Anxiety can help

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Oh, thank god. You can’t believe how anxious I get about events: the sole thing I’ve found can stop me worrying about a forthcoming gig is to have another gig to worry about it first. But 99U claims that anxiety can be good for you. Obviously within limits, neither they nor I want to encourage you to do anything that could get us sued, but.

Calming yourself down is often the wrong thing to do. Research by Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School found that when participants interpreted their nerves as excitement (for example, by saying to themselves “I’m excited!”), they gave better public presentations than those who tried to relax.

If you’re not anxious at all about an upcoming test, it probably means you don’t care. It’s only when anxiety becomes excessive and out of control that it starts to harm your performance. Psychologists have known about this anxiety “sweet spot” for decades…

The Unexpected Benefits of Anxiety – Christian Jarrett, 99U (undated, probably 22 June 2015)

Read the full piece for links to the research and a graph of that anxiety sweet spot thing.

Expand your comfort zone

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I’m a big fan of doing the unusual thing. Sometimes in big ways. Often in small and daily ways to mix things up. Why? Because this habit is a simple and relatively easy way to… expand your comfort zone. And if you change your perspective on yourself from someone who sticks to the old and comfortable all the time to someone who likes to mix things up then it will feel more natural and easier to break out of your comfort zone when comes to bigger things too. Because this habit makes the inner resistance and the fear that may hold you back smaller.

20 Small Ways to Break Out of Your Comfort Zone and Create a Positive Change Starting Today – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (undated, probably 18 June 2015)

Read the full piece though myself, I can only take a certain amount of positivity per day so I’m reading this 20-strong list over the next couple of weeks.

How Email became the Most Reviled Communication Experience Ever

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Am I the only person who actually likes email? Apparently so.

It wasn’t until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and ripping the cord out of the wall. (He couldn’t do the same at work, but I suspect he wanted to.) This abject fear and loathing of a telecommunications technology, and the radical step Honan took to escape it—not mitigate, not reframe, not “fix,” but escape—got me curious about how we got to this point. What are the actual, fundamental design flaws—if any—with email? What makes it such a huge target for “fixing,” yet so resistant to it?

How Email Became The Most Reviled Communication Experience Ever – John Pavlus, Fast Company (15 June 2015)

Read the full piece for advice on coping with email plus a little history of it. I enjoyed the history more but seemingly I’m a freak. I’m okay with that.

I Am Living List

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Writer Lindsey Bailey’s new blog includes one of the most inspiring and definitely the bravest thing I’ve seen online: a list of what she wants to do. That’s it, just a list. But there are entire worlds in some of the briefest entries and as you read on, you actually start to cheer as you reach ones she’s crossed off.

So here is my declaration; a list filled with big and little things that I dream of doing. Inspired by Sean Ogle’s idea that publishing this list makes you more accountable… below is my ‘I am living’ list.

I Am Living List – Lindsey Bailey, lindseybaileywrites.com (June 2015)

Have a read of it on her site.

Then when you have done, you can do what I did and prevaricate about doing the same thing yourself by instead going on to read Alex Townley’s response:

It’s more like free writing or word vomit, or possibly therapy, so I apologise in advance, but I’m blaming this on a friend and colleague of mine Lindsey Bailey, who has just launched her own website you can visit here (and very fine it is too). She has a section devoted to what she calls her ‘I am Living List’. A sort of fancy to do list of big and small things she’d like to do at some point. It made me start pondering, which led to thinking, which led to endless adding, first of things for my own ‘To Do’ list and secondly for those things which missed that list, those things which should have been on it, but never made it, because they’d already been done. So this is two lists, one of things I’d like to do, and a second, below it, of the surprising (to me at least) amount of vaguely noteworthy things I’m really glad I’ve done. Both lists I suspect are endless, but posting this will hopefully make me draw a mental line under them both in my head, and get on with something useful…. To Do List

This is not (really) a blog post – Alex Townley, love.bake.learn.make.laugh (11 June 2015)

So what are you waiting for? I can tell you that I personally am waiting for you to write a list like this so that I can read it to postpone writing mine.

Four steps to a CV, three steps to a bio

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I suppose I can tell you this now, since it is regrettably a hell of a long time since I did it, but when I was in college I wrote CVs for people. Anybody. Everybody. I did it as a favour, I did it for free – though nice people bought me meals for it – and after a while I wrote them very well.

That’s the thing. I practiced writing CVs by writing them for, I don’t know, a couple of dozen other people. Then I wrote mine and I’d learnt how to do it.

That may be mumble mumble years ago but the things I found out have stayed with me since. Here’s how to knock up a CV, especially if you’re a writer.

1) Bollocks to modesty. There’s a difference between boasting and lying by omission. You got on the New York Times Bestseller List? Say so. It’s a fact. Don’t qualify it (all US book writers were on strike that week), just state it.

2) Nuts to academic good practice: you are not applying for a university post, everything they tell you to do on CVs is wrong. Nobody gives a damn about how you’re interested in ballroom fish photography, they want to know you can do the job. Tell them that by leading with your latest work and then follow with the next most relevant thing. Divide it up into sections if that means you can group two long-apart events without looking strange.

3) Remember that the job of the CV is to get you an interview. Don’t put so much in there that they can effectively interview you on the page. The CV gets you in the door, nothing more than that.

4) Be plain, be simple, don’t go over a page.

That third point is key: remember the job this document is there to do and make it do just that. CVs get you interviews, The End. Getting the job is down to you in the interview.

Equally, a bio has a specific job, it’s just harder to define. You’ll get asked for bios for your books, you’ll need one for your website, it’ll just keep coming up a lot so having one ready is handy. As I write this to you, I need to write a new bio. I’ve got one ready to send when it’s needed quickly but because I’m tailoring this one specifically to the company that wants it, I’m going to rewrite it. The thing is that rewriting won’t take me much longer than copying and pasting the regular one because I do bios in the same way every time:

Look at who the bio is for or what the event is. Find two things you’ve done that are directly relevant and a third that is as far away from it as possible. Then write as little about each as you can.

You end up with something like this:

William Gallagher writes Doctor Who audio dramas and books on television media. He once had afternoon tea on a Russian nuclear submarine and regrets calling the place a dive.

The straightforward and the scary of text editors

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Listen, text editor or word processor: they’re both ugly terms and you can probably marshal brilliantly incisive definitions for what they are and why they are different but they both things you can write in. I think of a word processor as being something capable of handling complex books and a text editor as something for notes. But I have written – hang on, let me check, – just shy of 300 articles for MacNN.com this year and every one of them was in a text editor.

Some of them have been about text editors and I want to show you two that I think represent extremes of this market plus a third I say lies in the middle but which I adore. The first is Simplenote, which was recommended to me by MacNN’s Charles Martin and after a couple of months using it I wrote:

Start quick, get on with writing, finish and move on. There isn’t a Save button in Simplenote, and we just had to look to find that out: it never occurs to us to save, we just know everything always is saved. Compare that to Pages, where Apple tells us it is constantly saving yet we can’t shake that command-s keystroke twitch. One reason we trust Simplenote so readily is that we can see the result: write something on the Mac version, and it’s right there on the iOS one immediately.

We also like the fact that we often compile pieces we’ve written in a dozen different places, and can just paste them all in. No remembering to find some Paste As Special tick box, no reformatting, no format painter, just text right in. That suits us well for weblinks, too, as they just go in as text the way we intended.

Hands On: Simplenote 4.1.1 (OS X, iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (16 June 2015)

Simplenote is simple but not all that powerful and nor does it need to be. At the other end, though, you get Editorial. While Simplenote is across Mac, iOS, Android and – via the web – also PCs, Editorial is only for iPad and iPhone. It is so powerful that it honestly frightens me:

Look at the improvements in version 1.2, a more significant update from 1.1 than it sounds. It adds folding for Markdown and TaskPaper, it’s got new bundled workflows, and behind that blank screen, it has new modules for its native programming language, called Python.

If you don’t know what all this means, then in theory you never have to. You can ignore every bit of it, and just write in Editorial whatever you need to write. Yet that would be like buying one of those pens where you have to click to get the ballpoint nib out — and then never clicking it. You could make marks on the paper, but you’d know you were denying yourself the ink and color this app is capable of.

It’s capable of so much that Editorial has fans. Microsoft Word doesn’t, but Editorial so definitely does. Nobody’s actually called it life-changing yet, but they have called it worklife-changing, and they weren’t kidding.

Hands On: Editorial 1.2 (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (17 June 2015)

Since I wrote that review I’ve kept Editorial on my iPad but I can’t help myself, I keep turning to Drafts 4 to write. I love that app and I love that while for some indefinable reason I just enjoy writing in it, it also has some welly.

I’ll open it in a flash, write something immediately and only then think about where I’m going to use it. I’ll write down a stray thought and maybe seeing it there on the screen I’ll think yes, that’s something I should definitely do – so I’ll tap one button and the text goes off to my To Do app, OmniFocus. Maybe I think that’s something I should tell Angela – so I’ll tap one button and it’s sent to her by text message. And on and on and on. As many things as I can need or think of, and all with one button. Sometimes that button takes a lot of setting up, but once it’s done, I can tap away at will.

I think what’s significant is that there is such a range now of software you can write in. So much so that I can spend happy hours trying them all out instead of actually writing anything. Excellent.

Stop waiting

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There are limits here: if you want to quit your job then you should indeed wait until you can do it but what you shouldn’t is wait to begin. Start doing the thing that will get you out. Start now. Stop waiting.

Productive people sometimes confuse the difference between reasonable delay and true procrastination. The former can be useful (“I’ll respond to this email when I have more time to write it”). The latter is, by definition, self-defeating (“I should respond to this email right now, and I have time, and my fingers are on the keys, and the Internet connection is perfectly strong, and nobody is asking me to do anything else, but I just … don’t … feel like it.”).

When scientists have studied procrastination, they’ve typically focused on how people are miserable at weighing costs and benefits across time. For example, everybody recognizes, in the abstract, that it’s important to go to the dentist every few months. The pain is upfront and obvious—dental work is torture—and the rewards of cleaner teeth are often remote, so we allow the appointment to slip through our minds and off our calendars. Across several categories including dieting, saving money, and sending important emails, we constantly choose short and small rewards (whose benefits are dubious, but immediate) over longer and larger payouts (whose benefits are obvious, but distant).

In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion. Procrastination “really has nothing to do with time-management,” Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told Psychological Science. “To tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It – Derek Thompson, The Atlantic (26 August 2015)

Read the full piece. Via Inc.com and Lifehacker.

You possibly are or aren’t more productive when you have time off

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There’s a snippy article in the Harvard Business Review that begins:

We were recently working with a company in Amsterdam, and having difficulty getting a summer meeting scheduled because of the number of executives who were on vacation. Experiencing some frustration, we began to wonder how this company actually got its work done.

Ewwww, catty.

But their VP of HR assured us, “I am confident that because of the rest and break from work that our European executives get more accomplished in their working days than those in the U.S. who burn themselves out.”

Harvard Business Review then says “this seemed worthy of some research” but you have to read it as Challenge Accepted.

After that, it gets a bit muddy. Are you more productive if you have time off? The best way to summarise the findings is in that wonderful Simpsons quote: “Short answer yes with an if; long answer no with a but”.

Read the full piece by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (HBR 17 June 2015) to see them throw statistics in your face and then try to play it both ways.