productivity

Calling it

Posted by

0

My name is William and I have a problem with cold calls. Making them. I'm fine with getting them, I can even enjoy a good cold call so long as they don't stick robotically to a script. They always do but I always give them a chance to break free so I feel I've contributed something to the chat before I hang up on them.

But making cold calls, that's tough. And that's tough in another sense as I have to make them. I want to make them. I'm speaking at the Stratford Literary Festival next month because I cold-called. Obviously it took more than that one call, it took chats and emails, but it wouldn't have happened without my dialling that number. Me. Stratford. That's worth the difficulty of making calls.

I've developed two coping mechanisms that I want to tell you about. I want to tell you about them because this week I've been trying a modified version of one and am now ever more sure it works. At least, that it works for me. You own personal form of paraylsis may vary.

The first is that I know from years of struggling with this that statistically my most effective phone calls are made between 11am and noon. So in my series of Pattern Weeks here, I've written about blocking out certain times to do certain things and that hour is for phone calls. Monday to Friday, 11am to noon. Bang, bang, bang.

But to do it bang, bang, bang-like, I have to use the other strategy. This is exactly the one I write about in my Blank Screen book about writing To Do tasks as if someone else is going to do them. So in this case, rather than Call Anne, I write Call Anne re invoice number for the Doctor Who feature. Sometimes I'll even put the phone number in there too.

And that means no thinking, no looking anything up, just read task, see number, dial, speak, finish call, breathe out. (I shouldn't have chosen Anne as that example. She's lovely.)

So I game this: I arm myself with all the tools to make the call so that I can't prevaricate and then I set this inviolate time to make the calls – because that makes every other time the opposite. I cannot make phone calls outside that hour. (I do, it's often necessary, but the rule is the rule, I don't make these things up.)

The thing I've changed this week is that I've stopped ringing people on Mondays and Fridays. Again, not true. I had to ring someone yesterday in order to hit my thirty total for the month so nuts to the new plan.

But the new plan is to do 11-12 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

You may think that's an excuse, that I'm creating more specific times to call in order to create more times I don't have you.

You caught me.

But it's again down to what is working and how often I am reaching people. Mondays and Fridays are bad days to try to get to speak to folk. It must be nice to work in an office where you can relax on a Friday just because it's a Friday and it must be hell to work in one where you cannot do anything on a Monday but panic about catching up, but it's what happens.

And it's what works.

Or it's what works for me.

If you have the same problems with cold calling that I do, give this a try. If you don't, please tell me your secret.

You are feeling very sleepy

Posted by

0

The Blank Screen is about being productive. I have a section in the book (UK edition, US edition) devoted to the issue that “Time off is vital” and it says:

Apparently.

That’s all I’ve got for you about time off. I don’t do time off, I don’t know from time off.

But I’m learning a hell of a lot about sleeping.

This is still a work in progress and I would like to have figured it all out now but I’ll take anything I can get. Since January 2013 I have been getting up to write at 5am weekdays. (Not every weekday: I’ll book time off for lots of reasons like speaking engagements that mean I’m not home until 1am the night before. I’m not daft. I’m insane, but I’m not daft.) Today was day 223 and it was stunningly hard but as I almost always am, I am glad I did it because I got three big things done that were pressing on me. I’d finished them before 10am so suddenly Monday morning looked pretty good to me.

But.

The big downside of getting up at 5am is – well, okay, it is the getting up at 5am. But the second big downside is how tired I get toward the end of the day. Both the end of the working day and of the real day of the week. Actually, in some ways that’s an improvement for me: I now want and get evenings off where before I’d just carry on working until I stopped. The trouble is that I can be so bone-tired that the evenings are a struggle to stay upright.

It’s not as if you get a choice about stopping working and taking the evening off, though. Tonight I’ve got a Writers’ Guild committee meeting, for instance, and I’ll be home from that around 10pm. I don’t know about you but I can’t just go straight to bed. At least, I rarely can: I’ve had some times in the 5am Years when  I’ve had to crash out instantaneously. But usually I have to wind down a touch so that means tonight it’ll be 11pm before I go to bed.

So 5am to 11pm, it isn’t tenable. Much as I wish it were, I can’t do it. Can’t do it without help. I’ve tried caffeine, I am currently powered by caffeine, but I’m also trying napping.

Even saying that to you feels wrong. Why is that? I don’t work 9-5, I do work for myself, why does it feel so wrong to take a nap? I was struggling today so I slept from about 1:30pm to 2:30pm. It isn’t like having a second day, like getting up entirely refreshed, but where I was finding my mind folding in on itself before the nap, after it I sprang back out of the bed.

It feels like such a waste of time but the work I’ve done since has been better for it. As far as I can tell subjectively, the work I’ve done since that nap has been as good as the work I did first thing this morning. That’s got to be a good thing, that’s got to be a productive thing to pull off.

So we’ll see. There are so many days when I can’t do this – because I’m working in someone else’s office and they’re paying me to, I don’t think naps would go down well there – but when I can, I’m going to try doing it. I should try to do this with some statistical measure so I can assess what’s working regularly and reliably.

One thing that may help is a new app that I haven’t tried yet but wanted to tell you about. It’s called Best Sleep Hygiene and that’s one of those titles that doesn’t make any more sense the longer you know it and that you don’t get used to. It’s not about hygiene, it’s about how long and how well we sleep. I tell you, the title is giving me pause. But it’s a free app and it promises to analyse your sleep patterns. So I want to at least point it out to you even if, like a typical writer, the title is holding me back from exploring it here.

Yes, you do have time

Posted by

0

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.

Use Microsoft Office for free on iPad – kinda

Posted by

0

It's a trick, but it might be useful if you don't want to pay a subscription just to make one twiddle in a one Word document. As of today – 28 March 2014 – Microsoft Office for iPhone is completely free. Not just free as in you can read a document but must pay to edit or create ones, it's completely free.

But you can run iPhone apps on your iPad. They don't look great. This one doesn't look as good as the proper iPad version of Office released yesterday. But it is Office and it will open Word and Excel documents. Possibly also PowerPoint but, seriously.

You do still have to sign up for a Microsoft account and there are myriad better ways to write and edit documents than on the scaled-up iPhone Office but it works.

Get Microsoft Office for iPhone (it's one app with Word, Excel and the other one together) here.

How to pick the right To Do app for you

Posted by

0

Let me do the joke first: if you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad, buy OmniFocus. That’s it, we’re done, thank you for coming, I’m here through Friday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details, try the veal.

OmniFocus is so good that I’ve been asked whether the makers pay me to say that. And I really would offer it up as the one-stop, suits-all solution except that you can’t just stop once and it doesn’t suit all. It’s pretty close. Two things held me back from recommending it universally and one is that the Mac version has been hard to use. I’m sure I can’t say anything in detail about the beta release of OmniFocus 2 for Mac but I will certainly tell you that it is really good and much easier to use than it was. I’m saying easier, I’m not saying easy. But OmniFocus 1 was always worth the effort it took to learn it, OmniFocus 2 gets you its powerful features much more readily and clearly.

The other thing that has held me back from universal recommendation, though, hasn’t changed. And it won’t change. OmniFocus only runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads. There’s no Android, Linux or Windows versions and seemingly there never will be. I’m fine with that. Better the company stays great on one platform than it becomes okay on a few.

But it does mean I have difficulty recommending To Do apps. Actually, I won’t blindly recommend specific ones – not even OmniFocus when it comes down to it – because everyone is different and the best I can do is point you to some great and good To Do apps. In my latest The Blank Screen workshop, I discussed specific To Do software and hit a snag. To Do apps for iPhone: legion. To Do apps for Android: myriad. To Do apps for Windows Phones: hello?

Try this yourself. Do a google search on “best to do apps for Windows Phone”. You will get many results and several will be articles that state they include such things as To Do apps – but they don’t. I’ve read many top tens, top twenties, top something else and found not one single To Do app in there.

At the other end of the scale, if you have an iPhone, you’ve already got a good To Do app. It’s called Reminders and it’s very basic but what it does, it does very well. Reminders invented the Location Reminder idea – the way that when I leave a certain client’s office, my iPhone will tell me to send them an invoice – which I think should be mandatory now for all To Do apps.

Mandatory is a hard word. To Do apps are also a great example of when the word specifications is bollocks. I do recommend that you try many different apps but if, in so doing, you decided to write up a spec sheet of what they all did, it wouldn’t help you. Remember the Milk would score high for being on the web as well as Macs and iOS; OmniFocus would score low for being limited to Apple’s gear. Yet Remember the Milk isn’t right for me and OmniFocus is. Though I love the name Remember the Milk.

You can’t quantify experiences like using the right To Do app. But you can try.

Picking the right To Do app for you means testing out a lot. But you can limit how many you have to try or buy with this one simple thing: don’t look at a To Do app for mobile phones and tablets or for desktop Macs and PCs or for using online, if it doesn’t have Start Dates. These may be called something else like Defer Until (that’s what OmniFocus calls them and I don’t like that). But when you enter or edit a task, you must have the ability to prevent yourself seeing it until you need it.

Follow. I’m doing The Blank Screen at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I do not need and I do not want to see that on my To Do list until it’s time to prepare for it in about mid-April. So I don’t. “Prepare presentation for Stratford” is in my To Do list but it has a Start Date of 15 April and until that day, I won’t see it. I can look for it, I can see it when I review all my tasks, but each day as I look to see what I’ve got to do, Stratford will not be one of them – until it’s supposed to be.

Start Dates are as vital as Due Dates and if you use them, they are gold. But even if you don’t and never will, the fact that an app has them is a good indication that the app is powerful. Maybe you don’t need powerful features, probably you do, but it’s better to have them available, isn’t it?

 

Pick yourself up and have another go

Posted by

0

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.

Monday Productivity Pointers

Posted by

1

Not my pointers, unfortunately. But I’m just trying out Lynda.com with one of its free trial offers* and have found Jess Stratton’s Monday Productivity Pointers videos. They are short little clips with advice on specifics about being more productive at what we do – and especially at using software tools. Today’s one is about writing a press release: not everybody needs to do that but actually her advice is useful for many more things. Being clear, getting to the point quickly and knowing what your audience needs are things that apply to every email we ever send.

Try out Lynda.com and particularly Stratton’s Monday Productivity Pointers here.

*I said I was using a trial. The training website Lynda.com often has trials and they are usually tied to somewhere like the MacPowerUsers podcast – which is where this one is. I’d tell you how to get it but I think we’re right at the edge of when that trial is valid so let me instead give you a general wave and an encouraging nod in the direction of that podcast. If you hear a bit about Lynda.com and it’s still valid, great. If not, you’ll still have heard one, two or a hundred and eighty very entertaining listens.

Gaming productivity

Posted by

0

I’ve written before about using a mad-dash hour to get over problems. If you’re feeling low – like I have a cold coming on at the moment – or you’re just overwhelmed, agree with yourself that you’re going to spend an hour working. Just an hour.

And then list ten things that you want to get done in that time.  That’s what I wrote about in New Hour’s Resolutions – Not Year’s, Hour’s (2 January 2014) and that’s what I did:

Consider this a live post: as I write to you now it is coming up to the top of the hour and from that hour I am going to do ten things. I can’t tell you what they are because they’re specific and they involve other people who don’t know you and I are talking like this. But I took a shower, decided on this overall idea of ten things in the next hour and realised that if I do it, I’ll feel I’ve got somewhere today. And usually that’s all I need to keep getting somewhere each day.

I wrote down a list of eight things immediately. Had to check my OmniFocus To Do list for the other two and got a bit bogged down because there was so much to choose from. But the point of ten is that it’s not easy but it is achievable. Whatever you’re working on, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that there are ten really fast things you could do right now if you put your mind to it.

And I bet at least one of those is something you don’t want to do.

It’s getting on for three months later and I haven’t had need to do that hour again – until today. Today my head is just tilting into a cold and, moreover, for some reason I have things on my list that I kept putting off. I truly don’t know why: it was just an email I had to send someone. I think maybe part of it was that I couldn’t remember why I and to email them. I’d written the task in OmniFocus as “Email XXX about the YYY event” but honestly went blank on what that YYY event was. At least, blank on enough detail that I could coherently tell the fella about it.

Thirty-one minutes ago, I started a mad-dash hour with ten new things including that email. I made that email the third thing on the list after two other items I wasn’t especially looking forward to but would at least be quick. And when you start quickly, I’ve learnt that writing down the time you did it next to the item really motivates you to bound on to the next. Where I am guilty of thinking I’ll just make a mug of tea now, for this hour with that list and those times, I don’t.

I’m writing to you because even as I drew up the list, I knew this felt different to last time. I was seeding the list with things I didn’t want to do and – this is the killer difference: I am hiding the list from myself.

I wrote it in Evernote and hit return a few times so that the list vanished off the top of my screen. So now the sequence is: 1) Race to the top of the document, see the next thing, 2) race to the bottom, make a note of it or anything I need to write to get it done, 3) get it done, 4) note down the time next to it. Rinse, repeat.

I put writing to you as the fifth of the ten things so that I could know how it was going this hour, so that I also had something to look forward to if I’m honest with you, and also because it’s not a quick and easy thing, writing to you. I have to think about: I don’t want to take your time up with rubbish. (Usually.) So this was fun but substantive.

And because it’s taking more than the average 7.5 minutes that the preceding four tasks took me, I find that my list was written long enough ago and referred to long enough ago that I truly can’t remember what item six is.

But I’m about to find out.

Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

Posted by

0

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:

 

map

Beat the afternoon slump

Posted by

0

This is a big thing with me: I write from 5am weekdays and come 3pm or so I am starting to feel a bit tired. Feeble, really, but there you go. I’m being honest. And now I’m being hopeful too, because:

There are many reasons for feeling the mid-afternoon dip. According to a study by Gallup, 40% of Americans don’t get enough sleep. Getting enough sleep is a cornerstone habit that has many positive effects, mental and physical performance improvements among them. If you’re notgetting enough sleep, your brain is not functioning optimally.

Research also points to our circadian rhythms as a cause of mid-afternoon tiredness. Ourmental performance ebbs and flows throughout the day:

What you ate at lunch also has an effect. Food coma is a real phenomenon, and when you eat crap, you’ll probably feel like crap. You could also just be drained after a full morning of tough meetings and debates with your team. Willpower is a finite resource; we all start with a certain amount every day, and it diminishes with every decision or choice we make.

Whatever the reason for your lack of afternoon focus, let’s look at some research-backed lifehacks to help break out of the daily slump and finish your day strong.

Why We Procrastinate the Afternoon (and How to Stop) – Lifehacker

So there’s some research about it, which means we’re not alone. And then there are some solutions, which mean you’ve stopped reading and are already gone to Lifehacker. See you there.