Productivity
Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers.
It’s only about a heartbeat since they upped the free storage to one terabyte. Read the full piece for who gets this and when.
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Previously… last weekend I contributed to the Inkspill online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. All this week I’m running the sessions I wrote for them. Here’s today’s.
How to Get Rejected
Write badly. That’ll do it. But of all the reasons you will get rejected – and you will, you know you will – writing badly is the best of them. It’s the most embarrassing, perhaps, and it may well shut more doors than anything else ever will, but it’s also the best for one key reason.
You can do something about it.
You can write better.
Now, it would be good if that were as easy as it sounds but your writing is under your control, or at least it is more than anything else. Focus on your writing and don’t be thrown by things you cannot know. That sounds a bit Hallmark Card-like and we are all cut and bloodied by rejection but do this: control what you can control and bollocks to everything you can’t.
Let me give you a fast example. I spent a couple of years as features editor on a computer magazine and I needed writers. I really needed them, I had money to pay them, I would search for them. And at the same time, I must’ve got around 200 completely unsolicited submissions. Writers writing to me out of the blue pitching me articles. They should have been a godsend to me but they weren’t.
Of the 200, I commissioned 1. He was fine, I’d have used him again if I’d ever needed to go back to the same topic. That’s not the key fact here. The key is that of the 200, I read 7.
And not only would I do the same today, so would you.
Of the other 193, a surprising number were about fashion. I was on a computer magazine. Many were handwritten and, again, hello, computer magazine. Plus you can tell me you’ve got years of experience but if you’re not typing your articles, no, you haven’t.
Equally, you can tell me that you studied my magazine but if you spell the title wrong or if you send me a 300-word article when we only ever ran 5,000-word pieces, I don’t need to read your piece to know you can’t do the job.
Writing is not a competition. Also, writing is not for you: it is for the reader. My job was not to read every piece and pat heads, it was to fill blank pages each month. Realise that, keep that in mind, and you’ll avoid rejections.
And when you are rejected, take it. You can grind your teeth all you like at home, just don’t ever show it. Let it go because it’s already gone. Nobody ever convinced an editor that they have made a wrong choice by arguing about it. If that sounds unfair, compare it to this: nobody ever successfully used wailing to convince a lover not to dump them.
This ridiculous writing life we have chosen might be art, I hope it is, but it is also a job and it is also real. You’re not playing. And the sometimes great, sometimes deeply depressing fact is that most people are. So small things like being a pro when you’re rejected really help you stand out.
William
See William Gallagher’s scribbles – books, Doctor Who radio dramas and the rest – on Amazon.
I now write a lot on here via Drafts 4 and there’s a thing that used to take me three steps that now takes one. (If I’m quoting an article, I would take three trips back and forth from my browser to where I was writing the story: once for the big quote, once – if I’m lucky – for the title, author, date and name of the site and then once more for the website URL address. Now I copy the author and date while Drafts 4 grabs everything else and then pops it all into a new article in precisely the sequence and layout I like.)
Call it three steps I’ve lost: two of the copying-and-pasting ones plus one for the layout. Quotes on The Blank Screen are always indented and followed by a block that has the title, author, site plus date and is a link to the original. Also, somewhere in the rest of the article I’m writing I will direct you to read the full piece on the original site. Drafts 4 gives me a typical “read the full piece” line of text and makes the words “full piece” be a live link to that original. I will change that sentence eight times out of ten but it’s there waiting to be changed.)
It shocks me how much speedier I am having got rid of these two or three tiny little steps but I am and it is vastly more so than you would predict by just removing the time they took. Part of it is concentration: the steps were clear and simple but took skipping between apps and in the time that would take, my mind would wander.
So I do resist trying to quantify how much time an idea or a method or an approach will save me and, given how fast I type, I am deeply suspicious of even the great TextExpander‘s claim that it has so far saved me 229 hours typing since 19 June 2013 when I bought the thing.
I’d like TextExpander to give me a clue how long it took me to set up the various little snippets of text that it will expand out for me. And I’d like to know how long it took me to setup Drafts 4 exactly the way I want. It wasn’t trivial: I think Drafts 4 is remarkable and remarkably easy to use but I set it up for me through a fair bit of trial and error. If you told me I spent two hours setting it up, I’d believe.
And I’d think that worth the time because such a small change has made an enormous difference to me. Many automated things have made a big difference, I’m really only surprised that I don’t do more. You know about Drafts 4 now and TextExpander, but there’s also IFTTT. Every time a story is published on The Blank Screen, a copy gets added to an archive in my Evernote account. If you say something lovely about me on Twitter, I’ll tap that little Favourite button – and without my doing anything else, I know your tweet has been saved for me to another Evernote document. I seem to use Evernote a lot.
OmniFocus. I live in OmniFocus. I think the most automatic of the automated options to do with OmniFocus that I use is Mail Drop and I really, really use that. If you send me an email with a task in it, I’ll forward that straight into my OmniFocus To Do list. Apparently I’ve used that 1,977 times and the most recent was 3 hours ago. With a bit of digging and a Wolfram Alpha day-counting search, I can work out that this means that since I’ve had OmniFocus Mail Drop, I’ve used 2.89 times a day on average. I am truly astonished that it is as low as that.
I started using it in December 2012 and there’s no way my little brain can remember how long it took to set up but looking at the process now, I’d say it was ten minutes with nine of them spent reading what I had to do. If you want to use it yourself, it’s free but you need OmniFocus and you should have a look at this Omni Group explanation.)
All of which is a long way to say a short thing: automation can speed up your work like nobody’s business but it takes time to do. So to roll out my favourite quote from The Simpsons, if you’re wondering whether to automate your work: “short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but”.
If it takes you longer to automate something than this automation will save you, don’t do it. Except I really would not have predicted how much saving those steps by Drafts 4 would save me time and effort. Rather than just shrug and admit that your mileage will vary, let me show you the reason I wanted to say all this to you today:
That’s by xkcd and while it’s the full image, while you don’t see any more of this one, there is much, much more to see and relish on the xkcd site.
Fast Company did a piece some while ago about Ernest Hemingway and how very specifically productive he was. I didn’t know any of this and I rather like that some of his methods are word-for-word what I do too. Writer Drake Baer picked out six parts of Hemingway’s methods and I particularly like these two:
4) He attacked the early hours.
Hemingway got up insanely early, greeting the dawn with a craftsman’s devotion.
In his own words:
There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that.
5) He protected his time.
Hemingway famously galivanted around Europe as a member of the Lost Generation, typing out novels in Spanish hotel rooms and stories in Parisian lofts. He could work well anywhere, he maintained, as long as the circumstances fit.
As in, he protected his time: “The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.”
6 Ways to be a Hemingway-Level Productive Badass – Drake Baer, Fast Company (13 September 2013)
Read the full piece to see the other four Hemingway methods, would you?
You’ll thank me.
Normally, people do not enjoy being forced to do something. People also do not enjoy the guilt that comes with doing something that is bad for them. Surprisingly, these two wrongs seem to make a right: when people are compelled to engage in vices, they feel better than when they freely choose the vice for themselves. According to a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, persuading a friend to share a dessert removes the burden of choice from them, reducing their feelings of guilt and making them less conflicted about the decision.
Vices—junk food, movie marathons, celebrity gossip news, procrastination—have adverse consequences. Choosing them is ‘bad’ and results in guilt that we don’t get from virtuous activities such as exercise, working on a passion project, or reading high-quality media. “It has long been believed that yielding to vices…is bad,” write the researchers. “While not disagreeing with this picture, the current research presents the observation that a negative view of vices does not quite tell the full story.”
The researchers suggest that the guilt of choosing vices weighs us down, reducing our sense of ‘subjective vitality.’ Vitality, a term used to describe the feeling of being energized, has been linked to mental and physical wellbeing, improved task performance, tenacity, and self-control. It is not quite the same thing as happiness, which is a related but conceptually different experience.
Read the full piece.
If I haven’t said this to you before, let me say it now: I can’t stand systems for prioritising your work. The time you spend fiddling with your list is time you could spend doing the work. And the most fantastically well worked out priority list is torpedoed the next time anyone phones or emails you with a more urgent task.
But writer James Clear is well into priorities and says that investor Buffet is too:
With well over 50 billion dollars to his name, Warren Buffett is consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world. Out of all the investors in the 20th century, Buffett was the most successful.
Given his success, it stands to reason that Buffett has an excellent understanding of how to spend his time each day. From a monetary perspective, you could say that he manages his time better than anyone else.
And that’s why the story below, which was shared directly from Buffett’s employee to my good friend Scott Dinsmore, caught my attention.
Let’s talk about the simple 3-step productivity strategy that Warren Buffett uses to help his employees determine their priorities and actions
I’d like you to read the full piece as Clear writes it well, but a small spoiler is that he recounts this tale of Buffet going through his three-step priority process. Go read it, though, and tell me that it’s really prioritising.
I think it’s getting stuff sorted out before you start. I don’t take away from this that I must study my To Do list’s priority rankings.
Listen, we talk all the time about productivity but we are writers, we need to write. Last weekend I contributed a series of writing blogs and suchforth to Inkspill, an online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. You can still see and even take part in the entire weekend just by going to her official site. And I’d recommend that for seeing the work of my colleagues on the retreat, Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie.
But let me bring you what I bought to the table. Today, a video introduction that I grant you makes little sense out of context and within which I do look half-dead with sleep. But it also includes a writing exercise that I especially like doing with people. Plus, it’ll tell you what’s coming up over the rest of this week: each day I’ll post one of the writing exercise blogs I did for Inkspill.
I hope you like them and that when you’ve seen this video, you rush me caffeine.
Naturally you and I need full-time assistants, perhaps even a whole team of them based in our plush offices and working 24/7/365 right beside us. But some writers don’t have our needs or our lofty incomes, yet they also sometimes need the benefit of an assistant:
Whether you’re an executive flying all over the world or you’re a stay-at-home mom overwhelmed with too many tasks, Zirtual, a virtual personal assistant, aims to take some of the administrative and organizational tasks off of your plate, to make your day-to-day a little easier.
Zirtual assistants can respond to emails on your behalf, coordinate travel plans, manage your calendar, create itineraries and much more. Zirtual is also a great if you don’t need a full-time assistant, but you still need some help coordinating your hectic schedule. So instead of getting bogged down with all of the small administrative tasks that can suck hours out of your day, you can focus on the important tasks at hand.
8 Apps to Help You Get More Done in Less Time – Elisha Hartwig, Mashable (25 October 2014)
That’s all Hartwig says about Zirtual: it is only one of eight pieces of advice or services or software applications that she is recommending. Do read her piece for the others but also take a look at Zirtual’s own pages for details of this service. Zitual is an American company but it works with people in the UK, so long as they have from $399 per month to spend.
Following today’s earlier post about how the internet can spot when we’re depressed – though that’s not the same as it doing anything about it – the mental health issue continues with this more active article. Always and forever, remember this: depression is not the same as sadness. If you’re dep ressed and someone tells you it might never happen then you are fully and legally entitled to ram their tick ling stick up into intensive care.
But.
It is true that if you are prone to depression, there are things that make it worse or rather that make the experience worse. Bad things are always bad. Bad things do not cause depression. But a bad thing when you are depressed is crippling. I think of it this way: when you’re up and happy and excited, it only takes a pinprick to bring you back down into the mire of misery. Whereas if you’re down, it’s going to take one hell of a boost to make you even suspect that there are or there can ever be good times.
Fortunately, freelance life has a lot of boosts even though it also has a lot of pricks.
Jenni Miller writes here in Contently about the twin issues of being freelance and of being depressed: the two don’t go together, but when they meet, it’s murder:
The freelance lifestyle is incredibly tough, and managing mental health on top of everyday concerns like invoices and deadlines can feel overwhelming. As someone who’s lived with anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive order since I was a child, I’ve found that working as a freelancer has an equal amount of benefits and drawbacks when it comes to self-care and mental health. On one hand, it’s extraordinarily helpful to be able to make my own hours. If I am having a really bad day, I know I can take a few hours off and finish up a project later that night or over the weekend. At the same time, the isolation of working by myself and for myself can push all of my most vulnerable buttons.
Dealing with those drawbacks can be challenging, but over the years, I’ve relied on a few tactics that keep me healthy and productive even as the ebb and flow of freelance work swirls around me.
Read the full piece.
Perhaps I mean they make us more creative. The Atlantic has a good three-biscuit read of a feature about Abbey Road studios and – in part, in the part that interests me the most – the Beatles music was made there without anything approaching today’s technology.
limitations of Beatles-era technology were substantial by comparison, and they forced a commitment to creative choices at earlier stages of the recording process. If, for example, an engineer wanted to exceed the number of recorded tracks that their tape machine allowed, two or more tracks had to be mixed together and “bounced” to an open track elsewhere. Cuts were physical, done with razor blades and tape. Mixes were performed by engineers in real time. Big mistakes at any point in the process could force an entire recording to be scrapped.
It was because artists were often stuck with the mistakes they made that they sometimes decided to embrace them. Once while recording a Beatles song called “Glass Onion” Scott accidentally erased a large number of drum parts that had been painstakingly overdubbed. Certain that he’d be fired, he played the tape to John Lennon. To Scott’s surprise, Lennon said that he liked the unexpected effect created by the glitch—and both the track and Scott stayed.
The Technical Constraints That Made Abbey Road So Good – Justin Lancy, Atlantic (23 October 2014)
Read the full piece.