Productivity

Productivity

The big idea of how to be and how to stay productive

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It’s hard, isn’t it? Even now. You’re handling a lot more than you ever did but it’s ceaseless and the more you can do, the more you get given to do. You’re the one who gets stuff done and, grief, if that isn’t a pain.

Also a pleasure, admit it. Yes, sure, you can take on that extra work, no trouble.

It is trouble and it is hard and it does take consistent, persistent, ceaseless effort.

But the way you do this always the same. The detail of your tasks and even of how you organise them may vary, yet at the heart there are just three things to keep in mind:

1) Spend time now to save time later
Invariably, just invariably, it takes you less time if you do something now than if you do something later.

There are exceptions. I’ve found I boom along at close to lightspeed when a deadline is coming but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you said the quality of what I do suffers.

The key reason for this is to do with number 2:

2) Stop churning
I know someone who was worried about a thing that was coming up at the end of the month. But he had all the information he needed to know what that thing would be. Not just whether it would be good or bad, but exactly and precisely what it would be. No doubt, no question of error, no wriggle room.

Now, he carried on worrying rather than work it out because he didn’t want to know if it was bad. But he thought about this a lot, just a lot. He churned it over and over in his mind for weeks.

You don’t churn good things. So don’t churn bad ones either.

And one way you do that is number 3:

3) Get tasks out of your head
We’re rubbish at remembering everything and coping with everything, we are fantastic at acting, working, resolving.

Use a good To Do app, get everything in there and know that everything is in there, then just do what the app tells you needs to be done now.

Out of your head and into your list, it makes all of this easier.

End of the Summer

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I refuse to accept that it is already autumn – or the Fall, I love that Americans call it the Fall, it’s such a perfect poetic word for it – and instead I am going to insist to you that this is really an album recommendation.

It is. End of the Summer is a Dar Williams album and I love it. I remember buying it on CD in Tower Records in London. I don’t think the store is even there now.

But while you’re listening to it, I admit there might be some people who might think that this might be the end of the summer, a bit. And these people have opinions about what you should do about it:

After a summer holiday slipping back into work mode can be a challenge.

Being greeted by an overflowing inbox and a hectic meeting schedule may cause you to suffer from the back-to-work blues, making it difficult to focus on that mountain of work in front of you. Business coach Robyn McLeod, says succumbing to the pressure to speed back into work can undo any benefits you may have received from taking a break.

Follow these tips to re-integrate to work after your holiday and avoid the post-vacation hangover

Summer Vacation is Officially Over, How to Ease Back into Work – Lisa Evans, Fast Company (2 September 2014)

The tips centre on taking time before you go on holiday to plan what you’ll do when you come back. Block out time the first day to talk to people, catch up on what you’ve missed and handle your email better.

Read Evans’s full feature for some practical, good steps.

And then listen to Dar Williams.

Don’t deal with emails one at a time

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Yes, yes, sometimes you have to look at each email and decide what to do. Fine. But you know you often don’t. Look at the last twenty emails that landed in your inbox: a couple might be spam, a few might be useful or important or urgent, but the rest are nothing. So you delete them. I’m just saying deleting them faster.

What I do is option-click on the first email I know I’ll delete, then I keep the option key pressed down and I click on every killable one as I scroll down. Then, wallop, I press delete once and they’re all gone.

This writer has a different approach. I think it’s dangerously close to thermonuclear, but:

Rather than reading every email message and acting on it, select as many emails as possible in a batch and deselect the messages you actually need to do something with. Email clients have different ways of letting you do the mass selection, but Control-A(for Windows) or Command-A (for Macs) will usually do the trick; here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts for Gmail, Outlook, and Mail for Macs. Depending on your email client, you’re going to either be able to select as many as you can get on a screen or some other setting like 25, 50, or 100, as is the case with Gmail. Most of the time, scanning the sender and the subject will give you enough information to know whether the message actually requires your attention.

Use Batch Actions to Get Through Your Email Faster – Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourishing (2 September 2014)

It’s just the reverse of what I do: Gilkey gets ready to nuke everything and then gives a few emails a reprieve. Read the full feature for why and a bit more about how.

PC and Mac: You Need a Budget software on sale (briefly)

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Very briefly. Appsumo is offering a discount on this budgeting application, You Need a Budget, for Mac and PC which comes so highly recommended that I’ve just bought it.

Usually retailing for $60 (approximately £36), it is on sale via Appsumo for $30 (approximately £18) – but it’s only on sale for 72 hours. And I don’t know how many hours into that I heard about.

Go take a look now: you can guess what a budgeting application does but there’s a video showing why this is a good one.

Ask Me Anything – and now be able to read the answers

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Previously… Reddit’s Ask Me Anything interview platform has become the place to go because the most amazing people pop up on it. There’s no interviewer, there’s just you and this person. Plus maybe someone typing, if they’re not hot on the keys.

President Obama did an AMA. Do you need anything more?

Yes. You need to be able to read these things. If you happen to be on the site when the AMA session is live then you can follow it fine, I imagine. I’ve never used it live. It won’t be exactly as cut and thrust as a verbal discussion so it’ll be a bit boring while you wait for text answers to appear. But it will surely work and you will surely understand what’s happening.

You don’t when the interview is over. It is a mess. Rabbit holes’ worth of comments and sort-of questions and discussions and threads and sporadically an answer from the interviewee. It’s just unreadable. There have been attempts to fix this before but they’ve been by third-party websites that cull the interviews and curate the results. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but if you need someone else’s website to make your interview with the President of United States comprehensible, there is a lot wrong with your service.

Now Reddit has released an Ask Me Anything for iOS. Android will follow soon. It’s free and it works well: give it a go and find out just what a gorgeously astonishing range of people have answered questions on AMA.

The creativity spectrum and you

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I’ve heard people tell me, “I’m just not that creative.” I don’t believe it. You are creative and ingenious and resourceful and brilliant. Creativity doesn’t have to be defined by the bounds of art or literature. Your creativity can reveal itself in so many different ways: parenting, relationships, wardrobe, problem-solving, ideas, shoelaces, Tumblrs, cooking.

Everyone is capable of creativity.

What I Wish I Knew About Creativity When I Was 20 – Kevan Lee, Buffer (26 August 2014)

I’ve also heard people telling me that they’re not creative but I believe them. Maybe I just rankle at how each time it’s happened to me, the person has been proud of it. You can argue that they are just claiming to be proud, that it’s a defensive attack. But that’s to presume everyone really wants to be creative and I think that is as wrong as these proud non-creatives are.

Still, maybe I just mix with the wrong crowd. Lee’s full article is part a reassurance that there is hope for the not-we and part an exploration of what we would tell our younger selves now if we could.

Specifically, he has 17 points which I’m sure would be useful for sending back in time but are also interesting for us as we are today.

Bit late now: why you shouldn’t have taken a holiday in August

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Don’t do it in any August, any year. So if you’re the sort to already be plotting a world cruise for August 2015, bump it to September. Or bring it forward to July. Anything you like, really.

Just not August:

Let the slackers and the fashionably exhausted crowd burn their vacation days. Their absence makes August the best month to get work done.

7 Reasons to Skip Vacation in August – Ilan Mochari, Inc.com (7 August 2014)

I’m sold. Read all seven reasons in the full piece.

Thanks to Lifehacker for spotting it after I’d been away.

No dice. How to choose what task to do

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Actually, there’s more to this video than that but the presenter says a lot of things I do and she also knows the difference between dice and die. I like her already.

Here’s Edie Blue of the site Mandarin2English on picking your tasks and using a die to pick which one to do.

I should’ve called this Do or Die, shouldn’t I?

What happens when you switch off your smartphone

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I mean, seriously switch it off. Keep it as a phone instead of the entire world in your pocket and knocking at your door. Spoiler 1: it works out just fine.

Spoiler 2: I’m not going to find out for myself.

I’m fine with reading about it in a happy piece from someone who has now clearly achieved the kind of zen utopian state we can all aspire to just so long as we never get there:

In 2012, I realized I had a problem.

My iPhone made me twitchy. I could feel it in my pocket, calling me, like the Ring called Bilbo Baggins. It distracted me from my kids. It distracted me from my wife. It distracted me anytime, anywhere. I just didn’t have the willpower to ignore email and Twitter and Instagram and the whole world wide web. Infinity in my pocket was too much.

I wanted to get control, but I didn’t want to give up my iPhone altogether. I loved having Google Maps and Uber and Find Friends and an amazing camera.

So I decided to try an experiment. I disabled Safari. I deleted my mail account. I uninstalled every app I couldn’t handle. I thought I’d try it for a week.

My year with a distraction-free iPhone (and how to start your own experiment) – Jake Knapp, Medium (31 August 2014)

Find out what exactly happened and how to do it yourself, if necessary.