If you must use email as your To Do list…

Posted by William Gallagher

…well, you're going to go spare with confusion and the effort you put into managing it all will be achievable but wasted. I'm all for To Do lists but I want to spend the least time on the list and the most time doing the things I have to do. Email just doesn't cut it – but many people disagree and one group of them has also done something about it. Mindsense has released a Mac version of its iOS app Mail Pilot.

You read your email through it as normal but then mark it as if it is a task. So a previously-accused Email To Do-Er would read a message, see that the sender needed them to do a thing, and then they'd mark it as unread. Now in Mail Pilot, you instead have the option to mark something as Incomplete. Later, when you've finally remembered to do the thing buried deep down in last Tuesday's email – and checked that it only needed you to do one thing, not a dozen – you can mark it as Complete.

I sound like I'm knocking Mindsense and their new software but if I worked this way, I would use Mail Pilot. It has quick keystrokes for marking things up, it can set various reminders for you to alleviate the Last Tuesday Syndrome, it's been working popularly on iOS for some time.

I just think it's Occam's Razor: do you use a stylish-looking, well-made app to try managing your email To Do list or do you stuff email and do this properly in a real To Do task manager?

Mail Pilot is on sale for an intro price of US$9.99

Now you shouldn’t focus on your goals

Posted by William Gallagher

Not that we’re winging it here, no. You may have heard that it’s good to focus on how productive/happy/fit/slim/sexy you will be after you do whatever masochistic work you’re putting yourself through. But the site 99U says nah.

By all means visualize your goals to help get yourself started in the first place, but once you’re underway, try to let your long-term mission fade a little into the background. Revel in the process and you’re more likely to make it to the finishing line.

I don’t really have a problem with that: the journey is the reward (as Lifehacker, which pointed me at this article, mentioned too) and that’s fine. That’s drama, really. Plus the rest of that 99U piece has some rather interesting points about how subtly people can be affected by the smallest things.

XXX and ZZZ: lovely writers and their sleeping

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve said this before: I now cannot imagine staying in bed later than 5am – but I can’t half dream about it. It turns out that 5am is my best writing time and I hate it. But I do it. And I’ve had countless discussions with people who tend to claim that the best writers get up early (if they like me) or that the best writers work overnight (if they don’t). But now there are facts.

Sort of.

Brain Pickings did a gorgeous thing of trying to work out the unworkable-outable and somehow calculate/divine/guess (*delete as applicable) how early or late the best writers did their thing. They’re open about how you can’t really compare writers and they are frank about how you can’t trust writers anyway, they could all be lying. But as a point of comparison, it’s interesting. And moreover, it’s resulted in some rather beautiful graphics:

The end result — a labor of love months in the making — is this magnificent visualization of the correlation between writers’ wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion around each portrait, and their literary productivity, depicted as different-colored “auras” for each of the major awards and stack-bars for number of works published, color-coded for genre. The writers are ordered according to a “timeline” of earliest to latest wake-up times, beginning with Balzac’s insomniac 1 A.M. and ending with Bukowski’s bohemian noon.

Read Maria Popova’s Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized on Brain Pickings.

Pattern Weeks part 3: ready for you to see

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, there are limits. I want you to see an illustrated plan of my typical or pattern week because I want you to see if it’d be any use to you too. Plus, I hope that showing it you here means I’ll stick to it and find out whether it’s really any use to me.

Previously on Pattern Weeks… really the only thing to check out if you want to know more about this is the first post I wrote back on 31 December. Now read on.

Or rather, look on. Here’s the final thing: a pattern for my week that I’ve made my desktop wallpaper on my iMac and, here, my MacBook. The MacBook and its screen are artistically blurred; the tea mug in the foreground is mistakenly blurred.

And below it is the actual pattern, albeit without any incriminating text.

I won’t get any points for artistry. And without the incriminating text, I think there is only a little you can take away from the idea. But it’s a good little. And it’s this: I have put these many tentpoles into the week where at certain times I will do these certain things. That means on the one hand that I’m trying to guarantee that these get done but also on the other that there’s all that whitespace. That’s when the real work of the week will be done. If I planned it out too much, I’d be so often breaking the plan that I’d come to ignore it.

I think what I’m trying to create here is analogous to an ordinary office job’s schedule. Whatever you do, you have certain times in which to do it and there are points when you have to attend meetings or deliver reports. And as I say in The Blank Screen (US edition, UK edition) I believe that when you have a commitment like those, it takes away a lot of the churning stress. It adds other issues, but for that hour or whatever, you know you are doing what you have to do and you therefore don’t spend a lot of energy questioning it. You just get on with the gig.

The one other thing to say is that I’ve got to underline the word pattern. This is what my week should look like, it is the pattern for the future. And I know it won’t be like this. For one thing, I’ve planned out here 05:00-15:00 which I’m finding is a good amount of time to work both in when I’m at my best and in how much I can get done. But this coming Thursday, for instance, I’m definitely working until 21:00 so I might start either that day or Friday a bit later than usual.

But we’re halfway through January already and while I’m getting a lot done, I need to do more and the visual reminder right here on my screen, constantly, permanently, I am hoping that it will help. That it will keep me on track through the week and that it will also appeal to the visual side of me as I go.

We’ll see. But this is something new and just sometimes I suspect I need a new toy to help me work.

Maybe the five productivity apps you need but probably not

Posted by William Gallagher

Two reasons to show you one article about five productivity apps: first, they might help you. But second, I'm fascinated how differently we all approach what we do. I very heavily use exactly one of the five applications mentioned here (iWork with Pages, Numbers and Keynote) and I can't fathom how anyone would leave out 1Password, Evernote and my beloved OmniFocus.

And I shudder at the idea anyone would include a fitness app. Shudder. Told you.

You know and I'm slowly realising that there is no one way to do what we want and that if there were, many of us wouldn't like it. I think I'm at the point where my work flows along just about as well as I can make it and if I pootle around trying other things, it is more curiosity than it is a necessity.

Still, I have a terrible weakness for articles such as Apple Gazette's 5 Apps to Boost Your Productivity.

That’s rubbish: positive vs negative thinking

Posted by William Gallagher

I'm British and a journalist, cynicism comes to me a lot more readily than happy happy joy joy thinking. But the kicker for me is that it's quicker to think positively.

You know this already: when things are bad, you spend an awful lot of time brooding. That's too feeble a word: worrying, fretting, chewing, pondering, hating. When things are good, you get on to the next job.

I have also realised that it's true: I shouldn't make decisions and I definitely shouldn't act on them when I'm depressed. I still struggle with the concept of telling myself everything is wonderful all the time but I like the idea of head-down getting-on-with-it-all regardless.

Which is what I take away from this piece on The Simple Dollar about negative thinking:

You have to recognize when you’re telling yourself to make poor choices. For me, the best way to counteract this is to have a checklist of the things you’re working on and review it several times a day.

Working for yourself is harder and better than you think

Posted by William Gallagher

Lifehacker has a smart post about what it's really like when you go work for yourself. Some of the details are very USA-specific – naturally, since Lifehacker is an American site – but the principles are the same here in the UK:

Often, people want to freelance or start their own business because they're lured by the freedom of working from home. If that's what you care most about, you're probably better off trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute and learning about the downsides of working from home rather than leaving your employer to work for yourself.

List articles – 5 things to eat, 10 things to sell or whatever – are usually quite lazy pieces of writing that are also pointlessly empty. And I'll give you seven reasons why. But this one is simple and straight and practical: I'm not sure I've ever read it all put so well as Lifehacker does.

I've been freelance since the mid-1990s but I also had an enormous crutch of a regular client for a dozen years so I felt I eased into this life. Can't imagine going back now, but I can imagine doing this freelancing an awful lot better: when you've read that article, follow its many links out to further advice. It's a smart collection.

I must be a great writer, I get up early.

Posted by William Gallagher

Hand on heart, I'm having trouble adjusting to getting up at 5am to write. Given that today is the 190th time I've done it, I may have to accept that I never will figure it out. Alternatively, I'll have to accept the old man concept of naps.

But the problem is at the end of the day and during the evening, it's fine when I get up and often it is fine actually getting up. Not today, as it happens, but often. Okay, sometimes. Alright, once. Once I fair bounced out of the bed. Madness.

However, I think my getting up early like this works as much because the phones don't ring – and I cannot call anyone – as because it happens to be the time that suits my writing. In my head I'm a late-night jazz kind of guy, possibly without the jazz, but in my typing fingers I'm an early riser.

I know you can't equate the time you get up to the quality of your writing, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people trying. Now comes what may hopefully be the definitive analysis. It's got to be definitive because it doesn't come up with an answer. It just shows you a lot of facts. A lot:

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author.

Take a look at Brain Pickings' gorgeous infographic about famous writers and what time of day they got up out of their beds, the lazy bastards.

A four-day week with pay

Posted by William Gallagher

If you’re British and are old enough, the phrases three- or four-day week are not happy ones. They were borne of bad times when the economy was rough and companies were in trouble. That never happens now.

But it’s a term with bad connotations because it was a time when firms couldn’t afford to pay people for a whole week so they had to work three or four days instead. And there’s another way.

Hopefully there’s another way. Ryan Carson of the technology firm Treehouse proposes that maybe we can work four days a week and do more with it. He’s not trying to save money: you get paid your full, normal salary, you just don’t work five days a week. It sounds like he’s a productivity guru looking for a startling yet appealing angle, but the fella has his reasons and he’s put them to work: this is genuinely how his company is run.

What’s more, he wrote about it in his company blog, The Naive Optimist, more than a year ago and they sky hasn’t fallen under the weight of all that pie. I learnt of this through 99U which singles out his particular post about why he does this and specifically what has happened because of it.

There is a part of me that shudders at the notion. I love working, I don’t understand how to relax. But I am also very much an advocate of spending the right time on something: working for the sake of it is a waste of time, time that you could be spending working on other things. So I’m drawn to this and I admit you that I am persuaded by his reasoning and his results.

Today is the hardest day for keeping resolutions.

Posted by William Gallagher

I think it is, anyway. Sorry: no science or research here. Just a lot of years where some of it was in companies and the first Monday of the year was a hard one to ramp yourself up for. And for actually a lot more years when I've been working for myself and today is the day you feel you're starting over again from scratch.

That would be because you're starting over from scratch. All those books you wrote last year, you wrote them last year. Gone. What have you done this year? Bugger-all.

But don't think of today as a new working year. Don't think of it as a year at all. Think of it as exactly what it is: a day.

Today I'm working at a school for the day and part of me feels this is postponing all the freelancy getting-new-work stuff until tomorrow. But this is new work, this is a new school to me and it's working with the staff instead of with the kids and it's working with two other writers for the first time. So it's all new, it's all work, and it should be all great.

And I will worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. I will worry about it, but it will be tomorrow.