Advice

Never mind the quantity – why working smarter is better than harder

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This hits me in the stomach: I am so used to working all the time, constantly working. I cope better with rejection than I do with relaxation. But the more I’ve had to do as my career has grown and as I’ve started thinking about the productivity tools I’ve developed or that I’ve gleefully stolen, I’m changing. I work fewer hours now but I get more done and while I’m still figuring this out, it’s already clear that a lot of is down to how effectively I work.

Whenever I have something on my mind, I seem to find it everywhere in front of me too. So I’m not surprised that I was drawn across the space and time of the internet to the 99U site where they in their turn had found The Creativity Post. That’s a site that offers advice on this very issue. Specifically, it lists 21 tips to ensure you’re working smarter, not harder.

I loathe list journalism and I’ll give you why:

1) It’s easy and empty to just pick a number and write to it

b) It’s a kind of click bait where what they could say in one paragraph is split across pages just to get you to click

iii) I can’t think of a third thing and often enough, neither can any list journalist. But it doesn’t stop them.

In this case, I think we can make a ready exception because that number 21 feels calculated rather than a stab in the dark. And because this is all on one page. And because I think the The Creative Post comments make a lot of sense. Here’s one , for instance:

9. Delineate a time limit in which to complete task.

Instead of just sitting down to work on a project and thinking, “I’m going to be here until this is done,” try thinking, “I’m going to work on this for three hours”. The time constraint will push you to focus and be more efficient, even if you end up having to go back and add a bit more later.

Work Smarter Not Harder – The Creativity Post

Obviously I recommend you read the lot. And I’m also exploring The Creativity Post in general now. But let us also tip a hat to 99U for finding it for me.

 

 

Imaginary commutes

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Is this a thing? I heard of it for the first time today, in fact three hours ago. Actor/writer John Dorney mentioned that he’s learning the clarinet on his imaginary commute to work. Now, he could well have invented the term – the man writes some of the most imaginative Doctor Who dramas for Big Finish – or he could just be borrowing it. But either way, I’m having it.

Currently my commute is across the landing from the bedroom to my office via a bathroom. Sometimes, not always, I’ll throw in a trip downstairs to the kitchen on the way. I’m crazy.

But the idea of an imaginary commute is to set aside a time in which you don’t work and you’re not at home, not really. You probably are. But take a specific set time for it: a time you will go to work, a time it will take to travel there and a time you will arrive and get straight down to it. Fit something you want to do in between, something that’s at least broadly possible within a normal commute. John says he reads too and anyone can do that. Anyone can see the benefit of having a set time put aside for reading too.

The clarinet needs more imagination but I’m fine with that, I’m more a piano man.

On balance

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Here’s a secret. I just checked all my various bank accounts – business, personal, tax, savings, all that stuff – and I needn’t have bothered because it’s Saturday.

My bank’s computer system doesn’t bother to register most changes over the weekend. It does some, but not most. Couldn’t tell you why. Not a clue. I think it’s feeble and I think it’s amateur, most especially when it does register a payment made on Saturday but then afterwards changes its date to the Monday.

But I know it does this and I know it’s pointless checking anything on Saturdays or Sundays and yet I continue to check because that’s what I do. I check all my accounts every day.

You may call this excessive. But it is a direct response to a problem of mine. I write for a living but it is the writing that I want: writing for a living is being able to live while writing. Money isn’t the focus, money isn’t the objective. It’s working out nicely, thank you for asking, but my head is always over here in the writing instead of on the bank accounts and the invoices. And there have been times that has caused me problems.

Now that I talk about writers being productive, I have learnt a recurring truth: all this felgercarb about accounts and pitches and calls and the sheer volume of things writers have to do that is not writing may be a burden but it is also easier than writing. And if you get it done, it is done. Done and gone. It isn’t weighing on your mind and affecting your work.

So I tell people to get this stuff done now and what I’m telling you is how I do that. I check the balances every day. It means I know the moment a client has paid, it means I know the moment I’d paid off my iMac. (When I bought a 27in iMac, Apple was offering interest-free repayments and I knew – I knew – exactly what difference that would make to my balances and my cash flow. It was the right way to buy at that moment and I did it without hesitation, yet I was also glad when the last payment was done.)

All of which means there is a specific and positive reason to stay on top of these things. But because I know it is an issue with me, I also check the balances every day in order to check the balances every day. In order to make sure that I don’t slip back into any problems.

And I’d like to tell you this is a nice round number but actually, today was the 918th day in a row.

Doing anything 918 times is going to take you a while. So over that time, I have learnt various ways of checking extremely quickly and I keep looking for faster ones too. So I can tell you, for instance, that if you’re the UK you shouldn’t with systems that display all your accounts in one dashboard-like screen: every time I’ve tried every one, they’ve proved impossibly slower than doing it all one at a time through my bank’s own website. If you’re the States, it’s completely different: take a long, hard look at Mint.com. I wish that were available here. And I can also tell you that 1Password is a godsend for this: one click on my Mac or one tap on my iOS devices and it has gone to the bank sites, entered a lot of the security details (but not all, I’m not that stupid) and I can be entering those last details, seeing the accounts and getting out again in seconds.

Today was the 918th time in a row that I checked my balances and yesterday was the 211th day working day I’d got up to write at 5am. I am a writer, I do not like constraints and I do not function at my best in 9-5 office hours, yet I apply these daily responsibilities to myself and they work for me.

They work one day at a time. We can all do one day of something. I just advocate doing one day tomorrow too.

Actually, this has just popped into my head. I’m very much a Suzanne Vega fan, I think she is an astonishing writer, but her first album and its first side and its first song begins with a first line that goes: “It’s a one-time thing. It just happens a lot.”

I can’t believe that got into my DNA. But I just check the balances once. I just get up at 5am once. And then it just happens a lot.

How to Get Rejected – I didn’t think of this bit

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The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) and particularly the workshop I do based on it has a particularly popular segment called How to Get Rejected. Without fail, everyone thinks it’s a joke at first – and I’ll do anything for a laugh, it could easily be a gag – but then sees both that I’m serious and that it’s useful.

This is about what to do when you are rejected. It’s how to best deal with rejection and it’s how – sometimes – you can make it a good thing. Let’s not get daft about it. A slammed door is a slammed door. But just often enough, there is something more and the rejection is the first step rather than the last hope. I’ve even pitched things knowing that it will be rejected because it was useful. Also, I’m an idiot.

The one-line summary is that when you’re rejected, let it go. Because it’s already gone. The decision is made and you cannot change it – but you can change the future. Not always, not anywhere near always, but sometimes and it’s better for your anxiety pill intake as well as being good for your career:

Be the one writer who’s nice about all this. Steven Moffat had a particularly good line in Press Gang: ”It’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice”. It’s also just easier. See a rejection as personal and you get tied up in knots; ask them for feedback and you get tied up with the reputation of being a whiner – without getting any advice that was of any use to you. Either way, you get tied up and the whole point of this book is to show you how to be more productive. So be more productive by being nice about the things you can’t control and putting your effort and your time into the things you can. 

But.

I had a rejection yesterday that mattered. I responded the way I say we all should and it was particularly easy to be nice because I knew for a fact that the guy who brought me the news was not the one who’d made the decision. I knew he’d wanted the project to go ahead too, he’d gone to bat for me. So it was extremely easy to reply gratefully to him.

Only, this is the first time I’ve then had to pass the rejection on to other people. I still can’t tell you what the gig was because within an hour I’d thought of something else I could do with it so it’s still live, but it’s one where I’d had to get rights sorted out before I could pitch. Now I had to explain the gig was up to the rights owner.

It was a weird position to be in: I had been rejected and I was now rejecting – not literally but effectively. Just as the fella who told me wasn’t the one who made the decision, I obviously hadn’t made the decision either but he was the one telling me and now I was the one telling the rights owners. This is a project that matters to us all very personally as well as artistically and professionally so I didn’t enjoy dialling those numbers.

But the main rights owner, while as disappointed as I am, was nice about it. She took the rejection in exactly the way I believe we all should. She was nice and she understood that it wasn’t me. (We did then have a little shared grumble, because we could.) She was a pro and it reinforced for me that this works. I left that call feeling better and even energised to find a new route for the project. I’ve seen before that my being relaxed and nice about this has worked for me but now I felt it from the other side and I understand.

Being nice about a rejection doesn’t change the rejection. It may never change anything, ever. But it’s always better for your soul and your stomach. And I now believe that it is always better for the person who is rejecting you. There’s nothing wrong with making things better for them: they’re going to reject you regardless, it’s not like you’ll make them think they’ll reject you because you’ll take it better than other people. And often enough, it leads to other work in the future. That’s obviously great, that’s obviously what you want, but I see it as a bonus.

Leave ’em laughing, it’s the only way.

Very, very snap review: OmniDiskSweeper for Mac

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I tells you, right, I’ve got a 3Tb hard drive in this ‘ere iMac and it got down to just 15Gb free. Without my noticing. How dare it.

If you go below around ten percent free space on your hard drive, you pay for it in a dramatic slowness and that’s what I’ve had lately. This is the fastest machine I’ve ever owned, it is so much faster than my last Mac – a Mac Pro that officially ran for six years but actually I’m still using sometimes – that I could design books using the Adobe CC suite. But suddenly it was a molass at opening a folder.

OmniDiskSweeper saves the day. It’s a tool from the Omni Group and it chunders away across your drive, totting up the figures and tutting a bit, then showing you the lay of the land. You’re spending how much space on movies? Everything’s detailed and shown in such a way that you can quickly zero in on the – in this case – more than a terabyte of files to do with one old job. I am at this very moment copying that lot off to an external drive and intend to luxuriate in an iMac that is restored to life and which has enough room to paddle about in.

OmniDiskSweeper is free. Get it where many fine applications are sold, over at The Omni Group. It interests me, mind, that I would not have heard of or found or considered OmniDiskSweeper if I didn’t happen to be an ardent user of one of the firm’s other products and a pretty ardent user of a second. The Omni Group makes the To Do manager OmniFocus and the outlining software OmniOutliner. I am actually waiting for the chance to give them more money for the next versions of OmniFocus, I like it that much.

Save a whole second when you’re installing software on Macs

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It’s only a second, but it adds up. Next time you download some software to your Mac, don’t wait for the Verifying. Just immediately click Skip.

skip-button

After all, what exactly are you going to do if it fails to be verified? If it’s going to die on you, take that gigantic gamble of waiting until you run this software. It will always be fine. If there were every anything that would’ve stopped the thing being verified, the application won’t run now and you are no further behind than you were.

I’m wondering if this is all a hangover from the days when we would lose disc 6 of 19. Do you even remember the prehistoric days when you used to have to buy software on disc? I know. Crazy.

Minimise support delays

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This is not the way it should be, but it is the way it is. So far this year I have had three issues with companies where things weren't done or went wrong and each time the solution has been the same. Bollocks to their own support systems.

Use them, sure. If you can find a customer support email on the site – and well done if do, they are always hidden – then send them a message and start a clock. Each of the three I had problems with claimed some quick turnaround; I think two of them promised 24-hours and in one case I was specifically paying to get that speed.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't work. If they say 24 hours, leave them for a day and get on with anything else you can do. Then on hour 25, hit social media. Obviously you're always going to be polite but actually, there is such a thing as weaponised politeness. If you're a nutter in twitter, nobody notices and nobody cares. But if you're calm, rational and stating how a firm has failed, that gets you support immediately.

Seriously, immediately.

I was doing this across twitter, Facebook and Google Plus for one recent issue and before I'd finished, I had direct messages from support teams. Two of them.

One of the cases is still ongoing and as much as I understand that problems happen, this one enrages me because it is entirely the firm's mistake and they've accepted that. But I'm still having to pursue it.

Still, I have got human contact there now because I went public. And the other two issues from another two firms are resolved.

So while your instinct and assumption and normal reaction is to contact a firm's support, don't see it as a reasonable thing to do and definitely don't assume it will work. Instead, the email to the firm's support is step one and you are going to be taking step two in public.

It's tedious and it's aggravating and it is a waste of time, but as long as you know it's the way things have to go, you can schedule it and hopefully get on with something else. You've had the support email where they say they're escalating your problem: that's all you're doing to. They get their shot at fixing it privately, then you escalate it through social media.

I don't like this, I loathe complaining about things that I know are just happenstance but since they're happenstancing to me and they have to get sorted, I now have to be the one to get them sorted. And the way to do that is as quickly and thoroughly and widely as possible.

I wanted to say this to you because the third of these businesses is making me eat my desk in madness but I know I'm not alone. Take a look at this blog from writer and artist Gigi Peterkin who looks at it from an American angle.

Brainstorming with a point

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I've been in a fair few brainstorming sessions in my life but, hand on heart, I don't remember any of them being useful. They were sometimes done solely so that someone could say that they'd done them – businesses, eh? – but, seriously, nowt. Nothing. Consequently I don't believe I have ever willing stormed my brain for my own work but maybe, just maybe, I will now. I'll try it, at least. Because:

The ideas generated through this process work because the goal isn’t to simply come up with good ideas, it’s to come up with ideas that can move. Head over to Inc.com to catch all seven steps of the process and then try the process on your own or with your team.

That's 99U recommending that we go to Inc.com. Let's nip over there now.

Elite Death Squirrels

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Sometimes… look, The Blank Screen is about being creative and productive, most especially for writers but also for normal people too. Consequently, you will always find something here that is meant to help you get more things out of the way so you can get on with writing.

But sometimes, you just have to say bollocks to productivity.

I'm having an odd day where I think I've got to go to a meeting later and I know I have to get through a lot of jobs before I can leave. So I sat down at 05:00 and I began doing Serious Jobs.

And at about 05:01 I wrote this: “I was forced to do it by Elite Death Squirrels”.

By 07:00 I had a thousand words of a story that I doubt I'll ever be able to use anywhere. It certainly doesn't fit any of the pitches I'm doing this month. But it's done, I like it, it's here, and if I now have to run out into the snow without everything else done, well, bollocks to productivity.

Sometimes.

A good idea for Evernote users

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I'm going to be doing this from now on. Writer Jamie Rubin takes the idea of reviews from Getting Things Done and applies it to his use of Evernote:

I spend maybe 5 minutes on this a night and it helps ensure that I recall what came into Evernote that day, and gives me an opportunity to review it and process it in some tangible way.

The reason I'll do this now is that my Evernote inbox currently has 240 notes in it and while a lot are still in play, many can be squirrelled away and I want to. I'm not sure why I want to: there is no reason I can't just let the inbox fill up forever yet I am compelled to sort it out a little bit. Last night I had a look, saw this mass of notes, started dragging a few to notebooks, got very bored, gave up.

But just as I know I feel better when my email inbox is empty, I know I'll feel more in control if I do that with Evernote too. Plus, my beloved To Do manager OmniFocus has an inbox and you get into the habit of firstly chucking anything and everything in there, then later parcelling it out to different places. This task is one for the Writers' Guild, that one's for a particular project. This one has to be done on Wednesday but with that one it doesn't matter when I do it, it's just got to be done.

There is definitely a psychological aspect to this in that I feel better when the inbox is empty and all my tasks are off in their corners. But there is also a demonstrable practical effect in that it means on Wednesday I know I will see that task I need to do. I won't have to think about it at all on Monday or Tuesday, not even for the pixel of a second it would take to see it in the list and think no, that's not for today. It's gone until I need it. Equally, I have a project I've got to look at on Monday this week and I can just open up that project in OmniFocus and know that I'm seeing everything to do with it.

So keeping on top of stuff like this is demonstrably useful in OmniFocus, it feels psychologically useful in my Mail, I'm confident it'll work for me in Evernote too.

Read the whole of Jamie Rubin's piece here.