This week's personal Self Distract blog is about not waiting for permission, not waiting for anyone but yourself when you want to do something:
Two years after these writers lot met, they are still meeting and they are still writing and they are producing theatre with a company of actors. And they're doing it at the Birmingham Rep.
I think it's an inspiring story – and my wife Angela is one of the ones doing it.
I’m a very visual kind of man but, awkwardly, what I visualise is text. I can see words. If you and I are talking, I can choose to see your words as text. Squint a bit and there it is, word by word, white text on a black background, right in front of my eyes. It’s great for transcriptions. But text is so much a par of me and I am so much a writer through and through that I have ignored other visual ways of looking at detail. Okay, maybe I can see scenes visually when I’m reading or writing a script, but when faced with a problem, I used to always just think it through. More recently, I’ve written it down and thought it through.
But then last week, I had a meeting that was intentionally nebulous. It was clearly a chance to pitch something, but I didn’t know what and I was fairly sure that there were no specifics behind the invitation either. It would be up to me and what I could bring to the meeting.
And I mind-mapped it.
Slapped down everything I could think of that even considered crossing my mind in the week before the meeting. I used MindNode for iPad (£6.99 UK, $9.99 US) so it was with me wherever I went and by the morning of the meeting, I had a completely useless mess. But it was a big mess. Lots of things on it. And I started dragging bits around. This stuff sorta, kinda belonged with those bits over there. This one was daft. That one was actually part of my shopping list and I’d just put it in the wrong app.
And then I’d find one that ignited another small idea so I’d add that.
After a bit of adding and subtracting and moving around, I had three or four solid blocks of ideas that were related. I exported the lot from MindNode to OmniOutliner for iPad (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US) which picked it all up and showed it to me as a hierarchy of text lines instead of a visual bubble of blogs. I work better with text, I may have mentioned this, so that was perfect for me.
Nearly perfect. I really wanted to then hand the lot on from OmniOutliner to OmniFocus, my To Do manager, (iPad £27.99 UK, $39.99 US). I wanted to be able to tick off the ideas as I got through them in the meeting. I wasn’t able to do that on the iPad; I suspect that it’s something that needs me to use OmniOutliner on my Mac (from £34.99 UK, from $49.99 US). I’ve got that and I use it ever increasingly more, but I wasn’t at my office.
So instead I stayed with the text in OmniOutliner. Made some more changes and additions, moved some more things around. And then I worked from that list in the meeting and it went really, really well.
The whole process went well: the mind mapping on to the meeting itself. Enough so that afterwards I tried mind mapping again, this time to figure out what I’m doing with everything, not just this one meeting. I’m still working on it. But it’s proving useful. And while I can’t show you the meeting mind map as it’s naturally confidential, and I obviously can’t show you this new mind map of everything because it’s in progress, I can show you a blurry version. This is what I’m doing now:
I’m at TEDex Manchester – there are 900 people here but if you do spot me somehow, say hello, please – and I’m stealing this excuse to show you my favourite talk from this outfit.
Actually, it’s my favourite opening: I have never watched the whole thing. Each time I try, I get to the end of the opening sequence and think of someone else I want to rush over to with it.
Hello. Let us both agree to watch it all this time but I ask you particularly to give the opening moments a go. It’s the apparently famous tale of 17 camels. Never heard it before this, always try to tell people since, never quite get it right.
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.
I’d say that you don’t go easily from zero to being bought by Facebook for $19billon but actually you just don’t go there at all. Maybe that will change now that the social media firm’s payout for WhatsApp has set a bar for how much companies will pay for technology they need, but it’s still a dizzying amount. So dizzying that one can spend longer thinking about the cash than about how WhatsApp got there. Forbes has the story and it is a very interesting, even inspirational, read.
Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That’s where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom –which brought in a miniscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world’s largest social network.
Do note that Forbes is an excruciating site to read: you’ll have to schlep through popups to get to the text and there’s a semi-permanent floating ad that cuts down how much you can see at once. If you’re reading on Safari on a Mac, this is why the Reader mode is needed.
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.
He then goes on to outline what many of those 1,000 days looks like on the way.
Seriously. Apparently seriously. If you work a typical Monday-Friday week then you can guess that Monday is a day for recovering from the weekend, if you don’t love your job, or catching up on everything you’ve missed since Friday, if you do. It’s also a documented fact that website traffic goes up on Friday afternoons as office workers plan what they’re going to do next weekend.
So we’re already two days down in the hunt for the most productive time of the week. The Toronto Star reports that a survey by Accountemps says Wednesdays and Thursdays are okay, but Tuesday wins. Easy:
In the survey of more than 300 Canadian human resources managers, 33 per cent said productivity accelerated on Tuesdays versus the least productive Thursdays and Fridays, which polled in at 5 and 6 per cent, respectively.
Wednesdays were the next most productive according to 23 per cent, while Mondays rated a 14 per cent response and no particular day drew 18 per cent.
“There’s limiting distractions,” said Accountemps senior staffing manager Vitaly Melnik of the midweek peak.
“You’ve got your head focused after the weekend is over; you’ve caught up on everything; and you can do your regular work schedule most effectively. Then, after the hump of the Wednesday, come Thursday, Friday, you’re already thinking about the weekend. ”
Hat tip to Lifehacker for the link.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or maybe not. We do tend to divide ourselves into creatives and non-creatives, both sides of that either claiming superiority or at least dissing the other. But the New York Times says hang on a minute:
Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill. Pin it on pushback against standardized tests and standardized thinking, or on the need for ingenuity in a fluid landscape.
It’s a feature about Buffalo State College and how it has added an introduction to creative thinking course. Read more at the NY Times and if you fancy it – and you’re in the area – take a gander at the Buffalo State College’s creativity site too.