Advice

Your career today. Start here

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Good advice that you'll use, good advice you'll wish you had used: this piece about careers has everything – and a lot of everything. It's definitely a Pocket or Instapaper read-later kinda gig but whether you skim it now or read it properly over the weekend, do take a look:

Having spent over 35 years in business in global firms, I have seen tens of thousands of career trajectories–from the first steps of entry-level millennials to the long journeys of Fortune 500 CEOs.

What I see: Most people have the wrong approach to careers. They think about the immediate next step, not the pathway. They treat a career like a sprint, when in fact it is a 40-plus-year marathon. They are more focused on getting promoted on Tuesday than about having great choices when it really matters–in their 40s and 50s.

I have been thinking about careers for decades and lecturing on the topic for the last dozen years at places like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, McGill and NYU. Here are some of the things that you might not be thinking about your career, but should be.

Career Rocket Fuel by Brian Fetherstonhaugh

Pattern Weeks part 7 – yes, well, maybe it was a good idea

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Previously on previouslys…

Previously… in an attempt to get more done in huge week, I’ve scheduled some important slots. I’ll do certain things for certain projects at certain times so that they are done and I know they are done and they are always progressing instead of ever coming to a pause. I call this schedule the pattern for the week and it’s named after the term ‘pattern budget’. That’s the money you’ve got to spend on each one of many things, like episodes in a TV series. In practice, you shovel that cash around so your first episode can be really big. You just save the money later and it works out. Similarly, my pattern weeks get disrupted by other events: if I’m booked somewhere for a day, the people who booked me get me for the day. I don’t go off taking meetings or phoning other people.

Pattern Weeks part 6 – Not So Much – The Blank Screen, 16 February 2014

Week 7 has been a long time in the making, hasn’t it? The six-week week has gone sporadically dreadfully and occasionally okay. I find I have rarely looked at my plan wallpaper yet just seeing the edges of it peek out have meant that I’ve stuck to certain parts of it.

Specifically the part where I told myself to make phone calls during these times. Oddly, that’s the one part that I found most hard before and it’s the one part I really created all this to make sure I did. So, er, success, I suppose. Bizarrely, I’ve found I’ve still fallen behind on my OmniFocus reviews, though, and that’s something I actually enjoy doing.

Especially today when I did it and found I only had seven projects to review. (Because all the rest were reviewed recently enough that I didn’t have to check them again.) That mean the review took 15 minutes instead of an hour so I went off to make some more tea.

I definitely like pattern weeks when they involve tea.

 

Pattern weeks part 6 – not so much

It’s all down to you. Good.

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I spent today chairing sessions at the Royal Television Society's Birmingham Film and TV Summit and had one big belief of mine reinforced over and over.

It often seems in careers such as media that you have to do everything yourself. You have to put the show on right here. And it's true. If you don't push, nobody else will push you.

I know this to be true but what I believe is that it is good.

For this reason. If something needs to be done and it's down to you, you can and you will do it. If you're waiting for someone else to do it, they may not.

That's it. Not groundbreaking. But take on as much of the job as you can and you will do it.

I sound like a Hallmark Card so I'll shut up now.

Gaming productivity

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I’ve written before about using a mad-dash hour to get over problems. If you’re feeling low – like I have a cold coming on at the moment – or you’re just overwhelmed, agree with yourself that you’re going to spend an hour working. Just an hour.

And then list ten things that you want to get done in that time.  That’s what I wrote about in New Hour’s Resolutions – Not Year’s, Hour’s (2 January 2014) and that’s what I did:

Consider this a live post: as I write to you now it is coming up to the top of the hour and from that hour I am going to do ten things. I can’t tell you what they are because they’re specific and they involve other people who don’t know you and I are talking like this. But I took a shower, decided on this overall idea of ten things in the next hour and realised that if I do it, I’ll feel I’ve got somewhere today. And usually that’s all I need to keep getting somewhere each day.

I wrote down a list of eight things immediately. Had to check my OmniFocus To Do list for the other two and got a bit bogged down because there was so much to choose from. But the point of ten is that it’s not easy but it is achievable. Whatever you’re working on, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that there are ten really fast things you could do right now if you put your mind to it.

And I bet at least one of those is something you don’t want to do.

It’s getting on for three months later and I haven’t had need to do that hour again – until today. Today my head is just tilting into a cold and, moreover, for some reason I have things on my list that I kept putting off. I truly don’t know why: it was just an email I had to send someone. I think maybe part of it was that I couldn’t remember why I and to email them. I’d written the task in OmniFocus as “Email XXX about the YYY event” but honestly went blank on what that YYY event was. At least, blank on enough detail that I could coherently tell the fella about it.

Thirty-one minutes ago, I started a mad-dash hour with ten new things including that email. I made that email the third thing on the list after two other items I wasn’t especially looking forward to but would at least be quick. And when you start quickly, I’ve learnt that writing down the time you did it next to the item really motivates you to bound on to the next. Where I am guilty of thinking I’ll just make a mug of tea now, for this hour with that list and those times, I don’t.

I’m writing to you because even as I drew up the list, I knew this felt different to last time. I was seeding the list with things I didn’t want to do and – this is the killer difference: I am hiding the list from myself.

I wrote it in Evernote and hit return a few times so that the list vanished off the top of my screen. So now the sequence is: 1) Race to the top of the document, see the next thing, 2) race to the bottom, make a note of it or anything I need to write to get it done, 3) get it done, 4) note down the time next to it. Rinse, repeat.

I put writing to you as the fifth of the ten things so that I could know how it was going this hour, so that I also had something to look forward to if I’m honest with you, and also because it’s not a quick and easy thing, writing to you. I have to think about: I don’t want to take your time up with rubbish. (Usually.) So this was fun but substantive.

And because it’s taking more than the average 7.5 minutes that the preceding four tasks took me, I find that my list was written long enough ago and referred to long enough ago that I truly can’t remember what item six is.

But I’m about to find out.

Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

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I’m a very visual kind of man but, awkwardly, what I visualise is text. I can see words. If you and I are talking, I can choose to see your words as text. Squint a bit and there it is, word by word, white text on a black background, right in front of my eyes. It’s great for transcriptions. But text is so much a par of me and I am so much a writer through and through that I have ignored other visual ways of looking at detail. Okay, maybe I can see scenes visually when I’m reading or writing a script, but when faced with a problem, I used to always just think it through. More recently, I’ve written it down and thought it through.

But then last week, I had a meeting that was intentionally nebulous. It was clearly a chance to pitch something, but I didn’t know what and I was fairly sure that there were no specifics behind the invitation either. It would be up to me and what I could bring to the meeting.

And I mind-mapped it.

Slapped down everything I could think of that even considered crossing my mind in the week before the meeting. I used MindNode for iPad (£6.99 UK, $9.99 US) so it was with me wherever I went and by the morning of the meeting, I had a completely useless mess. But it was a big mess. Lots of things on it. And I started dragging bits around. This stuff sorta, kinda belonged with those bits over there. This one was daft. That one was actually part of my shopping list and I’d just put it in the wrong app.

And then I’d find one that ignited another small idea so I’d add that.

After a bit of adding and subtracting and moving around, I had three or four solid blocks of ideas that were related. I exported the lot from MindNode to OmniOutliner for iPad (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US) which picked it all up and showed it to me as a hierarchy of text lines instead of a visual bubble of blogs. I work better with text, I may have mentioned this, so that was perfect for me.

Nearly perfect. I really wanted to then hand the lot on from OmniOutliner to OmniFocus, my To Do manager, (iPad £27.99 UK, $39.99 US). I wanted to be able to tick off the ideas as I got through them in the meeting. I wasn’t able to do that on the iPad; I suspect that it’s something that needs me to use OmniOutliner on my Mac (from £34.99 UK, from $49.99 US). I’ve got that and I use it ever increasingly more, but I wasn’t at my office.

So instead I stayed with the text in OmniOutliner. Made some more changes and additions, moved some more things around. And then I worked from that list in the meeting and it went really, really well.

The whole process went well: the mind mapping on to the meeting itself. Enough so that afterwards I tried mind mapping again, this time to figure out what I’m doing with everything, not just this one meeting. I’m still working on it. But it’s proving useful. And while I can’t show you the meeting mind map as it’s naturally confidential, and I obviously can’t show you this new mind map of everything because it’s in progress, I can show you a blurry version. This is what I’m doing now:

 

map

Beat the afternoon slump

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This is a big thing with me: I write from 5am weekdays and come 3pm or so I am starting to feel a bit tired. Feeble, really, but there you go. I’m being honest. And now I’m being hopeful too, because:

There are many reasons for feeling the mid-afternoon dip. According to a study by Gallup, 40% of Americans don’t get enough sleep. Getting enough sleep is a cornerstone habit that has many positive effects, mental and physical performance improvements among them. If you’re notgetting enough sleep, your brain is not functioning optimally.

Research also points to our circadian rhythms as a cause of mid-afternoon tiredness. Ourmental performance ebbs and flows throughout the day:

What you ate at lunch also has an effect. Food coma is a real phenomenon, and when you eat crap, you’ll probably feel like crap. You could also just be drained after a full morning of tough meetings and debates with your team. Willpower is a finite resource; we all start with a certain amount every day, and it diminishes with every decision or choice we make.

Whatever the reason for your lack of afternoon focus, let’s look at some research-backed lifehacks to help break out of the daily slump and finish your day strong.

Why We Procrastinate the Afternoon (and How to Stop) – Lifehacker

So there’s some research about it, which means we’re not alone. And then there are some solutions, which mean you’ve stopped reading and are already gone to Lifehacker. See you there.

My perfect holiday: working away

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Now this is what we want. Stuff working smarter – Never Mind the Quantity (27 February, 2014) – just take holidays where you bring your work with you. Bliss.

Everybody is used to taking a vacation from work, but what about taking a vacation to work? That’s exactly what one company is offering their employees: They’ll give you $2,000 to go anywhere you want, and work like you’re in the office…

Citing the “dreary” winter conditions across most of the country, the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has come up with a new program for its hard-working attorneys. It will give attorneys $2,000 to go “anywhere in the world” with a group of their colleagues for a week. During that week, they’re expected to work just as hard as they would be if they were at the office. But they can be working from a swim-up bar in Grand Cayman, or a beach in Phuket if they like.

Sure You Can Take A Vacation — As Long As You Continue To Work – ATLredline

Hat tip to Lifehacker for finding this.

It’s the journey, not the finishing line

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I think I’ll probably always listen to what an astronaut says but this comment is particularly good. Chris Hadfield:

If you view crossing the finish line as the measure of your life, you’re setting yourself up for a personal disaster. There are very very very few people who win gold at the Olympics. And if you say, ‘if I don’t win gold then I’m a failure or I’ve let somebody down or something,’ .. What if you win a silver? What if you win a bronze? What if you come fourth? What if your binding comes apart? … What if all of those millions of things that happen in life happen. … Only a few people that go there are going to win gold. And it’s the same in some degree I think in commanding a spaceship or doing a spacewalk it is a very rare, singular moment-in-time event in the continuum of life. And you need to honour the highs and the peaks in the moments — you need to prepare your life for them — but recognize the fact that the preparation for those moments is your life and, in fact, that’s the richness of your life. … The challenge that we set for each other, and the way that we shape ourselves to rise to that challenge, is life.

Don’t Aim for the Finishing Line – Farnam Street

Read the whole piece to also see a video of Hadfield saying it.

This rather fits in with both the idea that it takes time to grow a business – The 1,000 Day Rule (28 February, 2014) – and that maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on goals – Don’t Plan So Much (27 February). It’s also true of drama: if the only interesting thing about a story is the ending, like discovering whodunnit at the end of a thriller, then it’s not drama. It’s more a puzzle.

And if I were to go all Hallmark-Card-like about it, I’d say that the ending is one day and the journey is a lifetime, we should enjoy the lifetime. I can’t believe I just said that.

Love Tuesdays, they’re your best day

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Seriously. Apparently seriously. If you work a typical Monday-Friday week then you can guess that Monday is a day for recovering from the weekend, if you don’t love your job, or catching up on everything you’ve missed since Friday, if you do. It’s also a documented fact that website traffic goes up on Friday afternoons as office workers plan what they’re going to do next weekend.

So we’re already two days down in the hunt for the most productive time of the week. The Toronto Star reports that a survey by Accountemps says Wednesdays and Thursdays are okay, but Tuesday wins. Easy:

In the survey of more than 300 Canadian human resources managers, 33 per cent said productivity accelerated on Tuesdays versus the least productive Thursdays and Fridays, which polled in at 5 and 6 per cent, respectively.

Wednesdays were the next most productive according to 23 per cent, while Mondays rated a 14 per cent response and no particular day drew 18 per cent.

“There’s limiting distractions,” said Accountemps senior staffing manager Vitaly Melnik of the midweek peak.

“You’ve got your head focused after the weekend is over; you’ve caught up on everything; and you can do your regular work schedule most effectively. Then, after the hump of the Wednesday, come Thursday, Friday, you’re already thinking about the weekend. ”

The Toronto Star

Hat tip to Lifehacker for the link.

 

Location, Location, Location

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Last May I was writing a huge book about Blake’s 7 plus a two-hour Doctor Who radio drama and a short one-act stage play for the Birmingham Rep. As you do. That’s actually the little cauldron I was in when I thought of The Blank Screen and so started writing that book at the same time. You can of course argue about the quality of my work – Doctor Who: Scavenger comes out next month so you can even hear it for yourself – and I did use half a dozen productivity tools to handle it all. But one that really helped was that I moved around.

I wrote Blake’s 7 in my office on a 27in iMac. I wrote the Doctor Who on my MacBook Pro, mostly in my living room. And then while this wasn’t as hard-and-fast, I did write at least some of the play on my iPad in the kitchen.

It got so I associated certain rooms and machines with certain projects. The Blank Screen is definitely an iPad book: I wrote that going everywhere, starting with the first thousand words on a bus ride to go see my mother. But Blake’s 7 is definitely an iMac: I say this to you and I can see it. My Word document open here, an episode of the show there or audio from an interview or a scanned document from the BBC Written Archives there.

I don’t think I ever told any of my editors or producers this, but in my head if I had to call them about something, I would first go to the room and the machine that I associated with that.

This was entirely a contrivance. The complete text and all notes for all of these projects were always on all of these machines at the same time. I could and when necessary did start a sentence of one book on one machine and finish it on another.

And at every place I also read RSS news. So I don’t know why it’s taken me ten months to find out that other people benefit from this madness too. ImpossibleHQ calls it Workstation Popcorn. Meh. But the ideas in their article about it fit what worked for me and they go further. Literally. This bunch recommends dividing your day’s tasks into groups and then physically moving to different locations between each set:

Once you finish all the tasks in group #1, get up and move. Close your tabs, pack your bags, and physically move your butt to your next spot. If you can, walk or bike to your next stop. Avoid driving if you can. The physical activity is important.

Workstation Popcorn – ImpossibleHQ

Hmm. I’m a writer, we’re supposed to be sedentary. But biking advice aside, there’s a lot to like in this piece and quite a bit to think about. Also a lot to wade through, but have a good go.