The Habits of Annoyingly Strong-Willed Bastards

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Okay, that’s a harsh headline. Have a read of the much more softly-worded 5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower over on Inc.com but I tell you, the first one is probably the best:

Eliminate as many choices as possible. We all have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self-control.

The more choices we make during the day, the harder each one is on our brain–and the more we start to look for shortcuts. (Call it the “Oh, screw it,” syndrome.) Then we get impulsive. Then we get reckless. Then we make decisions we know we shouldn’t make, but it’s as if we can’t help ourselves.

In fact, we can’t help ourselves: We’ve run out of the mental energy we need to make smart choices.

That’s why the fewer choices we have to make, the smarter choices we can make when we do need to make a decision.

Say you want to drink more water and less soda. Easy. Keep three water bottles on your desk at all times. Then you won’t need to go to the refrigerator and need to make a choice.

Or say you struggle to keep from constantly checking your email. Easy. Turn off all your alerts. Or shut down your email and open it only once an hour. Or take your mail program off your desktop and keep it on a laptop across the room. Make it hard to check–then you’re more likely not to.

5 Habits of People With Remarkable Willpower – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (undated)

Read the full piece.

Annie Lennox on staying creative and relevant

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It’s just one small part of an interview she did for Harvard Business Review back in 2010 but one small part is all the excuse I need to recommend you read the lot:

She was asked what the secret is staying relevant?

Curiosity, and not allowing yourself to be boxed in or easily categorized. In pop music you have to be prepared to take risks. Not everything is going to be to everyone’s taste. But you stay alive artistically.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Annie Lennox – Alison Beard, Harvard Business Review (October 2010)

Read the full piece.

Bollocks to maybe, it’s no or it’s hell, yes

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Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: if I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

No more yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no – Derek Sivers blog (28 August 2009)

Read the full piece. It’s from six years ago so it’d be interesting if I could find whether he stuck to it but Lifehacker just spotted this today and has some thoughts on the topic.

Full screen mode on notebooks

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And the unexpected benefits of what seemed like a thing I’d never use.

So, previously: my gorgeous 27in iMac is away off with the faeries – i.e. being seen to by Apple – and while it’s gone, I’m working on my old and I had thought underpowered MacBook Pro. It’s not underpowered. For the most part it’s doing its job well, I am doing my job fine. It’s got a broken keyboard but I’ve plugged in my iMac’s one and that’s all tickety-boo fine.

What’s really changed is that I’ve started using the Mac’s Full Screen jobbie. In pretty much any software you use on a Mac, you can tap a button or press a key to make that app fill the screen – and hide everything else. I have never used it before. I don’t want 27 inches of white blazing out at me when I’m writing.

Plus, it’s a slightly clunky idea because of the way you get back from this full screen lark to regular larking. You mouse up a bit until the menu bar reappears, then you find the button. Somehow a bit ugly.

Yet with a much smaller screen, I tried using this in one app and I’ve liked it so much that I’m using it in every app. I find I can swap between these full screen applications like moving from Word to Safari without closing the full screen, moving to the other app and reopening the full screen. Just the usual Command-Tab takes me through full screens.

Not always very smoothly. I seem to end up paused, hovering over the desktop for a time while it all figures itself out. But usually, I’m in Safari now, I’m in Mail next, it’s a quick thing and not anywhere near as disruptive to concentration as I thought.

But here’s the thing. Concentration. What I didn’t appreciate was that full screen apps hide their menu bar and that means they hide the clock. Hiding the clock turns out to be excellent: I could focus on the thing I was doing and spend whatever time it took. Of course, I have to leave for a meeting in a while so I couldn’t ignore time altogether but for about 90 minutes, I could.

Time passed but I was entirely focused on the job and if I sometimes longed for a tea break, I didn’t once stop to think about whether I had enough time to carry on.

If you’re not on a Mac, thank you for reading this far, and go find a way to switch off that damn clock. It’ll help you.

Tea breaks

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I take a lot of these tea breaks and I’ve been spending those three-minute aeons while the kettle boils by reading RSS news. But then isn’t a good tea break more than three minutes plus fifteen seconds hunting for biscuits? I’m trying a new thing now where I do come back to my desk and I do drink the tea as usual, but hey, I kick back for a spell while I’m doing it.

And I check out my OmniFocus list for short, quick things I can do before I have to concentrate on the next big job.

That’s it. Take your full tea break, get your mind fully away from the current job, but use the time to meander through your list and seeing what you can bat out of the way quickly.

Just an idea.

Clickhole: 8 Ways Your Ordinary Office Job is Slowly Killing You

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Serious advice here. Including:

Sitting too long and holding your breath the entire time

According to all recent findings, sitting in one place too long can lead to hypertension, blood clots, and heart disease, while holding your breath for an extended period of time reduces the flow of oxygen to your brain and slowly shuts down your circulatory system. Avoid this by standing up every few hours at work and occasionally breathing.

8 Ways Your Ordinary Office Job Is Slowly Killing… (no author listed) ClickHole (22 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

The two skills that mean the most for everyone

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They also mean the most to everyone, as in to everyone you ever work with. Over on TIME magazine, Auren Hoffman, CEO of LiveRamp says what these two are though if anything, I’d say it’s just the first one that matters the most. Or the first one that makes the biggest impact.

If you consistently do what you say you will do, you will almost certainly be someone people desire to have on their teams. It is so rare that when you work with someone who is reliable, you never ever want to work with anyone else. You will do anything to keep that person on your team.

Doing what you say you are going to do starts with setting the right expectations. If you tell someone you will get them the deliverable by Tuesday, you need to understand that it can actually be delivered by Tuesday. If you are good, you are probably factoring in slack in case someone in corporate slows you down or your child gets sick.

These Are the Most Underrated Skills That Many People Lack – Auren Hoffman, TIME (27 June 2015

The second one is about keeping track of yourself which I take to mean doing what you need to to do in order to make this first skill work. Read the full piece.

Un-send an email if you’re quick and on Gmail

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It’s not quite what it looks like, but if you’re a Gmail user and you switch this feature on, you can now have between 10 and 30 seconds to change your mind about sending an email.

Around the web this is being touted as a way to stop the hellstorm of an ill-thought, kneejerk angry email you sent in a fury. I think more practically it’s going to be to save you some of the times you forget to add the attachment you meant.

Here’s what Google says:

Previously a popular feature in Gmail Labs, and recently added to Inbox by Gmail, today we’re adding ‘Undo Send’ as a formal setting in Gmail on the web.

‘Undo Send’ allows people using Gmail to cancel a sent mail if they have second thoughts immediately after sending. The feature is turned off by default for those not currently using the Labs version, and can be enabled from the General tab in Gmail settings.

Google Apps update alerts: Undo Send for Gmail on the web (22 June 2015)

It isn’t really an undo. It’s a not-do-so-quickly. What happens is that the email just doesn’t go when it says it does, it waits in a little limbo for a moment. That’s why you can have a brief time to ‘unsend’ it but you can’t, for instance, undo the bitter message you sent yesterday to your ex.

This also isn’t new. It’s a feature in other email services but Gmail is definitely the biggest one and it’s so big that you can bet money both Microsoft with Outlook and Apple with Mail will surely introduce it soon.

Read the full piece for a bit more detail.

Pixar’s method for staying creative

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Don’t read this article, read this book instead: Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull. He’s one of the founders of Pixar and while the book is laden with Paxarian references and anecdotes, it’s a startlingly absorbing read about all creativity and specifically about how to keep it going.

However, I’ve had this book on my reading list for ages and even though I’ve enjoyed the start so much that I’ve recommended it before, it was only when The Creativity Post summarised it lately that I got it out again.

I don’t honestly think that Creativity Post adds anything to the topic but I’m not doing much better here. So take a look their full piece but, seriously, go buy the book.

Lifehacker: 10 Unusual Ways to make your To Do List Work

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Unless the first way is to hire someone else to do the other nine, I’m suspicious. But Lifehacker’s Melanie Pinola writes persuasively about methods of getting stuff down onto a list and then doing it. I don’t agree with them all but it’d be boring if I did. Here’s one unfair sample from her ten ways: she doesn’t claim it’s the best and I don’t think it’s representative of the rest but I just liked it as a dramatist:

Turn Your To-Do List into a Story

Visualise and map out your to-dos into a story, a narrative for your day. This storytelling technique can not only help motivate you to complete the tasks, it could boost your memory and help you make better sense of your days. There are other ways to visualise your to-do list that can prompt you to act more.

Top 10 Unusual Ways to Make Your To-Do List Actually Doable – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (22 Jun 2015).

Read the full piece.