Don’t talk back to your boss.

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Not even that one. The one who deserves it. I’m not convinced we need actual research on this – if your boss is bad enough that you want be abusive right back in their stinking face then they are also bad enough to fire you for it – but Harvard Business Review has looked into it.

It was a quiet day.

But there are figures that suggest maybe there are times when you should bite back and then there are figures that say nooooo. I expect those latter figure are chiefly unemployment statistics but if you’re having trouble with a manager or an important client, take a read and let it out.

The alternative hypothesis [to previous studies] that would maybe help us explain why people are hostile toward a hostile boss — we called it the buffering hypothesis in this study — is the idea that if you reciprocate your boss’s hostility, it will actually make things a little bit better and you will feel more satisfied, or not as depressed and psychologically harmed.

Our reasoning behind that second hypothesis is that if you reciprocate a boss’s hostility, you are less likely to feel like a victim. Now, we had never studied the idea that a person would report that they feel like they are a victim when their boss is hostile, but it seemed to make some sense.

So maybe if you reciprocate the boss’s hostility, it will make you feel like you are asserting some control over your situation, you are responding in some way, then you will not feel as victimized.

We found a surprising result: although a person is more likely to feel like a victim when their boss is hostile toward them, they are much less likely to feel like a victim when they reciprocate their boss’s hostility.

What Research Shows About Talking Back to a Jerk Boss – Walter Frick, Harvard Business Review (9 April 2015)

Read the full piece.

Twelve Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety

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The Positivity Blog – seriously, could that name be any more Hallmark Card happy clappy? – spends its time being very cheerfully upbeat about everything but once in a while it does hit home with a smart piece. This time it has solutions to when your stomach is churning. We’re creative people, we churn for a living, so I reckon even if one or two of the dozen methods help us out, it’s worth looking into. Although one of the suggestions is to do a workout, so, you know, already it’s 11 Powerful Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety and 1 to Increase it.

1. Breathe.

Sit down, in a quiet place if possible. Breathe a little deeper than usual and do it with your belly and not with your chest. For just a minute or two focus on only the air going in and out of your nostrils. Nothing else.

This will calm your mind and body down. And it will bring your attention back to the present moment instead of it being lost in scary, future scenarios or bad memories from the past.

12 Powerful Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (8 April 2015)

This isn’t on my mind because as I’ve got three speaking engagements back to back now. I might just breathe out a little and go re-read the full piece. Mind you, advice number 2 begins “Get Good Knowledge” and that phrasing gives me pause.

Get more out of that expensive computer of yours

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I’m not saying you and I should spend more time in front of our computers. I’m saying that while you’re there, you can make these things work harder for you.

Seriously, how much did that thing cost you? And you’re just switching it on to write in Word, check out Facebook and send the odd email?

Take a minute to just look into it a bit more. You spend a lot of time writing, for one thing: start there. Start with how no matter what word processor you use, I know that it is replete with shortcuts. You know how much, much, much faster it is to open a document by pressing Control-O on PCs or Command-O on Macs? There’s more. Google the name of your word processor and the phrase “keyboard shortcuts”. You will recoil at how many there are, but learn a couple of them now and they will become muscle memory.

This isn’t about teaching yourself something, not really, and it’s not even exactly about getting faster at the repetitive things you have to do on your computer. It’s about removing obstacles. Someone asked me recently about the whole Blank Screen thing and why I prattle on in workshops, books and online. Among many reasons – you know me, I can’t be concise – I remembered that I’d shown someone how to speed up a thing on her website.

I created a button for her which meant to write something on her site, she pressed that instead of schlepping through the most tortuous series of steps to get into where she could right. The result is that, yes, it’s quicker for her, but the real result and the reason I talk to you so much, is that because it’s quicker, she does it.

She does it more. She does it a lot. It is great to see her dusty old blog become this active, sparkling new thing.

My book goes as far into this as you usefully can while keeping you awake and more specific issues have cropped up in most mentoring sessions I do. I wouldn’t want to force you to become as technology dependent as I am – but you already are, you already have that computer, get more out of it.

I wanted to say this to you now because it’s on my mind and it’s part of a project I’m working on for later in the year. But you say something and then you realise it: do take a look at my Blank Screen mentoring service as this is just one thing you’ll find it good for.

People have to change their own minds

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“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others” – Balise Pascal, French scientist and philosopher. Brain Pickings uses this as the centre of a piece about how you can’t change some bastard’s mind but you can get them to look at things differently without wanting to throttle you.

Nearly half a millennium before modern psychologists identified the three elements of persuasion — attunement, buoyancy, and clarity — French physicist, philosopher, inventor, and mathematician Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623–August 19, 1662) intuited this mechanism as he arrived at a great truth about the secret of persuasion: Pascal came to see that the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs.

How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (20 May 2015)

Read the full piece.

Ignore emails that don’t ask you a question

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That headline is the entire story. To save yourself time, to save headaches and most of all to save those pointlessly ongoing email conversations, don’t reply unless they ask you something. I don’t know that I’m capable of ignoring email but I learnt that I should try from this interview with a CEO I’d never heard of before.

She’s Kristin Muhlner who runs NewBrand Analytics. Haven’t heard of that either, but.

I love email. I’m probably a rare breed in that regard. I love it because it allows me to work asynchronously and to consume vast amounts of information rapidly across the business. But unless I’m specifically asked a question, I don’t respond. If a CEO responds, everyone thinks they need to respond back, and that kicks up a lot of dust.”

The Many, Many, Many Things You Should Say “No” To At Work – David Zax, Fast Company (1 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

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If the To Do app 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 used to go um. Now I go: take a look at this post on the excellent Asian Efficiency.

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 (27 June 2013)

Read the full piece for the seven answers. As they say, none are miracles but together a couple of them might be just right for you.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…

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But apparently I might get more done. New research noodles the fact that at one level, anger gives you adrenalin and it gives you a right-I’ll-show-you attitude so you focus more.

Did you ever notice how your body tenses and how every hair in your body rises when you’re angry? How your heart pounds so hard that you can feel the throbbing in your temples?

When you’re angry, your blood pressure and heart rate go up—so do your energy and adrenaline. These physiological reactions brought by anger are the same triggers that put us in the fight or flight mode.

If our reaction from anger could spell the difference between death and survival, why aren’t we using our anger more often to our advantage?

Feeling Stuck? Make Your Anger Work for You – Cecille Doroja, Pick the Brain (15 October 2014)

More useful, I think, is the question the rest of the piece attempts to answer: is there a way to keep the anger useful and not get arrested for GBH?

A Month of Networking

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Special torture. Writer Rachel Gillett did it so you don’t have to. She documents an entire month and it’s perhaps not the most surprising read in the world but you’ll feel for her and you’ll also definitely take her advice.

WEEK 1: GET TO KNOW YOUR COWORKERS
During the first week of the challenge, I eased into networking by inviting coworkers to lunch. This low-pressure situation promised to help us practice our conversation skills. I asked my coworker Rose to invite another colleague, David, to join us for lunch—and on the walk to our lunch spot I felt very deeply the true awkwardness of this scenario.

I think we were all aware of the social connotation when someone asks you to lunch. One can’t help but wonder, what’s the motivation here, what’s the angle? So as we sat down to eat, I wanted to dispel any fears of a hidden agenda. Our networking lunch was simply an occasion to get out of the office, get to know each other better. After brushing the initial awkwardness aside, we enjoyed a delicious family-style meal of samosas, saag paneer, chicken tikka masala, lamb korma, and naan. We ate like kings, kvetched like yentas, and it was great.

My Painful (And Sometimes Fun) Month Of Networking – Rachel Gillett, Fast Company (16 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Daftest, best productivity tip

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I promise you this is the best tip you’ll hear all week unless you boss has just said you’ll be fired if you don’t pull your finger out. Actually, when you’ve read my tip you might even prefer your boss as he or she is at least succinct and pithy. My advice is long-winded and a chore – but the chore is the thing.

Just pretend for a moment that this works. Starting the next morning you get to your desk, write down what you do and the exact time. Everything you do.

What do I mean by everything? EVERYTHING.

Every time you do it. Every and every. No exceptions. Yes, even “Went to Loo”. “Skived off to write CV behind boss’s back”.

If you’re thinking that’s a waste of time, yep. It is. You’ll end up with an enormous list of utter trivial nonsense – “10:19 Slammed phone down on another sodding PPI call” – but the list will be enormous. It will be far more than you expect and you will have done at least substantially more than you would normally. The time it takes to write that line down is more than made up for by how you start getting twitchy when too many minutes have gone by without doing anything.

You’ll find yourself thinking I can phone Burt, I can email Susan, I can look up that account mess. Suddenly things you’ve put off or just not got around to become these quick things you can do for your list. So you do them and guess what? They’re done.

You will go insane if you do this every day but in emergencies when you’re overwhelmed and feeling like you aren’t capable of doing the job you were hired for, adding this extra burden relieves you. It makes you concentrate on the right here and now instead of the big picture and you need that.

By the way, I cheat. I use TextExpander to pop in the date and time. You knew there’d be technology somewhere. But there doesn’t have to be. A pen will do.

18 June 2015 – 09:00 Stopped nicking articles from my own Blank Screen newsletter

The Successful Failure

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That’s me, that is. Official. I’ve been interviewed for the US podcast series The Successful Failure: it’s about how one’s biggest, most calamitous bad times are what teach you the skills to get great days.

I’ve known the series producer and presenter, Gigi Peterkin, for years so she knew to steer me away from my haircut errors but she also got more out of me than I expected. Possibly more than I intended, but let’s not go there.

Instead, let’s go here: this is my episode on The Successful Failure website. Do take a listen to the other episodes and subscribe to it on iTunes.

You could also take a read of Self Distract, my personal blog when I mused about how much detail one can unintentionally give up in interviews.