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

Image by UniqueO Mania♥ via Flickr

A common, simple interpretation of the Zen ethos is to enjoy the journey, not focus on the destination. To relax and allow yourself to be led by the motions of the universe, rather than charging toward some ending.

But when we are trying to be our most productive and creative, simply allowing ourselves to flow in some natural direction just won't work. There are too many distractions, and it's too easy to be led astray by a thousand displacement activities and the urgings of our nemesis Resistance. At first glance, it seems that Zen and productivity can never coexist in our lives.

But I would argue that setting clear and evident goals may allow us to enjoy the journey even more.

If, as so many people are, we're just working for the sake of working, dealing with each problem as it occurs, buried in the swamp of our tasks and without an aim in sight, we can't see the road ahead. As travellers, we're climbing a mountain with no idea if we're going in the right direction, ready for the possibility that we might have to climb all the way back down again.

Once we have a clear goal, we have a destination, and we know roughly where it is. In a sense, we have a GPS reading for our destination - at any given time, we know which direction we need to be heading in. And while (if we want to achive our goals) we do have to keep moving towards it, we can now enjoy the side-paths, the unexpected discoveries, and sometimes the shortcuts we may come upon on the way, without fearing that we're losing our way. We can set our own pace, and enjoy the journey.

Labels: creativity, destination, goal-setting, goals, journey, productivity, Road, Zen

Image via Wikipedia

We've all been there. Your neatly organised task lists have grown into a sea of unfinished jobs you're afraid to look at, you're avoiding more work than you've completed all month. You have so many "Next Actions" you're spending half your time going round and round deciding which one to do next, and whenever you start to work on something the pile of things hanging over you pulls at your attention like a traffic accident.

You're at the bottom of the productivity pit, and you're thrashing yourself deeper every hour.

The good news is, you've made the first step in getting out: You know you're in there. We end up in the pit because we become unaware of the big picture, lose sight of the structure of what we're doing (and why), and end up endlessly thrashing around, mired in the muck and going nowhere. We have to take a step back (often it comes at the point of real desperation) to realise we're in the pit, and that somewhere above us is light.

So you've looked up. That's good. What do you do now?

1. Stop thrashing. Stop digging away at whatever's currently got your attention. Relax, take a deep breath. Remember that you've been here before, and you're still alive. There's a way out. Now you're going to find it.
2. Put aside the time needed to replan. A solid hour, at the very least. If you're thinking "But if I stop to replan it's just going to get worse", just look at how much you're actually achieving right now.
3. Get a fresh birds-eye view. Right now, your usual task management tools (RTM, GTD, to-do lists, project management tools, notebooks) aren't working for you, because when you look at them it's all just part of the mess you're buried in. Grab a clean sheet of paper, a text document or a flipchart, and start making simple lists. Don't copy down blindly from the lists that aren't working for you, just use them as a prompt and actually think about what needs doing right now.
   
4. Identify the unimportant things. If it doesn't need doing right now, if it's not time-limited, throw it on a pile to deal with later. When you throw it on the pile, consciously think "That's under control; it'll get done; let it go". Strip down your list until you've got nothing but the things that need doing right now. I guarantee it'll be shorter than you think.
   
5. Replan your time. How much time have you got left today? Pick out the actions you can comfortably get done. Everything else can be thrown in the no-worry pile. Include one thing you've been actively avoiding - those little packets of poison need clearing out of the way, but you don't have to take them on all at once. Leave yourself half an hour at the end of the day to review.
   
6. Knock out the quick things first. Each one will give you a little burst of calm and new energy as you get a bit closer to the light above. As you complete a task, cross it off with a flourish.
   
7. At the end of the day, review what you've achieved, and take a moment to really appreciate your crossed-out items and that one poison packet you don't have to deal with any more. Then, go back to step 4 and plan tomorrow exactly the same way. Leave your desk (kitchen table, workshop, coffee-shop sofa...) knowing that, slowly but steadily, you're climbing out of the pit.

I'll see you in the sunlight.

Labels: big picture, desperation, Getting Things Done, pit, productivity, Project management, Remember The Milk, rethinking, RTM, stress, Task management, tasks, thrashing

From 070703 Stuff

This is an old and obvious piece of advice, but it just keeps on being true. When the space in which you live or work is cluttered and messy, it brings down your productivity and even your happiness.

Living or working in a cluttered space gives one a subconscious feeling of disorganisation, and even of powerlessness - those piles of unattended junk or unfinished projects, those coffee cup rings, that overflowing bin, all send an unconscious message that you're not on top of things, not in control. You'll bring that feeling to everything you do.

If you have ADHD or just have problems with attention and procrastination, the mess around you can tug at your attention, leaving you unable to focus fully on your chosen task. If you feel demotivated or incapable, your environment may be a contributing factor.

Attack the mess in a way that fits your personal energy level and attention. I tend to go about it one of two ways:

Incremental

Set a mental flag that every time you go to the kitchen, you'll take a handful of plates. Every time you walk through the living room, you'll grab a couple of pieces of rubbish and put them in the bin. If the bin's full, you'll take the bag to the back door. If you're going out, you'll take the bag out as you go.

While you're on the (cordless or mobile) phone, occupy your hands by putting a few books on the shelves, stacking up papers, do a few pieces of washing up.

In short, just use your spare brain and body capacity to move steadily towards a clearer and cleaner environment - you'll barely notice you're doing it.

The Big Sweep

Put on some music, an audiobook or a background DVD, get yourself a drink, maybe some snacks, lock the door and unplug the phone, and make it a project. Lose yourself totally in sorting out your mess, take your time, you may even start to enjoy it! Pitting yourself against a serious challenge will help get your motivation motor running, just make sure you push yourself through to the finish once the job's shrunk enough to be a "Maybe I'll do it tomorrow" item.

Take some tips from this great article (from Zen Habits, via Lifehacker):
Zen Habits: How to Declutter an Entire Room In One Go

A Place For Everything

The most common demotivator in tidying is the moment when you pick up some discarded object, look around and say "So where do I cram this?" Make it easy to keep your space clear by having an obvious, accessible place for everything in your space. Next time you go to leave a CD box on your chest of drawers, you'll see it's just as easy to slot it into your neatly organised shelves.

Maintenance

Finally, remember that mess attracts mess - one discarded sock on the floor gives the subconscious message "That's where I throw my clothes", a few loose papers soon attract more, then become a pile of unfinished and distracting tasks. Don't let the mess seed!

Labels: Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, decluttering, Lifehacker, productivity, tidying, Waste

Image via Wikipedia

I talked in my last post about mitigating the negative effects of hyperfocus, whether you're ADHD or just blessed/cursed with unpredictable laser-beam attention.

When you and your focus are working against each other, it can be a miserable and unproductive time. But when hyperfocus works with you, and you with it, amazing things can happen.

Under the influence of hyperfocus I've built whole websites overnight, spent 14 hours a day hammering through a Quality Management system nearing deadline, taken whole projects from a lightning-strike 3am brainwave to a complete set of notes and plans.

Unfortunately, many of us are taught as children (and reinforced as adults) that this kind of obsessive behaviour is unhealthy or abnormal. We may subconsciously feel that we should behave like a "normal" person and spent moderate amounts of time and energy on our various tasks, not go hell-for-leather at an objective (sometimes until we collapse from exhaustion).

Many of us spend much of our lives fighting this drive, in the process making ourselves thoroughly miserable by denying our nature, and losing out on the enormous wealth of potential hyperfocus brings.

We need to realise that normal is a spectrum, and in any normal population there will be outliers with extreme ways of doing things. Often it's those extreme individuals who achieve the most amazing things.

My advice: If you find hyperfocus pulling at you, and the subject is interesting, beneficial or just has potential, run with it. Set yourself some limits to ensure that the essential things are taken care of, then let yourself fall into the task at hand, and see where it takes you.

You can even engage your hyperfocus intentionally. Faced with a big, daunting task, lock out all distractions, move or cancel other commitments to allow a solid block of time, blast some music or put on an audiobook, line up some caffeine or alcohol or healthy juice (you'll know what keeps you going best), and say to yourself "Come on, we're going to do this thing!"

The first half-hour might be slow, distracted, you're thinking of other things, but when that tunnel vision starts to take over and you realise two hours have gone by and you never noticed, your hyperfocus is working for you. I listed about 300 vinyl records on eBay this way at the start of 2007.

Stop worrying about acting normally, or how your friends and family will see you. Let the dog off the leash, ride the wave. You have been given a wonderful, powerful gift, a firehose of creative energy to use. Let your hyperfocus run free, miss meals, miss sleep, miss dates, see what happens. You may create something extraordinary.

Labels: achievement, attention, creativity, distraction, hyperfocus, productivity

Image via Wikipedia

At least once during most days, something takes control of my brain. It might be a technical problem to be solved (today it was getting a virtual NT4 machine to boot on my dad's computer), it might be a new idea for a project, it might be a website with a huge archive of interesting posts to read.

Once that idea gets into my head, it seizes control of my attention and I can't focus properly on anything else. If I try to spend time on other task, I find myself distracted and disinterested, and I get little done. Most often I end up flitting back and forth to the brain-thief, in a state of disorganisation, and achieve nothing on either task, while my stress levels steadily rise.

This is the dark side of hyperfocus. When it's directed, it can allow you to pour enormous energy into a task, excluding all other concerns. When it's bad, it can steal your attention away from the things you want and need to be doing, and leave you frustrated and unproductive.

Hyperfocus is a major symptom of my ADHD, but it's also something that a lot of creative people suffer with - as I've said in previous posts, there's a lot of blending between "normal" creativity and ADHD.

Fortunately, with practice and - most importantly - awareness of the mechanisms of hyperfocus, you can harness its light side for good and protect yourself from the worst of the dark side's damage.

The first (and most important) step is just to be aware when hyperfocus has you in its grip. Monitor yourself for those times when something has a magnetic pull on your attention. From time to time during your day, particularly when you feel yourself getting stressed and frustrated, take a step back and look at what you're actually doing - hyperfocus gives you tunnel vision, so you may not even be aware that you're locked in until you make a conscious effort and survey your situation.

The next thing is to ask yourself whether the thing that's got you locked on is really urgent, merely useful or an active waste of time. If it's urgent, it's all good. If it's useful, is there something more important you should be doing? If it's a waste of time, it's time to get it out of your head.

And getting it out of your head is the only answer to hyperfocus. Not fighting it, because an obsession opposed just grows. Sitting there telling yourself "This is a waste of time, I shouldn't be doing it" will just make you feel resentful and resistant, and you're likely to strengthen the focus out of sheer bullheadedness.

There are two ways to get a brain-thief out of your head: Closure and hand-off.

Closure: Size up the thief, and decide how much time and resources it will take to finish it completely. If you do have fullblown ADHD, think carefully - your judgement of the time required may be a little askew. If it can be done in an hour, and that's an hour you can spare, do it. Don't sit there making yourself feel guilty, acknowledge that in the long run this will make you more productive, and just do it. You'll get a boost of energy and relief from letting the hyperfocus dog off its leash, and when it's done you're free of the distraction.

Hand-off: Give yourself "interim closure". Find a way to unload that thought into a safe place, where you know it will not be forgotten. If it's a website, bookmark it somewhere you can come back to when you have time. If it's a project, take ten minutes to write down all your ideas and plans, and store it somewhere safe. Schedule a time when you know you can come back to the thief and give it the attention it craves. Then take a moment, sit back again and say to yourself "That's dealt with". Really visualise the task as locked off, in safe hands. Make it a complete thought in your head, not a loose end dangling. Then get on with your day.

Labels: ADD and ADHD, creativity, distraction, hyperfocus, productivity