Turn up

Posted by William Gallagher

My personal favourite line of Woody Allen’s is from the book jacket biog he wrote for himself: “Woody Allen’s one regret is that he is not someone else”. But I’d like to offer you this alternative:

I think that the biggest life lesson I learned as a boy that has helped me and is still with me is that you really have to discipline yourself to do the work. If you want to accomplish something you can’t spend a lot of time hemming and hawing, putting it off, making excuses for yourself, and figuring ways. You have to actually do it. I have to go home every single day, no matter where I am in a world, no matter what I’m doing, and putting 30 to 45 minutes of practice on my clarinet because I want to play. I have to do it. When I want to write, you get up in the morning, go in and close the door and write.

You can’t string paper clips, and get your pad ready, and turn your phone off, and get this, get coffee made. You have to do the stuff. Everything in life turns out to be a distraction from the real thing you want to do. There are a million distractions and when I was a kid I was very disciplined. I knew that the other kids weren’t. I was the one able to do the thing, not because I had more talent, maybe less, but because they simply weren’t applying themselves.

As a kid I wanted to do magic tricks. I could sit endlessly in front of mirror, practicing, practicing, because I knew if you wanted to do the tricks you’ve got to do the thing. I did that with the clarinet, when I was teaching, I did that with writing. This is the most important thing in my life because I see people striking out all the time. It’s not because they don’t have talent, or because they don’t want to be, but because they don’t put the work in to do it. They don’t have the discipline to do it.

This was something I learned myself. I also had a very strict mother who was no nonsense about that stuff. She said ‘If you don’t do it, then you aren’t going to be able to do the thing.’ It’s as simple as that. I said this to my daughter, if you don’t practice the guitar, when you get older you wouldn’t be able to play it. It’s that simple. If you want to play the guitar, you put a half hour in everyday, but you have to do it. This has been the biggest guiding principle in my life when I was younger and it stuck.

I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.

Woody Allen Interview ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ – Frosty, Collider.com (15 August 2008)

It’s not possible to feature Woody Allen without thinking of the same things that make some of his films uncomfortable. Yes, this interview was done in promotion of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It’s easy to say that this is the worst film ever made – so let’s. It’s astoundingly awful. Writer Ken Levine has a better take on it than I will ever manage because after five minutes I felt inspired to get on with my work.

So, you know, Allen is a productivity guru of a sort.

Though I’ve got to say that Midnight in Paris is as good as advertised.

What Isn’t There an App for?

Posted by William Gallagher

And you think I’m obsessed with software. Here’s this fella, Henry Alford, writing in the New York Times about deciding to immerse himself in apps.

The market research company Forrester Research predicted in 2011 that annual revenue from the purchase of apps would reach $38 billion in 2015, a figure so large as to inspire curiosity in even the most techno-churlish.

I recently spent three weeks trying to improve my life through apps. First, I diagnosed myself; I determined that I have bodily ills, household ills and wardrobe ills. Then I started Googling.

Lo, my bodily ills. The cold weather has slowed my commitment to swimming and walking; my current love handles give my mid-torso the silhouette of a rotary telephone. So for $2.99 I bought Meal Snap: You photograph food and Meal Snap coughs up a calorie count.

Maybe this will inject my snacking with accountability, I thought: taking pictures of all my midafternoon snacks and late-night indulgences will turn my liaisons with Mallomars into a war-crimes tribunal of eating.

What Isn’t There an App for? – Henry Alford, The New York Times (2 January 2015)

You read the full feature to see if that worked and what else he tried. And I’ll come to terms with the notion that apps aren’t just for transforming my work.

I can’t really imagine trading in OmniFocus for Meal Snap, can you?

14 things you can do to get you to do things only you can

Posted by William Gallagher

Nobody writes like you, nobody. So you are denying us all when you either procrastinate or are forced to procrastinate. Now I’ve added extra guilt on your shoulders, take a look at these 14 suggestions of how to pull your finger out. They’re all from Fast Company and I agree with almost all of them.

Okay. I’m not drawn to the one where they suggest working standing up.

But otherwise… Here are the first two of their 14 for 2015– it would’ve killed them to find a 15th? – as an example:

1. VISUALIZE AND SET UP YOUR DAY THE NIGHT BEFORE
Before emotional intelligence expert and author of The Other Kind of Smart Harvey Deutschendorf goes to sleep, he says he makes some basic decisions about the next day like what he’ll wear, eat for lunch, and the route he plans on taking to work. “The less time and energy you take to focus on routine, everyday things, the more you will have to work on what is important,” he explains.

He also suggests visualizing what exactly you plan to accomplish the next day. “Become extremely focused upon making this an ongoing part of your routine and you will surprise yourself by how much more you accomplish,” he says.

2. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE
“It’s very easy for me to work alone, but I find that my productivity is maximized when I surround myself with productive people I don’t know,” says Vivian Giang, a freelance journalist who covers leadership, organizational psychology, and gender issues.

She says working around productive strangers keeps her accountable for staying on task. “I’m not browsing social media without purpose. I eat healthier, I don’t take long breaks. I semi-compete with them because they always look like they’re coming up with great ideas,” she says.

14 Tips to Make 2015 Your Most Productive Year Yet – Rachel Gillet, Fast Company (undated but probably 2 January 2015)

Read the full feature for the other 12 ideas.

Work in Progress… bars

Posted by William Gallagher

Artist Viktor Hertz has a lot of these and they’re very good. See more on his official site.

The lazy route to doing more

Posted by William Gallagher

This isn’t my idea, but it’s similar to ones you’ll find all over The Blank Screen and – to be fair – pretty much everywhere you look that covers creative productivity. But there’s a reason for this: it’s a good idea.

The short version is that you should concentrate on doing small steps but doing them often. Let Steven Farquharson of 2HelpfulGuys explain his take:

I’m not going to lie…

I’m lazy by nature. Left unchecked, I would never get anything done. I always had trouble handing in assignments at school, and I always look for corners to cut.

In recent years I have become very ambitious, which mixes with my lazy attitude like oil and water. I’ve learned that most people are lazy to some extent. It is human nature to want to experience the most amount of pleasure with the least amount of pain.

I have often created vast plans for achieving my goals, but they would only work in a fantasy reality. I imagine myself turning into some sort of robot overnight that can work twenty-four hours a day without eating, sleeping, or needing to relax.
But these plans never stand the test of time.

Eventually I give up, and feel ashamed.

Does the progression towards your goals have to be this hard all the time?
No, and I think I’ve figured it out.

Daily Automatic Progress – Steven Farquharson, 2HelpfulGuys (3 January 2015)

Read the full feature for exactly what he’s figured out though, prepare yourself, it means doing a few things every single day.

Seinfeld’s technique for small talk

Posted by William Gallagher

Following on from a piece about how to handle the way we writers feel in social gatherings – seriously, normal people say parties, I am such a writer – there is this. Jerry Seinfeld has advice for what to do when talking to someone and it’s getting tricky.

It’s from his web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and an edition with comedian Amy Schumer. Here’s the whole episode, on account of a) I can’t just link to the tiny segment and 2) I enjoyed the whole episode while trying to get you a link.

But the technique is just this: ask questions – and specifically ask people questions that require numbers in the answer. Now watch on for why.

Be brilliant today, tomorrow and every day

Posted by William Gallagher

No ifs, no buts, no snarky comments from me: I found this TEDx talk by Dr Alan Watkins very persuasive. And that’s even though it begins with a sports story.

That’s specifically part 1: there is a part 2 right here but I haven’t seen it yet, I was too busy rushing to show you the first bit.

Beer brewed specifically to make you more creative

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m banjaxed, then: I don’t drink. But if you do or even if you’re just curious about whether this can possibly be true, take a load of this:

Conventional wisdom tells us that getting a little drunk stimulates creativity and problem-solving by quieting that “inner critic” who tells us to ignore (or not speak out loud) our most divergent ideas. The trick, of course, is getting just drunk enough to be creative and productive without slipping over into the territory where every idea feels like a good idea.

Advertising agency CP + B has teamed up with Professor Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois at Chicago to solve that problem for us. Wiley’s team discovered that a blood alcohol level of 0.075% is optimal for creative problem solving. The Copenhagen-based ad agency has created a craft IPA brewed to get an average-sized person to 0.075% in one serving. They’ve dubbed this potion of creativity “The Problem Solver.”

New Beer Developed to Maximize Creativity – Jason Brick, PSFK (22 December 2014)

O-kay. An advertising agency thought of this. A likely story. But there’s more: read the full piece to see what else is cooking in how we stimulate and feed our creativity.

Day 2 of decluttering OmniFocus

Posted by William Gallagher

Previously… 2014 ended with my OmniFocus To Do database so overstuffed that I wasn’t using the app enough. Now I’m decluttering and yesterday this began with a mindmap of all I have to do, all the plates I care about spinning, and all the stuff that I can ditch. Now read on.

It turns out that it’s rather hard to start over again on OmniFocus unless you really, really start over from scratch: back up your database and then delete it. Go from my current 2,513 things to do and 88 projects to do them in down to 0.

That is what I should do. But it isn’t what I’m going to do.

Instead, I’m going to greate one massive new folder, probably called 2015, then I’ll create subfolders for everything that I want to survive into the new plan. It just occurs to me that I did that mind map in MindNode which is capable of saving the image as text – nice for a text-thinking kinda guy like me but also handy because that text can go into OmniOutliner. Let me piddle about with it in that for a bit and then through the Mac version of it take that outline directly into OmniFocus. Have that create the subfolders for me.

Then I’ll move all the tasks over that I want to move over. In case I miss something important, I’ll bung everything else into a bucket folder and leave them there until I do that thing where you suddenly realise how stupid you’ve been deleting things.

But.

This is a lot of work, isn’t it?

Good.

Because I spent this evening going through my current 2014-style OmniFocus database and looking only at two places. One is the general catch-all inbox: when you’re in a hurry and adding tasks through the apps themselves, via Siri, through email and other ways, they land in the inbox and later on you sort them out a bit. Say that this task about getting a venue is to do with this event while that one about chasing payment is to do with your invoicing. You don’t need to do any of that, but it helps because you can then sit down and think, right, cracks-knuckles, this morning I’m doing everything to do with that event.

I had just under 30 things in my inbox to sort out. I’d done about 17 of them – as in actually done the tasks, not sorted or assigned to something, I’d gone out and done them. I deleted a few others, then assigned the rest to the various projects like particular events, particular jobs. One or two I put a definite deadline date on.

When you do that, those tasks turn up on what’s called the Forecast. Tap on that and you see everything task you have stated must happen today. Or in my case, a lot of yesterday’s. I clicked on the Forecast view and it was telling me I was behind on 60 tasks.

I can’t remember now how many it turned out I’d already done but enough. The rest I took the dates off entirely or I pushed to certain days this week when I know I can do them. I ended up with about 7 that I just went and did.

Again, this is a lot of work, isn’t it? But good – because tonight, just doing this, I feel much more in control of everything. This is the boon of OmniFocus: you can tell me about its features but it’s how it leaves you feeling good that matters.

That’s what I want all the time. Not to spend hours in OmniFocus but to spend a few moments there regularly and thereby be in charge of everything, feel in charge of everything.

It’s enough for tonight, though. Tomorrow, I press on – and I’m going to use a few tips from David Sparks’ OmniFocus Video Field Guide. I wonder if he’s done one about Evernote?