Advice

Experts are wrong – says expert

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I’ve often thought about this: experts say this or that can’t ever happen and then it does. Or they say it must but it doesn’t. I’ve just concluded that there is always another fact or another element that you don’t know or don’t see the significance of until it’s happened.

It has scared me a bit, actually. You know that Titanic wasn’t strictly speaking called unsinkable but few people seem to know why the term ever came up. It was to do with a new system of watertight bulkheads that meant if one was holed, it couldn’t flood the others. But these holds were open at the top. Nothing could flood enough to go over the top, of course.

So I spend some time, distressingly regularly, wondering what gaping hole I’m not seeing, what questions I’m not asking:

There will always be a wealth of experts arguing a number of sides to any given issue and most will be proved wrong. Yet we still seek them out because whenever there is uncertainty, we listen to anyone who professes to know more than we do. By looking for easy answers, we’re just asking for trouble.

Why Experts Always Seem to Get It Wrong – Creativity Post

The full post has more examples, better ones than my Titanic thing, plus more detail on why this all seems to be true.

What, even Sundays? Do something every day

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Getting up, for one. Probably eating. Exercise if necessary. But then also at least something, just something of whatever you're working on:

NO ZERO DAYS. A zero day is the day when you don’t do a single thing towards your goal.

Its 11.58pm and feel like you didn’t do anything? Do that one pushup. Write that sentence. Read one page.

You may say its not much but hey, its not a zero. 1 is much much better than a zero. Zero is your enemy. Fight it, ruthlessly.

Limitless

It's similar to the Jerry Seinfeld Technique (now famously denied by Seinfeld who says he has no idea where it came from or why it's named after him) and it's similar to my own Bad Days advice. So that's three people or three entire philosophies in agreement: can it possibly be wrong?

Nod to Lifehacker for reading Limitless

Shit Writing Syndrome and its cure

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They found it by accident. I had gone to the doctor for a routine penile enlargement procedure. I had filled out the standard Writers Guild insurance forms, and that’s where it turned up. When my doctor walked into the room, she had a hard time making eye contact.

“We won’t be enlarging your penis today,” she started, haltingly.

Ordinarily, she spoke with such clinical reserve. But this was different, personal. “When we looked at your paperwork, something seemed off. I took the liberty of sending it to a lab,” she continued. “Andy… your writing… it’s almost a hundred percent shit.”

How Writing for the TV Show “Community” Cured Me – Andy Bobrow – Medium (14 May 2014)

Writer Andy Bobrow naturally writes very well about writing very badly – and what little you can do about that – in the full piece.

Working, Waking, Walking hours

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Go for a walk. Now.

A recent study conducted by Stanford University (so you KNOW it’s legit) found that people were way more creative when they walked as opposed to sat. The study was conducted with human subjects. I was curious whether they had rats run a maze and then see if they could come up with better stories for 2 BROKE GIRLS.

These findings are no surprise to me. Often, while writing, I’ll pace with a yo-yo. (Still waiting for the study to conclude that yo-yo’s are the key to creativity – get busy Stanford.) But moving around seems to free your brain a little. Perhaps it’s just the increased activity. I don’t know. I was rejected by Stanford.

Unlock the Creative You – Ken Levine (15 May 2014)

Lest you read that article's title – Unlock the Creative You – and assume this is from some blue-sky, happy-clappy kind of site, it's actually from comedy writer Ken Levine. Usually he talks about comedy, sometimes he talks about baseball or some other sport, this week he touched on that study.

Read his whole piece here. I do also recommend the blog in its entirety but this is the first post I've read that I felt should be mentioned here on a productivity site.

Do more this weekend – if you must

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I used to treat Saturdays and Sundays more or less the same as any other day. You'd get family expectations but eventually they figure it out and let you alone as you carry on working. Since doing The Blank Screen and managing my time better, I've tended to take weekends off like a normal person. Not entirely, there's no need to be daft about it, but far more than ever before. I have even lazed around on a Saturday. And yet there's always someone to spoil it:

On Saturday morning I make a list — it usually includes hoovering, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, reading a book of choice, a gym session, some research or catching up on my Pocket reading etc. By having a list I can see how I progress throughout the weekend. Although I leave large gaps for general relaxing or wandering time (for a relaxing walk for example) usually I do something that’s on the list.

My proven ways to turn a lazy lie in — into a productive active resting and satisfying weekend
Krystian Szastok – Medium

Krystian has a lot of good ideas like that, dammit. Read the whole piece to see if there is any bit of it that you'll be able to do yourself for real.

There’s more to negotiation than money

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If you’ve got a meeting with someone, they want to work with you. Or at least they want to want to work with you. Make the most of that meeting, get what you can and remember that the ideal is that you will be working with these people so let’s leave everyone happy. And at some point money is going to come into it but money is not all.

It’s a lot. Let’s not be daft.

But:

Have more items than they have. Let’s say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance and they can’t budge higher.

That’s fine. Now make your list of other things: how much social media marketing will they do, what bookstores will they get you into, who has control over book design, what percentage of foreign rights, of digital rights, you can get. Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies are sold, will they pay for better book placement in key stores, will they hire a publicist? And so on.

Before every negotiation. Make a list. Make the list as long as possible. If your list is bigger than theirs (size matters) then you can give up “the nickels for the dimes”.

This is not just about negotiation. This is to make sure that later you are not disappointed because there is something you forgot. Always prepare. Then you can have faith that because you prepared well, the outcome will also go well.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Become a Great Negotiator – The Altucher Confidential

 

 

Be smarter: don’t apply for jobs when they’re advertised

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It can’t always be a good idea, but when it’s right, this could work well for you:

Introduce Yourself When They Aren’t Looking

What if you saw an ad for a job where you knew there was a fair amount of turnover. To add to this, let’s assume you are not desperate and unemployed. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to allow the ad to run its course and send a letter a few weeks later to make it appear your interest in the company was genuine and not an opportunistic spur of the moment decision made because there was an enticing ad that sparked your interest? The point here is to get yourself noticed when they aren’t looking — and when there aren’t a hundred other candidates seeking their attention all at once.

8 Ways to Get Noticed During a Job Search – Wisebread (2 May 2014)

The other seven ways are pretty good too: read the full list. (And a nod of the hat brim to Lifehacker for spotting this.)

Get a raise

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Here’s some smart advice from Time magazine about how to negotiate getting more money at work. But first, its opening lines made me laugh:

A new survey finds that what makes us satisfied at work isn’t what’s in our hearts; it’s what’s in our wallets. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 60% of American workers surveyed last year said pay/compensation was “very important” to them, making it the top-ranked priority.

Some things do not need surveys.

But the rest of the article is very good about whether you actually deserve a raise and only then how you ask for one. Plus it covers exactly what you’ve just thought about: what happens when you then don’t get it. Have a read of the full piece while I go talk to my boss about paying me more.

UPDATE: I am my own boss and he says no.

It’s when an app fails that you realise how much you like it

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TripIt_icon_flatThere are bad apps that you either ditch or tolerate. There are good apps that you use a lot. Then there are great ones that you use so much you forget that you’re using an app, it’s just the way things are. (I would offer that there are then even greater apps that are melded into your DNA: if I’m being harsh then I’d say only OmniFocus is like that with me, but isn’t it great that a tool can become so much a part of your life?)

Right up there in the so-great category for me is TripIt and I only appreciated that this week when it failed on me.

This is what is supposed to happen:

  • Make any travel booking anywhere and get an email ticket from ’em
  • Forward that email to plans@tripit.com
  • TripIt parses the ticket and pops every detail into your TripIt account
  • When you’re travelling, see everything you need on your iPhone

That last doesn’t sound so great but, seriously, it is. I had a thing where I was travelling from Birmingham in the UK to a village in the deepest part of southern France and it meant a lot of train rides and a lot of connections. Many of them were easy and great – I especially loved that I got a couple of hours in Paris both ways – but some were very, very, very tight. There was one where I had six minutes to get across what turned out to be a giant train station on multiple levels and though the guard I asked turned out to speak fantastic English, he also told me the wrong thing. Please picture me running, running and eventually sliding, sliding, sliding Charlie-Brown-like onto my train.

I do remember stopping on the way to help a woman carry an enormous suitcase up some stairs. So, you know, give me credit there: I may have made a mistake booking trains too close together but I’m a mensch under pressure.

What helped me throughout the whole journey was that I could look at TripIt on my iPhone at any time and be shown exactly what I had to do next. What the next train was, where it was, where it was going, what my seat reservation was, any booking references I needed, all that. I could choose to look at any or all of the steps in my journey so if something came up I’d be able to judge if I had the time to do it.

I’m not going to say that it made the journey pleasant when in fact the whole journey was great anyway, but it was a help and a guide and it became automatic that I would check TripIt along the way.

However.

It gets all this information from your email ticket. It parses that ticket: goes through it looking for departure times, train or airline reference numbers and so on. Fine. It’s handy that you just forward your ticket email to plans@tripit.com. (And clever that it’s always that same address: I can show you that address. It’s not a secret one like Evernote or OmniFocus use to let you email details in, it’s a big wide-open for-everyone email address and the smarts are in how it also parses who sent it. If I forward an email to plans@tripit.com, the service sees it’s from me and the details are popped into my account.)

Ticket emails differ between companies, though. TripIt is really good at this parsing but it gets thrown by two things: firstly a company it hasn’t parsed before and secondly if a company changes the layout of its emails. TripIt is an American service and I’m based in the UK so I’m not surprised that I occasionally hit companies that it doesn’t know. When that happens, TripIt sends you a warning that it couldn’t do anything with this stuff and that it has instead kept a copy of that entire ticket email in your account’s notes section. So at least you can see that.

But this week I booked a flight via Tripster and TripIt fell over. It believed it had parsed the email correctly, I got the regular TripIt success confirmation rather than any warnings, but it hadn’t. It believed my flight was tomorrow, it believed there was no seat or airline or reservation number. It was as close to a blank item in my travel itinerary as could be.

But TripIt is so useful when you’re travelling, so very useful, that I’ve taken the time to enter all the details for this trip by hand. Man, it was boring. And the knowledge that I will rely on this detail later actually made me nervous of entering it all, of not making any mistakes.

TripIt usually enters all my details for all my trips and it usually never goes wrong. I know I’m telling you of a time that it failed and that it was a boring time because of that, but it’s made me appreciate how good this app and this service is.

Let me quickly tell you that you can join the TripIt website for free and that there is a free app. I used that free app for years even though I don’t like ad-supported ones: I’d rather pay than have ads, I find them that intrusive. For those years, the choice, though, was between an ad-supported free app or a Pro version that required an annual subscription. I seem to travel more and more, but it’s still not enough for that.

However, at some point the company caved and released an app that you pay for but only pay that once. No subscription. It’s got an ungainly name: it’s called TripIt Travel Organizer (no ads) but it costs only 69p UK or 99c US. When I bought it I paid £2.49 and I still paid up before I’d reached the end of the sentence telling me it existed.

So: I thoroughly recommend, verging on urge you to use the TripIt website and this particular TripIt app.