Actually, this is about a lot of things including focus and moving on to new tasks and I was just going to quote you an excerpt but I’d like you to see the whole video. It’s a talk by a designer and illustrator I’ve never heard of before and I can’t say I’m exactly drawn to his work now, but there’s interesting stuff about being creative and productive.
time management
Under-promise and over-deliver
This is from last year but it’s a goodie from Lifehacker: it’s advice for freelancers about time management. Each section has a good summary of the issue and then links out to much more detailed Lifehacker articles. Here’s my favourite:
Picking the right projects and charging what you’re worth are the foundation for your life as a freelancer. The other main part is simply scheduling.
We’ve recently posted tips for how to better estimate time for projects, but you might want to double that time estimate or at least add some “buffer time”… That extra time is especially important when you’re tackling a new project area or it involves something highly susceptible to Murphy’s Law (e.g., when writing an article about upgrading a computer—everything will go wrong, trust me).
The more generous you are with estimating your time, the better you’ll be able to follow through on your commitments and follow the golden rule in business: Under-promise and over-deliver.
The Freelancer’s Guide to Time Management – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (28 August 2014)
Read the full piece.
Splitting hairs about time management but maybe usefully
…There are lots of misconceptions about what time management really comes down to and how to achieve it. Let’s look at some of the most common suggestions and assess whether they’re actually true.
It’s about managing your time. False.
Time management is a misnomer, says Jordan Cohen, a productivity expert and author of “Make Time for the Work That Matters.” He says that it’s really about productivity: “We have to get away from labeling it ‘time management’. It’s not about time per se but about how productive you can be.” He likens it to the difference between dieting and being healthy. “You can diet all you want,” he says, “but you won’t necessarily be healthier.” In the same way, you can pay close attention to how you spend your time, manage your email, etc., but you won’t necessarily be more productive.
O-kay. I shrugged at first but have been thinking about it, it’s fair enough. Read the full piece on Harvard Business Review for more suggestions.
Give away your time to get more
Oh, now I just sound like I write for Hallmark Cards. But, seriously, do things for other people, give your time away and you will have more. Or, okay, it will feel like you've got more time and you will do more: it's the same thing. The site 99U says we suffer from 'time scarcity' and that actually the word 'suffer' is spot-on.
A scarcity mindset turns you into a time miser. You start doing silly things like counting the minutes you spend waiting in line for your coffee or silently cursing every single commuter who slows you down on your way to work. At this point, giving away time seems like the very last thing that you should do.
Yet, saying and acting upon this statement—“I have enough time to be generous with it”—is a surprisingly effective antidote to the time-scarcity mindset. Simply giving your time away to others, even as little as ten minutes, creates a sense of “time affluence.”
In one experiment conducted by professors from Yale, Wharton, and Harvard, people who spent 15 minutes helping to edit research essays by local at-risk students reported that they felt like they had more spare time, committed to spending more time on a follow-up task, and then worked longer on that task. In some magical way, this group of givers was both more productive and felt like they had more time.
We can’t control what happens during our days, but we can control how we react. Usually, “busy” is a state of mind—a trap we can, and should, strive to avoid. Reframe your outlook, and your productivity (and mental health) will thank you.
Choi has a lot more to say about time management: give her a read.
Fascinating New York Times self-assessment
Get this while you can. The New York Times has done a fairly enormous study of its successes and failures in digital and at keeping print subscribers – and the whole report is online. I expected a PDF and instead it's a series of what looks like photocopy JPEGs and that makes me wonder how, shall we say, endorsed this online publishing is. Grab it now.
The Times is interesting because it has been so big and it has done so much and it has made a success of its paywall. Yet it is still struggling as all newspapers are struggling and this report reveals just how much. Most tellingly, just from the introduction, is the information that New York Times articles get read more on other sites or services such as Flipboard than on NYT's own. And that readership of the paper on smartphones has taken a little fall too.
But then the report is not without its unintentional moments of interest too:
The anxiety that filled the newsroom only a few years ago has mostly dissipated. The success of the paywall has provided financial stability as we become more digitally-focused. The sale of other properties like The Boston Globe has allowed the leadership to focus squarely on The New York Times. Both Mark Thompson and Jill Abramson have established themselves as willing and eager to push the company in new, sometimes uncomfortable directions.
Jill Abramson was forced out of her role as Editor this week.
Not all hours are equal
I tell people that I work in one-hour bursts and of course it’s true, I wouldn’t lie to you. I also point out that many folks follow the Pomodoro technique of working for, say, 25 minutes, then breaking for 5, working for 25, break for 5 and so on. Whatever works for you, works for you. But it does all unthinkingly assume that every hour is the same.
It’s a qualitative lens instead of a quantitative one. Focusing on your time management skills sounds great but all hours are not created equal.
We’re not machines and the time model is a machine model. Our job isn’t to be a machine — it’s to give the machines something brilliant to do.
Do you accomplish more in three hours when you’re sleep-deprived or in one hour when you feel energetic, optimistic and engaged?
This may sound fluffy but it’s an important perspective to take: 10 hours of work when you’re exhausted, cranky and distracted might be far less productive than 3 hours when you’re “in the zone.”
So why not focus less on hours and more on doing what it takes to make sure you’re at your best?
Time Management Skills are Stupid. Here’s What Works – Barking Up the Wrong Tree (September 2013)
Eric Barker writing in his productivity blog. He goes on to recommend that we work like athletes do:
Use the analogy of an athlete. They might train for long periods of time but the focus is not on monotonous hours of uninspired grind.
For athletes, it’s a focused explosion of effort followed by rest and planning before another all-out push.
I don’t know. I find what works for me is the steady drip, drip, drip. Some days I fly and that’s when I am at my most creative, when I am simply creating the most, but the mountain of work gets climbed in small steps for me. But Barker writes persuasively: see what you think in the full piece.