Productivity

Productivity

Contact has been made

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I do get told that I am a networker. I get told this a lot. Why does that feel wrong, though? Why does it feel wrong enough that I don’t believe it? Maybe because of this:

Research has found that people who engage in “instrumental networking,” where the goal is career advancement, made people actually feel physically dirty. So dirty, in fact, that they thought about showering and brushing their teeth!

Stop Dirty Networking: Make Friends, Not Contacts – Hamza Khan, 99U (1 October 2014)

Really.

In my case, I’m just more interested in everybody else than I am in me. I know that sounds false and possibly even stupid but the way I see it, I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it. Everybody else is new and isn’t that interesting?

This 99U article is about a couple of other sources which you can read if you slog through the full feature. But for once the article is the better bet: as short as it is, it’s to the point. And it suggests:

Opt for spontaneous networking, where the goal is the simply the pursuit of emotional connections and friendship.

Read the full piece.

Learn structure from Obama’s script writer

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By far, the best way to learn how to write speeches is to read the great ones, from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, to Dr. King’s Mountaintop speech, to Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance address. But if you’re looking for some quick tips, here are a few things to bear in mind next time you’re asked to give a speech:

1. Write like you talk. There is no First Law of Speechwriting, but if there were, it would probably be something like this: a speech is meant to be spoken, not read. That simple (and obvious) fact has a few important (and less obvious) implications. Use short words. Write short sentences. Avoid awkward constructions that might cause a speaker to stumble. Tip: Read the speech aloud as you’re writing. If you do it enough, you’ll start hearing the words when you type them.

6 Tips for Writing a Persuasive Speech (On Any Topic) ≠ Adam Frankel, TIME (12 January 2015)

Read the full piece.

Ten Tips on Being a Productive Writer

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Lucy Hay usually blogs about the techniques of writing and the industry that we writers work in but she did once do this very concise and smart round up of productivity tips for us.

There’s plenty in here that I do and that I recommend endlessly in The Blank Screen but also much that I hadn’t considered. Some of that comes from how Hay covers juggling the kinds of demands you have on you when you’re a parent.

But she also recommends relaxation. That’s where I turn my face against her.

Read the full feature on her Bang2Write site.

Sorry I’m late…

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We’re all unavoidably late for many things – but if you find that you are always late for everything, maybe you need to be looking into it. If other people tend to delay events for you or they just start turning up late too, then maybe you need to seriously look into it.

Time magazine says that your problem could be “rooted in something psychological, like a fear of downtime”. It has nine descriptions of how punctual people manage to be punctual and thereby live happy, fulfilling lives as paragons of virtue, spit.

But the descriptions aren’t of good ideas, such as my favourite one that says punctual folk are “immune to ‘just one more’ thing syndrome”:

You’ll rarely hear a time-conscious person say they need to squeeze in “one more thing” before they leave. That impulse can lead you off track, and suddenly it’s not just one more email—it’s an entire 15 minutes worth of emails.

“Train yourself to recognize that impulse when it happens,” Morgenstern says. “Resist the impulse to do one more thing and just leave.”

9 Habits of People Who Are Always on Time – Samantha Zabell, Time (12 January 2015)

Read the full feature for the rest.

Use Evernote to achieve your 2015 goals

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That’s not my claim nor my suggestion and it is the claim and it is the suggestion of the Evernote company. So, you know, pinch that salt. But there are some good ideas in this and I think the killer persuasive point is the first one: you’ve already got Evernote so why not?

Like millions of other people, I use Evernote as my “digital brain” to store ideas, notes, web clips, receipts, recipes, important documents, event details, and more. I couldn’t get along without it.

But, did you know you can also use it to help you achieve your most important goals for 2015? There are three advantages of doing so:

1. It’s a tool you’re probably already using. You likely don’t have to learn or purchase something new.

2. It’s a tool that is available on every device. This makes it easier to keep your goals visible—a key to following through on them. You can review your goals on your desktop while at the office or on your mobile device while on the go.

3. It’s a tool that is simple and flexible. So many goal-setting apps force you into their system and structure. They are often overkill with too many features. Evernote, on the other hand, is fairly free-form, so you can create whatever structure works best for you.

How Evernote can Help you Achieve Your Goals in 2015 – Michael Hyatt, Evernote Blog (29 December 2014)

Read the full feature for four steps to doing this. It includes how to get tick boxes into Evernote and – surely this isn’t just me? – I never remember that you can do this and then I never remember how to.

How to spend the last ten minutes of your day

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Drinking.

Alternatively, do this to get yourself ready to sleep tonight and start fresh tomorrow:

Start by identifying an exact time when you want to be in bed. Be specific. Trying to go to bed “as early as possible” is hard to achieve because it doesn’t give you a clear idea of what success looks like. Instead, think about when you need to get up in the morning and work backwards. Try to give yourself 8 hours, meaning that if you’d like to be up by 6:45am, aim to be under the covers no later than 10:45pm.

Next, do a nighttime audit of how you spend your time after work. For one or two evenings, don’t try to change anything—simply log everything that happens from the moment you arrive home until you go to bed. What you may discover is that instead of eliminating activities that you enjoy and are keeping you up late (say, watching television between 10:30 and 11:00), you can start doing them earlier by cutting back on something unproductive that’s eating up your time earlier on (like mindlessly scanning Facebook between 8:30 and 9:00).

Once you’ve established a specific bedtime goal and found ways of rooting out time-sinks, turn your attention to creating a pre-sleep ritual that helps you relax and look forward to going to bed.

How to Spend the Last 10 Minutes of Your Day – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (10 November 2014)

There’s more to it. Have a read of the full piece.

Airplane days, trains and pretend commutes

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I read somewhere of a fella who goes flying in order to avoid phone calls. That’s excessive, even for me.

But having found that necessary business trips came with unexpected benefits from being out of contact with email and the web, he now regularly conjures up a cheaper and greener equivalent. He just decides that today is a Airplane Day and switches everything off.

Similarly, there are people who do pretend commutes. They have to be people who are working at home because otherwise their pretend and their real commutes would overlap, creating a paradox that might unfurl the entire space-time continuum. Granted, that’s a worst-case scenario.

But otherwise they do a real pretend commute. They ‘leave’ at the same time – they don’t go out of the house but they dress, they hurry to finish breakfast and down one last gulp of tea. And then they shut themselves away for 15 or 30 minutes. It’s usually the same length of time that they used to have as a genuine, real-life commute and usually I think it shortens a bit as the years go by and they’re under more pressure to work.

This is all about releasing and controlling and channelling pressure, though.

During a genuine, real-life commute, there isn’t much you can do. True, these days you can work on your phone or iPad, but you could also see those being nicked away from you.

So you read.

The news, a book, anything.

The fact that you cannot do anything else means you do it and for that 15 or 30 minutes, you’re calm.

It’s easy to do when you’re really commuting, it is much harder to make yourself have a pretend commute – but the benefits are the same. You start the working day ready and composed. You take in information, you learn things, you just enjoy thinking about different things. And for everyone, that’s fuel.

For us as writers, it’s the sand that becomes the pearl.

And I say this sitting on a train doing exactly the work I’d be doing at my home office. Well. I did read a book, though. Come on. I read all of it.

Reddit speaks – online community names best productivity apps

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This isn’t an award show. There isn’t a single winner nor even a short list, really. Actually, as lists go it’s rubbish from the sense that to get on the list you just had to be named. But it’s also therefore comprehensive and you know that every app on Reddit’s selection is there through passion.

Maybe sometimes the passion of the manufacturers but usually the passion of a genuine Reddit user.

Take a look at the whole list – and yes, OmniFocus is right there.

All you need in life…

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…is to have enough cash that money isn’t a constant worry, and to have done things so that they are not a constant pressure on you.

You will want other things and maybe strictly speaking you do need them, but get those two right and you’re flying. Everything is suddenly possible. Everything is pretty good.

Yes. I’ve just finished my taxes. Not sure about the bit of having enough cash but tax preparation has been weighing on me for six months and I’m lighter now it’s done.

And naturally, inevitably, it took far less time than I spent putting it off.

There’s a lesson there, though I can’t imagine what it is.

Alternatively, beg them to SHUT UP

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Someone at Harvard Business Review has had enough and decided to write a Very Heavily Pointed article that even now they are innocently forwarding to the one of the bosses who will for god’s sake not shut up.

The article points out that there may be some things you can do about a boring boss, starting with:

Diagnose the problem. Many senior leaders are long-winded in some situations and not others. Does your boss tend to deliver an Oscar acceptance speech only when big clients come to the office and meet you in the conference room? Will your biggest client complain for hours about his divorce case over lunch, but not if he stops by the office? Are management monologues more likely to occur when there’s no formal agenda, if you’re on a phone call with no time constraints, or when no one asks any questions?

Take note of when your culprit tends to dominate the conversation so you can change the setting or circumstances. All of these clues can indicate what the core problem is — and help you devise a plan of attack.

Advice for Dealing with a Long-Winded Leader – Joe McCormack, HBR (9 January 2015)

Read the full piece.