from his mailing list because I simply didn’t read that bit and you don’t have to: read the full article for everything else he says about these three types of people.