Quick wins and the Quick Win Hour

Find a few things on your To Do list that won’t take a lot of time and do them. They’re quick wins because without much time and probably without much effort, you’ve knocked some stuff off your list.

It’s like taking baby steps or building up to doing something big except these things were real and they needed to be done so you’ve built up usefully. The sense you have that you’re on your way, you’re getting things sorted out, is real because it is real.

You can’t just do the quick stuff, you have to buckle down to the difficult and the long, but knocking off a few fast tasks is a good way to get yourself started on those.

Some To Do software including OmniFocus lets you say how long you think a task will take. I have never used this. I never will. I just think the time I spend working out time I’ll spend on a task is time I could be spending doing the task. Nonetheless, if you like doing this or it feels more natural to you than it does to me, you can assign approximate times to any or all of your tasks – and then choose to see a list of all those taking 10 minutes or less.

There are also To Do apps that let you assign an energy level to a task. I don’t even know if my OmniFocus does this because I’m not sure where to look. But if your To Do app does this, you could get it show you all the tasks that don’t need much oomph from you. All the ten minute tasks that you can do in your sleep: that’s a To Do list you can knock through quickly.

One thing I do often do is a Quick Win Hour. Take a moment to find ten things on your list or make up ten new things. Whichever it is, you do ten and you do that very, very quickly. Then you set a timer on your phone for one hour and you do all ten.

I’ve done this perhaps half a dozen times over the last two years and only once did I ever complete all ten within the time but, grief, it was close every other time. And despite or maybe because of my being so focused on the ten and the hour, I didn’t really register that each time I was getting up to ten things done off my list.

Turn up

My personal favourite line of Woody Allen’s is from the book jacket biog he wrote for himself: “Woody Allen’s one regret is that he is not someone else”. But I’d like to offer you this alternative:

I think that the biggest life lesson I learned as a boy that has helped me and is still with me is that you really have to discipline yourself to do the work. If you want to accomplish something you can’t spend a lot of time hemming and hawing, putting it off, making excuses for yourself, and figuring ways. You have to actually do it. I have to go home every single day, no matter where I am in a world, no matter what I’m doing, and putting 30 to 45 minutes of practice on my clarinet because I want to play. I have to do it. When I want to write, you get up in the morning, go in and close the door and write.

You can’t string paper clips, and get your pad ready, and turn your phone off, and get this, get coffee made. You have to do the stuff. Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren’t. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren’t applying themselves.

As a kid I wanted to do magic tricks. I could sit endlessly in front of mirror, practicing, practicing, because I knew if you wanted to do the tricks you’ve got to do the thing. I did that with the clarinet, when I was teaching, I did that with writing. This is the most important thing in my life because I see people striking out all the time. It’s not because they don’t have talent, or because they don’t want to be, but because they don’t put the work in to do it. They don’t have the discipline to do it.

This was something I learned myself. I also had a very strict mother who was no nonsense about that stuff. She said ‘If you don’t do it, then you aren’t going to be able to do the thing.’ It’s as simple as that. I said this to my daughter, if you don’t practice the guitar, when you get older you wouldn’t be able to play it. It’s that simple. If you want to play the guitar, you put a half hour in everyday, but you have to do it. This has been the biggest guiding principle in my life when I was younger and it stuck.

I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.

Woody Allen Interview ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ – Frosty, Collider.com (15 August 2008)

It’s not possible to feature Woody Allen without thinking of the same things that make some of his films uncomfortable. Yes, this interview was done in promotion of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It’s easy to say that this is the worst film ever made – so let’s. It’s astoundingly awful. Writer Ken Levine has a better take on it than I will ever manage because after five minutes I felt inspired to get on with my work.

So, you know, Allen is a productivity guru of a sort.

Though I’ve got to say that Midnight in Paris is as good as advertised.

The thirty-minute quick win

When I say go, I’m going to set a timer for thirty minutes and make a pitch. I don’t know what yet. But a friend has sent me a bundle of things that are so interesting, I want to do them all. And I’ve felt a bit blinded by which to pitch to first. Plus I’ve been a wee bit busy. So the result is that I’ve had the list for few days now and nothing is happening.

Let’s make something happen. Especially as today was a rubbish day. Got barely anything done and if I can whack out a pitch now, in front of you, I’ll feel better. I like feeling better.

So, here goes:

ME: Set a timer, thirty minutes
SIRI: Okay, your timer is set for thirty minutes. Remember, a watched iPhone never boils.

(It really said that.)

Go.

And… stop.

With 15 minutes and 28 seconds to go, I’m done. Read the pitch list, found one I fancied – it didn’t have to be the best, it just had to be there and be one I liked. No selection, or at least as little selection as I could manage. (There was one about poetry, for instance. Nice opportunity, lovely idea, completely outside my capabilities. So I moved on. But only a bit.)

Read the detail, did a swift email to them, gone.

And it worked, I feel better.

How to find your passion in life and work

I knew my passion was drama and writing and while I went the wrong way for a time, I still think I was lucky to have these obsessions that I could eventually do something with. I don’t often like to use the word lucky to do with writing because it isn’t luck or chance, I wanted what I do now and I worked for it and I got it. But I started from the advantage of know what I wanted to do, even as I didn’t think I could do it. It’s much more common to not have a single clue.

It’s much more common still to then feel that the answer is to find this thing you’re passionate about, then you could do it, then you could be as happily workaholic as I am. And by extension, if you can’t find it, you can’t. Writer Oliver Emberton has a smart piece about this:

Too many of us believe in a magical being called ‘passion’. “If only I could find my passion”, we cry. “Finding my passion would make me happy”.

Well, passion is real, and very powerful. But almost everything people believe about finding it is wrong.

Childhood is where passion goes to die

In theory childhood provides a great opportunity to try a bit of everything, find your talents, and with them, your passions.

But think for a moment how badly the system is stacked against you. Say school lets you try 20 subjects, ranking you against thousands of other children. Those aren’t good odds. Most kids are, by definition, around average. And it doesn’t matter how much we improve education, because people need to feel exceptional to feel passionate, and improving education simply moves up the average.

Say you’re one of the lucky ones, and you’re top of your junior math class. The education system will keep rising your difficulty until you find a level – like college – where you’re not exceptional anymore. Even if you actually are objectively pretty great, once you feel merely average, you’ll find your passion slipping.

And that’s if you’re lucky. What if your passion was for art? From an early age that passion is compromised by its social consequences. “It’s hard to make a living from painting” say your parents. “Your cousin is doing so well from engineering. Why can’t you be more like him?” And so you put your passions to one side, and let them wither.

In a population of billions, it’s obvious that not everyone can be unusually great at a handful of academic subjects. What if your true skills are in speechwriting, or creative dance, or making YouTube commentaries of videogames? None of those things are even on the syllabus.

And so most people grow up without much passion for anything.

How to find your passion – Oliver Emberton, personal blog (undated but probably 10 November 2014)

Makes me think of UK Education Minister Nicky Morgan’s asinine comments about arts subjects. Which then makes me think of poet Jo Bell’s calmly smart and classy rebuttal.

But back to the passion point. Emberton presents that as one of several rules to getting beyond the passion issue. Read the full piece for the rest of the rules plus some apposite illustrations.