But it’s up to you to decide how serious he is about it.
The video is a discussion with Lynch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A nod of the hat to Brainpickings.org for finding it – and check out what else they have to say on the subject. Actually, just check out Brainpickings in general. It’s a treat in my RSS feed every day.
Go ahead and do it. Whatever it is. If they really like you or they really matter, they’ll catch up.
“Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. The best moment of my life…was the day I realized that I know longer give a damn what anybody thinks. That’s enormously liberating and freeing, and it’s the only way to live your life and do your business.”
— Cindy Gallop
That’s the entire quote I found on the Swiss Miss website but I’m linking to that anyway because it’s so good. It’s a design site that I just find engrossing and delighting and actually inspiring too. So do go take a look at Swiss Miss and then on to Cindy Gallop’s Creative Mornings talk.
If you didn't even make it in time to have New Financial Year's Resolutions, do it now. Sketch out your next year and make me feel more sensible for how I'm doing it.
I did a rough year plan last December or perhaps really I had a thought about making a rough plan. I definitely helped others with theirs and they definitely tried to help me back, but I resisted. Mostly through being a bit focused on the month, the week, the day, the hour and occasionally the minute plan. But also because a year seemed a bloody big thing.
The year has got shorter now we're in May, but I'm not specifically planning 2014, I'm looking 12-18 months ahead now. And the reason I think I can do this is that my work has changed. I'm much more tied to a calendar now: I just did a gig at a festival and that was on a certain day, it was arranged many months before. It used to be that everything I did was task-based in that I'd get some work, I'd do it, I'd go straight on to the next. There were usually deadlines but they were always short ones and the quicker I could turn something around, the better.
With festivals and events taking over, I feel like I've got these tentpoles ahead of me. I can't do much in early October, for instance. Knowing that now, here in May, is weird but I like it. And whenever you find something you like, enjoy it, exploit it a bit. I've already used that October tentpole to say I can't do this other particular thing until December. I know that the two events need to be separated by a fair time, I know how long it will take me to finish up one and get the other going, I know how much time that will leave me for the short-term work I rather live for.
When did I get this organised? Today. And the thing with being organised around tentpoles in your calendar – I'm just making up terms now, aren't I? – is that the constraints are liberating. Knowing that I've just this week done one event means I can wipe that from my head and concentrate on one I've got for 31 May and then I can forget that until the next one in August.
I'm losing the anxious uncertainty I had when people would ask if I were available for something and I'd always say yes regardless of how hard or sometimes impossible that would make my month.
I keep saying this. As writers, we create characters and we set rules – our blind watchmaker can't suddenly see just because it solves a plot problem – and setting ourselves just a few rules, a few plans, helps.
Go plot out your next 12-18 months, would you?
There are jobs I don’t like doing.
Wait.
That’s not actually true. There isn’t a single thing I’m working on that I don’t relish. That’s nice for me, isn’t it? But nonetheless, there are always elements of most jobs that I really just don’t enjoy doing. Things that I put off for one reason or another. You’re the same, I can see it in you, so let me suggest something to help.
Find a thing you hate even more.
If that’s hard for you, bugger. I mean, it’s good that you can’t find bad things, but it’s a bugger because I need you to. For me, for instance, I don’t like invoicing and I don’t enjoy cold-calling. (I’m not a salesman who relies on cold calls but so many successful pitches and projects have come from my just ringing up a firm that I am compelled to keep doing it. Compelled. But still, I don’t like it.)
So I try to rig my time such that my choice is between doing an invoice or making a call.
Invoicing wins.
More than that, invoicing becomes the lesser evil at first, then it’s a near-as-dammit a pleasure because it’s the thing that means I don’t have to do this horrible other thing. I start looking for more invoicing to do so that I can postpone phoning people.
You may think I’m stupid and I will not disagree with you. But at the start of this, I hated invoicing enough that I wasn’t doing it, I was at best postponing it for as long as I could. And now at the end I’m looking for invoicing to do.
I want you to get more work done. (Because I want to get more work done too.) But The Guardian newspaper says you're better off doing less:
Most time management advice rests on the unspoken assumption that it's possible to win the game: to find a slot for everything that matters. But if the game's designed to be unwinnable, [book author Brigid] Schulte suggests, you can permit yourself to stop trying. There's only one viable time management approach left (and even that's only really an option for the better-off). Step one: identify what seem to be, right now, the most meaningful ways to spend your life. Step two: schedule time for those things. There is no step three. Everything else just has to fit around them – or not. Approach life like this and a lot of unimportant things won't get done, but, crucially, a lot of important things won't get done either. Certain friendships will be neglected; certain amazing experiences won't be had; you won't eat or exercise as well as you theoretically could. In an era of extreme busyness, the only conceivable way to live a meaningful life is to not do thousands of meaningful things.
This Column Will Change Your Life: Stop Being Busy – The Guardian 19 April 2014
The piece is an interesting and persuasive read. It's really also a part-review of Schulte's book, Overwhelmed (UK edition, US edition)
I'm thinking a lot about this idea of winning the game. That's not really me. I just know that I am happiest when I've thought of a new thing I want to create and then I've created it. When it's a real thing instead of a pipedream. You think of it and then you do it. That's what I want: would you call that a game?
The one good thing I can see about a game is that you can change the rules. I'm definitely up for that.
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I am behind on my work this week and it is officially because I had various meetings away from my office – but I think it’s more because I’ve worried about how far behind I am.
I knew Monday would be a write-off; I had things to do all day and all evening in London, forget getting much else done, much else written. Tuesday just had two chats but one was in Birmingham city centre so there’s travel time too. And today I went to a hospital with my wife Angela Gallagher where she was at very long last signed off for the end of her treatment for breast cancer.
Today I don’t care that I failed to get enough done. Not today. Today is fine, today is mighty fine.
But now we’re back and it’s around 6pm, far too late to make any calls for the day, I am slipping back into reviewing what I should’ve done instead of what I have done. Let me take that hospital appointment as a clue to how I should be looking at everything, at how I think we all should. There is no work that would’ve kept me from that appointment. Bollocks to everything else.
In a less dramatic, less bollocks, more I would reschedule if necessary kind of way, yesterday’s two chats were terribly entertaining and fun as well as getting things done. I enjoyed the nattering, I enjoyed the company. So what if I have to write this evening to make up for it?
And so what if I lost Monday?
‘Course, there are limits. You may not see me tomorrow because my head has got to be down, my fingers have to got be typing a lot. I mean, a lot.
But every once in a while, William, lighten up. Productivity is about the quality of work you do, not the quantity.
Sure, you should be doing that thing you do. And sure, it's hard to take time away from it. But do. Take time. Spend it on something else, spend it on something unrelated to anything you know or already work at. In fact, go ahead and dabble:
Dabbling is cross-training for the brain. Pursuing interests in a variety of subjects stretches the mind and pushes the imagination, causing us to be more creative. Dabbling is simply a way of gathering new information and experimenting with new ways of doing something. It causes you to think differently about everything else that you do, a process which can lead to incredible innovation. “The best way to discover something is to take an existing concept in one discipline and apply it to another,” says Stibel. Hopmann says Dabble fields lots of fan mail from people who have felt inspired after taking their courses, showing inspiration can come from the most unexpected places – even a glassblowing class
Why Dabbling can Make you a Better Entrepreneur – Entrepreneur magazine 27 February 2014
Read the whole article for more of an explanation of why it works plus what you can do to make the most of it.
Hat tip to Lifehacker.com for finding this.
And I have fallen behind on a project I am very keen to do.
I am compelled to make an excuse about the event, at least. It’s one that was rearranged to this afternoon, okay? And I caught it when I checked my calendar at 5am this morning. So when I say I nearly missed it, it’s not like I spilt my tea and had to run for the car. But somehow even though I want to go to this, and I will go to it, for some reason it wasn’t on my mental map of the week.
This is happening to me more often now and part of it is how I think my business is in a bit of a transition. Previously I was almost completely task-focused: I had this enormous list of things to do. It wasn’t event-based: I didn’t have a lot of meetings, for instance. Now I tend to run more talks and workshops – I did ten sessions in March – so my calendar is more important than it was.
I vehemently refuse to join up my tasks and my calendar: To Dos do not belong on certain dates. Or at least, they rarely really do. If something has to be delivered on Tuesday, you could put that on the calendar, fine. But do you then put a date on there that you’ll start the job too? Odds are, you won’t start it then. Instant failure. Instant unnecessary failure. Put the flexible start date in your To Do list, if you must, put the deadline in there too and then everything to do with that task is in one place.
I have zero question about this, absolute zero doubt. If you’re looking at me now thinking you’re not so sure, the strongest chance is that I have failed to convey to you why I think this. That’s how sure I am that I’m right. This is a rare feeling: let me have it. (Unless you really do think I’m wrong and you can tell me. I would prefer to know.)
But right or wrong, it is how I am working and today that isn’t working. So I’m taking steps.
And this has become a kind of live blog as I try to get a handle on it all. The aim is to get back on top of everything and to be creating new work, producing material, instead of losing most of my time to managing it all. And I know that the way this will work for me is in software. That’s just easily obvious because of prior experience. So taking a step back from that overall aim, I think that I can have two contributory aims:
1) Restore my previous excellent grip on all my tasks
2) Find a way to cope with my newfound extra need for handling events
The shorthand for number 1 there is OmniFocus. Much as I love that software, much as it as truly transformed my working life, my copy of it is a mess at the moment.
I think the shorthand for number 2 would be Calendar plus a regime of checking it. I do currently have a task in OmniFocus called “Check calendar for today and week ahead”. That repeats every week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I’m not sure why that isn’t working, then. I don’t want to make it a daily task but we’ll see what happens. Okay, it’s 07:47 and I’ve decided to temporarily make checking my calendar a daily task for Monday to Friday.
And I’ve just downloaded the new Fantastical 2 for iPad. I’ve been reading about this since its launch yesterday and I’ve been reading about its iPhone version since, oh, just about the day I bought Fantastical 1 for iPhone and had it superseded. I agree with the consensus that Fantastical is a good, strong app but for me it wouldn’t stay, I didn’t keep using it on my iPhone because I just found the standard Apple calendar better. Not in features, not in ease of use, but both of those are fine and the Apple one has the killer feature that it can include the current date in its icon. I struggle to believe how often I have to check today’s date but with that right there, job done. With Fantastical, I had to go into the app. Job not done.
But Fantastical 2 can show the current date as a red badge notification on its icon. I’m hoping that will be enough for me because I like what I see about the rest of Fantastical. I like how it feels holding your month and week in your hand, seeing the shape of it all. I’ll play with this and try to get it into my habitual working pattern. If it doesn’t work, I’m out £6.99. If it does, I’m out a lot more because I can see me buying the iPhone update and the Mac version too.
For now, though, at 07:52, let’s say that my second aim is at least addressed if not necessarily solved.
So it’s time for aim 1: OmniFocus.
This is going to take some time. It’s going to be a huge change for me. I’ve let OmniFocus sprawl a bit too much, I’ve let it become a repository for everything in my life. Things I want to read, for instance. I save those to Pocket but I often send them straight into OmniFocus: maybe they relate to a project, maybe I just want to remember them and OmniFocus’s mail drop service is too handy. Whatever the reason, I need to use Pocket and Evernote more, and to keep this stuff out of OmniFocus. That’ll take some re-training. But I’ll create an Evernote notebook for it all and get into the habit of using the Evernote equivalent of mail drop.
But things have also changed in my business and life. I am very pleased to say that I am still on Room 204, a Writing West Midlands development programme, but I’ve finished the formal, official year there. So about a year ago, I created OmniFocus projects to do with Room 204 and the eight separate things I was doing with them. I’m still doing them, I’m still doing them with Writing West Midlands, but the Room 204 projects need to go.
I’ve also got very lazy. If a great benefit of OmniFocus is that you know what you need to do now, that works because it hides from you everything you don’t need to do now. Only, for that to work day to day, you have to often review absolutely everything: go through all your tasks and see what’s done, what isn’t but can be, what will never be done and should be deleted. The idea is that you work through every task and you spend time on every task. This is more than an idea, it’s a principle and I have found that it works brilliantly for me.
Except lately.
Lately, I’ll do the review process and see – wait, let me try it right now – okay, I only have 12 projects review. Last time it was 67. (You set this project by project. You have to review everything but one project is my shopping list: I’ve set that to be reviewed once a year. Other stuff has to be reviewed every day.)
Especially when I’ve got 67 projects ahead of me, I’ll look at the list and I won’t patiently dwell on each separate task. Rather than do them right there and then or consciously test the task – why isn’t it done? what do I need to do it? – I just think yeah, yeah, haven’t got to that yet. And then I move on.
I can’t let that continue because I’m missing things and I’m not getting stuff done as much as usual.
So. It’s 08:03 and I am going to pull out the list of projects. I’m going to do a MindNode mind map of everything I actually have to do and compare that with what I’ve got. It’s slate-clean time.
Later…
Four days later. That is a hell of a slate-cleaning. I would like to point out that I did have that meeting to go and then there was something else on Friday, plus I worked the weekend… and all the way through, I was thinking of this. Right now, Monday at 12:12, I’m happier and I think I have proof that I am.
Let me tell you the proof first: I have no overdue tasks in OmniFocus.
And only 16 more things to do today.
It’s funny but having overdue tasks was proving to be a huge weight. It’s not really funny because it isn’t funny but it also isn’t funny because that’s how things used to be. That’s how they were before I moved to OmniFocus. Maybe it was worth letting things slide because I am reminded with extreme gusto that I do not ever want to feel this weight again. It’s paralysing: you feel you can’t clear that backlog, that there’s no point doing anything more.
So you now you’ve got to know how I did it. And it turns out I was right: it was a two-step thing.
The first was the Calendar and it was Fantastical 2 for iPad. I found that I still had Fantastical 1 for iPhone and I’ve been using that too – I’m honestly not sure what the difference is beyond some obvious aesthetic ones – and the combination has been useful. I’ve had to train myself to turn to my iPad whenever something comes up that needs me to look at my Calendar: even if I’m at my Mac, I turn now to the iPad for this. It’s not a habit yet but it’s becoming so and each time Fantastical does something clever, I am that much more sold on it. The most specific clever thing it does is accept natural language statements: typing “Lunch tomorrow with Steph at Birmingham” pops all the details into my calendar in the right spot. It reckons lunch is 1pm and actually I needed to change that but it was easy enough. But it new Birmingham, actually it knew the more detailed place name I put, and it knew what day tomorrow was. It’s very satisfying entering an event like this because it parses what you type as you type it: you see the place name flying off to that section of the appointment, you see the time going there too and you can see the calendar zipping along to the right day.
Also, it turns out that having today’s date as a red badge notification means that my muscle memory automatically makes me open the calendar. See the badge, intellectually know that it’s the date, but still open it as if there is something I need to be notified about. It’s made me open the Calendar about thirty times since last Thursday and as irritating as I suppose that is, it’s helping me to reinforce this new habit of using both Calendars and OmniFocus.
The second thing began with the way that a friend pointed out how casually I had planned her working year for her in a chat one day and she was back now with a pen to do mine.
Terrifying.
And we didn’t finish. But we’re still in play and I’ve been taking her advice to heart. That coupled with the most massively tedious reorganisation of OmniFocus has all proved part of it.
I’ve been using the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac beta because it’s the quickest version and also, I now think, the most pleasant to use. But this reorganisation meant replacing every old project with an entirely new system, then seeing what fitted the new plan and what did not. I have very ruthlessly and with only a little blood deleted gigantic chunks of tasks because I haven’t done them and, William, I ain’t going to. So they’re gone. Kiss ’em goodbye.
I did a MindNode map as I told you and this is how that looks. You know I can’t let you see the details, there’s plenty of confidential stuff in there but this is the shape of what I was dealing with.
Look at that mass of colour in the bottom left corner. The centre word there is ‘Kill’ – these are all the entire projects I deleted as part of this reorganisation. The smaller blog of colour is a set of seven other projects that I have taken out of OmniFocus and put into Evernote: they’re all research jobs, all reading ones where I was amassing things to read but no actual tasks yet.
Then the rest is everything I am in fact going to do. The central word, the white blob around which all the rest of the colours flow, is “OmniFocus”. And that’s apt: this app is that central to everything I do.
I still need to work out a system for tying those Evernote documents in to the tasks as they come up. It’s easy enough technically, you copy one thing from Evernote and paste it into OmniFocus – or vice versa – and are thereafter just a clicked-link away from either. But it’s the mental system that’s hard, the decisions I need to make about putting stuff in OmniFocus or in Evernote.
Similarly, if I get an email from you with a task in, you can bet I forward it on to OmniFocus but when do I then archive that email, when do I put it into my Follow-up inbox to make sure I see it? For that matter, when do I only put it into Follow-up, when do I not bother making it an OmniFocus task?
I’ve still got to work all that out but it will come and right now, I’m exhausted yet much happier. I mean, much. If you’ve read this far, you’re a mensch and I want you to take away this single point: getting on top of everything you have to do – just getting on top of it, not necessary even doing it all – makes you feel infinitely better.
You do. Don't tell me you're busy, I know you have time. Time to start that massive project, time to do something completely new. What you need to get this new or massive thing done is not time, it is involvement. Excitement.
I would say that I've been a bit busy this week yet I've also read – hang on, just checking – 396 pages of The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling). I'm reading it in the kitchen while I cook, I'm reading it on tea breaks, I'm catching a few minutes here or there with it. I'm not reading in bed: I've got this novel in paperback and for reading in bed I prefer my iPad. I'm never going to read it or anything else in a bath: I get that it's a relaxed time and that therefore reading should be great, but the idea of holding a book that is getting more sodden by the minute through steam or, god, shudder, shake, dropping it into the water. Eugh. Never.
So my time available for reading must be quite small yet I've read all of this in about a week, maybe a day or so more.
This happens to me regularly: one non-fiction book or novel will take me months to read, another one will zoom by in days. It is down to engagement and involvement: I'm enjoying The Cuckoo's Calling and it's pulling me back.
The great thing about new projects and massive new undertakings is that they are new. That they are side ideas, side projects, at least at the start and there is always the issue that you have other things to get on with. Other priorities, other demands on your time. Let the new project be a guilty pleasure that you enjoy spending time on and you will find the time.
You have the time. You do.
Productivity is supposed to just be a handy single word to cover all the things we want to do. But it becomes a label and then it becomes an ideal and you can see people for whom the word itself has become a cult. If you spend more time thinking about productivity than actually doing anything, you need help.
Hello. My name is William.
(Hello, William!)
The ease with which we can get caught up in shaving a few seconds off those tedious emails, in making sure our work is everywhere we are so we can get right down to it and finish that vital paragraph on the train, in writing sentences so long that you’ve forgotten the start… um… The ease with which we get caught up like that is one reason I think it feels so bad when we stop. When you fall off the productivity line, it’s rarely because you’ve made a conscious choice to get a life. It is usually that you didn’t keep up the effort. That feels bad enough but then these things snowball and you just see all the jobs you’ve got to do mounting up and mounting up. Perhaps because you have been on top of it all, you can see how big that mountain really is and that makes it even harder to get back going again.
Bollocks to mountains.
Do you know the phrase ‘sunk cost’? It’s the money you’ve already put into something. If you’ve invested £50,000 in something that isn’t working, it’s ferociously hard to forget that £50,000 and move on. Of course it is. It’s bleedin’ £50,000. Yet sometimes you should weep now and move on, sometimes it is a sunk cost. Because we are so wired to feel the loss of that £50,000 that if someone says you just need to do this simple thing – oh, and it only costs £20,000 more – we think about it. So we should: I’m not saying investors should bail out early, though you know how every website gives financial advice like that and then says, by the way, nobody here knows anything so you can’t sue us? Seriously, I know nothing about investing. I’m making an analogy. You knew that but I had to say it. Anyway. This £20,000 more lark: we don’t see the £20,000 because we’re still blinded by the enormity of the £50,000 we’ve lost. There’s a very good chance that we will spend that extra £20,000 because of it.
And then we’re out by £70,000.
Sometimes you must, you must accept that the money and the time and the sweat you put in to something is gone, it is this sunk cost and nothing you do will bring it back, maybe everything you can do will make it worse. Except moving on.
If you’ve fallen off the productivity line, forget everything that’s behind you. Yes, you failed to complete this important thing, yep you should’ve done that other vital thing. But you did fail and you didn’t do what you should.
Let it go because it is already gone.
Bollocks to all of it, there is literally nothing you can do to fix it so move on and put all that energy into doing the next thing instead. Some problems will cause you damage forever but not actually that many and most things you didn’t do today will be forgotten by everyone else by tomorrow, so join them. Forget it. Move on.
If you really are in a bad place and it really does seem like a mountain that is resting on your chest, do take a look at Bad Days in my book The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition).
But also just take a breath. Look at what’s in front of you right now and see what tiny bit of it you can actually do, right now.
Don’t look down, don’t look up, just chip away in small moves and I promise they add up to mountains. And if that’s too Hallmark Card-like for you, think of it this way: maybe small moves don’t add up very quickly or to very much, but they add up to a hell of a lot more than your sitting there doing nothing but regretting mistakes.