Productivity

Productivity

Lifehacker: 10 Unusual Ways to make your To Do List Work

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Unless the first way is to hire someone else to do the other nine, I’m suspicious. But Lifehacker’s Melanie Pinola writes persuasively about methods of getting stuff down onto a list and then doing it. I don’t agree with them all but it’d be boring if I did. Here’s one unfair sample from her ten ways: she doesn’t claim it’s the best and I don’t think it’s representative of the rest but I just liked it as a dramatist:

Turn Your To-Do List into a Story

Visualise and map out your to-dos into a story, a narrative for your day. This storytelling technique can not only help motivate you to complete the tasks, it could boost your memory and help you make better sense of your days. There are other ways to visualise your to-do list that can prompt you to act more.

Top 10 Unusual Ways to Make Your To-Do List Actually Doable – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (22 Jun 2015).

Read the full piece.

Enough with introvert vs extrovert

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Shyness and being outgoing don’t have anything to do with it; it’s more about where we get our energy from. In fact, the differences are pretty simple:

Introverts get exhausted by social interaction and need solitude to recharge.
Extroverts get anxious when left alone and get energy from social interaction.
That’s it. There’s nothing about shyness, being a homebody, or how adventurous you are. Both types can be social, both can creative, both can be leaders, and so on.

Let’s Quit It with the Introvert/Extrovert Nonsense – Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker UK (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Evolving mentoring

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Let’s see. Most recently I’ve mentored teenagers looking seriously at journalism, I’ve worked with a novelist on fitting her writing in around a demanding day job, tomorrow I’m mentoring a fella exclusively on the use of OmniFocus.

That’s unusual: only twice now have I been hired to mentor someone solely on one application they wanted to use – hang on, that’s a thought, both times it’s been OmniFocus – but it’s interesting because the software is the same yet their needs are not.

What I do particularly like, though, is stepping away from software and getting in to what you do and how you do it and how we can make it better and easier for you. Most importantly; how exactly we can get you more time to do what you need to do.

That’s my Blank Screen mentoring service and I’m conscious that I haven’t mentioned it for some months while I’ve been booked up. I’m still a bit booked up but I’m also dying to know what you’re up to so if you think I can be a help, let me know.

And take a look at my site’s mentoring page for details.

Using Safari because it’s there

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Safari is the default web browser on Macs and some people hate it. That’s fine, off you pop to Firefox or Chrome – and actually, I go to those two when I need something Safari doesn’t do.

Yet for us what matters the most in Safari is that we don’t think about it much: we’re more focused on the websites we’re reading than the tool we’re using to read them. Safari gets out of the way for us and we like that.

So we like Safari, some of us are sick of Firefox’s incessant updates and Chrome may be fast but it needs to be because you get less time before your battery is dead. Yet still it is true: we live with Safari and we have flings with Firefox and Chrome.

Living With: Safari – William Gallagher, MacNN (24 June 2015)

I wrote that as part of a longer feature on MacNN and it’s proved surprisingly, unexpectedly popular. The fashion today is to use Chrome, the fashion yesterday was Firefox, but I just get on with what I’m doing. Read the full piece.

So switch email off, what’s the problem?

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You get too much email and – more importantly – you react to it too quickly. Even if you’re the sort with self-control enough to not reply to someone until you’ve given their question proper consideration and maybe looked up if it’s one g or two in ‘bugger off’, you still react too quickly. You react to the bleep.

So stop the bleep.

Of course you want to know what’s going on and of course you want to be responsive. But it’s rarely significant to the other person whether you replied in an hour or a picosecond and it is always significant to you. Reply to emails at the top of the next hour and you’ve just got yourself something like 59 minutes uninterrupted working.

Except of course it is interrupted. It’s interrupted by the bleep or the red flag or whatever your system has.

But your system has an off switch. So switch it off.

On iPhones, for instance, just go into Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then click on Fetch New Data.

It will be set to Push but turn that off and then make sure everything is set to Fetch. Beneath that there’s a definition of what fetch means plus how often it will do it.

email off iPhone

Mine’s set to check for new emails every 15 minutes there but I will regularly change that to Hourly. It’s a shame you have to dig down all these levels to it, but once you know it’s there, you’re away.

I have no idea why my iPhone has a holiday calendar, by the way. I just schlepped through a storm trying to get Google Calendar to play nice and when it finally did, I had a holiday calendar on there. I’m leaving it well alone.

Caring for your partner with technology

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Over on MacNN.com there is a quietly remarkable article about using and being required to use technology when caring for someone. In the last few days, Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele’s wife had a stroke. Naturally you know where he is now both physically – constantly in hospital with her – and emotionally. During these especially hard first days, he’s finding that technology and particularly iPads are a recurring feature. Reading his piece, you feel that sometimes this is aggravating as it’s another form on another iPad but other times that it’s a help, that these devices and others are helping the recovery process.

It’s a fascinatingly personal article despite his efforts to avoid being personal at all: he doesn’t name his wife, he doesn’t say which hospital they’re in. He’s written it and will be back writing more specifically to bring some attention to medical aid and hopefully let others know what is available and what it all achieves. His article does exactly that but read it to see how a partner and a carer’s pain trembles just under the surface.

Read Technology in Recovery: Out of the ER, into the fire on MacNN.

The best time of day to do anything productive

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Fast Company doesn’t share all its working out but its article by Stephanie Vozza has specific advice on when best to get things done, particularly when you’ve got to work with other people. Two examples:

If you want to get a reply to your email, consider sending it early in the morning, between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Reply rates are highest in the morning—about 45%—according to the Yesware study.

Fewer emails are sent during these time slots, lowering competition. The study also found all weekdays to be equal. So don’t worry about the day; focus on the morning, instead.

Monday-morning meetings are a staple at many companies, but if participation is low, there’s a reason why. Only one in three employees is likely to attend, according to a study by the online scheduling service WhenIsGood.net: “If you have a meeting at 9 a.m., employees will need to prepare the day before, or turn up underprepared,” research coordinator Keith Harris told Inc.. If they’re not prepared, they won’t come up.

Get more participation by holding meetings at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, the company found. Tuesday afternoon stands out “because that is the furthest you can get from the deadlines at the end of the week without bumping into the missed deadlines from the week before,” said Harris.

The Best Time Of Day To Do Everything At Work – Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company (23 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Working in and on your business

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There’s a difference. I’m a freelance writer but over the last few years that’s meant more than sitting at my desk from 5am to 5pm typing. I’m out of my office a lot, I’m running workshops and giving talks, I have books that I’m publishing, I have lots of what are officially not writing jobs but they are to me. It’s all the one thing in my head, all the one writing and communicating thing that I enjoy so much, but it doesn’t look like one thing from outside. And I’ve been getting advice about this.

So far the conclusion-in-progress is that I’m either spinning a lot of plates or working with a 1,000-piece jigsaw, but whichever it is, I was given one piece of advice about it all that chimed with me:

Each day you spend in your business is a day you’re not spending on it

Follow. If I go into a school for myself or the Writers’ Guild or the Royal Television Society, that’s work and that’s great, but it is a complete day. I can’t do anything else in those working hours. That’s fine, that’s what I’m doing, that’s what I’m here for, that’s why I’m a freelance, but freelancers also take every day’s work they can. It’s what we’re like.

And if every day is taken up like this, you are spending no time planning for the future or managing your business. The person who gave me this advice also pointed out that the fee you get from going into a school is money today, not money tomorrow.

I find it hard focusing on the cash instead of the work or even – I’m going to say it, you can’t stop me – the art of what I do. But without cash, I don’t get to continue doing this. I need to be planning ahead, I need to be setting aside some time to work on my business.

So you know what I’m thinking now, don’t you? So should you.

Video: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Not Exactly

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Not everyone has a passion for something, not everyone has found what they could be so passionate about. But even if you have, this fella argues that you shouldn’t pursue it as your life’s career. Rather than look for the thing that fires you up the most, look for the thing that you’re best at. That either sounds like defeatism or hair-splitting but I suppose if you’re great at something and you do it for a living and it goes well, you can fake the passion.

Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz – it’s a venture capital firm and you know what crazy creative bastards venture capitalists are – just gave a commencement speech at his old university and boiled this idea down.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder and partner of famed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, delivered the commencement address at his alma mater Columbia University last month and offered up some pretty unconventional career advice. The gist: don’t follow your passion. 

Via 99U