Best productivity advice for November

I refuse to mention the word Christmas – damn – but on this first day of November, some things do change and the year is canted toward its end. Plus you know that January is for making resolutions, February is for breaking them and March is for admitting that you actually broke them within a day and a half. November has a purpose too and it’s you.

Back in January you were under all this pressure to declare your plans for the year. Nobody’s asking you to do that in November and actually fewer people are asking you to do anything. Depending on your industry, this can be a slow time and that’s typically true of freelance writing. When you do get work in then stuff everything I’m saying to you and go do that. But when you don’t, do this instead.

Look for some new places to pitch your work. A couple of Novembers ago, I made a list of ten companies I quite liked the sound of and only one of them listened to me. But they became a major source of income, they’ve accounted for maybe a third of the money I’ve earned since then. So you can say that my list of ten was rubbish and worthless and pointless, you can say that I should’ve just gone to this lot. I definitely did say repeatedly that this was a rubbish idea as I worked through the list and nothing was happening. But I still remember the moment, sitting in a Costa Coffee, when I hesitated over whether to bother continuing.

I think that nine failures made my approach to the last lot better or at least more practised. I also think that nine failures meant I wasn’t hoping for anything with the tenth and that I therefore had a busy, an un-needy attitude in that approach. I also know that if it had taken a lot of time I wouldn’t have bothered.

Whereas I think it probably took me two hours over the course of a week to compile that list of ten places; I expect that it took me less time than that to approach them all, and it made a huge difference to my productivity for the next two years.

The trouble is that you don’t think you’ve got two hours to spare over this week. Very often you haven’t, but as we head toward the end of 2016, you’re going to find the time. And if you don’t, if you’re so busy that you haven’t got the time, take it anyway. I’m not saying lie to your client or your employer about how you’ve just spent the last two hours, but only because they might hear me.

Focus on one thing at a time

I believe that splitting your concentration and even – gasp – multitasking means you end up with lots of things not finished. Probably not as good as they could be, either, but chiefly unfinished. Writer James Clear argues that there’s more to this one-thing-only approach, though, and he starts with trying to prove its value:

If you want to master multiple habits and stick to them for good, then you need to figure out how to be consistent. How can you do that?

Well, here is one of the most robust findings from psychology research on how to actually follow through on your goals:

Research has shown that you are 2x to 3x more likely to stick with your habits if you make a specific plan for when, where, and how you will perform the behavior. For example, in one study scientists asked people to fill out this sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME OF DAY] at/in [PLACE].”

Researchers found that people who filled out this sentence were 2x to 3x more likely to actually exercise compared to a control group who did not make plans for their future behavior. Psychologists call these specific plans “implementation intentions” because they state when, where, and how you intend to implement a particular behavior.

The Scientific Argument for Mastering One Thing at a Time | James Clear

The rest of the article is more about the philosophy of concentrating. Read the full piece.

Eat regularly

This morning I went straight to the keys and wrote a Writers’ Guild email newsletter that had to go out. Then I had breakfast. So it was around 11am when I ate and now, a couple of hours later, I’m putting off getting lunch.

This could be why I feel a little ill.

You know that you should eat regularly and if you didn’t know it, you hear it often enough. But there is a reason you hear it often, there is a reason why it’s important and in case it takes just one more push to get you to do it, hello. I’m pushing.

I’m pushing you because eating regularly, even though it takes time away from your work, means you can work better.

And I’m pushing you because that will push me. Let us work together. Hey, let’s do lunch, okay?

Farm your time better

Look, back in the olden days before there were clocks and deadlines, time was this vague, huge thing with little more than the seasons to mark its passing. Compare that to now when we can know time to the minute and we use it to the second: we have cultivated time.

If that’s true then I think it follows that we have to tend and farm time. There is a point when we sow and a point when we harvest.

And if I went even a pixel further I think I would break this analogy so I’ll shut up. But I’ve thought about this far more than it can seem here, certainly far more than is healthy, and the useful thing I’ve taken away from it is that we need breaks.

That without a break, over-worked soil will cease to be able to grow anything.

Learn how long it takes you to wake up

If I told you that the average person needs seven to eight hours sleep per night, you would not rush to hit the Facebook share button. But what’s less well known, certainly by me, is that there is an amount of time we each take to wake up – and that’s it’s several hours.

I find that half reassuring, half miserable. Read Fast Company’s account of how to find out your time.

When you’ve got nothing to do at work

Does this actually happen? They’re paying you for 40 hours a week, you would expect that they will have 40 hours worth of work for you to do – and you might expect them to try it on with 50 or 60 hours. Plus if they have very little for you to do, boredom will be the least of your worries as no business can keep you on for fun.

However. Maybe your work year is cyclical and you spend certain months gasping for air and then certain months playing Solitaire on your PC. For the sake of your will to live and – I think coincidentally – to help you get further in your job with this company, there are things you can do. Site point’s Lauren Holliday has advice that is really aimed, I think, at freelance people but if you’re freelance and bored then the thing you should be doing is getting more work in right now.

So while I take her points, I think this is handier when you’re in full-time employment and the issue is not whether you’ll get enough money to pay the mortgage next month but whether you can top your high score in Tetris. One thing she advises that I think applies to all of us, though, is this:

Organize Your Computer. When’s the last time you actually cleaned up your laptop aside from downloading an automatic Mac cleaner app? Your computer works hard so give it the Spring cleaning it deserves during the slow times.

How to Deal with Slow Times at Work – Lauren Holliday, Sitepoint (6 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

Don’t ever say or think ‘that’s good enough’

Brian Grazer, producer of 24 and Arrested Development on how there are no rules to how you achieve success – except maybe on.

“Every once in a while I rationalize quality,” [Brian Grazer] continued. “There are so many decision you make, and you’re trying to do excellence. We know what excellence is. We know what better food is versus not good food. But there’s a rationalizing process—that’s good enough. Anytime the light bulb goes, that’s good enough, it’s shitty!”

Brian Grazer Talks ’24,’ ‘Arrested Development,’ and Regretting ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ at Aspen – Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic (4 July 2015)

Read the full piece.

You work for yourself

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You work for yourself You do. I don’t care if you report to a manager and you turn up every day to the Acme factory line, you work for yourself. Act like you do because it will help your productivity – and act like you do work for yourself because you do work for yourself.

The good thing about fulltime employment – I’m guessing here because I’m freelance and haven’t had one fulltime post in 20 years – is that you do get to relax a bit. Don’t. You’re there to work and you are there to learn, to get value out of your company and be of value to it.

Nobody employs you because they’re nice. Hopefully they are but you earned your job there and it is costing them. A rule of thumb is that your salary is about half what it costs a company to employ you. (On top of the money you take home there is that much again the cost of hiring and tax and insurance and health and providing the equipment you need to do your job. The figure falls down the more you get paid but on average, roughly, kinda, that’s the sum we’re talking about.)

If you’ve done enough today to make you a bargain for them, then barring calamitous company misfortunes, your job is safe.

What I’m concerned about is how much you’ve got from the company. Firms don’t owe you anything but your salary and presumably they’re paying you that. But is what you’re doing valuable to you? Are you enjoying it and is it stretching you, growing you? We are not in a world where you can just walk out of a job if it isn’t, but you can look to see if it is and you can change things if it ain’t.

Don’t wait to be told what to do by a manager. Do what you’re there for and what you know how to do, then look for more. They’ll love you for all those words like initiative and discipline but you’ll love it for how it makes your job more interesting.

Plus, taking charge of what you do at your job helps you take charge of your career. And remember, you work for yourself. I’ve mentioned this. You’re just choosing to work with this firm for now. You have to keep earning your place there but the firm needs to keep earning its place having you.

This is all on my mind because I read some article saying that employees today need much more reassurance and appraisals than they did before. It’s on my mind because I had to make a fairly big business purchase decision and I realised that after 20 years I am still looking for permission from someone to do what I need to do.

That’s the curse of being a writer, though: we secretly believe someone is going to come along and stop us.

Cope with loosing freelance work

Contently has a good piece by Marianne Hayes about what it’s like when you have a long-standing freelance job abruptly end.

Within the last couple of months, I’ve had two steady, decent-paying jobs fall through. One was a regular copywriting gig for a medium-sized company; the other was with a well-established news site. Together, these projects were netting close to $2,000 per month. When they came to a grinding halt, I was left scrambling to make up the difference.

Overcoming this hurdle got me thinking about the steps I wish I’d taken to prevent the panic that comes with unexpectedly losing work.

3 Things I Learned from Unexpectedly Losing a Gig – Marianne Hayes, Contently (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece for her three tips but I’ll tell you now, it’s number 2 that’s going to save your neck: “Diversify your client list”.

How to be productive in the evenings

Who says you should be? You’ve worked all day, put your feet up. Except, when you’re writing there is a need to keep going and there is a satisfaction in having done so. Or at least there’s a hell of a dissatisfaction or plain misery in having gone another week or month or year without writing.

Lifehacker has the answer. It has several answers and here’s a taster of the first one, which also happens to be the one I most agree with and do my most to follow too:

Get Started As Soon As You Get Home

A number of you [in a discussion thread] said that if you wait until you’ve had dinner or spent some time with your family, it’s too late and your energy is gone—you’re too far out of “the zone” to really get back into it. The solution? Walk through the door, say hello to everyone, and head right for your workspace at home to do a little work. Whether it’s a few minutes or an hour, getting started as soon as you get home and you’re still in work mode goes a long way.

How To Stay Productive After Work – Alan Henry, Lifehacker (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.