Productivity

Productivity

Stop overthinking everything

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Years and years ago, my therapist told me that I overthink things. I still wonder what she meant.

This article buzzed around Facebook today and I found it useful because actually, yes, I do overthink. And it is a problem.

We all do our best to stay positive, but occasionally we can slip into negative thinking patterns that can wreak havoc on our lives. We might worry about our past mistakes or current stresses, and how these could lead to negative outcomes in the future. We might obsess about or over-analyze regular experiences and interactions, reading into them things that aren’t actually there. We might find that as soon as one bad thing happens, we associate it with all the other bad things that have happened in our lives and begin to feel miserable. We might feel anxious in the present, having a hard time getting out of our own heads as we worry and obsess about the things that could go wrong.

If you find yourself in this place frequently, you are what psychologists call a ruminator, or, an over-thinker, and this way of thinking can be harmful to your health. Psychologists have found that over-thinking can be detrimental to human performance, and can lead to anxiety and depression, especially in women, who are much more likely than men to ruminate on stress and disappointments than men.

8 Ways to Stop Over-Thinking and Find Peace in the Present Moment – Dr Kelly Neff, The Mind Unleashed (9 September 2014)

I find it helpful enough to just have my head explained there but the full piece includes the eight helpful suggestions of the title and they are good. Even the one that explains bloody walking is good for you. What is it with that today?

Bugger. Walking is good for your creativity

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Bugger, bugger, bugger.

This research – as well as the nifty soundbites or anecdotal quotes that have been around for hundreds of years – suggests that the act of walking itself, not just what you enjoy along the way, is what’s beneficial. The science to back this up is long established and trusted.

Exercise, of course, gets the heart pumping faster, thus circulating more blood to the brain. This is even true on small ambles – not just powerful sprints. All this extra oxygen-rich blood getting to the brain allows it to perform certain tests much better, especially those concerned with memory and attention.

More recent research showed that walking actually encourages the brain to create new connections between cells and helps transmit messages between them much more effectively. Furthermore, it can reduce the speed of tissue degradation and even enlarge the hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial navigation and converting information from the short-term to the long-term memory.

When it comes to a boost in creativity, though, researchers said there might be something else at play. They argued that walking distracts the brain’s prefrontal cortex, as it’s this which is responsible for decision making and rule learning – among other things. With the prefrontal cortex otherwise occupied, it enables left-field, alternative suggestions to sneak in where they may otherwise have been rooted out.

Does walking really improve your creativity? – Tom (no surname given), Ordnance Survey Blog (23 September 2014)

How a routine stops you becoming routine

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I’m afraid I know nothing about comic books so I’d not heard of this guy, but Joe Keatinge is apparently a star in this world and demonstrably interesting about being productive, creative and freelance:

I didn’t [have a daily routine] when I initially went freelance and largely floundered because of it. That said, if I can pass on anything to anybody, developing a routine has helped me immensely and greatly increased productivity. It’s also something I’ve recently greatly reworked to huge benefit and something I’m still getting used to, but here’s the gist of what I strive toward.

Monday through Friday I strive to be up no later than 7:30 AM, eat breakfast, drink coffee, achieve basic sustenance for my morning, but that’s it — I don’t look at my phone, at Twitter, at e-mail, not a damn thing. I used to do that and fall into the trap of screwing around when I should be working. Even the smallest diversion can take longer time to recover from than the actual distraction itself was so I’ve learned to keep them out of the way as much as I can.

That said, I’ve found if I immediately write ANYTHING immediately, I can achieve a lot later in the day, so at this point I do just that. Sometimes I immediately jump into a page, sometimes it’s just free form writing, sometimes its something I’m on a deadline on, sometimes it’s something no one will ever see, but it is something. And in writing anything I find my brain gets going and it keeps me on track for the rest of the day, even if I get distracted later on.

Creative Spaces: Joe Keatinge – Kevin Knight, EatGeekPlay.com (17 September 2014)

There are a couple of examples of his work in the piece and they are anything but routine. But he says he’s learnt to build structure into his day both for the sake of himself and for the sake of his art. Read the full piece.

Dip into the original Getting Things Done

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David Allen’s book Getting Things Done spawned an industry which has taken to doing podcasts. Allen’s own site hasn’t quite got in on the act yet, perhaps it’s on his Someday/Maybe list, but it has collated some audio interviews.

They’re all Allen talking on various radio and podcast shows so there tends to be a lot of overlap of topics as GTD is introduced each time. And I’ve had some problems getting the audio to play reliably so that’s two things against it but have a go with one and see what you think.

David Allen podcast interviews on Getting Things Done

Evernote for Mac gets needed update

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Short version: Mac users who got Evernote from the official site, go back and get the new one. If you got it from the Mac App Store, the update will be with you soon.

Longer version. If you’re an Evernote user then you tend to think that it is great but you have either one or two specific concerns. The one that everybody has is that starting a new note is slow. This is why there are a slew of iPhone apps that do nothing but quickly launch so that you can type something, then squirts your text into Evernote while you go off doing something else.

It’s also why a very welcome iOS 8 Extension is own controls for creating new notes. By itself, that doesn’t make the process much faster but we’re talking nuances here anyway: if it were that slow to start, we’d never start it.

The second concern is chiefly for Mac users. Evernote for Mac could get in knots and become frustrating to use for its speed issues, for how fiddly its tables were.

But I get to say could, past tense, because I’ve been running the updated release all morning and it’s great. From the Evernote blog:

You know what’s better than adding a new feature? Making a bunch of existing ones a million times better. That’s what today’s Evernote for Mac update is all about.

For months, our Mac team has been quietly rebuilding every underlying aspect of the app. This allowed us to tackle speed, sync, and editing in a holistic way rather than piecemeal improvements. On the surface, things look more or less the same. Hidden beneath is an entirely new Evernote, designed to put a smile on millions of faces.

Evernote for Mac: Better Note Editing, Faster Sync and 100s of Fixes – Andrew Sinkov, Evernote blog (22 September 2014)

Ignore people, ignore now, just keep working

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I think that’s advice we can all take in our writing. When you start writing, you get asked when your novel is coming. When you’ve a novel, you’re asked when the film is coming. On and on it goes. But just keep writing. When it comes, it comes.

None of which features in the new BusinessWeek interview with Apple’s Tim Cook but all of it features in there. Apple’s been knocked a lot for a lack of innovation and all the way time it’s been working on a watch. You might not like it, you might very well not be interested in it, but you know that every other smartwatch that comes out is going to borrow from Apple’s design.

The piece interested me anyway but in a small way it reminded me of writing. The way that a Doctor Who release comes out a year after I write it so I have the weird thing of people asking me about my new one and I have to think which one they mean and what I can say. I told you it was a small way. But it’s there.

Read BusinessWeek’s full piece.

It is not true that I used my iPhone 33 times today

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There’s a new free iPhone app called Checky that counts each time you tap your iPhone awake. It is fun and a bit sobering but unfortunately it’s also wrong. Listen, I’m not in denial here. I noticed around 1pm today that it reset to 0.

Go grab Checky anyway. It’s free and if you’ve just got an iPhone 6 or Plus, it might give you a sense of your new-toy addition.

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More good stuff from iOS 8

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It’s the update that keeps on giving little gorgeous details. This is a favourite of the less-obvious ones: iOS 8 gives you a bit of a nudge about what’s using your phone’s location-aware feature. Often you need that, more often you don’t.

It’s funny how many apps want to use your current location, it’s as if the developers fancied trying it out because it was new. The result is that every app seems to ask you to allow it to keep tabs on your location and over time you say yes enough that it becomes a long list.

Which eats into your battery power because they all keep yelling “are we there yet?” at the phone.

Now iOS 8 will nudge you. Just occasionally and just the odd app at a time. But when it happens, you get this. (And I said yes to this one.)

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Facebook sure loves your iPhone’s battery

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Previously… the Facebook app was shown to be a bugger for sapping your iPhone battery for no damn good reason. It’s still doing it. Ever since learning that about the app, I’ve had a habit of killing it each time I come out.

To be fair, I also kill it because I’ve had people believe I was online when I wasn’t. They got quite ratty.

So that was two good reasons to force-quit the Facebook app and I did, I do, I will. I’ll just avoid using it much more now.

Because of iOS 8’s great new feature that tells you what’s eating your battery time. Look at this. And tell me I really used Facebook five times more than I did OmniFocus yesterday.

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