Quick productivity tip – don’t search for questions

Posted by William Gallagher

Speaking with someone who is new to computers and especially to Google, it seems people believe the search engine answers questions. What it really does is search. Specifically, if you type a question in to Google it is going to search for anywhere on the web that has that question. The difference between these two can be so small as to be semantics except sometimes it's a huge difference.

If you asked Google “Who is the Prime Minister of the UK?” it would start by looking for pages that had that exact question in – so you're likely to first see lots of people on discussion boards or political websites asking this. Not necessarily answering it, either.

Whereas, if you searched instead for the answer, Google would look for pages that had the answer. Follow: search for the words “The Prime Minister of the UK is…” and you'll get every article that includes this sentence.

It is always better to search for the answer than to unknowingly be searching for the question because it is always more useful and sometimes it is gigantically more likely to get you what you want.

Mind you, be careful. If you start typing something like “The Prime Minister of the UK is….” into Google, it might autocompete your search with some choice words.

Easy and hard ways to break a bad mood

Posted by William Gallagher

If it's someone else in a bad mood, try singing to them.

It was worth a shot.

Lifehacker has ten persuasive suggestions for how to handle things when it's you in the mean reds and I rather like the last one:

Lastly, while it may seem counterintuitive, you may have to spend some time on what's bothering you. If it's something you need to deal with, pushing it down isn't going to help. Instead, think through what's making you mad—whether it's a piece of bad news or something else—and let your brain fully process it. If you do, you can actually lessen the effect it has on you. That isn't to say you should dwell on it all day long, but if it's something you need to work through, you're better off doing it now than letting it fester.P

Top 10 Ways to Beat a Bad Mood – Lifehacker

Do it all wrong. But preferably quickly.

Posted by William Gallagher

Aim big, set goals, focus hard and work long hours. Or, you know, don’t. Creativity Post (via 99U) has advice that goes against the grain but apparently works. Or at least works for the industry figures who’ve each been quoted for this piece about your own business:

We all love to take advice from people who’ve previously been through the same situations as us or who are further along a similar path to us. For entrepreneurs this is particularly useful, since it’s such a difficult, unknown path to tread sometimes. Funnily enough, some of the advice I’ve come across through reading interviews and articles from famous entrepreneurs is often counterintuitive to what I would expect them to say. I thought it would be interesting to gather some of this advice into one place, so here are ten of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I’ve come across from famous entrepreneur.
Creativity Post

I’m leaning toward being sarcastic about this because you can walk away with the certain-sure knowledge that the answer to business success is to take what advice you fancy and do something else anyway. But actually there is a huge amount in here that’s making me think. Some of it’s backing up ideas I’ve had, some of it is challenging assumptions. It’s a good read.

Your career today. Start here

Posted by William Gallagher

Good advice that you'll use, good advice you'll wish you had used: this piece about careers has everything – and a lot of everything. It's definitely a Pocket or Instapaper read-later kinda gig but whether you skim it now or read it properly over the weekend, do take a look:

Having spent over 35 years in business in global firms, I have seen tens of thousands of career trajectories–from the first steps of entry-level millennials to the long journeys of Fortune 500 CEOs.

What I see: Most people have the wrong approach to careers. They think about the immediate next step, not the pathway. They treat a career like a sprint, when in fact it is a 40-plus-year marathon. They are more focused on getting promoted on Tuesday than about having great choices when it really matters–in their 40s and 50s.

I have been thinking about careers for decades and lecturing on the topic for the last dozen years at places like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Columbia, McGill and NYU. Here are some of the things that you might not be thinking about your career, but should be.

Career Rocket Fuel by Brian Fetherstonhaugh

Excess Baggage

Posted by William Gallagher

I once arrived at BBC Television Centre to find that the laptop in my bag had a broken screen. Since then, I've been careful verging on paranoid everywhere I go and I've learnt a lot.

Specifically this: don't carry a laptop.

A few years ago I'd have said that to you very deadpan seriously but of course it would've been a gag. Today, not so much. I've got a day of meetings and I'm at a café having a mug of tea before the first one. (Also a late breakfast bacon sandwich which is reminding me of a friend's advice only last week: always bring a second shirt. Alas.)

The bag in front of me is a Knomo that I bought years ago for carrying my MacBook Pro. It was designed for that: the MacBook fits it incredibly snugly. But I haven't put the MacBook in there in years. Instead, that snug MacBook bag is a roomy iPad one. I have an iPad Air with a Belkin keyboard case and a sleeve that my wife Angela Gallagher designed and made for me. Alongside her sleeve, I keep a Mophie battery charger, a Mu travel plug – it's gorgeous, it folds down flat – plus one Lightning cable and one micro USB cable. Oh, and Apple earbud headphones.

That's it.

That's everything I need today and actually most days. The iPad is a wifi-only model but with my tariff with 3 UK I can tether it to my iPhone without limit. It's been on 4G for months as I was part of 3's 4G beta test and I regularly forget to switch the iPhone's wifi back on. But whether I tether or borrow firms' wifi on my travels, I have everything I need because I use iCloud, Evernote and Dropbox. I used to be able to remote control my office iMac via LogMeIn but that company wants me to pay a greater-than-worth-it-to-me subscription to keep using the service that I bought on the vowed guarantee that its one-off cost would be all I'd ever pay. The fact that they've changed this and, last time I looked, their website still makes the old claim, means I'm not a fan. I'll find an alternative but for the moment, I haven't looked, I've just stopped remote controlling my Macs.

One more thing. Like many bags, this Knomo is buckled to one side. The shoulder strap connects to two hard-wearing metal clasps that are stitched into one side of the bag. I always put the iPad Air into my case with the screen facing toward the side with the clasps. It'll be in its case, it'll be in Angela's sleeve, but that's the direction it faces. So that I always know which way around it is without opening the case. So that I can put that case down and know, can decide, that the delicate screen won't be on the side I just smashed down on there.

Usually I think productivity is about making the most of your time but occasionally it's just about not being bleedin' stupid and slapping your computer equipment around as you travel.

It’s all down to you. Good.

Posted by William Gallagher

I spent today chairing sessions at the Royal Television Society's Birmingham Film and TV Summit and had one big belief of mine reinforced over and over.

It often seems in careers such as media that you have to do everything yourself. You have to put the show on right here. And it's true. If you don't push, nobody else will push you.

I know this to be true but what I believe is that it is good.

For this reason. If something needs to be done and it's down to you, you can and you will do it. If you're waiting for someone else to do it, they may not.

That's it. Not groundbreaking. But take on as much of the job as you can and you will do it.

I sound like a Hallmark Card so I'll shut up now.

Gaming productivity

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve written before about using a mad-dash hour to get over problems. If you’re feeling low – like I have a cold coming on at the moment – or you’re just overwhelmed, agree with yourself that you’re going to spend an hour working. Just an hour.

And then list ten things that you want to get done in that time. That’s what I wrote about in New Hour’s Resolutions – Not Year’s, Hour’s (2 January 2014) and that’s what I did:

Consider this a live post: as I write to you now it is coming up to the top of the hour and from that hour I am going to do ten things. I can’t tell you what they are because they’re specific and they involve other people who don’t know you and I are talking like this. But I took a shower, decided on this overall idea of ten things in the next hour and realised that if I do it, I’ll feel I’ve got somewhere today. And usually that’s all I need to keep getting somewhere each day.

I wrote down a list of eight things immediately. Had to check my OmniFocus To Do list for the other two and got a bit bogged down because there was so much to choose from. But the point of ten is that it’s not easy but it is achievable. Whatever you’re working on, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that there are ten really fast things you could do right now if you put your mind to it.

And I bet at least one of those is something you don’t want to do.

It’s getting on for three months later and I haven’t had need to do that hour again – until today. Today my head is just tilting into a cold and, moreover, for some reason I have things on my list that I kept putting off. I truly don’t know why: it was just an email I had to send someone. I think maybe part of it was that I couldn’t remember why I and to email them. I’d written the task in OmniFocus as “Email XXX about the YYY event” but honestly went blank on what that YYY event was. At least, blank on enough detail that I could coherently tell the fella about it.

Thirty-one minutes ago, I started a mad-dash hour with ten new things including that email. I made that email the third thing on the list after two other items I wasn’t especially looking forward to but would at least be quick. And when you start quickly, I’ve learnt that writing down the time you did it next to the item really motivates you to bound on to the next. Where I am guilty of thinking I’ll just make a mug of tea now, for this hour with that list and those times, I don’t.

I’m writing to you because even as I drew up the list, I knew this felt different to last time. I was seeding the list with things I didn’t want to do and – this is the killer difference: I am hiding the list from myself.

I wrote it in Evernote and hit return a few times so that the list vanished off the top of my screen. So now the sequence is: 1) Race to the top of the document, see the next thing, 2) race to the bottom, make a note of it or anything I need to write to get it done, 3) get it done, 4) note down the time next to it. Rinse, repeat.

I put writing to you as the fifth of the ten things so that I could know how it was going this hour, so that I also had something to look forward to if I’m honest with you, and also because it’s not a quick and easy thing, writing to you. I have to think about: I don’t want to take your time up with rubbish. (Usually.) So this was fun but substantive.

And because it’s taking more than the average 7.5 minutes that the preceding four tasks took me, I find that my list was written long enough ago and referred to long enough ago that I truly can’t remember what item six is.

But I’m about to find out.

RTFM*

Posted by William Gallagher

I use OmniFocus 2 for iPhone every day. Close to every hour. And still I’ve just learnt some things I didn’t know – because the Omni Group has posted a short manual to the iBooks Store here.

Mac software tends to work the way you expect it to, so I don’t often look further than what I can figure out as I go. But I should know better because I used to write some of these manuals. Not all that many and so long ago that I can still remember how gorgeous bromide proof pages looked – and how rubbish final printed manuals looked in comparison. But simplicity is a very hard-won feature in software and if you lean on something a lot, it’s worth seeing what else is hidden behind the simple surface.

Consequently I’m now also reading the Omni Group’s OmniOutliner manual on the iBooks Store.

*This used to be a very familiar term when I was briefly a technical author: Read the Fucking Manual.

Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m a very visual kind of man but, awkwardly, what I visualise is text. I can see words. If you and I are talking, I can choose to see your words as text. Squint a bit and there it is, word by word, white text on a black background, right in front of my eyes. It’s great for transcriptions. But text is so much a par of me and I am so much a writer through and through that I have ignored other visual ways of looking at detail. Okay, maybe I can see scenes visually when I’m reading or writing a script, but when faced with a problem, I used to always just think it through. More recently, I’ve written it down and thought it through.

But then last week, I had a meeting that was intentionally nebulous. It was clearly a chance to pitch something, but I didn’t know what and I was fairly sure that there were no specifics behind the invitation either. It would be up to me and what I could bring to the meeting.

And I mind-mapped it.

Slapped down everything I could think of that even considered crossing my mind in the week before the meeting. I used MindNode for iPad (£6.99 UK, $9.99 US) so it was with me wherever I went and by the morning of the meeting, I had a completely useless mess. But it was a big mess. Lots of things on it. And I started dragging bits around. This stuff sorta, kinda belonged with those bits over there. This one was daft. That one was actually part of my shopping list and I’d just put it in the wrong app.

And then I’d find one that ignited another small idea so I’d add that.

After a bit of adding and subtracting and moving around, I had three or four solid blocks of ideas that were related. I exported the lot from MindNode to OmniOutliner for iPad (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US) which picked it all up and showed it to me as a hierarchy of text lines instead of a visual bubble of blogs. I work better with text, I may have mentioned this, so that was perfect for me.

Nearly perfect. I really wanted to then hand the lot on from OmniOutliner to OmniFocus, my To Do manager, (iPad £27.99 UK, $39.99 US). I wanted to be able to tick off the ideas as I got through them in the meeting. I wasn’t able to do that on the iPad; I suspect that it’s something that needs me to use OmniOutliner on my Mac (from £34.99 UK, from $49.99 US). I’ve got that and I use it ever increasingly more, but I wasn’t at my office.

So instead I stayed with the text in OmniOutliner. Made some more changes and additions, moved some more things around. And then I worked from that list in the meeting and it went really, really well.

The whole process went well: the mind mapping on to the meeting itself. Enough so that afterwards I tried mind mapping again, this time to figure out what I’m doing with everything, not just this one meeting. I’m still working on it. But it’s proving useful. And while I can’t show you the meeting mind map as it’s naturally confidential, and I obviously can’t show you this new mind map of everything because it’s in progress, I can show you a blurry version. This is what I’m doing now:

Beat the afternoon slump

Posted by William Gallagher

This is a big thing with me: I write from 5am weekdays and come 3pm or so I am starting to feel a bit tired. Feeble, really, but there you go. I’m being honest. And now I’m being hopeful too, because:

There are many reasons for feeling the mid-afternoon dip. According to a study by Gallup, 40% of Americans don’t get enough sleep. Getting enough sleep is a cornerstone habit that has many positive effects, mental and physical performance improvements among them. If you’re notgetting enough sleep, your brain is not functioning optimally.

Research also points to our circadian rhythms as a cause of mid-afternoon tiredness. Ourmental performance ebbs and flows throughout the day:

What you ate at lunch also has an effect. Food coma is a real phenomenon, and when you eat crap, you’ll probably feel like crap. You could also just be drained after a full morning of tough meetings and debates with your team. Willpower is a finite resource; we all start with a certain amount every day, and it diminishes with every decision or choice we make.

Whatever the reason for your lack of afternoon focus, let’s look at some research-backed lifehacks to help break out of the daily slump and finish your day strong.

Why We Procrastinate the Afternoon (and How to Stop) – Lifehacker

So there’s some research about it, which means we’re not alone. And then there are some solutions, which mean you’ve stopped reading and are already gone to Lifehacker. See you there.