Productivity

Productivity

14 things you can do to get you to do things only you can

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Nobody writes like you, nobody. So you are denying us all when you either procrastinate or are forced to procrastinate. Now I’ve added extra guilt on your shoulders, take a look at these 14 suggestions of how to pull your finger out. They’re all from Fast Company and I agree with almost all of them.

Okay. I’m not drawn to the one where they suggest working standing up.

But otherwise… Here are the first two of their 14 for 2015– it would’ve killed them to find a 15th? – as an example:

1. VISUALIZE AND SET UP YOUR DAY THE NIGHT BEFORE
Before emotional intelligence expert and author of The Other Kind of Smart Harvey Deutschendorf goes to sleep, he says he makes some basic decisions about the next day like what he’ll wear, eat for lunch, and the route he plans on taking to work. “The less time and energy you take to focus on routine, everyday things, the more you will have to work on what is important,” he explains.

He also suggests visualizing what exactly you plan to accomplish the next day. “Become extremely focused upon making this an ongoing part of your routine and you will surprise yourself by how much more you accomplish,” he says.

2. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE
“It’s very easy for me to work alone, but I find that my productivity is maximized when I surround myself with productive people I don’t know,” says Vivian Giang, a freelance journalist who covers leadership, organizational psychology, and gender issues.

She says working around productive strangers keeps her accountable for staying on task. “I’m not browsing social media without purpose. I eat healthier, I don’t take long breaks. I semi-compete with them because they always look like they’re coming up with great ideas,” she says.

14 Tips to Make 2015 Your Most Productive Year Yet – Rachel Gillet, Fast Company (undated but probably 2 January 2015)

Read the full feature for the other 12 ideas.

The lazy route to doing more

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This isn’t my idea, but it’s similar to ones you’ll find all over The Blank Screen and – to be fair – pretty much everywhere you look that covers creative productivity. But there’s a reason for this: it’s a good idea.

The short version is that you should concentrate on doing small steps but doing them often. Let Steven Farquharson of 2HelpfulGuys explain his take:

I’m not going to lie…

I’m lazy by nature. Left unchecked, I would never get anything done. I always had trouble handing in assignments at school, and I always look for corners to cut.

In recent years I have become very ambitious, which mixes with my lazy attitude like oil and water. I’ve learned that most people are lazy to some extent. It is human nature to want to experience the most amount of pleasure with the least amount of pain.

I have often created vast plans for achieving my goals, but they would only work in a fantasy reality. I imagine myself turning into some sort of robot overnight that can work twenty-four hours a day without eating, sleeping, or needing to relax.
But these plans never stand the test of time.

Eventually I give up, and feel ashamed.

Does the progression towards your goals have to be this hard all the time?
No, and I think I’ve figured it out.

Daily Automatic Progress – Steven Farquharson, 2HelpfulGuys (3 January 2015)

Read the full feature for exactly what he’s figured out though, prepare yourself, it means doing a few things every single day.

Beer brewed specifically to make you more creative

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I’m banjaxed, then: I don’t drink. But if you do or even if you’re just curious about whether this can possibly be true, take a load of this:

Conventional wisdom tells us that getting a little drunk stimulates creativity and problem-solving by quieting that “inner critic” who tells us to ignore (or not speak out loud) our most divergent ideas. The trick, of course, is getting just drunk enough to be creative and productive without slipping over into the territory where every idea feels like a good idea.

Advertising agency CP + B has teamed up with Professor Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois at Chicago to solve that problem for us. Wiley’s team discovered that a blood alcohol level of 0.075% is optimal for creative problem solving. The Copenhagen-based ad agency has created a craft IPA brewed to get an average-sized person to 0.075% in one serving. They’ve dubbed this potion of creativity “The Problem Solver.”

New Beer Developed to Maximize Creativity – Jason Brick, PSFK (22 December 2014)

O-kay. An advertising agency thought of this. A likely story. But there’s more: read the full piece to see what else is cooking in how we stimulate and feed our creativity.

Day 2 of decluttering OmniFocus

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Previously… 2014 ended with my OmniFocus To Do database so overstuffed that I wasn’t using the app enough. Now I’m decluttering and yesterday this began with a mindmap of all I have to do, all the plates I care about spinning, and all the stuff that I can ditch. Now read on.

It turns out that it’s rather hard to start over again on OmniFocus unless you really, really start over from scratch: back up your database and then delete it. Go from my current 2,513 things to do and 88 projects to do them in down to 0.

That is what I should do. But it isn’t what I’m going to do.

Instead, I’m going to greate one massive new folder, probably called 2015, then I’ll create subfolders for everything that I want to survive into the new plan. It just occurs to me that I did that mind map in MindNode which is capable of saving the image as text – nice for a text-thinking kinda guy like me but also handy because that text can go into OmniOutliner. Let me piddle about with it in that for a bit and then through the Mac version of it take that outline directly into OmniFocus. Have that create the subfolders for me.

Then I’ll move all the tasks over that I want to move over. In case I miss something important, I’ll bung everything else into a bucket folder and leave them there until I do that thing where you suddenly realise how stupid you’ve been deleting things.

But.

This is a lot of work, isn’t it?

Good.

Because I spent this evening going through my current 2014-style OmniFocus database and looking only at two places. One is the general catch-all inbox: when you’re in a hurry and adding tasks through the apps themselves, via Siri, through email and other ways, they land in the inbox and later on you sort them out a bit. Say that this task about getting a venue is to do with this event while that one about chasing payment is to do with your invoicing. You don’t need to do any of that, but it helps because you can then sit down and think, right, cracks-knuckles, this morning I’m doing everything to do with that event.

I had just under 30 things in my inbox to sort out. I’d done about 17 of them – as in actually done the tasks, not sorted or assigned to something, I’d gone out and done them. I deleted a few others, then assigned the rest to the various projects like particular events, particular jobs. One or two I put a definite deadline date on.

When you do that, those tasks turn up on what’s called the Forecast. Tap on that and you see everything task you have stated must happen today. Or in my case, a lot of yesterday’s. I clicked on the Forecast view and it was telling me I was behind on 60 tasks.

I can’t remember now how many it turned out I’d already done but enough. The rest I took the dates off entirely or I pushed to certain days this week when I know I can do them. I ended up with about 7 that I just went and did.

Again, this is a lot of work, isn’t it? But good – because tonight, just doing this, I feel much more in control of everything. This is the boon of OmniFocus: you can tell me about its features but it’s how it leaves you feeling good that matters.

That’s what I want all the time. Not to spend hours in OmniFocus but to spend a few moments there regularly and thereby be in charge of everything, feel in charge of everything.

It’s enough for tonight, though. Tomorrow, I press on – and I’m going to use a few tips from David Sparks’ OmniFocus Video Field Guide. I wonder if he’s done one about Evernote?

How to cope with parties or any social events

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The way I look at this, nobody has any reason to be fussed whether I’m there or not. Plus, I’m infinitely more interested in you than I am in me so I see social gatherings as a chance to meet new people and find out all about them. Since I don’t matter and you matter very much, I’m usually okay at parties and the like.

Except.

I do run out of fuel. I do have to go away sometimes. That’s a story for another day and the one for today is how it feels when you’re at the door, you’re reaching out for the handle, and you don’t know what’s on the other side. That’s hard:

We all have moments of awkwardness, but many people deal with it on a daily basis. Life for someone who’s socially awkward is a constant minefield of terror, self-recrimination and perceived faux pas. Going to parties is a nightmare because what if you don’t know anyone there? You feel as though you never know the “right” thing to say and when you do manage to open your mouth, you’re disjointed and stuttery, losing your train of thought before it departs the station. Worse, you may end up saying the absolutely worst possible thing you could… and now everybody’s just looking at you.

Paging Dr. NerdLove

Skim through this part 1 until you get the idea and are used to someone calling themselves Dr Nerdlove and then go on to properly read part 2. Hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting part 2.

One quick tip for writers to save money

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This applies to anyone buying anything online but we writers need every trick we can get. That’s so even if the trick and the tip in question is really small.

This is really small. But it’s saved me enough over the years that I want to be sure that you know it too:

When you’ve picked an item on an online store and put it in your shopping basket, open a second tab and google the name of the store plus the phrase ‘voucher’.

Nine times out of ten, you won’t get anything useful. Nine times out of ten you will be told there are discounts available for that reseller and there aren’t, it’s just to get you to click through or join up or something. But once in a while, and just often enough, you get 5%, 10% and 20% discount vouchers.

Usually what you get is some code word or serial number: copy that and you’ll find a spot to paste it on the online store’s checkout page.

If it worked every time, I’d have told you before. But it happens enough that Angela got an extra present this Christmas.

OmniOutliner 2 for iPad revisited

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I wrote here about how good this app was when it first came out a few months ago but today MacNN.com ran a new piece of mine about how great it is after you’ve been using it for those few months. It’s an outlining application and I am not naturally a guy who likes outlines but what I wrote includes this:

This is one of those apps where the feature list doesn’t tell you what you need to know. All outlining software lets you slap down some headings as you think of them and then fill in details or shove thoughts around until everything looks sensible. The difference between these apps is in how little they get in the way of your starting, how much they help you as you go along, and then how much you can do with your outline at the end of it.

You can open OmniOutliner on your iPad and just get going: we’ve been testing it for months on assorted jobs and keep coming back to the very basic options for their sheer speed and ease of use. But one project was going to be for several different audiences who would need different amounts of detail. We just outlined as normal but added extra columns for these audiences, adding notes where we needed to and knowing that as we adjusted the outline, those notes would follow.

Hands On: OmniOutliner 2 (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (3 January 2015)

Do read my full piece. Though I say full, I’d like to be fuller: there are options and features I didn’t get you. The one that’s on my mind to tell you is that I have a base outline now for a particular workshop I do and while I rewrite the presentation every single time, I can now start with this one outline and start shuffling. Once or twice while I’ve been presenting I’ve also tapped a button and had OmniOutliner record audio right into the outline too. That’s been invaluable when I’m revising the presentation and can simply hear how people reacted to sections where we were all talking and discussing.

I do like software and I do love software that transforms my working life. But there is a special place in my heart for software that changes my mind about something. I’m still not a natural outliner, I still like diving ahead and seeing where I end up, but more and more I’m using OmniOutliner to help me get jobs done well and faster.

Take a year off every seven years

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So there’s this fella named Stefan Sagmeister, right, and every seven years he closes his design business for the next 12 months. The obvious first thought is that this is nice for him, a second obvious thought is that you hope it’s nice for his staff if he has any – he’s not all that clear on this point – and maybe a third obvious thought is that this idea is bloody expensive.

I suspect that last, least, most unlikely obvious thought is that you’ll do this too or that you could do it too. Still, he’s very convincing about the benefits and actually rather convincing about the necessity too. Enough so that it’s making me wonder whether I’d benefit from closing my business for a minute.

Be the worst

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I feel this is more likely to apply to you than it is to me but the crux of this is that if you are the best person in a group, get out. Finance writer Emma Lincoln:

In fact, you should always try to the be the worst one in the room. If you’re the best one in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

That’s why I read other personal finance blogs, and why I’m helping organize a personal finance retreat this summer. Because when I spend time around people who (metaphorically and physically) kick my finance-ass, I’m inspired to work that much harder to hone my money-saving skills.

And when I meet couples who have done incredible things together, built homes together, traveled the world together, saved a million dollars together, I’m inspired to go deeper with A, to seek out the goals that are the most challenging to set.

Are You the Worst? – Emma Lincoln (29 December 2014)

Read the full piece. Also, hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting this.