Better networking for beginners

Posted by William Gallagher

From Harvard Business Review where they’re probably more into setting up contracts and contacts in hard business than writing, but still:

Meet in person if possible. In a globalized world, geography often intervenes. Last week, I had an initial call with a friend-of-a-friend in Singapore, and we’re not likely to connect in person anytime soon. A phone call is a good start (they’ll at least remember your name and know something about you), but it’s a much weaker form of connection than the alternatives. Video conferences are slightly better; as I describe in my forthcoming book Stand Out, my friend John Corcoran, a Bay Area podcaster, makes sure to conduct his interviews with Skype’s video feature, even though he only uses the audio tracks, because he wants to establish a face-to-face connection. But wherever possible, find out when the person will next be in your city (or vice versa) and make a plan to connect then to cement your new tie.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Network – Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review (10 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Just a quarter of an hour

Posted by William Gallagher

Writer Sallie Tams has a blog post with a huge amount of solid, good, even great advice about getting on with things. Do read the whole piece but this is one section I especially liked:

YOUR STARTER FOR 15 – what can you do in the next 15 minutes that advances you towards the goal? There are 96 opportunities to do this every day – take just one of them and use it to get one step closer to where you want to be. You will be astonished what you can achieve in 15 minutes. I did this with my extremely derelict and over-grown garden when I moved into this house. Initially I was completely overwhelmed and had no idea where to start but by giving myself 15 minutes every night and a little longer at weekends, got the task done and the results were edible (as you can see above) – how great is that?

Done Really Is Better Than Perfect – Sallie Tams, One Word After Another (15 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Unconvinced: To Do Lists are Evil, Schedule Things Instead

Posted by William Gallagher

Prolific productivity writer Eric Barker – hang on, you can’t have lazy productivity writers, can you? – argues that whatever doesn’t get scheduled doesn’t get done. He has a point. I disagree with the logical extension of this that To Do lists are therefore worthless and the calendar is king. Here’s the core of is argument:

To-do lists are evil. Schedule everything.

To-do lists by themselves are useless. They’re just the first step. You have to assign them time on your schedule. Why?

It makes you be realistic about what you can get done. It allows you to do tasks when it’s efficient, not just because it’s #4.

Until it’s on your calendar and assigned an hour, it’s just a list of wishful thinking.

How to be the most productive person in your office — and still get home by 5:30 p.m. – Eric Barker, The Week (18 September 2014)

Read the full piece for more but I’m unconvinced. I seethe logic and I am actually scheduling times for certain things every week yet, I don’t know. I have a recurring task to check the Writers’ Guild email inbox that I’m responsible for. It takes about two minutes if there is email in it, less if there isn’t. I could schedule an hour for that and relax for 58 minutes.

But I think you’d argue that it would be sensible to schedule an hour for doing, say, all Writers’ Guild stuff. That’s certainly less time-consuming than taking each Guild task and assigning a time to it.

So let’s say Tuesdays at 9am, I do Guild work. That’s what I need to schedule, not every single damn task in it. And come Tuesday at 9am, what will I open to start work? My To Do list.

I nearly skipped pointing you at this piece because I think it’s one good point puffed up to be a whole article. But there is an interview within it with a professor who sounds remarkable at getting a lot done. So do have a look, if only for that.

What your boss thinks when you quit

Posted by William Gallagher

I see you as a writer and in my mind that means you’re self-employed: you may have one day job, you have a dozen clients, but you’re a writer which means you’re creating your own work and then doing it. But we do constantly deal with other people and it’s interesting to see things from their perspective as well as ours.

I think it’s interesting from a writers’ point, the writer’s way of understanding characters. But it’s also practical and pragmatic when it comes to, say, quitting your job. This is a weekend read kind of piece about what it’s like to be a boss losing staff and how they should best cope with this – which means it’s also about what we can expect and what we should hope for whenever we resign from a job or a contract.

Unexpected resignations present big challenges for leaders, especially those unaccustomed to dealing with them. “It’s probably a frustration you haven’t had for a while — and if you’re a relatively new manager, you might not have ever experienced this before,” says Priscilla Claman, the president of Career Strategies, a Boston-based consulting firm and a contributor to the HBR Guide to Getting the Right Job. Abrupt employee departures are especially hard on the psyche. If you’ve grown to really rely on that person, “you may feel deserted and alone,” says Anat Lechner, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations at NYU Stern. “You’re left psychologically and practically without a point person.” Here are some tips to help you manage the separation and make the transition as smooth as possible.

Once the news is delivered, Claman advises “muting your inner response of: What? Why? You didn’t tell me!” Instead, she says, “breathe” and “even if you’re upset” do your best to engage in a “warm and friendly conversation about [the person’s] future plans.” In the modern workplace, “people come and go over and over again so it’s important to maintain relationships,” she explains. If your interactions with the employee have been difficult and you sense hostility in the departure — in other words, he can’t wait to leave — you need to “figure out what can be salvaged,” says Lechner. She recommends saying something like, “I appreciate the contributions you’ve made and I understand that you’ve had a tough time here. For the sake of your reputation and mine, let’s take the high road.” She adds, “Do things right so there’s no bad blood.”

When an Employee Quits and You Didn’t See It Coming – Rebecca Knight, Harvard Business Review (12 March 2015)

Read the full piece. The details of corporate practice are American but the principles are the same everywhere.

Write like you’re doing a meal plan

Posted by William Gallagher

This doesn’t help if your main writing work today is a novel. But if you’re writing lots of smaller pieces, if you’re blogging, if you’re pitching stories out to people, if you are doing anything that is bitty, take a minute to do a meal plan.

For instance, this news site The Blank Screen will almost invariably have five new articles per day. If a lot happens, if something very big and relevant to you and I goes on, then it’s more. It’s rarely less because there is always enough going on and enough to read that I can help you postpone actually doing any work.

I don’t try to write five articles per day, though, I try to write six. It’s not always possible of course but when it is, when I can do it and when there is material to write about, then a sixth piece is a real help.

It can’t be something time-sensitive, it can’t be breaking news, but it can still be something useful and interesting – just something useful and interesting that I can hold to the next day. That means the next day begins with me already having one of the five started. If I then manage to write six new ones, I can hold two over for another day.

You could argue that this is like preparing today’s meal and then using leftovers tomorrow. I like that except it feels mildly insulting to whatever tomorrow’s articles are. Still, it’s true.

But there’s something else. It’s easier to write that sixth article than it is to write the first. It’s like you’re in the zone by then, you’ve got five pieces behind you, a sixth is not a massive stretch.

On Fridays, I also write The Blank Screen email newsletter (do sign up for your copy). Also on Fridays I write an entirely personal blog called Self Distract. Then on the first Monday of every month I write an email newsletter for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s West Midlands branch. Now, that Guild newsletter goes out on that first Monday in the month but I’ll write as much of it as I can the previous Friday. So that means on one Friday in a month I am writing two email newsletters, one personal blog and five or six news articles. Doing them all in one go, piece after piece in a row, is much easier and faster than picking up one piece a day and working on those.

As well as being in the zone both of writing and of researching new material for the newsletters, there is the practical element that they get written in the same places. I’ll compile the ideas in Evernote but both newsletters are sent using a service called Mailchimp and there are certain steps you go through. Go through those steps for The Blank Screen newsletter first means you whack through them all a second time for the Writers’ Guild much faster.

Everything you write – I mean you, specifically you – has three parts to it. There’s the getting ready to write, there’s the writing, there’s the finishing up. If you can do more writing in the middle then you save the time getting ready and you save the time wrapping up the details.

I see that very much like planning out the meals for the week and knowing that if I do a slow cooker thing on Tuesday that it will last me Wednesday and Thursday too.

One thing. The Blank Screen newsletter always includes a section called What I’m Writing. Ostensibly this is to show you that I am doing some bleedin’ work, I’m not just after telling you to do some. It does also definitely mean I will write something in the week so that I don’t have to confess laziness to you.

But.

It also very specifically means I will always include a reference and a live link to the new personal Self Distract blog.

Which means I have to write and publish Self Distract first.

By making this choice, I set a sequence for myself and that means I never have to think about it. I’m sitting down now to write Self Distract and that is the only thing I can do, it is the right thing to do, I can concentrate on it fully.

Maybe I just need tricks like this to get me through the week but I bet you do too.

Seriously? Productivity poetry?

Posted by William Gallagher

Look, it’s been a long week. I have no clue why I just typed “productivity poetry” into Google but the apparent insanity of that is dwarfed by the fact that I got a result.

HelloPoetry.com, which I confess I hadn’t heard of before, has a whole slew of poems on the subject of productivity. I would say without the aid of any expertise that most I saw are rubbish. But there are smart ideas and wry ones too, including this which I rather like:

Circular Defeat

I stay up through the night
for the
quiet
to make plans
for the
productivity
that I sabotage by staying up through the night

Circular Defeat – Noax Identz, Hello Poetry (16 August 2014)

That is the complete poem but try some of the others too on the full site.

I wonder if there are poems about OmniFocus.

OmniFocus videos by the tonne

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m still poking around these seeing what I don’t know and seeing what I think of the whole thing but there is now a series of 20 or more video tutorials about OmniFocus.

They’re fairly short and to the point, which I like. If you’re on the fence about OmniFocus then get off the fence and buy it. Or try this YouTube playlist for a visual flavour of the software.

Make time for reading

Posted by William Gallagher

I found this on 99U in a piece called How to Make Time for New Hobbies but it boils down to reading and it boils down to that advice coming from a book. There is something meta about a book telling you to read, but I like it. The book is called The Obstacle Is the Way and the author is Ryan Holiday.

Said author says:

Where do you get the time to eat three meals a day? How do you have time to do all that sleeping? How do you manage to spend all those hours with your kids or wife or a girlfriend or boyfriend? You don’t get that time anywhere, do you? You just make it because it’s really important. It’s a non-negotiable part of your life.

…Perhaps the reason you having trouble is you forgot the purpose of reading. It’s not just for fun. Human beings have been recording their knowledge in book form for more than 5,000 years. That means that whatever you’re working on right now, whatever problem you’re struggling with, is probably addressed in some book somewhere by someone a lot smarter than you.

How to Make More Time for New Hobbies – 99U

That is a direct quote from the book except that I got it indirectly: this is the same passage that 99U cites. Go read what they say about it in the full piece, would you?

Nuts to self doubt

Posted by William Gallagher

This is becoming a thing on The Blank Screen: articles about doubt, self-worth, worry, all that kind of thing. Anyone would think we are writers. Here’s a 9-part guide to why self-doubt is useless bollocks. I think there’s really only a couple of parts in it that are good and like you I hold on to the thought that a bit of self-doubt is better than a tonne of ego.

But I like this one. It’s about doubting your ability to make a decision: writer Minda Zetlin argues that you should go for it because:

You will survive a bad decision. This is often where I trip up. I tend to believe that a wrong decision will drag me down along with everyone around me. But few decisions are that powerful or that unchangeable. Nobody gets everything right all the time, so we’re all sure to have some of our decisions go south. It’s what we do afterward that makes the difference.

Nine Reasons to Conquer Self-Doubt and Start Believing in Yourself – Minda Zetlin, Inc.com (8 December 2014)

Read the full feature.

Infographic on becoming productive (seriously)

Posted by William Gallagher

I thought this was a joke. Maybe because the only infographics I read regularly are ones on Clickhole.com but it’s genuine and it’s serious. This site has a whole series of infographics that actually do discuss getting more productive and do so in a way you’ll remember.

Do read the whole site but here’s one I particularly liked. Click on it for the full size version.