Oh, you’re so powerful, Mr or Mrs or Ms Swoon

Posted by William Gallagher

This isn’t me. I suspect it isn’t you, either. Creatives and artists are more focused on the work and worried about our neuroses than we are on jockeying for position and trying to make a splash in a company. But then we also regularly meet and rely on the people who do exactly this. So whether you want to appear powerful yourself or you’d just better recognise the signs in others, Time magazine has you covered:

Take up lots of space. MIT researcher Andy Yap says the way we stand and sit can give both those around us as well as ourselves the sense that we’re powerful. Specifically, what Yap calls “expansive poses,” where people adopt a wide stance when standing, put their hands on their hips instead of at their sides and stretch out their arms and legs when seated. “High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power,” Yap writes. “That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.”

Scientists who study the effects of these hormonal changes say they’re associated with status, leadership and dominance — and all you have to do is take up more space.

5 Scientifically Backed Ways to Seem More Powerful – Martha C. White, Time (21 July 2014)

Oh, someone please help me. Or someone please stop articles claiming science when they mean, at best, statistics. But there is another one of these five ways that rang a few bells with me: I’ve seen us doing this too:

Tap into the “red sneaker effect.” This is why Mark Zuckerberg can get away with wearing a hoodie. Researchers from Harvard Business School studied how sometimes looking out of place can have a positive effect. “Under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors can be more beneficial than efforts to conform and can signal higher status and competence to others,” they write. (They give the example of someone wearing a pair of red sneakers in a professional setting as an example.) Since most of us try to conform to social norms, we tend to think that people who deliberately don’t do so because they have enough social status that they don’t have to care what the rest of us think.

I did know a guy who was considered a rebel at his company because he wore something like a Winnie-the-Pooh tie. I thought this told me a lot about the company.

Read the full piece

Short version: managers can cock it up, seriously

Posted by William Gallagher

We’re creative, it’s what we do. We keep meeting people who say they aren’t creative and I think maybe we’re a bit guilty of reacting the wrong way. Sometimes we’re entrepreneurial – you don’t need to be creative, just hire me! – or, whisper it, we’re patronising. As we’re the creatives, we know what to do and everybody else is just a paper-pusher.

The thing is, people who are not creative do not understand us or what we do. And they don’t like that. They don’t like that one little bit. And what we don’t understand, we seek to control. So you get people like the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, telling our film industry that we should only make successful films. Idiot.

And you get people trying to structure our lives. Now, sometimes that is more than fair: I’m not saying a company that employs you shouldn’t object if you never bleedin’ turn up. But we get micromanaged. We get treated as resources. There’s the Hollywood Approach: if a project is good with one writer, it must be better with ten. Or the BBC Approach: if these creatives love their work so much, we can pay them less.

All you can do is get the work done and keep an eye out for places that think creativity comes in shrink-wrapped boxes off some shelves. But if we can’t fix the situation, we can at least be glad we’re not in this one. Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how 3M has gone from an innovative company to a far more efficient firm that just doesn’t innovate any more. It all happened when they hired a new CEO, James McNerney, and the firm seemed to take a collective “hang on a minute…” when he left again.

At the company that has always prided itself on drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past five years, today that fraction has slipped to only one-quarter.

Those results are not coincidental.

“Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process,” says current CEO George Buckley, who has dialed back many of McNerney’s initiatives. “You can’t put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That’s not how creativity works.” McNerney declined to comment for this story.

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity – Brian Hindo, Bloomberg Businessweek (10 June 2007)

It’s an ancient story and while the full piece is a long and deeply interesting read, would you mind going off to see how 3M is doing today? I can tell you that Buckley lasted at 3M until his retirement in 2013.

Another hat tip to the superb 99U for this.

Work in 90-minute bursts for best effect*

Posted by William Gallagher

*One caveat: I found I work better in hour-long chunks. Many folk do 20 minutes on, 20 off, and so forth. But the thing is to do it in concentrated blocks of time and maybe 90 minutes is a good one.

The theory boils down to the fact that we can’t increase the hours in the day, but we can increase the energy with which we make the most of those hours. Taking short, scheduled breaks throughout the day rejuvenates and restores us physically and mentally, helping us plow through those assignments and to-do lists in a third of the time.

The coolest take away from the article concerns what I now call “work blocks.” In short, after that 90 minutes of work, our bodies and minds need a break. But our 9-5 (or 7-7) work culture demands focus for much, much longer blocks of time, so many of us fight that urge to break by filling up the mug with more coffee, rubbing our eyes and refocusing on the screen.

No more.

Inspired by [New York Times writer Tony] Schwarz and the studies he cited, I created a Daily Schedule that broke up my day into 90-minute Work Blocks, separated by 30 minute Breaks and, in the middle of my day, a 2-hour lunch. I know some of you just spit your coffee out. But you read that right. I take a 2 hour lunch to get a long run or workout in, eat and read from a book or write a few lines in my journal.

During the 30 minute breaks I read, clean, walk to the post office and complete those little, once distracting tasks that now actually kill two birds with one stone. Sometimes, if I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, I’ll even knock off for a cat nap.

Do Less = Do More: The Art of Being Creative and Productive – Chase Jarvis, own blog (27 March 2013)

As always, the full piece is worth a read: particularly so this time, I think, as I just got rather absorbed reading it. Hat tip to 99U.

Interrupt a meeting with a two-minute silence

Posted by William Gallagher

Everybody shut up. Just think:

Seems counterintuitive to plan silence into a meeting, doesn’t it? Alexander Kjerulf, author of Happy Hour Is 9 to 5, has found silence to be an ideal way to encourage deep thinking and ideas, right in the midst of a meeting.

“The purpose of meetings is not to talk–the purpose of meetings is to arrive at ideas, solutions, plans and decisions.”

Since few of us can think deeply while we’re talking, the two-minute silence break gives a chance to mull over a decision, issue, or stalemate.

9 Science Backed Methods for More Productive Meetings – Kevan Lee, Buffer (undated but approximately 17 July 2014)

As ever, I choke on the word ‘science’ but at least they mean this idea and the other eight have some solid research and statistics behind them. Most of the ideas in the full piece are pretty familiar – limit meetings to who really needs to be there, make them quick and so on – but they’re all good and well worth your time reading.

How many hours a day are you actually productive?

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s about 22:30 as I write this and I’ve worked with a few interruptions since 06:30. But you have to wonder how many minutes of actual useful work I got done.

There is a currently very brief discussion about this issue on Reddit. Part of the reason I want to tell you about this is to also point out that Reddit has useful productivity chatter. But here’s the start of this one in particular:

Taking away your bathroom breaks, lunches, Internet breaks, and staring into space, how many hours are you actually productive? This question is directed to office workers, primarily.

For me, it’s about three, MAYBE four hours. I feel like I get the same amount of work done if I come into the office for 3 or 4 hours (vs. 8 hours) because I stay focused for those 3 or 4 hours because I know I only HAVE those 3 or 4 hours…whereas during a normal 8 hour day, I’ll work for 30 minutes, get distracted for another 30, etc.

Do I just get mentally fatigued easily, or is this normal?

Reddit Productivity (24 July 2014)

Go add your tuppence, would you? But have a break first, obviously.

Search Twitter by number of retweets

Posted by William Gallagher

This is a clever idea: if you want to find something on twitter, it stands to reason that the best information is the one that has been retweeted the most:

Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.

labnol.org min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5

If you are brand manager trying to find out the most viral tweets generated for an event or a content, the min_retweets and min_faves search operators may save you several hours. You can also archive tweets to a Google Spreadsheet automatically.

A Twitter Search Trick You Didn’t Know About – Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration (25 July 2014)

The full article explains that you can do this most easily on Tweetdeck, the twitter client that includes a feature specifically for this, but the trick works everywhere with a bit of effort.

Hat tip to Lifehacker for spotting this.

Review: OmniOutliner

Posted by William Gallagher

I am still tickled that the one thing I am currently dragging my feet over is writing a review of the productivity tool OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I use this constantly. I waited a year for that to come out. But still I haver. I did write several thousands words about it but threw them away: I felt it wasn’t a review as much as it was a manual for using it. There are plenty of places that tell you how to use OmniFocus, I need to get my head straight over what I feel I can usefully tell you.

And getting your head straight is what OmniOutliner is for.

The clue is in the name – actually, the two clues are in the name. OmniOutliner is an outliner made by The Omni Group, the same company that does OmniFocus. They make many applications and, truth be told, the only reason I looked at OmniOutliner first was that I adore OmniFocus so much. It also helps that OmniOutliner is affordable where the other products are expensive. Well, the graphics package and the project planning one are cheap for what they do, they’re just expensive if you only want to play with them. I’d play with the trial versions but I know that before long I’d be convincing myself to buy it.

This is what happened with OmniOutliner. I got the trial of version 3 and before the end of the day had bought it. Before the end of the week there was a beta release of version 4 and I switched to that. Fortunately for my wallet, when version 4 came out officially, I was able to get it for free because I’d bought 3 so recently.

I am going to rave about OmniOutliner, I think there’s little chance you hadn’t twigged that yet, but it isn’t an unqualified hymn of praise and I think I am a very low-level user of it. I now use it extensively but, for instance, there are close to myriad options for doing outlines that look pretty. I don’t mean that dismissively: there are design tools that make outlines clear and easy to read even when they are swamped with information. I’ve had a play but I keep coming back to the plain and basic outline.

It’s just that I keep coming back to it for so much. I used to be a determined explorer, always writing to see where the writing would take me. I write Doctor Who radio dramas, though, and those require a treatment outline before you get the gig. And I wrote a 170,000-word book about Blake’s 7 which was the biggest single project I’d ever done and it needed support. I needed support. Then I had a project that required me to deliver ideas to a company. When I agreed to that I thought it would be a doddle but their definition of an idea was 1,200 words of fully worked out story. To do it and to hit the deadlines, I found I was slapping down a thought in OmniOutliner and then seeing how I could expand it. If the story had this, what would come after it? What do I need to get us to that moment? The story would grow from a thematic idea, a one- or two-liner thought into a detailed beat sheet that I would then follow as I wrote up the idea.

That’s the bit I’ve always loathed: having such a detailed plan makes me feel as if I’m not writing, I’m typing. The story is told, so far as I’m concerned. But in that case I fashioned stories faster, I groped toward them quicker. And then there was longform prose in Blake, I think I got into the habit of going to OmniOutliner.

The day I realised I had a problem, though, was when I turned to it on a domestic project. Not writing, just something I needed to do. Usually I’d have done that in OmniFocus but I needed to think through the steps and I found myself writing it in OmniOutliner.

Then in the last 18 months I seem to have grown a new career in public speaking and in producing events. For both of them, I rely on OmniFocus but I get to my task list through this outliner. Truly, my heart is still an explorer yet I can’t deny that outlining is helping me now with many events and I think a giant part of that is down to OmniOutliner. I’ve piddled about with outliners in, say, Microsoft Word, and it’s been a shrug. OmniOutliner has become a pal.

Last week I did a gig in a college, I took over a three-day writing course and it was an interesting combination of their existing course outline and what I could bring to it. The course outline was rather good, I thought, so I didn’t change any of that, I just worked to see what I could do that would fulfil what they needed and what the students wanted. I planned the three days out in OmniOutliner and you should see it. I can’t show you because so much of it is confidential and I’m just always wary of discussing any detail that’s to do with education and students.

But it started as a copy of the main headings and main times from the college’s existing plan. Then I prefixed it with questions for the college staff so naturally it then also included their answers. I have several writing exercises I particularly enjoy so I have those already outlined in other plans so I dropped them into this outline and moved it around. Added more, deleted bits. Made it fit. Then during the three days I wrecked that lot apart, moving things around, splitting things, adding, deleting. And making huge amounts of notes right there in the middle of the outline. About the one thing I didn’t do was record anything but I could’ve done. There is a button for recording audio. It’s right there.

And speaking of being right there, I did most of this on OmniOutliner for iPad as I ran around but I could also check it and change it on OmniOutliner for Mac.

That was flawless: the outline was just there, whichever machine I went to.

But I did get display faults on the iPad. I have a Belkin keyboard case that when you pop up the iPad in just the right way it links to the external keyboard and takes away the usual iPad one. I found several times that as I broke the connection to the keyboard, because I was folding it away to let me walk around, OmniOutliner would get confused. I wouldn’t get the Apple on-screen keyboard the way you would expect but I would get a toolbar across the middle of the screen where it would be if the keyboard had appeared.

I had no way to fix that in OmniOutliner, I would work around it by quitting and relaunching.

But I look at this outline now and it’s got that glorious feel of a book you’ve worked on for a term. It no longer makes any sense to anyone but me, it is crammed with details even I will forget. And those details meant I was able to write up the student feedback very, very quickly: everything I wanted to say about them I had already made notes about right there in the outline.

I was accused tonight of using too many apps and I think my considered response is just you try to take them away from me. OmniOutliner is now in the tool bag, it is part of what I do, part of how I do it. That’s quite rare: OmniFocus has a permanent place there too but I’m a writer and I haven’t settled on one word processor yet. So you don’t get in easily. But then you can’t take these tools away from me easily, hardily or in any way at all.

Here’s The Omni Group’s own video about OmniOutliner 4 for Mac:

Introducing OmniOutliner 4 from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

And here’s the firm’s video for OmniOutliner 2 for iPad:

Introducing OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

You can get OmniOutliner for Mac from the App Store but don’t. Get it directly from The Omni Group instead because that’s how you get major updates for free or cheap. On the official site, OmniOutliner 4 for Mac costs $49.99 US (equivalent to £28.90 UK). There are family and education discounts, see the site for details, but there is also an OmniOutliner Pro 4 for Mac that costs $99 US (£58.33 UK). I have no idea what the difference is with the Pro version but the site explains.

Then you have to get OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from the App Store where it is £20.99 UK or $29.99 US.

The worthy and best way to present

Posted by William Gallagher

What’s it called when a book as one title followed by “Or” and another one? As in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus? This is The Worthy and Best Way to Present or A Longer Term Review of David Sparks’ Presentation Field Guide.

This iBook was released on 21 July and I started reading it immediately. I remember saying on the launch day that:

This book was released sometime overnight, I got it around 8am, I’m maybe a third of the way through the text – I’ve not looked at the many videos yet – and I have a complaint.

He’s so persuasive about preparing your presentation before you ever go near Keynote or PowerPoint that I resent the bejaysis out of him. I have one presentation to give tonight and three tomorrow. I wanted a quick fix! I wanted a magic sauce!

David Sparks’ Presentation book now out – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (21 July 2014)

In the end, I actually gave five over those two days, 21 and 22 July. It’s complicated. But it was also true what I said about how good it made me feel that I was already doing some things Sparks recommends: that’s how persuasive and convincing he is, I read this book and feel that he’s right. Therefore whatever I do that is the same is also right, therefore I am right, therefore I feel good.

And then there’s the stuff he recommends that I don’t do. It was quite hard doing those five presentations with the book’s advice about planning in my head. The book’s very specific advice about how using Keynote is actually the last step, or at least toward the last step, as you should know what you’re going to say through planning and thinking first. The fact that I thought I had three and it became five rather tells you that I didn’t plan or, in my defence, couldn’t plan ahead.

I have not given a single presentation since then. But I have some coming up and I am using Sparks’ advice from this book. That may be the best review I can give it except that I think this leaves you only with the idea that the book is useful. It doesn’t tell you that it’s also fun.

Those five presentations went well but they were hard and they were part of a bigger project I enjoyed yet I’d got at the last moment. Even so, even with trying to plan in the gaps during the first day and then learning I really had to rework everything overnight, I was still going back to this book to read it at points because I was enjoying it.

Actually, as I write this to you, I still haven’t watched the videos or listened to the audio interviews. The book works without them but I’m expecting to find that they’re a good watch and listen too.

The therefore hugely recommended Presentations: a MacSparky Field Guide by David Sparks is available now in the iBooks Store for £5.99 UK, $9.99 US.

The worthy but dull way to present…

Posted by William Gallagher

That’s a harsh headline since I’m really just setting you up for its sequel, The Worthy and Best Way to Present which follows in a thrice. But I was reading this form the Harvard Business Review:

Addressing the individuals concerns of stakeholders in the room will go a long way toward winning you allies. “If the finance person frets about keeping expenses under control, discuss expense numbers,” says [Raymond] Sheen [author of the HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case]. “If you have someone who is interested in growth in Asia, show how your project helps the company grow in the region.” Research past presentations and the outcomes to make sure you have your bases covered. If there are “issues that other projects have had, you should have an answer for those,” says Sheen. You might also consider giving decision makers a preview of your presentation ahead of time, and asking for their input. You can then salt their recommendations into your presentation, which will increase their investment in your success. “When you let people feel like they co-created your content, then they’ll not only support you but then they’ll feel empowered as ambassadors,” says Duarte. “They’ll feel like they’re representing their own idea.”

The Right Way to Present Your Business Case – Carolyn O’Hara, Harvard Business Review (21 July 2014)

And, sorry, O’Hara, but my mind wandered very quickly there.

The whole piece is a bit dry but its advice is solid, if ironic: reach out to people more, communicate more and avoid being a bit dry.

Watch a Community writing lesson

Posted by William Gallagher

In case you don’t know and haven’t heard me rave about it like the late-comer evangelist I am, Community is a US comedy set in an adult education college. It is very funny but it is also so deeply imaginative that I spent the whole second season simply agog.

Now, I do believe that reading the scripts and watching the episodes is an education in writing. I believe that about most scripts: I once read all seven years of Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts in order to see how a successful show finds its feet, matures and ends. That’s 178 one-hour scripts and my conclusion, if you’re interested and have far less time than you imagine this will take, is that most of them were boring puzzles rather than stories.

Whereas I then read all 176 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in script and enjoyed it immensely.

Only a few Community episodes are online but there are some at Lee Thomson’s fabulous site TV Writing here. Unfortunately, none of them are for the episodes I want to talk to you about.

More than talk: there is a Making Of documentary about two of them that is on YouTube now. Before I show you that, though, let me say that the episodes are sequels to the show’s first big hit. That was a season one story about a paintball game gone wrong – honestly, it is one of my favourite television episodes ever and I long to have been the one to write it – and that’s the lesson I want us to focus on.

Not why you should make a sequel to a hit since that’s obvious financially if in no other way. But actually why you shouldn’t. Why the show was told it could never top that original and how it did. Watch the episodes, would you? In fact, just watch the show. Part of the fun of seeing the episode A Fistful of Paintballs and its second part, For a Few Paintballs More, was the anticipation. And the part of the fun of watching was to see how it used the season leading up to it, how it was a true finale instead of a stunt episode.

You can get Community season one on DVD at Amazon UK here and at Amazon USA there.

Now, YouTube. The Making of the Paintball episodes: