Email is great, now leave it alone

Posted by William Gallagher

There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that email addiction leads to stress and unhappiness. Now, for the first time, researchers have tested this idea directly and found that, yep, there are probably positive psychological benefits to intentionally ignoring your email whenever possible. In a new study in Computers in Human Behavior, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia took a group of workers and, over the course of two weeks, assigned each to one of two conditions: One group was told to keep their email program closed, turn notifications off, and check their email only three times a day, and the other was told to leave notifications on and check their email as often as possible. After the first week, each group switched into the other condition, and each group was regularly surveyed about how often they were checking their email, how stressed they were, and how productive they felt.

To De-Stress, Check Your Email Less – Jesse Singal, Science of Us (December 4, 2014)

Read the full piece. Via New Republic.

Quick notes: get meetings faster and get out of them quicker

Posted by William Gallagher

This is mostly for when you’re meeting a colleague. It doesn’t work so well if you ring up Steven Spielberg and ask for a meeting when he’s never heard of you.

But when they have heard of you and you can get meeting with them, do it like this. Say immediately, right up front, now when exactly you want it. So rather than get into the “can we meet? when’s good for you cycle”, ask: “Can we meet on Tuesday at 11am to discuss X?”.

The first and most startling thing you’ll see is that it is preposterous how many times people say yes. But even if they don’t, the next most likely thing is that they’ll say no, how about Wednesday? You already a step or three down the line. But above all that, this also tells them that you’re serious, it therefore tells them that this is genuine and purposeful meeting, and it can start to train them to be the same back.

When you get them, make meetings shorter than you think you need and also be very clear about that. When you schedule a meeting, email everybody saying what the start and end time is, plus a list of things that will be covered.

Then cover them, assign each task to somebody (though it’s usually you), and end the meeting. Get out to your next thing and you’ll train people (including you) to cut out the nonsense vocal exercises that are most meetings most of the time.

I recommend 15 minutes and the fewest number of people you can manage. Also, as well as sending everyone that start-and-end-time kind of agenda, email them after the meeting too. This like the news thing: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them it, then tell them what you’ve told them. Those headlines again: short meetings, specific actions, reminders afterwards.

When I run a meeting and also take the minutes, I do send them around as an attachment the next morning but I also append a text task list to the email body. Few people read the minutes to any meeting in any organisation but this way they can see what they’ve promised to do.

Busy doing nothing – official

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s possible that you cannot clear any time in your day to do nothing. It’s entirely possible. But Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, says he does precisely this and that it is a boon for him.

If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day (broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks). It’s a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

At first, these buffers felt like indulgences. I could have been using the time to catch up on meetings I had pushed out or said “no” to. But over time I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.

The Importance of Scheduling Nothing – Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn blog (3 April 2013

Read the full piece for the details of why he does this and exactly how it has helped.

Hat tip to the Sydney Morning Herald for mentioning this today.

Relax, you’re not that busy

Posted by William Gallagher

Stop thinking of relaxing as a ticket to laziness and build free time into your day. Relaxation relieves stress, lets you enjoy the moment and improves your problem-solving skills. So take naps. Breathe. Meditate. If you’re always rushing, develop a morning routine to set a calmer tone for the rest of the day. Don’t be so busy you’re not enjoying the precious little time you have on this earth.

How to Stop Being Busy – Sasha Graffagna, SuperheroYou (2 June 2014)

Read the full piece for more interesting and sobering, even correctly chastising thoughts.

Do something else at 2pm

Posted by William Gallagher

Writer JD Arbuckle has a longish piece about studying your habits and rhythms in order to improve your productvity. It’s interesting but this is the bit that grabs me:

Move into a completely different task between 2PM – 3PM. Most people suffer from a mid-afternoon crash during this time. The worst thing you can do during this hour is try to grind through the crash. Instead, head to a local restaurant and meet a friend. Switch into workout clothes and run the lake. Go run errands and pick up groceries. After this break, you will return to finish the rest of your work completely re-energized and focused (If you haven’t already finished everything between 9-2)

5 Strategies for Maintaining Peak Performance Levels – JD Arbuckle, Conquer Today (12 June 2014)

Read the full piece.

OneHourADay app briefly free

Posted by William Gallagher

What could you achieve in just one hour a day?

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion – So what happens you set just one hour a day for to achieve your goals?

By breaking down a goal into smaller hourly tasks, it will not only make it easier but also more effective in achieving your goals.

Try this simple app, that helps you get down your desired goals and also a detailed description then start the timer when you are ready to dedicate one hour of your day to achieve your goals. The timer will stop at one completed hour until the next day. It will also keep a running total of all the hours you have achieved towards your goal.

You can set a daily reminder and add additional goals.

Example Goals:
Revising for exams
Playing the Piano
Write a book

Give it a go and see what you could achieve in just one hour a day!

Parents, stop laughing. For everybody else, maybe yes, maybe you can get an hour spare to work on your goals. Even if it’s not necessarily 60 minutes in a row.

I’m not sure of the value of this app. I already work in hours, it just seems to suit me to do one hour on this then one hour on that. But I do it most of the time by asking Siri on my iPhone to set a timer for an hour. (Sometimes Siri tells me “Remember: a watched iPhone never boils.”) So if you have an iPhone that can run OneHourADay, you don’t actually need OneHourADay.

But it looks good, it’s a positive reminder of what you want to do and there is something satisfying about seeing it on your screen. Plus, it was £1.49 (or $1.99) and it’s now briefly free, so do take a look. Watch that it’s still free when you check out that link, though: I’m expecting the free offer to expire soon.

It’s so easy to break habits

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, I could do with fixing my tea drinking habit. And my Pepsi Max addition. I could lighten up on the curries too, or at least if I stopped having so many I could perhaps lighten up.

But about six months ago I made a plan – and put it in OmniFocus – that every day I would post one article to this Blank Screen news site. Just one. After a while, it became a habit. And there was certainly never a shortage of material.

After a spell, that became frustrating: there was always more that I wanted to say.

So I worked out timings and figured out the average time per article – it’s ridiculously variable – and also reckoned that doing two together would take less time than doing one then coming back later for the next.

In my head I was about to change the repeating daily OmniFocus task to “Post three new articles” and I began typing exactly that. But somehow the word ‘three’ changed itself to ‘five’. A slip of the mind.

But I tried it. And for at least five months, I did five stories a day. It got so doing the five was a normal part of my day. Until the end of September.

Then various events I’ve been producing all year came along and last preparation, new marketing and new research followed by the performance, it clobbered me and I failed.

I failed to post at all one day.

I remember sitting by the bed, iPad in hand, not really able to focus my eyes let alone my head. It was probably a sensible decision to fall asleep, even if my body made that choice for me.

But.

Having broken the chain once, that chain became china: it shattered at the break. It became very easy to not post at all.

Now, I don’t think you were waiting for me every day. But I was. And I’m jolted by how hard it was to break the pattern the first time yet how very, very easy it was to break it the second.

So I’m back. I promise myself and you that I’m back. But do please take a telling from my admitting to having been poor like this. You can do more than you expect with a habit and if you don’t break it, you feel great.

Dramatic timing

Posted by William Gallagher

Pretend you’re presenting Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor or any of those: spread things out for maximum dramatic effect – and it’ll help you get it done.

This one needs an example. I’ve just taken over running a programme of about 24 writers who are being paired up into buddies. It got complicated: the number varied, everyone must pair with everyone else but only once, some dropped out, some joined, all that. But in the end, last Sunday, I had the list of who was to work with whom.

And as I was about to post it on the group’s secret Facebook group, I stopped. Instead of the whole list, I just put the first pair up. And announced that I would reveal the rest throughout the day. I was called a tease.

Every thirty minutes for the rest of the day I revealed one pair. It was a daft and a fun idea but you can’t believe how it helped me. I became very conscious that I had to write a new, funny announcement every 28 minutes or so. So I’d post the new one and immediately get on with other work I had to do, shovelled through as much of that as I could before my alarm went off and I did another announcement.

I got a huge amount of work done that day and it felt like a game. If there is anything of yours that you can spread out like this, give it a try, okay? It focuses you like nobody’s business.

Now, there is actually a strong chance that not one single one of those writers noticed this because they could’ve just come on at the end of the day and seen the whole list. So next time I’m going to spread it out over days. I don’t think that will help my productivity, I think it’ll be more fun.

How a routine stops you becoming routine

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m afraid I know nothing about comic books so I’d not heard of this guy, but Joe Keatinge is apparently a star in this world and demonstrably interesting about being productive, creative and freelance:

I didn’t [have a daily routine] when I initially went freelance and largely floundered because of it. That said, if I can pass on anything to anybody, developing a routine has helped me immensely and greatly increased productivity. It’s also something I’ve recently greatly reworked to huge benefit and something I’m still getting used to, but here’s the gist of what I strive toward.

Monday through Friday I strive to be up no later than 7:30 AM, eat breakfast, drink coffee, achieve basic sustenance for my morning, but that’s it — I don’t look at my phone, at Twitter, at e-mail, not a damn thing. I used to do that and fall into the trap of screwing around when I should be working. Even the smallest diversion can take longer time to recover from than the actual distraction itself was so I’ve learned to keep them out of the way as much as I can.

That said, I’ve found if I immediately write ANYTHING immediately, I can achieve a lot later in the day, so at this point I do just that. Sometimes I immediately jump into a page, sometimes it’s just free form writing, sometimes its something I’m on a deadline on, sometimes it’s something no one will ever see, but it is something. And in writing anything I find my brain gets going and it keeps me on track for the rest of the day, even if I get distracted later on.

Creative Spaces: Joe Keatinge – Kevin Knight, EatGeekPlay.com (17 September 2014)

There are a couple of examples of his work in the piece and they are anything but routine. But he says he’s learnt to build structure into his day both for the sake of himself and for the sake of his art. Read the full piece.

Exactly how long you should work every day

Posted by William Gallagher

Twenty-four hours.

Sorry? Sleep what?

Recently, the Draugiem Group, a social networking company, added to this growing body of research. Using the time-tracking productivity app DeskTime, they conducted an experiment to see what habits set their most productive employees apart. What they found was that the 10% of employees with the highest productivity surprisingly didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else. In fact, they didn’t even work full eight-hour days. What they did do was take regular breaks. Specifically, they took 17-minute breaks for every 52 minutes of work.

“Turns out, the secret to retaining the highest level of productivity over the span of a workday is not working longer–but working smarter with frequent breaks,” wrote Julia Gifford in The Muse when she posted the study’s results. Employees with the highest levels of productivity worked for 52 minutes with intense purpose, then rested up, allowing their brains time to rejuvenate and prepare for the next work period.

The Exact Amount of Time You Should Work Every Day – Lisa Evans, Fast Company (15 September 2014)

Madness. But okay, maybe persuasive madness. Read Evans’s full feature for more – and particularly on what those most productive 17-minute skivers do during their breaks.