Advice

It’s the way you tell ’em

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I’ve been a TV historian – as in, I write articles and books about television history, not as in I’m Michael Wood – and it’s been a problem with my writing. I was in a script meeting where a fella wanted me to do a scene in a certain way and I couldn’t because I’d already seen it in TV dramas. A lot. I mean, a lot. To me, it was a roll-your-eyes cliché and while I wasn’t rude or stupid enough to use those words, I did make it clear that I wasn’t going to use those words.

“You know it’s been used before, but the viewers don’t,” he said.

I thought then and I think now that this is bollocks. We have all seen umpteen thousand TV dramas and maybe we didn’t all concentrate on them as much as I did, but I suspect we did. I’m trying to remember this specific scene so I can tell you and you can roll your eyes.

I thought I had to come up with something new. I was and I am aware that this is a painful thought as there is so much I haven’t seen, so much I haven’t read that the odds of my finding something genuinely new are about as high as the chance I’ll find a way to end this sentence without saying low or nonexistent.

Still, it was okay for me, I felt it was okay, if the thing I found was new to me. If it were new to me and it did something, it took me and the audience somewhere, if it meant more than its surface, if it had more to it. I believe this today.

But.

This is going to sound a bit obvious but it came to me yesterday like I was on a bus to Damascus.

You can take an old idea and find something new in it.

harryaugustcoverFollow. Yesterday morning I was reading through my Google Alerts and there was reference to a new novel called The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. By the time I’d read the reference, I’d got the sample chapters off iBooks and by the time I’d read those, I’d bought the novel, and by the time yesterday was over, I’d finished reading it. Some 400-odd pages during the day. This may be the least productive I have ever been, and as I’m the laziest man you’ll ever meet, that is indeed saying something.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is about a man who dies after a reasonably long life and is immediately reborn right back at the start. He is the baby he was, just with a lifetime’s knowledge. And then many years later, he dies again – and is right back at the start, right back to being the baby he was. Just with two lifetimes of knowledge and experience.

It’s an interesting idea and you can see a lot of drama potential, but the reason I got the sample rather than going straight to buying the whole book was that I knew that idea already. It’s Replay by Ken Grimwood.

replayThis reborn as yourself idea isn’t so common that you roll your eyes, it isn’t one that crops up every two years in EastEnders. But it is extremely distinctive. If you’ve ever read Replay, it’s stuck with you and you’re going to think of it when you hear of this new novel.

But apart from this one, gigantic, unmistakeable same idea at the start, Harry August has a second gigantic idea. One that could not work without the first one. It’s this. As he’s coming to the end of his life in the 1990s, he meets someone else going through this born-die-born cycle. But as he’s a dying old man, she is a little girl. And she has a message she needs him to take back to when he was born in 1918.

That idea could not exist without the same Replay-style idea at the heart of the book and it makes this a totally different – and I’m going to say totally new – type of story.

Don’t abandon things because they’ve been done before. I think that’s what I’m saying. Don’t abandon them just because they’ve been done before. But don’t do them the same, either.

Should you write your To Do tasks as question?

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No.

So there.

Write your To Dos as if someone else is going to do them. Take the time to put that extra explanatory detail in there – so instead of writing “Phone meeting Anne” on your list, write “Phone Anne to ask her for purchase order number”. The second takes longer to write but you come to the phone tomorrow and you are dialling immediately. The former is shorter but tomorrow you’re going to look at “Phone meeting Anne” and think, what’s that about? Is she phoning me or am I supposed to phone her? And you may well have to stop to think: hang on, which Anne?

I believe this, I do this, it works. Not everyone agrees.

1# Change a relatively boring list to something that can excite you
Since lists in their current state are declarative in nature, I first tackled changing the way I write them.

I found out that we’re more likely to read something if it has a question mark attached to it which led me to change the way I write tasks.

Let’s start with one of the most boring tasks that I know off, doing your laundry.

Instead of writing it like the mundane task it is i.e. as a declaration “- Do the laundry at 8 PM”, write it as a question or even a challenge! This will rub some extra flavor into it “Can you finish the laundry before 8:30 PM?” and will make sure you’ll tackle it.

Asking question stimulates our curiosity; curiosity is an engine that motivates us to explore and discover.

Are We Managing Our To-Do Lists All Wrong? – IQ Tell

Haim Pekel wrote that on the IQ Tell productivity blog which I didn’t see and hadn’t heard of until Lifehacker spotted it yesterday. Lifehacker’s more pro this idea than I am, so do read the full piece on IQ Tell to see what you think.

Don’t drive angry

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From Groundhog Day by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis. There is very little relevance here but I read the words “Don’t drive angry” and that’s what starts playing in my head. What may be more relevant is where I read the words.

Time magazine has a feature on this and nine other things you really should not do when you’re angry. I’m afraid I think I’ve done at least 12 of them.

You shouldn’t drive
Operating a motor vehicle when you’re enraged can be dangerous. Research shows that angry drivers take more risks and have more accidents. “When you’re angry, you’re primed for attack, so it’s not a good time to jump in a vehicle,” says David Narang, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Santa Monica, Calif. “In addition, anger gives a person tunnel vision—you stare straight ahead and may not see a pedestrian or another car coming into your peripheral vision crossing the street.” If you must drive when angry, Narang suggests opening your eyes purposefully and looking around you to avoid tunnel vision.

10 Things You Should Never Do When You’re Angry – Time

It’s very easy to get angry as a writer, most especially when your latest rejection is just nuts. But don’t drive. And nine other things. I’d like them to have included a few things you should do, but for a strong list of what to avoid and why, do read the full feature.

 

 

 

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/time/topstories/~3/Q-idFqWrq1o/

Make writing a habit by tying it to something else

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You have lunch most days, right? You go to bed pretty much every night? Write for half an hour before you eat lunch. Write for ten minutes before you go to bed.

That’s it. That’s all. That is actually my productivity tip of the week – I do one of those in each of the weekly The Blank Screen email newsletters – and it’s so new to me that it isn’t in The Blank Screen book. I shouldn’t tell you that. But it’s you, I can’t lie to you.

And I can’t try to make this one sound more than it is. Just find a thing you have to do or a thing you like doing and then do some writing before it. Before it every time. Make the two things go together like a double bill. It means you won’t forget to do it, you will make it a habit.

Just be careful of one thing. Whatever you tie this writing to, make sure you do the writing before it. Not after. Telling yourself you’ll write for an hour after you come back from the gym won’t work. Telling yourself you’ll write for ten minutes before you go to the gym, that works.

 

Do this and you’ll get a job

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The New York Times has been running a short series called How to Get a Job at Google. It’s very much about getting a vocational education, it’s mostly rather down on the concept of getting a degree in what interests you even if that won’t directly set you up for a career in the burger and fries industry. But among the long part 2 feature last weekend, there was this about writing a CV.

Laszlo Bock “is in charge of all hiring at Google – about 100 new hires a week” and says about CVs:

“The key,” he said, “is to frame your strengths as: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.’ Most people would write a résumé like this: ‘Wrote editorials for The New York Times.’ Better would be to say: ‘Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.’ Most people don’t put the right content on their résumés.”

How to Get a Job at Google, part 2 – The New York Times

I read that translating the word job into the words freelance contract – and, actually, also translating resumé into CV – but what he then says about interviews is surely useful advice for any session where you’re pitching yourself:

“What you want to do is say: ‘Here’s the attribute I’m going to demonstrate; here’s the story demonstrating it; here’s how that story demonstrated that attribute.’ ” And here is how it can create value. “Most people in an interview don’t make explicit their thought process behind how or why they did something and, even if they are able to come up with a compelling story, they are unable to explain their thought process.”

There’s a not a gigantic amount more in the full Times piece but see what you think of the guy’s opinion on whether liberal arts qualifications have merit.

By the way, this is the 300th news post on The Blank Screen. Let us raise a mug of tea. Clink.

Stop trying new software

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Shudder. If it’s easier to be productive than it is to write anything – and, oh my lights, it is – then it is easier still to pretend to be even more productive by forever trying out new software tools. I am completely fine with this. If I hadn’t played, I mean, investigated, then I wouldn’t now be using OmniFocus and where would we be then? We wouldn’t be here: you and I, talking like this, it would not have happened if I hadn’t moved to using OmniFocus to get tasks done. That’s a scary thought. I knew that software was transformative, but I say this to you and I remember when I was first trying it out and I considered going back to my previous To Do manager.

That was a near miss.

Anyway.

I am definitely pro exploring and investigating. Except there’s this fella, Frank Chimero, who argues that enough is enough and I think he has a spectacular point:

Being an early adopter is exhilarating in the same way that riding a rollercoaster can feel like travel. You’re moving, but you’re not actually going anywhere, only devising ever-increasingly complex methods to make yourself feel slightly more barfy. You are in a loop de loop of productivity, changing for change’s sake. I made an agreement with myself in January: no new apps on my phone or computer. Don’t do new stuff. Just do your work.

Text editor, spreadsheet, email, pencil, paper, Photoshop. OK. That’s enough.

No New Tools – Frank Chimero

Is Chimero his real name? Seems wrong for someone saying you should stop where you are. But he means it and you see there where he says he made this agreement with himself in January. We’re now in May and he has things to say about how it’s going in the full article here.

 

Take a breath. Or a holiday. Or something in between

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A couple of weeks ago I got an email that so annoyed me, I wanted to reply instantaneously. But instead I calmly made lunch, watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother – and then exploded.

It was going so well until the end there, wasn't it? I sounded so calm and professional. Once in a very long while, though, it is fun to make the ground shake – and that's not what I want to talk to you about. It's that 45 minute break I took before replying, that's what's key, that's what you and I need to talk through.

Number one thing: just because someone has emailed you, that doesn't mean you have to reply at all, let alone that you have to reply right away.

I'm a scriptwriter and the analogy I leap to is when you read a script that has a character asking a question. In a bad, tedious script, the next character will always answer it. In good scripts, they won't. For at least three reasons, the greatest being that it is extremely boring. Then there is also the fact that we don't tend to talk like that in real life. And there's also that often the answer is a chore to get by because you've done all the work with the question.

Follow. Here's a bad line of dialogue:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?

You know that the next line belongs to his son. You know that this happens a lot, you know that his son uses the Dad Taxi all the time. You know the father doesn't like Sally. And you even know what time the next scene is going to start and end. It's not that bad a line, since it gives you all of that attitude along with all of those facts, but it is a question that does not need an answer. In real life, the kid would sulk. In scripts, bad writers automatically write him an answer and that answer will be rubbish. It will be an answer because of course he must reply with one. It won't have any value, it will just be a delay before the next thing happens.

Just let me stay on scriptwriting dialogue for a moment. This is an aside, I know, but even in an example, I want to be clear that there is a difference between an answer and a response.

This is how that exchange would go in a bad script:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?
SON: But you promised you would! I've told Sally I'm coming and everything.

And this is it in a better one:

DAD: Do you really think I'm going to keep being a taxi for you? That I'm going to pick you up at 6pm, drive you to this “Sally's” place and wait outside until 1am?
SON: I can go over to mom's, she'll drive me.

It's a response and it also tells us that the mother and father are divorced.

Anyway.

Back to the point about replying and responding instantaneously. We do think we have to, we feel bad if we don't. It's as if it's a phone call to us, we feel the pressure to reply, the pressure that the other person is waiting. And they are.

But still: train yourself to not automatically reply to emails.

I'm not saying be rude, I'm saying avoid kneejerk reactions by avoiding replying. Maybe just for a short while, maybe forever.

A few days ago, a friend asked advice on a technical thing and I didn't know the answer. I was replying instantly to say this when the phone rang and I had to go off doing something. I felt bad leaving her hanging, leaving her thinking that I might be able to help. About an hour later, I got to reply to her – and in the hour I'd thought of something. Completely unintentionally, completely without planning or even conscious thought, something had whirred away in my noggin and popped out when I was ready to reply. It didn't solve her problem, it didn't save the day, but it was useful and I got it because I took time before replying.

That was an hour. The lunch and HIMYM was about 45 minutes.

Jo Warwick writes on the Dumb Little Man website that maybe you should take a break that is proportional to the issue. Have a coffee, take a walk – or even take a holiday. Seriously.

Take some timeout and let the dust settle, before you do something drastic, that you just might regret…
The expense of replacing some things in life and starting again can be too costly, heart-breaking or sometimes impossible and you could end up losing the one thing that it’s totally irreplaceable….
So walk away, take some space and give yourself however long you need to breathe, calm down, relax and gain a little perspective on the situation.

How Not To Make A Drastic Mistake You Will Regret – Dumb Little Man

It's not like you can just take a hike whenever you feel like it, she's not arguing that. But she is arguing persuasively that time out saves lives. Read her whole piece on the Dumb Little Man site that, actually, I'd never heard of before ten minutes ago. I'm off to have a look around it.

Seriously, no deadlines. Unless..

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Yesterday's post on not setting deadlines for your tasks got me a lot of reaction from people saying they have to set deadlines or they don't get things done. And I do agree that even a fake deadline can be a motivator.

What I'm saying, though, is that most tasks do not need this so don't do it. Don't give deadlines unless they are real or you really need it.

So for example, straight from my own To Do list this right now:

Change Evernote and Dropbox passwords

I need to do it, I want to do it. In fact, I want to do it quite regularly. But it doesn't have to be done today, it doesn't have to be done tomorrow. It's in my To Do list and I will see it every time I choose to review my entire list. I'll see it when OmniFocus says it's time for me to review my project called “Mac &c”.

But I won't see it today. I didn't see it today. I just had to go looking for it now, trying to find a good example of all this. (Confession: it was difficult. It seems most everything I'm doing is urgent.)

Or this:

Book Four Oaks train for Wednesday morning

That obviously has a deadline, doesn't it? If I didn't see that task on my list until Thursday, I'd be sunk. So in theory I would have a deadline of Tuesday and maybe a start date of last Friday when I was asked about going to this school.

I say in theory because I don't know. I just found that task in my list now but I've already done it, I've already booked that train seat, so I just ticked the task as completed and it's gone. Vanished before I could remember to check what the dates were for you.

This is how most of my To Do list work goes now: I check the list, see I've done a lot of the things already, I tick them all off. I used to find something on the list, do it, come back to tick it, pick the next thing, go away, and so on. Rinse, repeat. Now I see what I've got to do today and I just go do it. My life runs by this To Do list yet I hardly look at it. That's one thing I adore: I don't have to be a slave to checking this stuff yet it just still gets done.

And one thing that used to make me come back to check the list every few minutes was how often I would set deadlines. Fake deadlines. Really just the same as writing it all out on a piece of paper and pretending you can get the lot done tomorrow.

Here's a third type of task from my list now:

Write 20,000 words of novel MW by end of May

There's a deadline right there. It's fake. Nobody is waiting for it – well, nicely, they are but not specifically at the end of May. But I am doing a writing buddy thing for April and May with someone who's particularly good at fiction so I want to have a substantial chunk to show her by the end. (I'm on about 13,000 words, thanks for asking.)

If I miss that end of May deadline, it doesn't matter. It's more than just letting myself down since I have told this buddy that I'm doing it. She may not be waiting for it, she may be dreading getting it, but I've told her it's happening so I feel held to account.

That's good. That's planting a stick in the ground and working towards it.

I have no problem setting deadline dates for this fakery.

I just want you to stop doing it for “Buy beans at supermarket” too.

Go the fuck home

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No apologies for this: you’re right, it’s a very old productivity video tip. It’s, like, two years old now. And no apologies for the fact that I only know about it because Lifehacker.com just plucked it back up out of their archives. Pam Selle gives a very persuasive argument about not working long hours: I mean persuasive, I’m can feel myself being persuaded. And I love this stuff. I also work from home, so, you know, the detail may not apply to me but I’m suspecting the idea does.

You’ve got the idea now: she is nothing if not clear about this. But read more about it, about that particular event and about her on Pam Selle’s own website.

Force your To Do app to have start dates

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Most To Do apps don’t have this but you need it and there’s a way to fake it on any software:

Screen Shot 2014-04-26 at 16.52.19

This is the ideal: you write one task and you give it both a start date – called “deferred until” in that screenshot – and a date that really have to do it by. All in one. (Actually, no, the ideal is to not use either start or end dates, especially not end dates. But that’s another story.)

There’s a good, solid, practical reason why this is the ideal when you have a deadline and there is a more nebulous yet enormously more important reason too. First, the practical one:

Having one task with start and end means you’ve one place to go change its details if you need

The nebulous one is:

Software that has start dates will keep your task hidden away from you until then.

It’s in your system, you won’t forget it, you just won’t have to consider it at all until the time you’ve said you should start.

Set it, forget it, get on with the stuff you have to do now.

I mean it when I say this is enormous. It’s the difference between a To Do list that you will use and one that just becomes this enormous long stupid hateful damn bloody list of a million things you still haven’t done yet, you total failure.

So it’s a shame that not every To Do app does start dates. My beloved OmniFocus does. (The screenshot above comes from OmniFocus for Mac where start dates are now called Defer Until dates. Apparently people got confused. But start dates are so crucial that the term is now burnt into me.) Other apps have it too: the online one Asana, the iPhone one Appigo To Do. It’s hard to give you a definitive list of what does and doesn’t have it because it changes a lot – and because some software firms look like they’ve only added start dates because customers wouldn’t stop shut up about them. The feature is there but, my lights, it’s hard to find.

You’d think you could just google like “omnifocus start date app review” or somesuch and get the answer for any app, but you simply can’t. Do try it. If you’re considering a particular To Do app, definitely google whether it has start dates. Be prepared to dig through articles. If the app is free, just get the bleedin’ app and try looking in that. But look for it, hope to find it, be prepared that you may not.

And if you don’t, fake it.

Do this:

  1. Give your task a deadline, a due date, that is really the day you should start it
  2. Call that task something like “Do that thing which is due on 1st May”
  3. Create another task called “Do that thing” and give it a due date of 1st May or whatever the the real deadline is

It’s two tasks instead of one. And you may see both on your list every day, but typically your app will at least put them at the bottom of the list until the first deadline appears.

It works. It’s not elegant. There’s a strong chance that it’ll go wrong: if you tick the first one, the starting task, when you begin it but you don’t finish on that day, you have to remember to continue it tomorrow.

Have you noticed that I’ve avoided saying oh, to hell with it, just buy OmniFocus?

Bugger.