Advice

God, I am just like so swamped with work right now

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It’s crazy-bad. Crazy. Man, I’m exhausted from it. Reeling. I tells you, right, if I don’t stop for just one goddamn minute and have me some me-time, I will not be responsible for my actions.

I know you’ve heard people say things like that but be honest, how often have you said it too?

We have a problem—and the odd thing is we not only know about it, we’re celebrating it. Just today, someone boasted to me that she was so busy she’s averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn’t complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.

Why are typically rational people so irrational in their behavior? The answer, I believe, is that we’re in the midst of a bubble; one so vast that to be alive today in the developed world is to be affected, or infected, by it. It’s the bubble of bubbles: it not only mirrors the previous bubbles (whether of the Tulip, Silicon Valley or Real Estate variety), it undergirds them all. I call it “The More Bubble.”

The nature of bubbles is that some asset is absurdly overvalued until—eventually—the bubble bursts, and we’re left scratching our heads wondering why we were so irrationally exuberant in the first place. The asset we’re overvaluing now is the notion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all; what Jim Collins calls “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”

This bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we “should” be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it’s code for being successful and important.

Why We Brag About Being Busy (And How to Regain Focus) – Greg McKeown, Lifehacker (16 June 2014)

McKeown’s article is on Lifehacker but it was originally on the Harvard Business Review which I want to mention both because that’s where this originated and these things should be noted, but also because the original piece had a great word in its headline. That headline is “Why We Humblebrag About Being Busy“. I love that word humblebrag.

And I’m only a little bit ashamed to admit that I need to eat me some humblebrag pie.

Put the screen down and go to sleep

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You do this. I’ve seen how tired you are in the mornings so I know you do this. It’s pretty late at night, you’re walloped and you know you should go to bed. You know you want to. You also know that there is not one damn thing stopping you going. Yet you stay there.

You find something to read on your iPad, you check out something on your iPhone, maybe you use other devices and one doesn’t like to judge. But it’s bad and you should stop it and I don’t care that it’s hard or that you just want five more minutes:

Why it’s harmful: Anyone who’s missed out on sleep thanks to a deadline or bawling infant is familiar with the irritability, stress, and gloom that can set in the next day. If sleep deprivation and disturbances become chronic, they increase a person’s risk of developing depression or anxiety disorders.

What you can do: Prioritize sleep and practice healthy bedtime behaviors, such as limiting caffeine and alcohol in the hours before bed. It’s also important to curb your computer, tablet, and smartphone use late at night, Buse says; the blue light emitted by these devices suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin and can disrupt your circadian rhythm.

12 Ways We Sabotage Our Mental Health – Health.com

That quote is of the complete text to the 4th of the 12 Ways. I quote it so you don’t have to schlep through an irritating slideshow where every step is on a different page solely to build up the hit counts on the site. But actually, the other 11 are pretty good. If you have a minute, some patience and a steady hand, do take a quick glance through them on the full feature.

When you’ve got that new job, do this

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Last month, as you might have heard, I started a new job.

That’s Angela Ahrendts, previously world famous (in the retail and business world) for being the CEO of Burberry. I hadn’t even heard of Burberry. Now she’s world famous (in the computing world as well as retail and business) for being the new Senior Vice President of Apple Retail. If you don’t happen to know who runs what in Apple, I commend you on your excellent life choices. But this is an interesting position because it’s been done so extraordinarily well that it transformed Apple into the success it is – and it’s been done so badly that there were visible dents in that success.

Now Ahrendts is in charge and everything I read impresses me. But today what I read is nothing to do with Apple, it’s her writing on LinkedIn about what it is like taking a very big change in one’s employer or one’s career.

I am by no means an expert at these transitions, but I’ve always tried to be consistent in how I run, exit and begin in a new business. I thought I would share a few professional and personal insights which are helping me adapt to a new sector, culture and country. (Silicon Valley can feel like a country unto itself!)

…Also, trust your instincts and emotions. Let them guide you in every situation; they will not fail you. Never will your objectivity be as clear or your instincts sharper than in the first 30-90 days. Cherish this time and fight the urge to overthink. Real human dialogue and interaction where you can feel and be felt will be invaluable as your vision, enabled by your instincts, becomes clearer. In honor of the great American poet Maya Angelou, always remember, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I would argue this is even more important in the early days.

Starting Anew – Angela Ahrendts, LinkedIn (23 June 2014)

Her full piece isn’t a huge amount longer but it’s worth your time.

Searching job ads won’t cut it any more

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A decade ago, John Battelle stressed the importance of “search literacy.” What he meant was that people who were skilled at using Google to find information had an edge over those who had yet to acquire this aptitude. In the Information Age, if you couldn’t make sense of an increasingly information-rich world through effective search capabilities, you’d be culturally marginalized, just like a person who couldn’t read street signs.

Now, those who can conceptualize and understand networks – both online and off – have an edge in today’s fast-paced and hyper-competitive landscape, where the speed with which we can make informed decisions is critical. To wit, the subtitle of my forthcoming book is “Managing Talent in the Networked Age” — I think the networked age changes everything.

The Information Age to the Networked Age: Are You Network Literate? – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn (4 June 2014)

I could probably look up who in the world John Battelle is yet it would feel like giving in. This is a jargon-stuffed plug for a book yet it’s worth a skim because its central point is good. It is true that you don’t get work through job ads so much anymore. So many people apply for everything that it’s become a game instead of a strategy. And if all Hoffman’s article boils down to is “it’s who you know”, he has a point. Getting out there, making yourself known by doing something useful and meeting people along the way, it works.

And it’s a lot more fun meeting people than it is filling out online CVs that are only going to be read by software algorithms.

Via 99U

Zipping files doesn’t do what you think

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Yes, if you zip a file, you are compressing it. You are making it smaller for emailing to someone. So far, what you think is right.

But zipping does absolutely nothing – at least nothing useful – if what you’re sending is a JPEG image or an MP3 file. Because those are already compressed. If they could be compressed further, they would’ve been.

What you’re doing by zipping an image or a MP3 audio is making it tougher for the recipient to open. I just had a thing where I had to unpick why an audio file wouldn’t play on an iPhone: it was because it was sent zipped. All zipping did was make the audio unplayable until I’d unzipped it and resent.

So you are always better off sending JPEG images and MP3 files unzipped.

But.

There is one specific situation when you should zip anyway.

It’s when you’re sending many files to someone at once. Zipping produces one file and it does so regardless of how many things you’re trying to send. So, for instance, I just delivered 40 images to a client and did so by sending them one zip file containing the lot.

They get one file and it has everything.

Now, what I actually sent them was a Dropbox link to the zip file, I didn’t try to send 100Mb of zip to them over email. But the zipping part was the same.

So.

Zip to compress files like word processor documents and zip to gather up lots of files into one.

But don’t zip a JPEG or an MP3 because that’s just a chore.

Getting Things Done – book (half) recommendation

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It’s one of the strangest books I’ve ever read yet I can see, I can clearly see, how so many of the things I do to stay productive either came from this book or were confirmed for me, were oddly validated.

Getting Things Done (UK edition, US edition) is a self-help book by David Allen. The strange things first: it was written in 2001 and you will be amazed how long ago that seems. (Example: Allen talks a lot about how, for instance, you obviously can’t access the internet unless you’re in your office. It’s practically Victorian.) Also, it feels as if Allen is focusing on office workers and people who may do fantastic things but aren’t the kind of messy-minded creatives that writers are.

So I remember reading this and rather translating it on the fly. The very last thing he says is that you should wait three months and then re-read the book. He promises it will seem like a completely different thing. I did that. It did. The second time through, it was rubbish.

But the ideas. Next Action comes from David Allen: the idea that you can break down a mountain of a job by listing just what the one very next thing you can or you have to do is.

OmniFocus works with this Getting Things Done system – the cool kids call it GTD and it actually is a cult – though you don’t have to use Allen’s techniques to get a lot out of that software. David Allen doesn’t: I believe he prefers a paper-based system. Strange how I’m not surprised.

But if I can’t recommending it entirely, I do recommend it fairly wholeheartedly. How about this? Go to Amazon UK or Amazon US and use the Look Inside feature to read a few pages and see what you think.

There is also an official site for David Allen that you might like.

Make life a little easier than it is

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It’s funny how once you notice something or there is one particular thing on your mind, you see related issues everywhere. After today’s news story about how we make life harder for ourselves, I’ve found this on Lifehacker. Not only that, but it’s an old article the site has recently brought back up to the fore as if waiting for me.

Remember the last time you lost confidence after your boss was disappointed in your work—or maybe you were stood up by a friend? You second-guessed yourself after that, and ultimately your work or personal life suffered. The idea behind recalibrating your reality is pretty simple. When you get locked into a view of the world you get stuck in routines and you lose sight of different viewpoints. Recalibrating that view can help you solve problems, win arguments, and even be happier. But how do we actually do it? We’ll take a look at a few of the different methods you can use to recalibrate your perception of the world and yourself, but first, we have to understand how we perceive the world to begin with.

How to recalibrate your reality – Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker (republished 20 June 2014)

Take a few minutes and read the whole piece: it’s long and detailed and involved and very interesting.

Don’t make life harder than it is

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You do this. You know you do. So do I:

Another driver cut you off. Your friend never texted you back. Your co-worker went to lunch without you. Everyone can find a reason to be offended on a steady basis. So what caused you to be offended? You assigned bad intent to these otherwise innocuous actions. You took it as a personal affront, a slap in the face.

Happy people do not do this. They don’t take things personally. They don’t ascribe intent to the unintentional actions of others.

10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be – Tim Hoch, Thought Catalog (17 June 2014)

That’s “You ascribe intent”, otherwise called number 1 in a series of 10. Some of the other 9 are pretty familiar too.

It’s all ultimately a plug for a book I haven’t read called The Truth About Everything (UK edition, US edition) but it’s a good plug. The ten points are well made and being aware of them, recognising them in yourself, isn’t a bad thing at all. Do have a read of the ten.

Shudder. Organise yourself by paper envelopes

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I need the 21st century. Couldn’t cope without technology. But I accept your mileage may vary so if you have a lot of paper or you really want to do things with paper, I’m not judging you. I don’t comment, I merely report:

I was reminded of this earlier when reminiscing about my old job and the Noguchi filing system. It was devised by Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio, and for about a year I used it extensively.

Instead of a filing cabinet or set of drawers, you’ll need an open shelf and several 9″ x 12″ (or larger) envelopes. Using scissors, cut the flap off the top of the envelope, as shown above. You cut the top off to make it super easy to get at the envelope’s contents. Next, write the date and title along the side of the envelope. Again, see the image at above for a reference. Make one envelope per project and place the envelopes next to each other on the shelf, with the date and title side facing outward.

In Practice

Don’t attempt to organize, classify, or otherwise sort the envelopes. It will be tempting to do so, but the beauty here is that the system takes care of organizing for you. As you take a folder off the shelf to use it, return it to the far left.

The Noguchi filing system – David Caolo (3 June 2014)

I can’t look. Is it over? Caolo’s full feature on Unclutterer details the idea complete with a diagram.

Via Lifehacker