Dennis Hopper, bless his cotton socks, on the Johnny Cash show. Happy New Year, world.
life
28
Dec 11
Productivity Tramlines 2012
Just in time for the New Year, this is a list of the basic techniques I’m going to be using to pull myself out of the kamikaze productivity nosedive I took over the last couple of years (it was great while it lasted). The aim of posting them here is threefold: a) to make a public commitment which I’ll find harder to discard, b) to share them with other people who might be looking for simple tips (rather than ploughing all the way through yet another self-help book) and c) to release them into the world like genetically engineered woolly mammoths.
- Your body clock is rarely wrong. Some of us are morning people, some are evening people, some are night people (interestingly, almost nobody appears to be an afternoon person). I’m assigning different activities to different times of the day when I know I’ll have the most energy, motivation and opportunity to carry them out. (For example, I’m much happier exercising in the late morning after doing some work and before lunch.) This is one of the big advantages of being a consultant working from home – my time is pretty much my own.
- Lists are your friend. Taking a leaf out of Ben Franklin‘s book, I’m going to use lists effectively. First thing in the morning, I’ll review and finalise the list of tasks I need to do that day; last thing in the evening, I’ll review my progress that day and draft the list of tasks for the following day. This ToDo list will be supplemented by Run Lists which cover specific areas such as writing I want to complete, errands I need to run, things I need to buy, etc. (I also need to remember that lists can also be your enemy, especially if you make the mistake of generating a never-ending list that, you know, never ends.)
- Paper is for plotting. I want to avoid the computer and use paper for brainstorming and early drafting wherever possible. I’m going to make sure that there are three sizes of paper in the room: large (preferably A1), medium (A4) and small (notepad or post-it notes). A1 is for mindmapping and other planning activities; A4 is for drafting layout or copy by hand; the small sizes are for reminders, quick lists and keeping track of stray thoughts. (I tend to hoard paper, so I’ll destroy notes as soon as possible after they become redundant – when I type them up, when I action them, when they go over their own time limit.)
- Keep the internet on a leash. Computers are great for productivity / computers are terrible for productivity. (In order to maximize the former and minimize the latter, you should never sit down at a computer without being absolutely clear about exactly why you’re sitting down at a – wait, what was I doing again?) In particular spending too much time online is a time-killer, leads to depression, and probably turns you into a morlock: I’ll assign specific sessions for activities such as checking email and RSS feeds, web searching, and social media, turning off my wireless connection outside those times.
- Chunk your work, then take a break. This is basically a variation on the Pomodoro technique: every work task (or anything that resembles work, like blogging) gets a specific time limit, and a timer to tell me when that limit is up. Work takes place during that time only, and each task is followed by a break during which I’ll do something completely different, so drafting the executive summary for that evaluation report will be followed by baking a cake. Most of these work chunks will be 25 minutes (followed by 5 minute break) or 45 minutes (followed by 15 minute break). If I’m not finished in the allotted time, tough: I’m still stepping away from the task. One exception. If I’m writing creative stuff and I get into the flow.
NOW, MORLOCKS
20
Dec 11
You are the New Work
I think by now everybody received the memo about how the concept of a “career” is dead, right? If you haven’t received that memo yet, and you still think you’re in a stable job (or worse, a stable job market) then I suggest you get ready, because you’ve got a big surprise waiting for you. The problem we all face is that the career is dead, but almost nobody has worked out what’s replaced it, and even fewer people have managed to action it.
So a lot of people are in a tough place, particularly when they’re operating even further out – not just away from the roulette wheel (aka the “stable job market”) but outside the casino altogether (e.g. outside the formal economy). One such friend has been ploughing a lonely furrow for a few years now, working on a critical issue for post-crash resilience, gaining traction but not generating income. He needs to change his strategy, and so far he’s come up with three possibilities:
- Continue down the same path with the communities he’s already working with, while broadening his work into other areas of resilience.
- Go professional and open source his work – the product is free, the services are paid – but this will probably need a lot of work, possibly some compromises, and definitely some investors.
- Undertake some other work and receive payment in kind (specifically non-monetary – think gold or silver), on the basis that the existing money system isn’t looking very healthy.
He emailed a bunch of people recently with a call for comments on these options, and suggestions for alternatives. Personally, I think these options are interesting but insufficient. The first won’t generate enough income and break the cycle; the second will probably derail the community-focused work (since we’ve already established there isn’t a lot of profit in it); the third won’t further the work and renders you a hostage to fortune, i.e. the market for gold/silver (I’m not a believer). So what else is out there?
- Seek funding from the sort of foundations that throw funding around – up to and including the whole TED Fellows circus. This might be good in the short-term, but I’d see it as a pretty big sell-out since I harbour an unwarranted hatred for the whole TED ethos.
- Go the Kickstarter route a la Marcin Jakubowski and others. There’s a strong vision which can generate a plausible objective to fund, and I think other people could get behind it. This approach is ideal for relatively limited projects but might not work for longer-term income.
Overall, I think his only hope of survival is a three-pronged approach: first, pursue as wide a range of income streams as possible (including any and all of those described above); second, make a big push in branding himself more visibly, although that can feel a little uncomfortable in the Big Brother age in which we live; and third, establish a plan which enables you to say that it’s okay to spend a couple of years earning income outside your immediate interests, in order that you can return to your life project at a particular point in the future. If you’re forced to make compromises, you may as well set the terms of those compromises.
14
Dec 10
Low Density Working
About 10 years ago, I decided to pursue a slightly different approach to working than my friends and colleagues. I decided that I wanted to be able to pursue multiple interests, which meant carving out particular space for each, and not necessarily competitive space. I also recognised that the industrial model of working from 9am-5pm for 45-50 years was an historical accident rather than the natural order; portfolio working and career shifts were clearly going to be increasingly normal for people from my socio-economic background. Finally I believed that retirement ages would be progressively raised as I grew older, with a good chance that the whole concept of retirement would be buried; and that pension funds would be of almost no value by the time I came to claim mine.
I adopted a “low density working” strategy which is relatively simple to implement but requires a fairly radical shift in how you view your life. “Work-life balance” is a failed attempt to balance the requirements of industrial working patterns with the desires of post-industrial “leisure” opportunities, and pursuing it just leads you further down the rabbit hole. Instead, imagine your productive time spread out more widely across your life, both in terms of hours per day but also in terms of days per year and years per lifetime. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be working more, because exactly the same amount of work is spread out across a wider period of time. That’s low density working, and frankly it’s far less onerous than the industrial model.
What are the advantages? Well, you won’t feel like you’re working as hard, because the work is less intensive. You can balance out periods of intense work with periods of almost no work, and still feel satisfied that you’re not, in fact, slacking. These interests might turn into another job entirely, of course, even one that you pursue alongside your existing job; or they might simply develop skills that you’ll need to face our descent from our recent fossil fuel binge. You can schedule entire weeks, months or years for interests you want to pursue, and not have to call it a sabbatical (a colossal misnomer, if ever there was one). This all boils down to one thing: more autonomy.
This brings us to the biggest obstacle to this approach: most companies aren’t a fan of low density working, as you’ll quickly find out when you suggest to your boss that you alter your personal work patterns. Most companies follow an industrial model even when their business doesn’t require such a model; partly because that’s what they’re used to, and partly because that’s what their partners and competitors do. My way out of that was to become a consultant, but not everybody can become a consultant, and not everybody wants to be a consultant; if you start your own business, you can structure it in a way which makes low-density working possible (as the recent Rework recognises).
One thing is for sure: as soon as you accept the trends that I described in the first paragraph, it should be clear that the industrial model will not last for much longer. Whether it dies before I do or not, I prefer not to place my bet on a horse that has already lost the race. You’ll quickly realise that there isn’t actually that much work to do in the world, which is why so many offices are filled with people not performing work-related tasks but social maintenance tasks; contra Taylor, a significant proportion of a large organisation’s time is taken up with simply keeping the different units of the organisation together. I’d prefer to expend my social energy on people I choose to be around, rather than people I’m paid to be around.
On the other hand, I might be barking up entirely the wrong tree. Time will tell.