How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

Posted by William Gallagher

I was saying this just last Thursday: if OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I go um.

Here’s a group that didn’t stop at um. This is Asian Efficiency:

A lot of OmniFocus Premium Posts customers and OmniFocus users have been emailing us with one of their biggest challenges: they love OmniFocus but are forced to use Windows at work. What to do?

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (25 October 2014)

Read the full piece. I like very much that they’re upfront with how there is no magic option, I like how this isn’t written as if they’ve found the solution. It’s written baldly and starkly: there is no great answer, there is just this way of coping when you have to.

Do read that full piece and check out Asian Efficiency. The site has various options for OmniFocus users where you can buy some of their help.

Celebrity fame and productivity

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve got one of these. But if I were also a famous celebrity, this is what would happen. You’d hear about me a lot on the news and each time I would’ve got a new book out. Or my shocking scurrilous sordid squid sex secret has been revealed. (Delete depending on what celebrity news outlet you read.)

My personal life aside – we’re all adults here, I don’t judge you, you don’t judge me or at least don’t judge me until you’ve tried it – I think that there is something interesting and something that gets forgotten. These people you see relaxing on the BBC Breakfast couch talking about yet another book, yet another success, they have two things going on that they don’t really talk about and that they are not really asked about either.

First, they need that publicity. I don’t mean that they crave it within their souls or that their lifeforce depends upon adulation, I mean that without you hearing about their book, the book doesn’t sell. They want to eat, sure, but they probably also want to keep on writing books and they need us, they need some floodlights put on their faces.

But the second thing is ridiculous. We listen to journalists asking people about their new book and yet we don’t really, consciously think: “They’ve written a new book”. Obviously they have but we tend to think more that it’s “They’ve got a new book out”. That’s subtly different and I think it misleads us.

To get on the telly talking about a book, you have to write the book.

We see celebrities relaxing, talking happily at events and in interviews, but they solely got there because they did the work. It’s back-breaking work but they have broken their backs and done it.

And tomorrow they’re off doing it again.

I’m not fussed about fame and celebrity, I am very fussed about getting enough sales that I can keep writing books. Do the work. Be productive. And you will produce things.

I have no idea whether that will get you on the telly but I know that you don’t get on if you haven’t done the work.

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.

Star Wars productivity advice

Posted by William Gallagher

Make better films.

I’d start with the scripts, myself.

But if you’re not George Lucas, there is apparently still much advice can you take, mmm, from the films of the Wars of Star. Writer Yael Grauer knows more about Star Wars than I thought existed and has found eight apposite quotes to help us in our work.

Spoiler: one of them is the one you just thought of – “Do or do not, there is no try.” And one of them is just “Ready are you?”. But overall the eight have interesting points, starting with number 1 where she says you could benefit from reframing a job, from looking at it all in a different light:

“Deliver more than you promise. The best way to be always certain of this is to deliver much, even when you promise nothing.” ―Master Tho-Mes Drei, Jedi Master and Jedi Temple instructor

Somewhere on your journey, you’ll hit a point where you have enough work coming in that walking away from a client doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. As a Jedi, you are sworn to protect the peace and justice of the Republic. Therefore, you would follow both the letter and the spirit of the law of any contract you sign, putting effort into each project that you’re obligated to complete. That means you may find yourself in a non-ideal engagement you’re committed to finishing, even though you’re dreading every minute of it.

This is where business coach Pam Slim, award-winning author of Escape From Cubicle Nation and Body of Work, recommends defining specific benefits to your plight. Maybe it’s realizing an assignment will look great in your portfolio, or perhaps the money from a project will pay your healthcare bill the month. “Sometimes making it super concrete can create a positive correlation for you in getting something done,” Slim said. Focusing on the direct reward of completing a project can take your mind away from the challenges.

8 Jedi Mind Tricks for Freelancers (and Star Wars Nerds) – Yael Grauer, Contently (4 August 2014)

Seriously, I could do without the Jedi bits. But I like the points her full article makes.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Posted by William Gallagher

When we write we know to put characters in conflict but in real life, we avoid that all we can. And quite reasonably so. But sometimes, it might be worth a bit of a scrap:

While some people plow through conflict to get their way, a 2010 study by Provo, Utah-based leadership training firm VitalSmarts found that 95% of employees have trouble voicing differences of opinion, which results in a loss of roughly $1,500 per eight-hour workday in lost productivity, doing unnecessary work, and engaging in active avoidance of co-workers for every crucial conversation they avoid.

“We’re constantly faced with choices and conflicts. We work through the vast majority. The conflicts that get the most attention are the ones that go bad or go wrong,” says Peter T. Coleman, psychology and education professor at New York City’s Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement.

Somewhere between browbeating and caving in every time you’re faced with someone else’s preferences, there’s a middle ground out of which can spring innovation and ideas.

How to Use Conflict to Your Advantage at Work – Gwen Moran, Fast Company (31 July 2014)

Moran’s full piece goes on to give five pointers on how and when to do it, starting with choosing your battles wisely.

New York Times on the need to take a break

Posted by William Gallagher

I slept in this morning. It’s my first Monday back working and I slept in. Woke at 8am, it’s now slipping a wee bit past 9am and if you can really call nattering to you work, then this is the first work I’ve done. I am hours behind and I feel great.

I’m going to have to think about this. But as if to aid me thinking about it, I just read this:

Every day we’re assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions. According to a 2011 study, on a typical day, we take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986. As the world’s 21,274 television stations produce some 85,000 hours of original programming every day (by 2003 figures), we watch an average of five hours of television per day. For every hour of YouTube video you watch, there are 5,999 hours of new video just posted!

Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain – Daniel J Levitn, New York Times (9 August 2014)

I know what you’re thinking: who’s the slacker who didn’t make it 6,000 hours?

But Levitin’s point is that we need to step away from all this once in a while. And apparently, for a great number of people in the US, that once in a while is right now:

This month, many Americans will take time off from work to go on vacation, catch up on household projects and simply be with family and friends. And many of us will feel guilty for doing so. We will worry about all of the emails piling up at work, and in many cases continue to compulsively check email during our precious time off.

But beware the false break. Make sure you have a real one. The summer vacation is more than a quaint tradition. Along with family time, mealtime and weekends, it is an important way that we can make the most of our beautiful brains.

Is your brain beautiful? Or is this like football, which I think is called the beautiful game for absolutely no reason whatsoever?

Levitin’s full piece is an opinion article in the New York Times but it’s opinion backed up by some academic research that he and his colleagues have done. Read the lot for a bit more waffle but also a great deal more concrete bits about handling how our attention is so assaulted.

To work better, work less

Posted by William Gallagher

I feel busted. I am guilty of every single thing in this article about our attitudes to working long hours. And I am going to do something about it, even if I have to work all the hours god sends me.

It has long been known that working too much leads to life-shortening stress. It also leads to disengagement at work, as focus simply cannot be sustained for much more than 50 hours a week. Even Henry Ford knew the problem with overwork when he cut his employees’ schedules from 48-hour weeks to 40-hour weeks. He believed that working more than 40 hours a week had been causing his employees to make many errors, as he recounted in his autobiography, My Life and Work.

…It seems silly that many work long hours simply for the sake of having worked long hours. Perhaps the reason people overwork even when it is not for “reward, punishment, or obligation” is because it holds great social cachet. Busyness implies hard work, which implies good character, a strong education, and either present or future affluence. The phrase, “I can’t; I’m busy,” sends a signal that you’re not just an homme sérieux, but an important one at that.

There is also a belief in many countries, the United States especially, that work is an inherently noble pursuit. Many feel existentially lost without the driving structure of work in their life—even if that structure is neither proportionally profitable nor healthy in a physical or psychological sense.

To Work Better, Work Less – Cody C Delistraty, The Atlantic (8 August 2014)

How many hours a day are you actually productive?

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s about 22:30 as I write this and I’ve worked with a few interruptions since 06:30. But you have to wonder how many minutes of actual useful work I got done.

There is a currently very brief discussion about this issue on Reddit. Part of the reason I want to tell you about this is to also point out that Reddit has useful productivity chatter. But here’s the start of this one in particular:

Taking away your bathroom breaks, lunches, Internet breaks, and staring into space, how many hours are you actually productive? This question is directed to office workers, primarily.

For me, it’s about three, MAYBE four hours. I feel like I get the same amount of work done if I come into the office for 3 or 4 hours (vs. 8 hours) because I stay focused for those 3 or 4 hours because I know I only HAVE those 3 or 4 hours…whereas during a normal 8 hour day, I’ll work for 30 minutes, get distracted for another 30, etc.

Do I just get mentally fatigued easily, or is this normal?

Reddit Productivity (24 July 2014)

Go add your tuppence, would you? But have a break first, obviously.

Even boring jobs can make a difference to people

Posted by William Gallagher

I have a problem with this headline because I think all the work in this video is deeply interesting. But the designer in it insists he learnt the lesson that even work that seems dull may reach out and change peoples’ lives. I don’t need convincing.

Instead of just going through the motions on your next project [says 99U], look for the hidden opportunities you already have. On The Creative Influence, graphic designer Michael Bierut challenges us to look for opportunities in even the most dull assignments. He speaks about his mentor, designer Massimo Vignelli, when he was asked to sort through the chaos of the New York subway signage during the 1960s.

Michael Bierut: Make the Best of What You’ve Got – Stephanie Kaptein, 99U (22 July 2014)

Free (and paid) week planners for creative people

Posted by William Gallagher

The site Productive Flourishing makes a good point:

After years of struggling with the planners designed for and by office workers, I figured out that it wasn’t me that was the problem: it was the design of the planners.

Creative people approach their work differently. Most of us don’t work 8–5, and we don’t have projects that we can plan to get done during the same times each day. The limiting factor for us is not the amount of time we have available, but rather the type of time we have available.

One size does not fit all when it comes to planners. Check out the planners below to see which ones best relate to what you’re trying to do, and give them a try!

Free Planner – no credited author, Productive Flourishing (undated but July 2014)

And here’s an example of what one such plan looks like. This is a month’s action plan:

The full article contains very many such free planners but also links out to a set of paid premium ones.