Not convinced: making Sundays better

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Didn’t we just do this with Mondays? Now we’re attacking Sundays which, I grant you, are usually in a a bit of shadow because of the following Monday. And also they are nearly as boring as Bank Holidays. But there are ways to make them better:

Do Sunday on Saturday. [T]ake care of buzz-killing chores, errands, and commitments on Saturday, when you’re naturally in a better mood. This… leaves you open for ‘moments of unencumbered joy’ on Sunday when your psyche is in need of them most.

Become a forward thinker. [End] your workweek with a plan… Create a Monday-specific to-do list, line up necessary files, and tag e-mails that require attention.

How to Make Sundays Suck Less – Allison Stadd, 99U (5 March 2015)

Notice that citation is for 99U, not Real Simple. This is partly because I found it first on 99U but also because for once Real Simple is a sort-of real magazine: you go through it like someone has scanned each page of a print title. It’s good, it’s interesting, it’s just hard to link to a specific line of text.

So do go read the full 99U feature but then click through to Real Simple, would you?

Walk out of meetings you don’t need to be in

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There’s a true story of Apple’s Steve Jobs telling someone they weren’t needed in this meeting, go away. But there is also the endlessly true endless story of our endlessly ending up in meetings we have no interest in. Worse than no interest, we have no stake in, nobody cares what we think, we don’t care what we think, we are there in body alone.

So go away.

Five or ten minutes into many meetings at Etsy, Eric Fixler, a senior software engineer at the time, would pick up his stuff and just walk out the door, mumbling something about not being useful here. If he had nothing to contribute, he went and found a better use of his, and our, time… teaching me a valuable lesson along the way.

There is no reason to sit in a meeting to which you add no value. Everyone invited should be there for a reason, and if you are there for a reason, you should be actively contributing, regardless of role or seniority. We hired you for your experience and insight, not to be a wallflower. If you can’t actively contribute to this particular discussion, there should be nothing wrong with leaving. We certainly don’t want to be wasting anyone’s time. Everyone at a startup has a million things to do.

Thus was born The Fixler, a simple and powerful rule: If you are sitting around a conference table and your presence isn’t necessary nor adds value to the others in the room, you may get up, say ‘Fixler’, and walk out without explanation or penalty.

Pull a Fixler – Jesse Hertzberg, Title Needed (6 February 2015)

Read the full piece. Also, hat tip to 99U for finding and analysing this.

Feeding your specialism: finding enough to write

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The problem: you’re writing about a particular topic so much that you become known as an expert. Perhaps you’re not, but you’re more expert than most people so you get asked more, so you get the chance to write more. Since this is hopefully a topic you’re interested in and especially if you are also being paid, this is all very good news.

Except it means you have to keep coming up with the goods. Finding new material, finding new things to write about. I was trained as a journalist when the job required you go out and find things and I lament that now it’s more a job of finding other people’s articles online.

But here’s someone else’s article online. It’s about how to find other people’s articles online. Before this gets too meta, it’s also about feeding your interest so that you can find these and your favourite subject doesn’t become a chore to you.

[Once] your career is up and running, suddenly you face a new challenge: finding the enough stories for your specific beat. Becoming a science writer seems like a great idea until you realize you have to come up with, say, 52 unique science-related stories a year. How do you keep it up?

…How do I find the best stories for these beats? In my case, it comes down to a three-pronged strategy: reading news, following my interests, and asking questions.

Every weekday, Monday through Friday, I publish two stories on The Billfold. How do I come up with 10 new personal finance stories every week? I read a lot of news. Every morning, I get up and start reading sites like Slate, The Atlantic, and The New York Times to look for topics I can turn into stories.

Ask a Freelancer: How Do I Find Enough Stories for My Particular Beat? – Nicole Dieker, Contently (24 February 2015)

Do read the full piece.

Not convinced: making Mondays better

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I do like Mondays. I think you can finally get to do some serious work and all the things you’ve thought up over the weekend now snap into action. But there’s this fella who has more specific motivational ideas about making your Monday fantastic.

They’re a bit saccharine for me, bu he says that the most successful people begin their Monday in specific ways starting with:

They start with a positive attitude.

So much time and energy is used up by a bad mood. Super productive people don’t like to waste any energy and they certainly don’t want the week to lag from a bad start. They focus their mind on joyful productivity from the moment their feet hit the ground in the morning. They revel in the excitement of what they can accomplish. Instead of lamenting going to work, focus on where you truly want to be and what will take you forward.

5 Simple Things Super Productive People Do on Monday – Kevin Daum, Inc.com (9 March 2015)

Read the whole piece for more.

Move your deadlines up

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There’s an interesting piece on Contently about coping with deadlines and this is my favourite one:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It’s not just a funny observation; it’s called Parkinson’s Law. If you’ve felt unproductive or if you want to increase your output, move your deadlines up. That’s right, giving yourself less time could actually make you more productive.

According to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, deadlines set near the present encouraged people to get started on their work, while deadlines set further in the future (e.g., early next month, early next year) encouraged procrastination.

Instead of setting your deadline for next Monday, try moving it up to this Friday. You may find yourself more compelled to work throughout the week. If you’re used to catching up with work on weekends to meet a Monday deadline, moving your deadlines up to Friday could mean finally getting to relax on Sunday.

And you don’t necessarily need to tell your editor about the accelerated deadline for it to be effective. It might sound counterintuitive, but shorter deadlines could also clear your head and help you think straight.

5 Ways to Use Deadlines to Your Advantage – Herbert Lui, Contently (25 February 2015)

Read the full piece for four more ideas.

It’ll just take a minute…

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There’s some smart and simple advice from productivity writer Grace Marshall: get a stopwatch. Well, if you have a phone, you have a stopwatch, but get it and use it. Time what you do.

Time your distractions
Next time you tell yourself you’re just going to have 5 minutes on Facebook – set a stop watch and see how long you actually spend. It may only take 5 minutes to post your update, but if you start scrolling, clicking and exploring links, how long is that actually taking?

Test those two minute jobs

We all have things we perpetually underestimate. What are yours? For me it’s the bitty jobs. The things I think will only take two minutes (e.g. email file) but actually take anything from 5 minutes (connect to server, wait, find file, type email, press send) to 15 (oh wait, that’s the wrong format, fix that, change the date, add that other bit of information, save it to PDF, check it looks alright, now type the email and send it…) Next time you tackle your simple, mundane or bitty jobs, use a stopwatch and see what you discover.

Stop the clock – Grace Marshall, grace-marshall.com (undated but probably 9 March 2015)

I think by excerpting this bit I make it sound like a time and motion study but in her full piece, Marshall is relaxed and persuasive about how it’s a small thing that helps a lot.

IdeasTap closing down

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I wasn’t the very greatest of fans of IdeasTap but it’s still sad to see it go. The CEO has the details:

Today, I am the bearer of sad news. On the 2nd of June 2015, IdeasTap will shut its doors. It is a painful day for me, and for the whole IdeasTap team.

Over the last six years we have worked hard to make IdeasTap what it is today, and I am enormously proud of what we and our members have achieved together. Ultimately, however, we simply do not have the funding to continue – although we will honour all existing commitments to our members, partners, funders and suppliers.
I set up IdeasTap in 2008 amid the fast-growing global financial crisis. My trustees and I could see the impact it was going to have on young people leaving education and, in particular, we were concerned about those entering the arts and creative industries.

We wanted to do something about it, and IdeasTap was our response: funding for creative projects, unique industry opportunities, training, advice, online and offline networking, job listings and more – all for free.

The end of an era

Read the full piece for more of IdeasTaps’ history, how it failed and also a little about what’s happening next.

Under-promise and over-deliver

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This is from last year but it’s a goodie from Lifehacker: it’s advice for freelancers about time management. Each section has a good summary of the issue and then links out to much more detailed Lifehacker articles. Here’s my favourite:

Picking the right projects and charging what you’re worth are the foundation for your life as a freelancer. The other main part is simply scheduling.

We’ve recently posted tips for how to better estimate time for projects, but you might want to double that time estimate or at least add some “buffer time”… That extra time is especially important when you’re tackling a new project area or it involves something highly susceptible to Murphy’s Law (e.g., when writing an article about upgrading a computer—everything will go wrong, trust me).

The more generous you are with estimating your time, the better you’ll be able to follow through on your commitments and follow the golden rule in business: Under-promise and over-deliver.

The Freelancer’s Guide to Time Management – Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker (28 August 2014)

Read the full piece.