advice

My perfect holiday: working away

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Now this is what we want. Stuff working smarter – Never Mind the Quantity (27 February, 2014) – just take holidays where you bring your work with you. Bliss.

Everybody is used to taking a vacation from work, but what about taking a vacation to work? That’s exactly what one company is offering their employees: They’ll give you $2,000 to go anywhere you want, and work like you’re in the office…

Citing the “dreary” winter conditions across most of the country, the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has come up with a new program for its hard-working attorneys. It will give attorneys $2,000 to go “anywhere in the world” with a group of their colleagues for a week. During that week, they’re expected to work just as hard as they would be if they were at the office. But they can be working from a swim-up bar in Grand Cayman, or a beach in Phuket if they like.

Sure You Can Take A Vacation — As Long As You Continue To Work – ATLredline

Hat tip to Lifehacker for finding this.

It’s the journey, not the finishing line

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I think I’ll probably always listen to what an astronaut says but this comment is particularly good. Chris Hadfield:

If you view crossing the finish line as the measure of your life, you’re setting yourself up for a personal disaster. There are very very very few people who win gold at the Olympics. And if you say, ‘if I don’t win gold then I’m a failure or I’ve let somebody down or something,’ .. What if you win a silver? What if you win a bronze? What if you come fourth? What if your binding comes apart? … What if all of those millions of things that happen in life happen. … Only a few people that go there are going to win gold. And it’s the same in some degree I think in commanding a spaceship or doing a spacewalk it is a very rare, singular moment-in-time event in the continuum of life. And you need to honour the highs and the peaks in the moments — you need to prepare your life for them — but recognize the fact that the preparation for those moments is your life and, in fact, that’s the richness of your life. … The challenge that we set for each other, and the way that we shape ourselves to rise to that challenge, is life.

Don’t Aim for the Finishing Line – Farnam Street

Read the whole piece to also see a video of Hadfield saying it.

This rather fits in with both the idea that it takes time to grow a business – The 1,000 Day Rule (28 February, 2014) – and that maybe we shouldn’t focus so much on goals – Don’t Plan So Much (27 February). It’s also true of drama: if the only interesting thing about a story is the ending, like discovering whodunnit at the end of a thriller, then it’s not drama. It’s more a puzzle.

And if I were to go all Hallmark-Card-like about it, I’d say that the ending is one day and the journey is a lifetime, we should enjoy the lifetime. I can’t believe I just said that.

The 1,000 day rule

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You know the idea that if you just work on something for 10,000 hours you will be great at it. Please check back with me in hour 9,999 and we’ll talk again. I’m less cynical about the number 1,000 and specifically an idea that it takes a thousand days to make your business work.

Any number is bollocks, really, so if you are on day 1 or day 999 and things don’t look like they’re on track, I wouldn’t lose sleep. But this is one of those ideas where the point of the number is not to plant a stick in the ground and say this is the finishing line. It’s to say that the finishing line is way over there, it isn’t on your first day or at the end of your first month.

Dan from TropicalMBA claims:

I was chatting with my friend David from Greenback Tax Services the other day about these misconceptions. I said: “people don’t understand they need to be poor for 1000 days.” Our basic hypothesis: you’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1000 days after you start your muse business. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times. For many of us it’s been almost exactly those 1000 days it took for us to get back to the level of income we enjoyed in our corporate days.

The 1,000 Day Rule: What Living the Dream Really Looks Like

He then goes on to outline what many of those 1,000 days looks like on the way.

Location, Location, Location

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Last May I was writing a huge book about Blake’s 7 plus a two-hour Doctor Who radio drama and a short one-act stage play for the Birmingham Rep. As you do. That’s actually the little cauldron I was in when I thought of The Blank Screen and so started writing that book at the same time. You can of course argue about the quality of my work – Doctor Who: Scavenger comes out next month so you can even hear it for yourself – and I did use half a dozen productivity tools to handle it all. But one that really helped was that I moved around.

I wrote Blake’s 7 in my office on a 27in iMac. I wrote the Doctor Who on my MacBook Pro, mostly in my living room. And then while this wasn’t as hard-and-fast, I did write at least some of the play on my iPad in the kitchen.

It got so I associated certain rooms and machines with certain projects. The Blank Screen is definitely an iPad book: I wrote that going everywhere, starting with the first thousand words on a bus ride to go see my mother. But Blake’s 7 is definitely an iMac: I say this to you and I can see it. My Word document open here, an episode of the show there or audio from an interview or a scanned document from the BBC Written Archives there.

I don’t think I ever told any of my editors or producers this, but in my head if I had to call them about something, I would first go to the room and the machine that I associated with that.

This was entirely a contrivance. The complete text and all notes for all of these projects were always on all of these machines at the same time. I could and when necessary did start a sentence of one book on one machine and finish it on another.

And at every place I also read RSS news. So I don’t know why it’s taken me ten months to find out that other people benefit from this madness too. ImpossibleHQ calls it Workstation Popcorn. Meh. But the ideas in their article about it fit what worked for me and they go further. Literally. This bunch recommends dividing your day’s tasks into groups and then physically moving to different locations between each set:

Once you finish all the tasks in group #1, get up and move. Close your tabs, pack your bags, and physically move your butt to your next spot. If you can, walk or bike to your next stop. Avoid driving if you can. The physical activity is important.

Workstation Popcorn – ImpossibleHQ

Hmm. I’m a writer, we’re supposed to be sedentary. But biking advice aside, there’s a lot to like in this piece and quite a bit to think about. Also a lot to wade through, but have a good go.

Never mind the quantity – why working smarter is better than harder

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This hits me in the stomach: I am so used to working all the time, constantly working. I cope better with rejection than I do with relaxation. But the more I’ve had to do as my career has grown and as I’ve started thinking about the productivity tools I’ve developed or that I’ve gleefully stolen, I’m changing. I work fewer hours now but I get more done and while I’m still figuring this out, it’s already clear that a lot of is down to how effectively I work.

Whenever I have something on my mind, I seem to find it everywhere in front of me too. So I’m not surprised that I was drawn across the space and time of the internet to the 99U site where they in their turn had found The Creativity Post. That’s a site that offers advice on this very issue. Specifically, it lists 21 tips to ensure you’re working smarter, not harder.

I loathe list journalism and I’ll give you why:

1) It’s easy and empty to just pick a number and write to it

b) It’s a kind of click bait where what they could say in one paragraph is split across pages just to get you to click

iii) I can’t think of a third thing and often enough, neither can any list journalist. But it doesn’t stop them.

In this case, I think we can make a ready exception because that number 21 feels calculated rather than a stab in the dark. And because this is all on one page. And because I think the The Creative Post comments make a lot of sense. Here’s one , for instance:

9. Delineate a time limit in which to complete task.

Instead of just sitting down to work on a project and thinking, “I’m going to be here until this is done,” try thinking, “I’m going to work on this for three hours”. The time constraint will push you to focus and be more efficient, even if you end up having to go back and add a bit more later.

Work Smarter Not Harder – The Creativity Post

Obviously I recommend you read the lot. And I’m also exploring The Creativity Post in general now. But let us also tip a hat to 99U for finding it for me.

 

 

Don’t plan so much

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This could be a sister post to one on how you shouldn’t spend so much time analysing, you should just write now and revise after: Use the Force – and Edit Later (27 February 2014). There is an argument that when we plan too much, too specifically, that we are also limiting ourselves. It’s fine and even good to have goals, but lighten up.

…of all the disappointments in life, there is hardly a kind more hazardous to happiness and more toxic to the soul than disappointing ourselves as we fail to live up to our own ideals and expectations.

The solution, however, might not be to further tighten the grip with which we cling to our plans — rather, it’s to let go of plans altogether. So argues British journalist Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (public library) — a fascinating look at how our conventional approaches to happiness and success tend to backfire as our very efforts to grasp after such rewards generate a kind of anti-force that pushes us further away from them.

– Brain Pickings

Read the full Brain Pickings article for more on it and details of Burkeman’s book. The summary of the article and the book must surely be that there’s got to be a middle ground, though.

Use the Force – and edit later

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One of my books was peer-reviewed by an academic who criticised the first draft with the comment that the first third was plainly rushed. The last two thirds, he or she said, were clearly far more considered and therefore vastly superior.

You know where this is going, don’t you? I’d spent five months writing the first third and one week doing the rest.

That wasn’t through some disinterest in the ending, it was more that I found it hard to start. Not in the sense of putting my backside down on the chair, rather that I had to find the right point and the right tone to start the book or the whole thing wouldn’t work. It was very important to me and I wanted to get this one right, more than ever.

But pondering turned into paralysis and though I was writing away all the time, I was really rewriting. I have no idea how many goes I had at the opening chapters. I just know that the deadline got frighteningly close and that suddenly I was having to write at speed and at 2am.

PressPageThumb03Stuff it, I’m going to tell you. The book was my first, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair (UK edition, US edition). It was important to me because everything is, of course, but also it was my first book. Plus it was about The Beiderbecke Affair, the 1980s drama serial by Alan Plater that either you don’t know at all or you are already humming the theme. It’s astonished me how many people have written to say they loved that show and also that they really believed they were the only ones. It was a show that felt like your own. It was that personal. I think it was Alan’s best work and that’s saying something because he wrote 300 or more scripts for television, stage, film and radio.

He was also a friend. He died in 2010 and not many months after that, I phoned up the British Film Institute to propose this. Someone should do a bio of Alan but I can’t, that would turn a friend into a journalism subject. But I could do Beiderbecke. I could really do Beiderbecke. It’s personal to me just as it is with so many.

Here’s how personal it got. I have roller blinds on my office window but I’ve never got them to work. They’re just hanging up there at the top, half stuck in knots. And it’s a big window. So at 2am, the lights on in my office, the dark night outside, that big window is a mirror. Even under deadline pressure, I was getting really, really, really intense about a particular point to do with the show. And I promise you I saw Alan Plater reflected in the window. He was leaning back in his chair, lighting up a cigarette, and saying that it’s only a TV show, William.

I didn’t have time to rewrite the last two thirds much. But I also didn’t need to.

Even when I went to the second draft – and I must say that anonymous academic had a lot of really good points that I stole, as well as some that I just ignored – I didn’t have to change the back of the book.

Sometimes, you just have to press on and, sometimes, that works. I’ve discovered that my top writing speed is twenty pages of script or 10,000 words a day and that I can keep that up for about eight days in a row. Whenever I’ve had to do that, it’s been with the full realisation that I’m going to have to change a lot later. Edit, improve, fix, rewrite. It’s true. But even in those times, it is remarkable – to me – how much doesn’t have to be fiddled with.

Stop analysing, just do it.

And then analyse later. I’m not advocating being careless about your work, but I am saying it’s easier to change something than it is to make those first marks on the page.

Imaginary commutes

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Is this a thing? I heard of it for the first time today, in fact three hours ago. Actor/writer John Dorney mentioned that he’s learning the clarinet on his imaginary commute to work. Now, he could well have invented the term – the man writes some of the most imaginative Doctor Who dramas for Big Finish – or he could just be borrowing it. But either way, I’m having it.

Currently my commute is across the landing from the bedroom to my office via a bathroom. Sometimes, not always, I’ll throw in a trip downstairs to the kitchen on the way. I’m crazy.

But the idea of an imaginary commute is to set aside a time in which you don’t work and you’re not at home, not really. You probably are. But take a specific set time for it: a time you will go to work, a time it will take to travel there and a time you will arrive and get straight down to it. Fit something you want to do in between, something that’s at least broadly possible within a normal commute. John says he reads too and anyone can do that. Anyone can see the benefit of having a set time put aside for reading too.

The clarinet needs more imagination but I’m fine with that, I’m more a piano man.

On balance

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Here’s a secret. I just checked all my various bank accounts – business, personal, tax, savings, all that stuff – and I needn’t have bothered because it’s Saturday.

My bank’s computer system doesn’t bother to register most changes over the weekend. It does some, but not most. Couldn’t tell you why. Not a clue. I think it’s feeble and I think it’s amateur, most especially when it does register a payment made on Saturday but then afterwards changes its date to the Monday.

But I know it does this and I know it’s pointless checking anything on Saturdays or Sundays and yet I continue to check because that’s what I do. I check all my accounts every day.

You may call this excessive. But it is a direct response to a problem of mine. I write for a living but it is the writing that I want: writing for a living is being able to live while writing. Money isn’t the focus, money isn’t the objective. It’s working out nicely, thank you for asking, but my head is always over here in the writing instead of on the bank accounts and the invoices. And there have been times that has caused me problems.

Now that I talk about writers being productive, I have learnt a recurring truth: all this felgercarb about accounts and pitches and calls and the sheer volume of things writers have to do that is not writing may be a burden but it is also easier than writing. And if you get it done, it is done. Done and gone. It isn’t weighing on your mind and affecting your work.

So I tell people to get this stuff done now and what I’m telling you is how I do that. I check the balances every day. It means I know the moment a client has paid, it means I know the moment I’d paid off my iMac. (When I bought a 27in iMac, Apple was offering interest-free repayments and I knew – I knew – exactly what difference that would make to my balances and my cash flow. It was the right way to buy at that moment and I did it without hesitation, yet I was also glad when the last payment was done.)

All of which means there is a specific and positive reason to stay on top of these things. But because I know it is an issue with me, I also check the balances every day in order to check the balances every day. In order to make sure that I don’t slip back into any problems.

And I’d like to tell you this is a nice round number but actually, today was the 918th day in a row.

Doing anything 918 times is going to take you a while. So over that time, I have learnt various ways of checking extremely quickly and I keep looking for faster ones too. So I can tell you, for instance, that if you’re the UK you shouldn’t with systems that display all your accounts in one dashboard-like screen: every time I’ve tried every one, they’ve proved impossibly slower than doing it all one at a time through my bank’s own website. If you’re the States, it’s completely different: take a long, hard look at Mint.com. I wish that were available here. And I can also tell you that 1Password is a godsend for this: one click on my Mac or one tap on my iOS devices and it has gone to the bank sites, entered a lot of the security details (but not all, I’m not that stupid) and I can be entering those last details, seeing the accounts and getting out again in seconds.

Today was the 918th time in a row that I checked my balances and yesterday was the 211th day working day I’d got up to write at 5am. I am a writer, I do not like constraints and I do not function at my best in 9-5 office hours, yet I apply these daily responsibilities to myself and they work for me.

They work one day at a time. We can all do one day of something. I just advocate doing one day tomorrow too.

Actually, this has just popped into my head. I’m very much a Suzanne Vega fan, I think she is an astonishing writer, but her first album and its first side and its first song begins with a first line that goes: “It’s a one-time thing. It just happens a lot.”

I can’t believe that got into my DNA. But I just check the balances once. I just get up at 5am once. And then it just happens a lot.

Tired and tested – how exhaustion helps creativity

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Allegedly. I’m writing this to you at 06:15 and I’ve been working for about an hour so tell me about tired. While you’re doing that, tell me about being more creative now. Because the productivity blog Buffer wants to show us that being a wreck is a help to us, creatively:

If you’re tired, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and focusing on a particular task. It’s also a lot less efficient at remembering connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections, be open to new ideas and think in new ways. So a tired, fuzzy brain is much more use to us when working on creative projects.

That notion is backed up or at least given a bit of plausibility by some Scientific American research that Buffer links to. Plus the article goes on to many other brain-based issues about productivity and creativity under stress.