Productivity
Perhaps within our lifetime we will even see to-do lists whittled down or even eradicated by Sunday nights, reversing the current trend of growth over the 48-hour weekend period. It’s truly a transformative prospect.
Scientists Posit Theoretical ‘Productive Weekend’ – no author listed, The Onion (18 August 2014)
Read the full piece.
Find a few things on your To Do list that won’t take a lot of time and do them. They’re quick wins because without much time and probably without much effort, you’ve knocked some stuff off your list.
It’s like taking baby steps or building up to doing something big except these things were real and they needed to be done so you’ve built up usefully. The sense you have that you’re on your way, you’re getting things sorted out, is real because it is real.
You can’t just do the quick stuff, you have to buckle down to the difficult and the long, but knocking off a few fast tasks is a good way to get yourself started on those.
Some To Do software including OmniFocus lets you say how long you think a task will take. I have never used this. I never will. I just think the time I spend working out time I’ll spend on a task is time I could be spending doing the task. Nonetheless, if you like doing this or it feels more natural to you than it does to me, you can assign approximate times to any or all of your tasks – and then choose to see a list of all those taking 10 minutes or less.
There are also To Do apps that let you assign an energy level to a task. I don’t even know if my OmniFocus does this because I’m not sure where to look. But if your To Do app does this, you could get it show you all the tasks that don’t need much oomph from you. All the ten minute tasks that you can do in your sleep: that’s a To Do list you can knock through quickly.
One thing I do often do is a Quick Win Hour. Take a moment to find ten things on your list or make up ten new things. Whichever it is, you do ten and you do that very, very quickly. Then you set a timer on your phone for one hour and you do all ten.
I’ve done this perhaps half a dozen times over the last two years and only once did I ever complete all ten within the time but, grief, it was close every other time. And despite or maybe because of my being so focused on the ten and the hour, I didn’t really register that each time I was getting up to ten things done off my list.
He’s from New York City and he talks really fast so this must be true. Plus, it’s convincing. Going outside, getting exercise, smelling grass – no, really, grassy grass, not druggy grass – and just doing something different helps you.
I’d like to think that this hasn’t happened to me, that I haven’t done it, but I’m not sure I can. Certainly, this Lifehacker article rang a bell or two with me because I’ve seen it happen to other people:
There’s a jerk inside all of us: we roll our eyes when someone in line has a complicated order, curse at little old ladies who don’t drive fast enough, and sneer at people who are just too happy. Over time, that snark kills our productivity and poisons our relationships.
There’s a difference between being occasionally sarcastic and a little derisive in your head, but when negativity becomes your default reaction, you have a problem.
The idea is that if you default to witty comments, you only do witty comments and you’re missing action.
Read the full piece for how it claims to show “how to keep your inner asshole in check”.
I’m not certain I agree with this because I do agree with the Aaron Sorkin line from Sports Night:
If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.
But, still, it’d be nice to be one of the smart ones and reportedly there are ways to pull that off which don’t involve hiring a bunch of clowns. According to Gwen Moran in Fast Company:
READ . . . A LOT
It stands to reason that actively seeking out challenging, thought-provoking information will make you smarter. A widely reported 2012 study done by researchers at the University of California, published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, found that students who spent 100 hours or more studying for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually had changes in their brains. The findings indicated that such intensive study showed changes in the parts of the brain associated with reasoning and thinking.
I like that one. I like that a lot. I’m less keen on the very next piece of advice which is some junk about regular exercise. Sheesh.
Read the full piece.
There is an idea that we have to keep at things, that if we give up now then we’ve wasted all this time and we were so close to doing whatever it was. That’s true often enough to be a problem, but sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, it’s bollocks.
When it’s bollocks, end it.
The end of something, when unrushed and deliberate, is a time for celebration as well as closure. It’s an opportunity to reflect back on everything that’s happened, good and bad, and how it’s affected you. The end is a chance to tell the project’s whole story, a chance for the community you built to celebrate how they came together in the first place, and for everyone to exchange contact information and pack up their things. It’s a time to say goodbye and thank you, and then look ahead.
Your Project Deserves a Good Death – Christina Xu, Medium (19 May 2015)
Xu defines several ways that projects come to an end, from kind of withering away out of your mind to crashing and burning, and gives most of them film-related names. That could be cute but it works: you remember what the Titanic version is and you’re intrigued by the Evil Stepmother one.
Do have a read of her full piece on Medium.
Via 99U.
I’ve been saying that this isn’t a universal truth: I get up to write at 5am because it unfortunately happens to be when I write the best. Cannot tell you how much I loathe and resent that fact but I also can’t deny it.
Except I often try and most especially I try to tell you that you need to find your best time, whenever it is.
But now I’m going to say no, it’s 5am. Universally. Or near enough.
I am still, unbelievably, struggling because of a virus I had months ago: the actual virus is long gone but the knock-on effect of its seven weeks is very definitely not. There are things still not done because of it and, I think even worse, the weight of those things is crippling. I never fail to get up at 5am weekdays if I’ve told myself I will, but I have very often decided the night before that I won’t. Maybe the reason I’m feeling so weighed down is a lack of sleep: you have to reckon that early morning starts and reasonably late night finishes are bad for you, are cumulatively bad.
But.
I’ve found that if I lie in to 7am then it is at least 8am, very often 9am, before I start working.
That’s four hours behind before I’ve even started. There was one day recently that this feeling made me somewhat mad with myself and I roared through the rest of the day working very well, very quickly, very effectively. But otherwise, no. It’s a slog and I get done far less than I need. That just adds to the weight.
Plus, there is something weirdly cosmic about this 5am thing. A version of that headline up there has become a litany, it is something I have said aloud to myself and others: “If I get up at 5am, good things happen”. They really do. I’ve had unexpected work offers that were terribly interesting, I’ve had pitches go unexpectedly well. The offers didn’t come at 5am, the pitches didn’t go well at 5am, but on days when that’s when I got up, that’s when those things happen.
I can’t accept anything cosmic – not in that sense – so I can easily and will readily rationalise that I dealt with people better when the weight was off my back a bit. I’d be receptive and listening when something came up and that quickly nurtured it into something big and real.
All of this is nuts and bananas if you’re working 9-5 somewhere, if you’re working a night shift somewhere else or if you’re a parent who is therefore working 24 hours a day. It isn’t anything but sensible if you’re full-time self-employed freelance and I am: I hope that you can do this silly thing with me, I know that there is no excuse for me not to.
So while this will be posted around 11am today, I’m writing it now at 05:25. Had a very bad night, totally crap night and when the alarm went off I was having a dream where someone said: “It’s so sad, she’s just phoned to say -“. I long to know where that line was going, I don’t even know who ‘she’ was in the dream, but it’s gone forever.
Okay, if you get up at 5:01 then good things happen and your dream can finish its thought.
In a study of 1,000 U.S. professionals, 94% said they work 50 or more hours a week, with nearly half that group putting in more than 65 hours a week. And that doesn’t include the 20-25 hours/week most of them spend monitoring their phones while outside the office. If aren’t auditing how we spend our most valuable resource, our time, who else will? Nobody ever dies saying “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”
Where Is All of Your Time Going? – Hamza Khan, 99U (11 May 2015)
Well, true, but a lot of us have wished we’d spent more time at our keyboards writing. This article is about understanding what you spend your hours on so that you can be more in control of your time. There’s that great Douglas Adams line he gives to a security guard on low pay: “The hours are good. The actual minutes are pretty lousy”. I’m paraphrasing because I’ve decided to spend this time talking to you instead of looking up the accurate quote.
I think the 99U piece is a bit academic at times and it really is canted toward getting you out of the office – so it even recommends exercise, shudder – but there’s a lot of good advice in it. Do read the full piece.
I just liked this: it’s a pragmatic approach to steadily improving the quality and the quantity of work you get as a freelancer. I’ve been lurching about a lot lately, taking on fun things because they were fun and ignoring that they wouldn’t pay off until next year, so I need to balance that out with shorter term things. This article won’t solve the world, but it’s a good start.
Here’s a simple example from it about the scary part of asking for more money:
Approach your renegotiation one of two ways: either quantify how your workload has increased or how you’ve become more valuable to the client (if you’ve transitioned from an occasional writer to a regular contributor, for example), or simply say, “As we approach the next calendar year, I’m having conversations with all of my clients about my rates.”
Read Dieker’s full piece.
There’s little getting away from the fact that a To Do list is a list. It’s a lot of words, ranged in a column, and if there is anything visual about it, it’s that together they look daunting. But there are things you can do and Trello is a free service that has a good stab at one of them.
Specifically this. You do end up with lists in Trello but each list is like a stack of little cards and you can drag them around. In an ideal, recommended, go-on-try-it Trello way, you might have one stack for all your tasks, then one very short stack for the thing you are doing now. You might also have a stack for the one thing you will do next. Also a stack for everything you’ve done.
When the time comes to railroad, you can look at your Next Thing To Do stack and slide the card over to the Look I’m Doing It Now stack. And then have a quick look through Everything On My Plate and drag out one card to be the Next Thing To Do.
The visual part is the dragging. It looks and feels like you’re doing this on paper on your desk and that may suit you amazingly well. I learnt of Trello from a friend for whom it works amazingly well: she can see what she’s got to do at all times.
Plus she works in a team and while they haven’t all adopted it yet – she’s the first one to try it out – they now have the option for the entire team to use the same free system and work together.
It sounds ideal and it could be for them, it might be for you, right now it seems it definitely is for the friend who told me about it.
It isn’t for me, though.
That’s for a lot of reasons and I think the first is down to how you spend that time picking the next thing to do. Time spent working on your list is time you could be spending on doing the tasks.
Next, the space you put these stacks of cards is called a board and not only can you have many boards, you are encouraged and expected to. Have one board for all the things that your colleagues are working on together but keep a separate, private board for all the secret trysts you get up. (I’m not judging.)
That’s fine and my friend has many boards already, but for me it’s back down to the business of having one system for everything: how do you know you’re done when there are always other boards to check?
There is also the fact that Trello doesn’t have the oomph of something like OmniFocus. Plus it’s an online service. You use it via iOS apps on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s really an online service and you can’t use the apps when you don’t have an internet connection.
That’s bad. That’s the only thing I’d say is definitely bad: everything else I don’t like is personal preference, but the inability to use this when you’re away from a wifi hotspot is bad.
My friend tethers her wifi-only iPad to her iPhone to get it to work or sometimes she just uses it on her iPhone. So it’s not a dealbreaker for everyone and it does have this unusual visual aspect that is going to be worth a lot to many people.
So especially as it’s free, do go give Trello a spin, would you?