Productivity

Productivity

Own goals

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This may just be a different way of saying that small moves work, that consistently doing a little builds up to a lot. It’s definitely reminiscent of the notion that writing a few words a day gets you a book in the end. But James Clear puts it this way: bollocks to setting goals, concentrate on your day to day systems for getting things done.

Okay, he didn’t say bollocks. Normally I’d now show you what he did say and point you at his website but I find his site a bit annoying: it’s very full-on selling and despite having a lead to this particular article, I couldn’t find this particular article.

So instead, let me show you this quote from Clear as used on a site that found it useful:

If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your systems, would you still get results?

For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

For example, I just added up the total word count for the articles I’ve written this year. In the past 12 months, I’ve written more than 115,000 words. The typical book is about 50,000 to 60,000 words, so this year I’ve written enough to fill two books.

That’s a huge a surprise, since I never set a goal for my writing. I didn’t measure my progress in relation to a benchmark. I never set a word-count goal for any particular article. I never said, “I want to write two books this year.”

What I did focus on was writing one article every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that schedule for 11 months, the result was 115,000 words. I focused on my system and the process of doing the work, and in the end enjoyed the same (or perhaps better) results.

An Almost Foolproof Way to Achieve Every Goal You Set – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (5 February 2014)

Read the full piece and try not to think he’s a wimp for only writing 115,000 words in an entire year.

OmniFocus: save everything to it

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ofWhat do I mean by everything? EVERYTHING.

If it’s something you have to do, if it’s something you want to do, if it’s something that might turn into something that has to be done by somebody, save it in OmniFocus and worry about it later. Get it into OmniFocus’s inbox and get it out of your head.

When you get time, go through that inbox and have a think. You’ll find that you delete a lot, you mark many others as done, and the rest you have a proper ponder about. Slot this task into that project, add a date or don’t – preferably don’t – and do what’s called processing everything. When it’s all slotted away and your inbox is clear, everything is off your mind and it’s all in your one OmniFocus system.

This came up in a mentoring session I did earlier this week that, unusually, was dedicated solely to the use of OmniFocus. It was for a fella whose workload made me go pale and who has been handling it all on paper. Now he’s taken to OmniFocus like an evangelist in the making, but I think he has one issue left.

What I’ve said to him is that if he gets into the habit of saving everything to OmniFocus, he will come to know that everything is in there. No more wondering if there’s another list in another notebook. I’m lighter for knowing where I am with everything, even if right now I’m under the cosh with too much to do.

The thing for this fella is that he will have to work to make the habit of saving everything to OmniFocus and especially so because he uses a PC. There’s no OmniFocus for PC. Here on a Mac, even as I write to you, I can tap a couple of keys and add a task in to OmniFocus 2 for OS X while it crosses my mind, but he will in theory have to stop working and get out his iPad.

I’m advising him to instead use email a lot. I’ve already shown him how when somebody emails you with something you’ve got to do, you can forward it on to OmniFocus and it will land in your inbox. The subject of the message will be the name of the task and the content of the email will be in the task’s notes.

But you can also just email OmniFocus yourself. Got a stray thought? Email it in to OmniFocus.

It’s not the same as having the To Do app in front of you all day, every day, but that’s not a bad thing. Get used to checking it regularly and get very used to saving everything to OmniFocus and you can then spend the rest of your time actually working on all these things you’ve got to do.

Give less of a damn, sometimes

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This is hard to hear but writer Kelly O’Laughlin has a point. In her blog Quiet Revolution, she recounts how a pal was overwhelmed at work, overwhelmed to the point where she was thinking of leaving.

For people like me and my close-to-quitting friend, the concept of giving anything less than our best doesn’t cross our minds. It simply isn’t an option. We set high standards for ourselves and are disappointed and frustrated when we can’t always achieve those standards. It’s that impending anxiety of failure that caused my friend to believe: “If I can’t do my job well, I don’t want to do it at all.”

But the brutal, honest truth is that many bosses don’t notice who is giving 100% and who is doing the minimum to get by. If you relate to this story so far, I’m willing to bet that your 80% of effort is most people’s 100%. So, by caring less, you’re actually caring just enough.

It’s great to want to be helpful and make a difference at work, but you have to take care of yourself first. You aren’t helping anyone if you burn out and quit. Putting in slightly less effort in times of high stress doesn’t mean you don’t care about your job; it means you care about yourself more.

Want to Be Happy at Work? Care Less About It – Kelly O’Laughlin, Quiet Revolution (undated, probably 16 June 2015)

I truly don’t know what to think about this. Have a read of the full piece and see what you think, would you?

Apple Music is good

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As I write this to you, it’s about 5am and I realise I’m not in the mood to listen to any music. More often, though, if I’m here working away on my own and most especially when I have to really concentrate on the job, I will be playing music – and now I think that means I will be playing Apple Music.

Certainly for the next three months while it’s free, anyway.

Apple Music is like Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and many other services: you can listen to just about any music you like, just about whenever you like. Streaming music should be a familiar concept to me because that’s surely what radio has always been yet somehow I find it hard to get used to the idea. I’m so used to buying music, whether that is on vinyl, CD or download, there is the choosing and the buying and the playing.

Now there’s really just the playing as you don’t buy an album per se and I think you don’t choose in quite the same way. You explore, you sample, you don’t think about whether to invest some cash in this artist or that album.

I’ve liked the idea enough that I got a free Spotify account to try it all out and for over a year I’ve been playing it a lot in the car. Only, Spotify defaults to trying to recommend music to you and I always disliked or even loathed its choices. They made me feel very old and I don’t need any help feeling very old.

Spotify stops recommending stuff if you create a big enough playlist of favourite choices. I created such a playlist: 50 or so tracks that I like a lot. Only, I’ve ended up playing just those 50 over and over. I’m not unhappy: sometimes it’s perfect, sometimes it’s not.

It’s not as if I play the same 50 in the same order: unless you pay for a Spotify account, you can only play things on shuffle. It did just feel that some days Spotify got my mood exactly right and other days it didn’t.

You also get ads on Spotify every three songs or so. I got very used to those and, I don’t know, maybe I got close to paying for an account. That would remove the ads, that would allow me to play the song I wanted when I wanted, it would let me play an album in sequence.

I’ll never know how close I came, not now. For if I do end up paying for a streaming music service, it will not be Spotify. Not any more. It will be Apple Music.

I’m just trying to define why. Writing for MacNN.com about it, I concluded that I and we like it a lot:

We’d say love, but come on, the paint’s still wet, let’s take this affair a little slow for a time: we’ve got three months of dating before we have to make a commitment.

Hands On: Apple Music (iOS, OS X, Windows) – William Gallagher, MacNN (30 June 2015)

Read the full piece for more specifics about how it works and what’s good but after a night’s reflection, I think it comes down to two things that will help me while I work.

I think.

There’s the way I could just leave it running playing fairly random tracks but generally ones I like or am going to like: you give it some nudges about what you’re into as you set it up and it seems to do rather well with that information. That’s good.

But there is no question: the ability to just say aloud “Hey, Siri, play ‘Life is a Celebration’ by the Kids from Fame” and have it do that, that is startlingly great. Siri doesn’t work on Macs, which is going to be an issue as that’s where I spend most of my day, but using it via my iPhone and iPad for one day, I’ve become addicted to this feature.

They used to do this on Star Trek: “Computer, play some Bix Beiderbecke”. And it’s here.

My iMac returns home later today from having a repair done: when it’s here and I’ve updated iTunes, I’m going to see if I can use Siri to control it via my Apple Watch. My entire working day may change if it works.

NOTE: To play Apple Music, you need iTunes on your Mac or Windows PC, or an iPhone or iPad. Android stuff coming later.

The Habits of Annoyingly Strong-Willed Bastards

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Okay, that’s a harsh headline. Have a read of the much more softly-worded 5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower over on Inc.com but I tell you, the first one is probably the best:

Eliminate as many choices as possible. We all have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self-control.

The more choices we make during the day, the harder each one is on our brain–and the more we start to look for shortcuts. (Call it the “Oh, screw it,” syndrome.) Then we get impulsive. Then we get reckless. Then we make decisions we know we shouldn’t make, but it’s as if we can’t help ourselves.

In fact, we can’t help ourselves: We’ve run out of the mental energy we need to make smart choices.

That’s why the fewer choices we have to make, the smarter choices we can make when we do need to make a decision.

Say you want to drink more water and less soda. Easy. Keep three water bottles on your desk at all times. Then you won’t need to go to the refrigerator and need to make a choice.

Or say you struggle to keep from constantly checking your email. Easy. Turn off all your alerts. Or shut down your email and open it only once an hour. Or take your mail program off your desktop and keep it on a laptop across the room. Make it hard to check–then you’re more likely not to.

5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (undated)

Read the full piece.

Bollocks to maybe, it’s no or it’s hell, yes

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Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: if I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

No more yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no – Derek Sivers blog (28 August 2009)

Read the full piece. It’s from six years ago so it’d be interesting if I could find whether he stuck to it but Lifehacker just spotted this today and has some thoughts on the topic.

Tea breaks

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I take a lot of these tea breaks and I’ve been spending those three-minute aeons while the kettle boils by reading RSS news. But then isn’t a good tea break more than three minutes plus fifteen seconds hunting for biscuits? I’m trying a new thing now where I do come back to my desk and I do drink the tea as usual, but hey, I kick back for a spell while I’m doing it.

And I check out my OmniFocus list for short, quick things I can do before I have to concentrate on the next big job.

That’s it. Take your full tea break, get your mind fully away from the current job, but use the time to meander through your list and seeing what you can bat out of the way quickly.

Just an idea.

The two skills that mean the most for everyone

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They also mean the most to everyone, as in to everyone you ever work with. Over on TIME magazine, Auren Hoffman, CEO of LiveRamp says what these two are though if anything, I’d say it’s just the first one that matters the most. Or the first one that makes the biggest impact.

If you consistently do what you say you will do, you will almost certainly be someone people desire to have on their teams. It is so rare that when you work with someone who is reliable, you never ever want to work with anyone else. You will do anything to keep that person on your team.

Doing what you say you are going to do starts with setting the right expectations. If you tell someone you will get them the deliverable by Tuesday, you need to understand that it can actually be delivered by Tuesday. If you are good, you are probably factoring in slack in case someone in corporate slows you down or your child gets sick.

These Are the Most Underrated Skills That Many People Lack – Auren Hoffman, TIME (27 June 2015

The second one is about keeping track of yourself which I take to mean doing what you need to to do in order to make this first skill work. Read the full piece.

Un-send an email if you’re quick and on Gmail

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It’s not quite what it looks like, but if you’re a Gmail user and you switch this feature on, you can now have between 10 and 30 seconds to change your mind about sending an email.

Around the web this is being touted as a way to stop the hellstorm of an ill-thought, kneejerk angry email you sent in a fury. I think more practically it’s going to be to save you some of the times you forget to add the attachment you meant.

Here’s what Google says:

Previously a popular feature in Gmail Labs, and recently added to Inbox by Gmail, today we’re adding ‘Undo Send’ as a formal setting in Gmail on the web.

‘Undo Send’ allows people using Gmail to cancel a sent mail if they have second thoughts immediately after sending. The feature is turned off by default for those not currently using the Labs version, and can be enabled from the General tab in Gmail settings.

Google Apps update alerts: Undo Send for Gmail on the web (22 June 2015)

It isn’t really an undo. It’s a not-do-so-quickly. What happens is that the email just doesn’t go when it says it does, it waits in a little limbo for a moment. That’s why you can have a brief time to ‘unsend’ it but you can’t, for instance, undo the bitter message you sent yesterday to your ex.

This also isn’t new. It’s a feature in other email services but Gmail is definitely the biggest one and it’s so big that you can bet money both Microsoft with Outlook and Apple with Mail will surely introduce it soon.

Read the full piece for a bit more detail.

Pixar’s method for staying creative

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Don’t read this article, read this book instead: Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull. He’s one of the founders of Pixar and while the book is laden with Paxarian references and anecdotes, it’s a startlingly absorbing read about all creativity and specifically about how to keep it going.

However, I’ve had this book on my reading list for ages and even though I’ve enjoyed the start so much that I’ve recommended it before, it was only when The Creativity Post summarised it lately that I got it out again.

I don’t honestly think that Creativity Post adds anything to the topic but I’m not doing much better here. So take a look their full piece but, seriously, go buy the book.