Know your limits by setting them

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Today I started around 7am, I’m going to write until about 4pm, then I’ve various errands I need to do and I’ll cook at maybe 6:30pm. That’s nice.

But.

This is new. It’s new for me or at least it’s fairly new since I lost my biggest single client as a freelance writer. Wait – I’ve just looked that up: it was three years ago next month. Unbelievable. Is that really right? Only three? Feels like a decade. It seemed like such a bad day at the time but, wow, I wish it had happened sooner.

Anyway, having a big regular client gives you structure in two ways, doesn’t it? There is the time you have agreed or are contracted to work with them. That stops you doing anything else, gloriously it also removes the churning as you think constantly about what is the best thing you could be doing right now. What can you do this minute that will help you? Nothing. You’re committed, you’re contracted. Stop churning, get working.

This type of contract also defines the rest of your time: it is the bits when you’re not working for them and so therefore must get all your other work done. What is the best thing to do at this minute? Work.

When that contract goes and you’re suddenly doing much more irregular and many, many, many more jobs all at once, the structure of your working life changes. I’d say for the better: I have come to adore jumping from one job to another, switching tasks a dozen times a day. Do note that I say switching: I will always and forever do one thing and then do the other, I will not attempt multitasking. I’ve learnt that much at least.

However, switching and jumping plus irregular and many, many, many more jobs does rather mean that you can be always working. I like this. I like this a lot.

But I have felt overwhelmed this year and when I’m being close to nasty about how good or bad my work is, I can’t help but note that longer days do not get better results.

So yesterday I tried laying out one hour on this, one hour on that, plus not checking emails until the top of the hour. This is all stuff I advocated in my book The Blank Screen and it is all stuff that I have learnt to do, that I have regularly done. But somehow doing it again in the midst of feeling under water, it helped even more.

I’m trying it again today. It means I know what I’m doing for the next several hours and I know when I’m stopping. Which means that for once I can tell you I will be having a very good time tonight relaxing with a copy of Pride and Prejudice.

I’m actually looking forward to that. The evening is now a thing to look forward to instead of just a different set of numbers on the clock.

Happy for me, isn’t it? But I hope you can do this too. Right up to re-reading P&P, though get your own copy. Obviously.

Screens Are Bad

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I think we knew this. What I really want is for someone to explain that monitors and phone screens are bad for us – and here’s the solution. Er, the solution that continues to allow us to do what we do and use what we use. In the meantime:

FOR MORE THAN 3 billion years, life on Earth was governed by the cyclical light of sun, moon and stars. Then along came electric light, turning night into day at the flick of a switch. Our bodies and brains may not have been ready.

A fast-growing body of research has linked artificial light exposure to disruptions in circadian rhythms, the light-triggered releases of hormones that regulate bodily function. Circadian disruption has in turn been linked to a host of health problems, from cancer to diabetes, obesity and depression. “Everything changed with electricity. Now we can have bright light in the middle of night. And that changes our circadian physiology almost immediately,” says Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut. “What we don’t know, and what so many people are interested in, are the effects of having that light chronically.”

Screens May Be Terrible for You, and Now We Know Why – Brandon Keim, Wired (18 March 2015)

Read the full piece – on your screen.

Don’t ask for permission

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There’s the old idea in writing and possibly most of all in journalism: don’t ask for permission first, just do it and apologise afterwards if you’re caught. But there is another thing you can do that avoids the pitfall of permission and the way that abdicates your responsibility to whoever said yes. There is another thing that takes this lack of permission and produces productive results:

Instead of higher-ups making decisions, often far removed from the real problems that team members face, you give the decision making power to those that are closest to the problem.

24 People, No Managers: Our New Experiment in Getting Work Done at Buffer – Leo Widrich, Buffer (6 October 2014)

I’m not sure that gives you the whole picture. But then the full piece goes into a lot more detail than I think you need. So here’s the halfway skinny: don’t ask for permission but do ask for advice.

Buffer is a technology company and author Widrich details how they go about making decisions on the way from idea to product. It’s rather empowering: have a read.

Also a hat nod to 99U for their take on this.

Unfair review of “Getting Things Done” 2nd edition

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Look, you should probably get this book. How’s that for an unfair review? Also, much of what started me off doing The Blank Screen can be traced back to David Allen and Getting Things Done so, you know, I do entirely believe that the man is smart and that this GTD is clever.

But.

After more than a decade, he’s released an updated version of the Getting Things Done book and I can’t get through it. I got the opening 30 pages or so from iBooks as a sample and the book is only £6.99 but I can’t do it, I can’t buy it because I just know I won’t be able to press on

I just don’t think Allen is a writer. Brilliant ideas and such great, great experience, but not a writer. For instance, I don’t think he always knows what he’s conveying. Follow. This new book is a complete rewrite except that he admits it’s more a complete re-type: he did retype the entire book and he added and changed bits along the way. I can’t tell how much is new but the core ideas are the same and that’s how it should be.

Except.

For this edition I grappled with how much attention to continue to devote to paper-based tools and materials… as many in the younger generations have come to believe they don’t have to deal with paper at all.

Tell me I’m wrong, do, but I can see him tussling over the phrasing of this and trying to not sound like paper is best and we’re all eejits for not seeing it. I’m fine that he believes in paper but he doesn’t sound like anyone else’s belief could be valid. This is about paper and whether you make scribbles instead of typing into your phone yet it’s rankling like a religious issue.

Maybe that’s partly because in the run up to this passage I’ve been finding the writing a slog. Maybe it’s because a sentence or three later he can’t resist going “so there” on us with:

Ironically, there is a growing resurgence of interest in the use of paper among is the most sophisticatedly digital.

Is there? To give the man credit, he may write that line like a defensive drinker in a pub argument but he pops a footnote asterisk next to it. There’s no answering footnote in the sample so let’s give him credit and the benefit of the doubt too.

But even if this is correct, it isn’t me. So he’s not writing about my world and he isn’t writing well; he doesn’t have to do the former but he does the latter and that’s why I’ve got to skip the rest of the book.

More grandmother, eggs and email advice

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Given that I’m just after admitting to you that I have today followed my own advice and it worked – and so I am therefore feeling good about the day but also a bit unbearably smug – there is something else.

One other thing I’ve done today that I swear up and down in the The Blank Screen book that we should all really, really do – and we don’t. I try. But today I did it and it worked.

I didn’t read any emails until the top of the hour.

Right now, for instance, it’s a few minutes past the hour and I can see that there are two emails waiting for me. Wait. Three. I should really also switch off that notification –

– and the phone just went. Well. Other that that, I’ve been good. And it’s helped.

So. Switch off your emails and only let yourself read or write any at the top of the hour.

A bit of this, a bit of that

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Today is probably the first day in three months that I have felt on top of things. I’m not. But I feel that I am. And it’s because I did this:

One hour on this project
One hour on that
One hour on the other

It broke down slightly, there were urgent interruptions but having set aside an hour to do something, I did it. As it happens, the first task only took me 37 minutes. I don’t usually count that precisely but I enjoyed the thought that I could take the rest of the hour off so I noticed. And I took it off.

A later hour took 67 minutes, but.

All of the things I am working on took steps forward today and I have to feel good about that. I do admittedly also feel good that I got this idea from my own book, The Blank Screen.

Okay, so I’m feeling on top of things and just a teeny bit smug about that. But join me in smugness, will you? It feels good.

“Lose sight of the shore”

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I don’t even care what this was about, I am just very taken with a phrase that Apple’s Tim Cook just used in an interview about the company.

Still, so you get the full context, here’s the thing. Apple is unusual in that it will ditch popular things because it thinks they’re on the way out. That sounds impossibly arrogant and the company’s rivals which hang on to everything sound like they’re doing us a favour. But time and again, Apple turns out to be right and every manufacturer ditches the floppy drive, the CD, the DVD and more.

Actually, Apple’s even ditched bigger things: once it ceased production on the world’s most popular MP3 player – I can’t remember which iPod it was but one of them – in order to bring out a complete replacement. Which then did better.

Enough. Here’s the quote in context:

“Part of the reason Microsoft ran into an issue was that they didn’t want to walk away from legacy stuff,” Cook says. “Apple has always had the discipline to make the bold decision to walk away … We changed our connector, even though many people loved the 30-pin connector. Some of these things were not popular for quite a while. But you have to be willing to lose sight of the shore and go. We still do that.”

Tim Cook on Apple’s Future: Everything Can Change Except Values – Rick Tetzeli and Brent Schlender, Fast Company (18 March 2015)

Actually, have a read of the whole thing as it’s a rather absorbing piece. But, it’s that line, isn’t it? Lose sight of the shore and go.

Reminds me of Dar Williams’s lyric from We Learned the Sea that “the stars of the sea are the same for the land”.

Self-perception and other stories

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Look, you do this and I do this. I very do this. I very do this a lot. You set out aiming to do something or be something or learn something – and then as soon as you’ve done it, you dismiss it.

It must be easy, you think, because you did it. Therefore anyone can.

But the consequence of this is that everything ahead of you is a mountain and everything behind is just piddling about in the water.

When you do something amazing, accept that it’s amazing.

Okay? There. You’ve been told. And so have I. You got it from me and I got it from a chat with coach Alec McPhedran who ran career advice sessions today as part of Digital Birmingham.

This just tickled me

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Ages ago, I read an article in Time about how to improve your memory and I knew it’d be interesting for us. You’re ahead of me now, aren’t you? Yes, I forgot.

But.

That’s not what tickles me.

What tickles me is that I just found my note about this and it included the full link to the piece – and Time’s website basically says what memory article?

This is of no use to you but I had to share.

OmniFocus contexts for all

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Context is a thing. If you can be bothered, you can set a context for any particular task you need to do. Back in the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, typical contexts were Home and Work. So you’d say this bathroom tap you have to fix has a Home context, this sales call has a Work one. Hold that thought.

While you hold that thought, add in that this is actually useful. Maybe not in this example but in general. You could go in to work, get out your To Do list and have it only show you the things you can do there. Nothing about the tap or the spanner you need to buy, because you can’t do anything about that here and now.

The trouble is that you can make that sales call from home now.

So maybe you have a context that is Worky Stuff. Okay.

Traditionally, the people who use contexts in this way are followers of the Getting Things Done system that advocates them. I’m resistant to some of this GTD stuff but I use contexts and I also use OmniFocus which is a To Do app that features them.

Traditionally, OmniFocus users have believed that you should have very few contexts or it all gets messy. I get messy. I have contexts for places so that I can say to Siri “Remind me to email Des when I get home”. Lots of places. Lots of contexts. I have been naughty.

Except there is this writer who says nuts to that, have many, many, and three times many contexts. For this reason:

OmniFocus’s role as an Everything Bucket often seems to be overlooked by those looking for just a to do list. Which is fine. I’m a big believer that whatever system works for you, well, works for you.

For me, I like the idea that there’s one place that all my tasks end up. I like that it’s not my email inbox, and I like that it means that I have a quick answer when someone asks me if there’s anything they can help with…

…In actual fact, I have hundreds of the damn things, and not just because I have a context for just about every person I interact with. Seriously, it’s how I ninja’d that meeting: I had a context for my colleague and had been collecting “things to ask” over the course of a couple of weeks.

Meetings, awesomeness and potential bodily harm: an OmniFocus story – Relative Sanity (21 January 2015)

Read the full piece. Hat nod to http://simplicitybliss.com for spotting this and making me happy.