advice

How to Get Rejected – I didn’t think of this bit

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The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) and particularly the workshop I do based on it has a particularly popular segment called How to Get Rejected. Without fail, everyone thinks it’s a joke at first – and I’ll do anything for a laugh, it could easily be a gag – but then sees both that I’m serious and that it’s useful.

This is about what to do when you are rejected. It’s how to best deal with rejection and it’s how – sometimes – you can make it a good thing. Let’s not get daft about it. A slammed door is a slammed door. But just often enough, there is something more and the rejection is the first step rather than the last hope. I’ve even pitched things knowing that it will be rejected because it was useful. Also, I’m an idiot.

The one-line summary is that when you’re rejected, let it go. Because it’s already gone. The decision is made and you cannot change it – but you can change the future. Not always, not anywhere near always, but sometimes and it’s better for your anxiety pill intake as well as being good for your career:

Be the one writer who’s nice about all this. Steven Moffat had a particularly good line in Press Gang: ”It’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice”. It’s also just easier. See a rejection as personal and you get tied up in knots; ask them for feedback and you get tied up with the reputation of being a whiner – without getting any advice that was of any use to you. Either way, you get tied up and the whole point of this book is to show you how to be more productive. So be more productive by being nice about the things you can’t control and putting your effort and your time into the things you can. 

But.

I had a rejection yesterday that mattered. I responded the way I say we all should and it was particularly easy to be nice because I knew for a fact that the guy who brought me the news was not the one who’d made the decision. I knew he’d wanted the project to go ahead too, he’d gone to bat for me. So it was extremely easy to reply gratefully to him.

Only, this is the first time I’ve then had to pass the rejection on to other people. I still can’t tell you what the gig was because within an hour I’d thought of something else I could do with it so it’s still live, but it’s one where I’d had to get rights sorted out before I could pitch. Now I had to explain the gig was up to the rights owner.

It was a weird position to be in: I had been rejected and I was now rejecting – not literally but effectively. Just as the fella who told me wasn’t the one who made the decision, I obviously hadn’t made the decision either but he was the one telling me and now I was the one telling the rights owners. This is a project that matters to us all very personally as well as artistically and professionally so I didn’t enjoy dialling those numbers.

But the main rights owner, while as disappointed as I am, was nice about it. She took the rejection in exactly the way I believe we all should. She was nice and she understood that it wasn’t me. (We did then have a little shared grumble, because we could.) She was a pro and it reinforced for me that this works. I left that call feeling better and even energised to find a new route for the project. I’ve seen before that my being relaxed and nice about this has worked for me but now I felt it from the other side and I understand.

Being nice about a rejection doesn’t change the rejection. It may never change anything, ever. But it’s always better for your soul and your stomach. And I now believe that it is always better for the person who is rejecting you. There’s nothing wrong with making things better for them: they’re going to reject you regardless, it’s not like you’ll make them think they’ll reject you because you’ll take it better than other people. And often enough, it leads to other work in the future. That’s obviously great, that’s obviously what you want, but I see it as a bonus.

Leave ’em laughing, it’s the only way.

Very, very snap review: OmniDiskSweeper for Mac

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I tells you, right, I’ve got a 3Tb hard drive in this ‘ere iMac and it got down to just 15Gb free. Without my noticing. How dare it.

If you go below around ten percent free space on your hard drive, you pay for it in a dramatic slowness and that’s what I’ve had lately. This is the fastest machine I’ve ever owned, it is so much faster than my last Mac – a Mac Pro that officially ran for six years but actually I’m still using sometimes – that I could design books using the Adobe CC suite. But suddenly it was a molass at opening a folder.

OmniDiskSweeper saves the day. It’s a tool from the Omni Group and it chunders away across your drive, totting up the figures and tutting a bit, then showing you the lay of the land. You’re spending how much space on movies? Everything’s detailed and shown in such a way that you can quickly zero in on the – in this case – more than a terabyte of files to do with one old job. I am at this very moment copying that lot off to an external drive and intend to luxuriate in an iMac that is restored to life and which has enough room to paddle about in.

OmniDiskSweeper is free. Get it where many fine applications are sold, over at The Omni Group. It interests me, mind, that I would not have heard of or found or considered OmniDiskSweeper if I didn’t happen to be an ardent user of one of the firm’s other products and a pretty ardent user of a second. The Omni Group makes the To Do manager OmniFocus and the outlining software OmniOutliner. I am actually waiting for the chance to give them more money for the next versions of OmniFocus, I like it that much.

Minimise support delays

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This is not the way it should be, but it is the way it is. So far this year I have had three issues with companies where things weren't done or went wrong and each time the solution has been the same. Bollocks to their own support systems.

Use them, sure. If you can find a customer support email on the site – and well done if do, they are always hidden – then send them a message and start a clock. Each of the three I had problems with claimed some quick turnaround; I think two of them promised 24-hours and in one case I was specifically paying to get that speed.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't work. If they say 24 hours, leave them for a day and get on with anything else you can do. Then on hour 25, hit social media. Obviously you're always going to be polite but actually, there is such a thing as weaponised politeness. If you're a nutter in twitter, nobody notices and nobody cares. But if you're calm, rational and stating how a firm has failed, that gets you support immediately.

Seriously, immediately.

I was doing this across twitter, Facebook and Google Plus for one recent issue and before I'd finished, I had direct messages from support teams. Two of them.

One of the cases is still ongoing and as much as I understand that problems happen, this one enrages me because it is entirely the firm's mistake and they've accepted that. But I'm still having to pursue it.

Still, I have got human contact there now because I went public. And the other two issues from another two firms are resolved.

So while your instinct and assumption and normal reaction is to contact a firm's support, don't see it as a reasonable thing to do and definitely don't assume it will work. Instead, the email to the firm's support is step one and you are going to be taking step two in public.

It's tedious and it's aggravating and it is a waste of time, but as long as you know it's the way things have to go, you can schedule it and hopefully get on with something else. You've had the support email where they say they're escalating your problem: that's all you're doing to. They get their shot at fixing it privately, then you escalate it through social media.

I don't like this, I loathe complaining about things that I know are just happenstance but since they're happenstancing to me and they have to get sorted, I now have to be the one to get them sorted. And the way to do that is as quickly and thoroughly and widely as possible.

I wanted to say this to you because the third of these businesses is making me eat my desk in madness but I know I'm not alone. Take a look at this blog from writer and artist Gigi Peterkin who looks at it from an American angle.

Brainstorming with a point

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I've been in a fair few brainstorming sessions in my life but, hand on heart, I don't remember any of them being useful. They were sometimes done solely so that someone could say that they'd done them – businesses, eh? – but, seriously, nowt. Nothing. Consequently I don't believe I have ever willing stormed my brain for my own work but maybe, just maybe, I will now. I'll try it, at least. Because:

The ideas generated through this process work because the goal isn’t to simply come up with good ideas, it’s to come up with ideas that can move. Head over to Inc.com to catch all seven steps of the process and then try the process on your own or with your team.

That's 99U recommending that we go to Inc.com. Let's nip over there now.

Feel great about reading this

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Tell yourself you can have a treat afterwards. If I could get it to you, there is a biscuit here with your name on it. And doubtlessly you can find or think of many treats and rewards for yourself – and this is reportedly one way to get yourself to do stuff.

…my father created a system of small rewards to help me get through schoolwork. The fundamental basis of the system is counter-intuitive: If you want to get five tasks done, my father always said, first find five additional but enjoyable tasks to do.

Sidin Vadukut writing on Quartz. He makes it sound there as if you have to reward yourself with another task and I like the way that works but he's speaking more broadly than that. He's saying that you can, for instance, research something you're interested in buying. That could be your treat for doing the horrible thing. It doesn't have to be caffeine- or sugar-related.

You can read his whole piece with good and strong arguments here and I must also tip my hat to the 99U site which spotted this.

My only thing against it, really, is that I can see myself ballooning up under the amount of tea or chocolate biscuits I'd end up eating. Actually, that's one serious concern but my only other thing against this is that sometimes it's good to do lots of bad things. If I have a lot of calls to get out of the way, I will do them better and faster by just whacking through the lot one after another. If I stopped between them, for any reason, I would find it just a bit harder to pick up the phone again.

I have to fool myself into cold phone calls so perhaps that's just a weakness of mine. I'll think about this.

Review everything so you don’t have to see it all

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Yesterday's post about reviewing one's Evernote notes each day got me a message about how OmniFocus rocks reviews. It does. I even said so. In fact, I said it was because I'd felt the huge benefit of reviews in OmniFocus that I was going to give this similar Evernote one a go. But I didn't say what OmniFocus's review is.

I'm not sure I've even said what OmniFocus is. That's rare. Usually you can't shut me up about this software. It even comes up in my otherwise application- and platform-agnostic book about productivity for creative writers, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition)

Songs will be sung of the day I finally shut up about it. OmniFocus is a To Do manager but as I'm sure I've said before, that's like saying War and Peace is a stack of paper with some ink on it.

So, you may guess, I'm a fan. Rather than fan on at you about it now, though, I want to make sure we're clear on what a review is in this context. If you have OmniFocus, great. If you can get it – it only runs on Macs and iOS so Windows and Android users are out of luck – well, that's great too. But if you don't have it, you can still do this part.

Maybe not so well.

Actually, no, there's not a maybe about it. OmniFocus does reviews really well, most especially in the iPad version.

But you can and even more than I would go on at you about OmniFocus, I would go on at you about reviews.

Here's the thing.

Right now I have several hundred tasks in my To Do manager, arranged in probably a couple of dozen different projects. Everything I ever have to do, everything I ever think of gets chucked into OmniFocus. Now, many of them never get done. If it occurs to me, I'll add it to OmniFocus and think about it later. When that time comes, often I've done the thing already. Very often I'll find it occurred to twice so it's in there twice. And fairly often I'll look at it and decide no, I'm not going to do that.

But otherwise, it's all in here and it's all live.

Except.

I have a busy day today and OmniFocus is showing me 24 things. Just 24. Actually, hang on… I see I've done four of them this morning. Okay, that's 20 left. But as much as 20 is, it's nowhere near as much as several hundred. I can completely forget all the rest of them, I can pretend they don't even exist and because I do that, I am doing these twenty – wait, just remembered another one I've done, it's now 19 left – I am doing these 19 at a clip.

That's nice for me.

But the reason I can do it all is that OmniFocus is hiding the rest until I need them. And the reason OmniFocus can do that is because I review regularly.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I open up OmniFocus and check every task in every project. If you think ticking one thing off as done is good, imagine how great it was just now ticking off five or doing a review and seeing you've already done thirty tasks. I look at every task and if it isn't done yet, I have a ponder about why. Do I need to do something else before I can get that done? Fine, add another task. I rattle through these remarkably quickly and at the end I still have the hundreds of tasks but I know what they all are.

And most importantly, I know they're being dealt with. Those things I have to wait for Bert to call me back, they'll wait there until he rings me or I chase him. Those things I know I have to do on Tuesday, I'll see the list on Tuesday and not before.

You end up trusting your system, whether it's OmniFocus or anything that works to David Allen's Getting Things Done ideas (UK edition, US edition). And that trust is amazingly liberating. Knowing that you list is only showing you what you need to know now, it means that the list is doable.

And that means you do it.

This is one of the key things that makes a To Do list something I use rather than hide away from. And it's just this simple idea of a review.

Seriously, you don't need OmniFocus to do this. But, seriously, OmniFocus could just be the finest piece of software I've ever used and it is certainly the one thing that has made me productive. You'd think they were paying me.

A good idea for Evernote users

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I'm going to be doing this from now on. Writer Jamie Rubin takes the idea of reviews from Getting Things Done and applies it to his use of Evernote:

I spend maybe 5 minutes on this a night and it helps ensure that I recall what came into Evernote that day, and gives me an opportunity to review it and process it in some tangible way.

The reason I'll do this now is that my Evernote inbox currently has 240 notes in it and while a lot are still in play, many can be squirrelled away and I want to. I'm not sure why I want to: there is no reason I can't just let the inbox fill up forever yet I am compelled to sort it out a little bit. Last night I had a look, saw this mass of notes, started dragging a few to notebooks, got very bored, gave up.

But just as I know I feel better when my email inbox is empty, I know I'll feel more in control if I do that with Evernote too. Plus, my beloved To Do manager OmniFocus has an inbox and you get into the habit of firstly chucking anything and everything in there, then later parcelling it out to different places. This task is one for the Writers' Guild, that one's for a particular project. This one has to be done on Wednesday but with that one it doesn't matter when I do it, it's just got to be done.

There is definitely a psychological aspect to this in that I feel better when the inbox is empty and all my tasks are off in their corners. But there is also a demonstrable practical effect in that it means on Wednesday I know I will see that task I need to do. I won't have to think about it at all on Monday or Tuesday, not even for the pixel of a second it would take to see it in the list and think no, that's not for today. It's gone until I need it. Equally, I have a project I've got to look at on Monday this week and I can just open up that project in OmniFocus and know that I'm seeing everything to do with it.

So keeping on top of stuff like this is demonstrably useful in OmniFocus, it feels psychologically useful in my Mail, I'm confident it'll work for me in Evernote too.

Read the whole of Jamie Rubin's piece here.

Ego versus productivity

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I am a man so, yes, I want to be right. But it’s more important to me that the thing we are doing together works, is the best we can make it. And if I am wrong, bollocks to my ego, you have to tell me and I have to take it immediately because we must fix it now.

The time you spend trying to gently point out a problem to me is kind but it is also exactly as much a waste of our joint effort as the time I spend puffing out my chest and grudgingly accepting that this is not the most right I’ve ever been.

Sometimes it genuinely can hurt to be wrong. I’ve had blood running cold – which I thought was a nonsense phrase but, my lights, it is spot on – and I’ve been shown to be wrong when other people were depending on me. Compared to that, most day to day moments of being wrong are trivial. And in every case, you and I are better off putting things right.

You’re wondering if something has happened to make me think this today.

No.

Not today.

Not that I’ll admit to you anyway.

Instead, it is always a thing with me because it always a thing. Tell me I’m an idiot, rave at me if you must, but do it now and do it quickly so we can fix this and get on to the next crisis. There is always a next crisis. And if upsetting me means we move on, let’s just move on.

 

You don’t know what you do

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You know what you're doing, but you don't know what you do. I'm writing to you from a school where I'm just a guest at a Royal Television Society project getting kids into television careers. I am the tiniest part of it, I am merely a live version of one PowerPoint slide that lists various jobs people can do. But of course it's not me who matters, it's what I've done and in this case how I started at a school like this one.

Not as good, to be truthful: I'm very impressed with schools today in comparison to my old one. (I should go to my old school sometime: that would be so strange.)

But you forget that what you do every day is something that you hopefully wanted to do, it's certainly something that you had to work hard at doing. And there are people starting out who maybe want to do the same but certainly need to see that it can be done.

That was the problem in my school: I am a writer but then writing was something I believed other people did, it was something the school discouraged. If a writer, any writer, even me, had come in to the school, I would've started my writing career ten years earlier.

Maybe I would've benefited from that push more than most. The kids in this school are easily the smartest I've met so far and they are asking very sophisticated questions. But the fact that they have the Royal Television Society in here, the fact that actually at this moment all of the kids are working on a genuine practical exercise – not a theory, not an ideal, but a real television project – it is fabulous to witness.

And of course it's a honour to be included. But it's also sobering: I always feel as if I'm just starting out but if I'm made to look back, there is plenty to see that the school-age me would be very proud of.

I don't know what I do. Mind you, I also don't know what I'm doing, so.