wagon

It takes more power to start the engine than keep it going

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This is really just about my sum total of knowledge about cars. I can drive and I can see when they have enough wheels, but otherwise, they are magical devices whose magicality is reduced every time you have to pay insurance or go for a service.

Wait.

I also know what cars look like from underneath, but that’s just because I used to watch The A Team. It’s quite complicated under there, you know.

We’re now into March and while I am loathe to write you another piece about how gosh-hard it is to keep being productive, I need to talk to you and this is how I’ve managed to do it. About thirty times in the last few days I’ve started to write something serious but it turns out that I can only do serious by accident.

So let me take this one car fact and treat it with more seriousness than it warrants.

It is true, though. Starting to write to you got harder the longer I spent not doing it. Where I have not lacked for news or information to tell you, I have lacked the discipline. I will again say that, look, very bad cold, right, six weeks and I’m still snuffling, but I’ve lacked it and that’s that.

Except, you do of course know the phrase that what’s done is done. I reckon that in the same vein, what isn’t done, isn’t done. Somehow that sounds more defeatist but I hear it the same way: the past is the past and we can only change what comes next.

There is so much to tell you. Such gorgeous nuggets of news and details that will help you get more done and enjoy doing it. I’m going to be right here telling you it all – though I’ll understand with far more humanity now why you might sometimes just want to skip thinking about this stuff.

Crisis talks #5: did it work?

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Yes. Compared to the start of the week, I am back working and back at least knowing exactly what I’ve got to do.

I’m not there yet and there is much still to do to repair the damage from delays, much to get me ahead again, much enough waiting for me that there are people who won’t believe I’m back.

I am, though, and as well as feeling better from the cold slipping away (after a month) I am feeling better for being on top of more things.

Not everything, not yet. But more. Nearly most.

Listen, this series has been an attempt to show you how to restart when everything has fallen down and you’re overwhelmed. I’d like to end it by telling you three lessons I’ve learnt:

Don’t hide from your To Do list. Especially not if it’s OmniFocus. Be more ruthless about what work you do and don’t take on
Take time off before you have to

They’re hard-won lessons but they’re won.

Crisis talks #2: Spokes in the wheel

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I spent yesterday writing by the living room fire. Took my little Monday list and did maybe half of it. Didn’t do the tough one-hour job.

Caught up with one project, though just about the moment I did that, I was already behind on it again.

If I do this again today, I’ll be just about on schedule for that one project for this week too. So the plan on this Get Back to Work shtick is to do that. Sit by fire, write, catch up.

I will also have to do the tough hour.

But then I hope to spend this afternoon reviewing all my OmniFocus projects and getting back on track with the countless other things.

So. Lessons from yesterday. Doing anything at all is better than not.

Crisis talks #1: fallen off the wagon

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Okay, it’s 8am on Monday and clearly there is a problem. I am behind on everything, just everything, and there hasn’t been an article on The Blank Screen since 20 January. Equally clearly, I need to fix this.

Maybe slightly less clearly, I think I have to fix it in front of you.

It’s not that I imagine you’re riveted to details of what I’m up to but if you aren’t already struggling with getting more productive, you will be. You start this stuff and it’s great, you feel happier, but then it goes wrong and I’m realising you feel worse than you did back when you were just lurching through life and work.

Let me show you the fight and hopefully you’ll get something from it. Let me show you the fight and hopefully my knowing you’re there will help me stick at it.

A little bit of background, also known as an excuse. Just over three weeks ago, I got a cold. No question, it was just man flu but it knocked me off my feet. Or it should’ve done: I pressed on as well as I could and definitely that was a mistake. By chance I was mostly booked to be writing in my own office but I had four gigs outside and I vomited on the way to two of them.

Yesterday I thought this was all done, finally over, I felt recalled to life. And then mid-afternoon, bam. Desperately difficult to move. Appetite vanished. Increasingly ratty. In the end, I went to bed around 8pm and spent a very feverish night. Twelve hours later, the fever is gone, I have a what feels like a concussion headache and I’m unexpectedly snuffly. That was one thing I didn’t have during the main cold but I have it now.

I also have very obvious problems to do with getting work done.

First, I don’t look in OmniFocus.

That’s my usually beloved To Do app and every praise I’ve given it before is true, I just don’t dare look in it to see what I haven’t done yet.

The second was my email. I do the Inbox Zero thing where I deal with an email as soon as I see it: if I can reply there and then, I reply. If I can delete or archive it, wallop. If it needs a bit more work, I send it on to OmniFocus.

You can’t believe the pressure and the misery of seeing the emails build up after a couple of years of being on top of this stuff. At one point I had around 40 emails in that inbox and I would look at each of them, actually incapable of knowing what to do. Then a new one would come in from someone I just didn’t want to have to think about so I’d go away.

Early last week, I got those 40 down to 0 by doing the Inbox Zero lark and that’s great apart from how I’ve found it hard to keep it down. An email will come in that I know I need to reply to and I’m afraid I’ll forget but I haven’t the consciousness to do it now, so I’ve been leaving it there. And then we’re right back to the same problem.

Yesterday morning I replied to all the ones waiting and right now, this minute, I’m not looking at my emails at all.

I’m going to look at OmniFocus.

It’s going to be a mess.

I was re-organising my entire OmniFocus life when this hit so I know I have just the most gigantic mess of projects that I can abandon but haven’t, projects that are so late I will have to give up on them, just more and more projects. Actually, hang on, I can do this, let me check: right, OmniFocus tells me I have 76 projects and a current total of 2,993 tasks to do.

I’m going back to bed.

No, wait, get this done. Back in a sec.

Ha! Caught! If you just throw things in to OmniFocus they go into what’s called the inbox: just a growing list of things that you’ll think about later. Bung them in now when you think of them, later go back and decide what you’ll actually do. Decide that this is to do with your work and this for home, that this has a deadline and that doesn’t, all this sort of stuff. I am amazed and deeply relieved to find that I must’ve done this going back later.

For there were just seven things in the inbox. I tell you, face up to your fears, it works out. Especially as I’m not going to do three of the seven: they’re not needed now so I just deleted them. It also turns out that I’ve done two of what’s left so I tapped the Done button and felt good. That left two and one is a big job that’s going to take an hour. I admit I don’t feel up to that yet.

But the last of the seven was just that I meant to email thanks to someone. So I did it.

And that’s where I got caught: going in to email her meant that Mail got all the new emails that I’ve been avoiding looking at this morning.

I don’t know what I was afraid or of what exactly I was avoiding but there are – curiously – just seven emails in my inbox now. Brilliantly, six can be deleted immediately so they went to the trash with gusto. One was a thanks email to me so I read and enjoyed that but don’t need to reply so that’s now archived off.

An empty email inbox is a good thing.

OmniFocus is another. I’ve moved that hour-long job from the inbox and into today’s due tasks. I’ve ticked the thanks email as done, so I have an empty OmniFocus inbox too. But right now OmniFocus looks like this:

(null)

That doesn’t look awful at all: you can’t see the details but you can see I have five things to do today. Now, I know that doesn’t include one increasingly urgent problem though I admit I have no idea what to do about that. I feel I may look at that tomorrow.

But look toward the top left where it says Forecast. There’s 53 next to it. And just underneath, you can see I have 52 things I should’ve done in the past.

Now, actually I know I will have done a lot of that. Even in my worst moments I’ve kept on writing so I’m hopeful I’ll have done many of them and just need to tap Done. Okay, no, hang on, I’m being honest with you here so that I can be honest with myself. I feel like you’re holding my hand. Let me check the 52.

I’ve already done 33 of them.

I’m looking pretty smugly relieved here, aren’t I?

I shouldn’t.

Some 16 of those 33 are repeating tasks and I’ve done them yet definitely haven’t done them every day or every week or whatever it is. Actually, I can’t work out how many I have and haven’t repeated.

The bigger number in every sense is further down that same OmniFocus column: do you see where it says 74 projects? I told you I had 76. But this means there are 74 that I haven’t reviewed.

Reviewing is a great thing. You take a minute to look at the whole picture, everything you’re doing, and you add more tasks, you tick off ones that are done, you delete others, you really just get that whole picture in your head. See where you are with everything, make decisions about it all – and then forget the lot. Trust that OmniFocus is tracking everything you need. And instead you just look at doing today’s five things.

The trouble is that reviews take more than a minute, especially when you have 74 projects to look at.

What I need to do is review them all once and then as I go through each one, decide when I want to review them next. Every project must be reviewed but you can say how often. So, for instance, there are certain financial things I review every second day. I keep my shopping list in OmniFocus but I’ve told it to make me review that once a year.

I must go through the rest so that they pop up as needing reviews in some more manageable way. A few a day, for instance. I’ll get on that.

But not today.

Today I am truly struggling so what I’ve just done is create a single To Do task called Monday. I’ve written in it the few things that I truly cannot leave plus some notes about them.

This is not how to use OmniFocus. But it will get me through today. See you tomorrow?

Productivity tip of the week

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Eighteen months of work, hours of advice from many people, oodles of detail and my current project was just all so big that I was regularly derailed by it. I can’t tell you exactly what it is yet but at this stage the job was just to apply for Arts Council funding to get a project done.

The good thing is that I started the process bewildered and now I know we’ve got a strong application, I know that I did it as well as we could. One bad thing is that you obviously never know whether the bid will be successful. But even if it fails, the process taught me a gigantic amount. So that’s good. What’s really bad is that at this crucial point, I was derailed again. Knocked off the productivity train of mixed metaphors. And once you’re off, it is stunningly hard to get back on.

Yesterday at 10am, though, I set a timer on my iPhone for one hour. No way to finish the job in an hour, not even a chance of making a good enough dent. But at least I’d be doing something, I’d be inching along instead of panicking about it all the time like it was a dental appointment.

Do this for me. Do an hour. Whatever it is that is pressing on you, just take the next hour and work on it. Even if that is all you do, you are better off doing that than worrying about it. You are certain to feel better for being even an hour further along with it. And, not to scare you here, but I didn’t stop at the end of my hour. Five hours later, I’d done the application completely. I actually had finished the job. Well, it’s now with my partners on the project, it’s not submitted to Arts Council England yet, but I feel pretty fantastic.

One hour turned me from wanting to run away from this thing into wanting to do more. So try it. Just an hour. Okay?