Writing and Productivity

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In 1967, behavioural psychologists Martin Seligman and Steve Maiers discovered quite by accident (while investigating simple conditioning) that dogs which were unable to escape from an unpleasant situation (small electrical shocks given through the floor of their box) gave up even trying. They were conditioned to be helpless, and would just lie there and take the shocks even when free to move.

The ethics and humanity of the experiment are a topic for another time, but they gave psychologists a valuable insight into one of the causes of depression and demotivation - learned helplessness.

If you've been through a prolonged period when you repeatedly fail to get work done or achieve your goals, you may be suffering from a form of learned helplessness yourself. The original cause may be minor (a natural period of low energy or high distraction, selecting or being given a series of goals that were impossible for you to achieve), but the longterm effects can be quite severe. You have literally been trained (or trained yourself) to expect failure or at least a lack of achievement, and when that training becomes strong enough, you have no motivation to even try any more.

Fortunately decades of behavioural research have also shown that what has been trained can be untrained. You just need to create a string of situations where you are visibly achieving what you set out to do.

Set yourself well-defined goals

A vague goal like "Improve my website" has no solid endpoint, so you can keep throwing time and resources at it without ever getting that "job done" feeling which in behavioural terms is your "reward", reinforcing your good habits. A solid goal like "Redesign front page to be less cluttered" is better.

Break down your tasks

"Redesign front page to be less cluttered" is still one big chunk, which means you only get one reward. Better still is break it down into multiple steps:

1. Smaller logo
2. Move news into a sidebar
3. Create boxes for different content
etc.

This creates multiple easily-achievable steps, which means (to the unconscious part of your brain where training takes effect) you get multiple "job done" rewards, and more reinforcement. This is an important aspect of Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" system, but a lot of people don't really apply it.

Keep your successes visible

If you keep a digital to-do list or use whiteboards, you may be inclined to delete each task as it's completed just to keep things neat and tidy. Instead, cross them off and keep them around, at least until the end of the day. Looking at a long list of completed tasks is more reward, and more positive reinforcement of how much you're achieving.

Labels: Dave Allen, Depression, Getting Things Done, Learned helplessness, Martin Seligman, Motivation, productivity

I've spent a lot of time lately observing myself at work, trying to identify patterns and trends in my energy levels, what works and what doesn't, the best times to focus on certain types of activity.

My mental state during the day can be simplified into two categories - high energy and low energy. In the high energy state I'm going a mile a minute, hammering out writing, jumping from task to task, barely pausing between finishing one thing and starting the next. It feels good, and satisfying, and it's what allows me to get a lot done during the day.

In the low energy state I'm relaxed, calm, quiet, I move fairly slowly, I don't feel a real need to do anything. It feels good too, just in different ways. When I'm in the low-energy state I can sit down and read a book or eat dinner without the TV on, two things I just can't do when I'm on high.

My intention in studying these states has been to learn to harness and control them better, and switch between them at the times I choose. Too much of the time when I need to be working I'm on low energy, and when I'm done at the end of the day I get stuck in high energy and can't settle down or sleep.

But I had a simple but interesting realisation - that practically all my best ideas come to me when I'm in the low energy state, not really thinking about anything in particular. When I try to brainstorm article ideas in high energy mode, for example, it's very hard work and the ideas tend to be pretty unoriginal or flat.

My best ideas, that I get really excited about, have all come to me when I was making dinner, going for a walk or most of all settling down to sleep - the notepad by my bed is an absolute essential.

Since I realised this, I've been making more time for relaxing activities and downtime in my day - taking a full hour for lunch, for example, where before I'd gobble at my desk, and winding down earlier in the evening to have some real relaxation time. I keep a notebook to hand and just let ideas flow up without feeling the need to pursue them right away, and some good stuff has been floating to the surface.

Slow down to conceive, speed up to implement. Does it work for you? Share your experiences in the comments.

Labels: creativity, downtime, Energy level, productivity, relaxing, Time management

This is currently my favourite tool for organising, planning and unloading. I got these magnetic whiteboards for four pounds each from Wilkinsons. Since I don't have any clear wall space in my workroom I attached them to my bookshelves - I knocked small nails into the edges of the shelves and put cable grips on the frames, so I can take them up and down or rearrange them according to my needs.

I've found these boards to be a really useful tool - I can scribble notes as they come to me, brainstorm and diagram freely over a large area, and they're highly visible, which is great for keeping ideas and intentions at the front of my mind.

Technically, I could do the same job with a personal wiki or simple text files, but being able to structure my ideas visually seems to help the way my mind works, and that blank white space is very inspiring when I'm unloading and expanding ideas.

When I need to clear a whiteboard for another purpose, I take a snap with my cameraphone - at intervals I unload the pictures into a dedicated folder in Picasa.

Labels: ideas, organisation, productivity, whiteboards, Wiki

Image via Wikipedia

The always-on internet connection is, for many of us, a boundless source of new information, easy research, connectivity and entertainment. But it's also potentially your biggest distraction and time sink. How do you get the most of out of the Web to teach, entertain and update you, while avoiding the worst of its distractions?

The best solution I've found so far is strict partitioning of the online material I encounter, dividing it into "boxes" which I only enter at specific times. Here are the categories:

1. News (feeds)

If a site has regular updates which are genuinely of use or interest to me, I add its RSS feed to my Google Reader. I further subdivide these into two categories (labels).

Category 1: Essentials. This feed includes Boing Boing, Lifehacker, 43 Folders, a carefully culled handful of webcomics and other sites from which I want to read, or at least be aware of, every post. This is the feed I work through when I start my day, over my first cup of coffee, while the brain is still gearing up. I'll check every headline, but not necessarily read every post - I just want to be sure I haven't missed anything from those sites.

Category 2: Inessentials. Into this feed go any sites which produce a large number of items which may interest me, but which I don't mind missing - a few sub-Reddits, Dailymotion, and similar large-scale meme pools. I read it after the Essentials, usually in between answering emails, and I give it as much time as I can spare - which, some days, is none. When I'm done with it for the day, I Mark All As Read. So it gives me a daily snapshot of memes and news I can dip into as I have time.

2. Bookmarks

I use Delicious for bookmarks, largely so I can access them from any machine and any browser. They go into one of three major categories.

Category 1: Night Off. If it's going to take more than five minutes to read or watch, the item goes into my Night Off tag. This is my bucket for anything that interests me, but is not vitally important. If I can, I put aside two or three hours one night a week to work through these, usually with a drink or two and something to munch on. This is the place for all the funny articles, stupid internet videos, and other entertaining diversions.

Category 2: Major Reads. Anything that's going to take a bit of in-depth reading - (multi-page articles and PDFs, online courses) that I'm going to learn something important from. I give a whole morning to this stuff once a week if I can spare it, and deliberately shut out distractions to get the most from this material.

Category 3: Future Reference. This comprises all the rest of my bookmark tags - anything I want to keep around and come back to later, for entertainment or useful information. Every couple of months I cull my bookmarks of dead pages, stuff I'm clearly not going to come back to, and anything I feel I've fully internalised.

By sticking to this routine, I can get through large amounts of online information without getting sucked into the "just one more page" black hole which has eaten up many a productive day.

How do you tame the Web? Give your opinions in the comments.

Labels: bookmarks, distraction, drinking from a firehose, Google Reader, productivity, research, time sink, WWW

Over time, we learn to associate certain moods, states of mind and emotions with our environments. Just walking into a familiar room can summon up the feelings we've experienced there; if we've been ill and confined to bed for a time, being in the bedroom can make us feel sickly and down for days afterwards. A house we haven't visited for years can trigger powerful nostalgia, because it summons up the feelings and memories associated with it.

These feelings can be very powerful, not just affecting our state of mind but causing physiological changes. Medical studies have shown that recovering heroin addicts can actually start to experience withdrawal symptoms if they return to a place where they frequently shot up, because their mind and therefore their body anticipates a hit based on their environment.

These associations can have a powerful effect on your productivity. If your office or work area is somewhere you consistently get good done, have a clear head and see results, you will experience those feelings and a clear, productive state of mind just by walking in the door.

If you have a prolonged period of writer's block, distraction or unproductive time, those associations will be working against you. If you've spent a couple of weeks doing nothing but improve your high score on Solitaire, your computer will stop feeling like somewhere you do work and it will become harder and harder to bootstrap yourself into a productive state of mind, because of the associations with that environment.

Try to be aware of the state of mind you experience when in your workspace, and keep the associations positive and productive. If, while you're working, you feel the need to take a break and goof off for a bit, don't beat yourself up about it, but take it away from your workspace - go to another room or outside and play games on your mobile phone if that's what you crave.

Try not to take lunch at your desk either - the change of scene will clear your head anyway, and may help you subconsciously work through a challenging problem that's occupying you. Insomnia experts recommend the same principles - keep the bed for sleeping, try not to eat or work there. By letting each environment keep its useful associations, you can manage your own state of mind more effectively, and with great benefit to your productivity.

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Labels: distraction, environment, Health, productivity, situation, state of mind, writer's block