How To Make More Money By Talking

So I had an enquiry from a client.  They were working with another consultant who wasn't really doing what they wanted and had lost a lot of time on a project.  They outlined what they were looking for and I made a few guesses about their requirements and sent them a quote.  They were modestly interested but wanted to both lower the price and speed things up.  Sometimes it is best to just pull the plug on an unpromising opportunity and spend the time looking for a better one.  I tried to do this by turning down their request for a meeting at their premises.  That I thought would be the end of it.

Instant Action

Planning and organising is important.  But it shouldn't become an end in itself.   Over the last six months or so I have been working a system whereby I use my Google calendar as my To Do list as well as a calendar.  The theory was that I would allocate time on my calendar and colour code it so I would know where my time was going and adjust it to make sure I was using my time in the most productive way.   It actually worked pretty well for a while.  But eventually the amount of stuff I was trying to keep track of became so large that it became a job in itself to keep on top of it.

Nudge Yourself for Better Results

I was up with the lark this morning.  Did some exercise.  Ate fruit for breakfast.  Sat at my computer ready to start working before seven.  Then spent over an hour goofing around on the internet failing to achieve anything very much.   What went wrong?  I knew what I was going to work on, but I wasn't all set up ready to go.  Consequently I somehow sunk into torpor rather than activity.

Repetition Can Be A Good Thing

I have just read a blog post by Steve Pavlina.  In it he goes over some stuff that he has done before adding no new information, just putting it into a new set of words.  In a sense this post is superfluous because you can get the same information in his previous work.  We tend to put a premium on originality and creativity so seeing someone trotting out the same old is not supposedly a good thing at all.

Meetings - Five Tips On How To Handle Them

Having worked at a company where there was a culture of having no meetings at all I can confirm that there are some advantages to having meetings.  A regular time where you can bring up and hear things that matter is valuable, and you need some kind of official news source to counteract the rumour mill that operates really well.  But nonetheless nearly everybody agrees that meetings are not productive.  Here are my tips for getting the most out of them culled from over twenty years of boredom, frustration and general confusion.

What Impact Are You Having?

One Sunday I bought a stereo.  This was back in the nineties when I was living in a flat above a hardware shop.  I set it up fiddled with the dials and then got distracted.  I was consequently unaware that I had turned the volume switch up to full and set a timer.   For the rest of that week I was totally unaware that every day at 2.00pm my new possession was blasting out the Byrds' Greatest Hits.

Getting the Most Done With Your Time Part 2

This first day of my experiment is easing myself into it gently by looking at one of the easiest factors.  Do regular breaks help?   I haven't worked out the details of my experimental design yet so the idea is that this should work as a stand alone experiment in its own right and will also form part of my larger experiment later.

Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 1

Okay you've overcome procrastination, you've got a clear working environment avoiding distractions and you have your list of what you need to do prioritised so you know what is important.  What is the best way to work now?  I looked into the various gurus and advice available, and it turns out that there is nobody with any credibility in this field.  There are plenty of people who will give you all sorts of tips, quite likely good ones.  But I want hard data on actual productivity.  Well, I'm a scientist.  If there is no data out there I'll generate it myself. I will devise an experimental design to test the various factors that might be important and run tests on myself to see which ones work the best.

Virtue of the Day - Patience

Some Projects Just Need Patience

I have just finished a rather pleasant breakfast of fried up leftovers from last night's dinner.  It is 8.15am.  Ideally I should have booked in a solid hour's writing/blogging and a further hour on solid billable work.  In fact I have done 15 minutes and 30 minutes respectively despite having got out of bed at 6.00am as planned.

Why There Is No God

Scientists have done an amazing job of working out how the world works.  This knowledge has enabled us to do both good things and bad things.  Eliminating smallpox has to be a high point.  Nuclear weapons would be about the lowest.  These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that there is still so much we don't know.  Most of the universe is unobservable in principle and we still don't know where most of the dark matter is.

Blogging Against The Clock

Andy Warhol Said Everyone Would Be Famous for 15 minutes - And You Can Write A Blog Post in that time

I have blogged before about doing a blog post in 15 minutes.  This has developed into quite an interesting habit.  I now regularly write 15 minute blog posts for several of my blogs.  (Needless to say this is one such post).  While there are obviously lots of topics that simply can't be dealt with so quickly,  I have been surprised at just how much you can cram into writing and get online in a quarter of an hour.  This is how I do it -

Tidy Desk

When I was a lab manager one of my big struggles was keeping the lab tidy, or more particularly making sure other people kept the lab tidy.  There is a law of entropy that uniquely applies to ensure that no laboratory will ever stay tidy without eternal vigilance.  I was less concerned about my desk, but the habit seeped across by osmosis and I became an advocate of tidy desks as well.  Experience has convinced me that you can do your most productive work if where you are working is uncluttered.  This even applies to desktops on computers.  I always appreciate a programme with a full screen view.

My rules for keeping my desk tidy are -

Write A Blog Post In 15 Minutes

How Quickly Can You Write A Blog Post?

If there is anyone it is possible to fool, it is yourself.  I have just set out to write a blog post in 15 minutes.  In the event it took 40 minutes.  The interesting thing is that if I hadn't timed it I may well have continued to believe that it had only taken 15 minutes.  That is a planning error of 260% of which I would have been totally unaware.  No wonder time is such tricky stuff to manage and why none of us do it as well as we would like.

Useful Bollocks

Lucky Mammal Looking For Purpose

The reality is we are rats that got lucky.  Our ancestors spotted the potential of tool using early on and we have been reaping the benefits ever since.  We have created a materially very comfortable if a bit confusing world to live in and are doing rather nicely thank you.  Especially compared to being chased across the savanna by hyenas.  If flint were just a bit less available, we might still be doing that.

Twitter Humour - 5 Ways To Get A Laugh

Fight rough. Play rough.  Wear a ruff.

I spend rather more time than I probably should on Twitter.  The main draw for me is that lots of people post very funny tweets.  I can't resist trying to do the same myself.  I don't think I can claim to be a master of Twitter humour just yet, but I am getting some retweets and favourites so I am sort of making progress.  Twitter is a relatively new medium for humour and what works elsewhere often doesn't work on Twitter, while there are things that are only funny because they are on Twitter and wouldn't work elsewhere.  Here are five joke formats that work well.

Don't Be Right, Be Interesting

Karl Marx was influential - but was he right or just interesting?

"Dear Lord, please make all the bad people good, and all the good people interesting." - Dave Bartram, lead singer of Showaddywaddy

In a recent article in the Guardian Oliver Burkeman points out that it is more important to be interesting than to be right.  It is an intriguing thought.  It is one that certainly makes sense to me.  In fact I am a perfect example in that I find a lot of what Steve Pavlina writes to be not just wrong, but completely contradictory to my world view.  But because he writes in an interesting way I still read him rather than people who are more accurate.

Media Diet Update - Easy Win!

I have been on my media diet for three days now.  I feel much better.   I have a residual nagging worry that the world's problems are not going to get solved as quickly if I don't have an opinion about them, but I have noticed a distinct uptick in the amount of writing I am doing.  Most habits are hard to build and take a long time to pay off.  This one is both easy and is paying off almost straight away.

If you are still a news junkie, the good news is that I estimate I have freed up about thirty minutes a day.  If you are happy with that cost for your addiction then you are getting a good deal.

Build Habits One Step At A Time

I am feeling a bit frustrated this morning.  Despite getting up on target and despite starting the day with a decent exercise routine, I am still procrastinating at getting started doing actual productive stuff.  My ideal is to be clearing important items off my todo list before 7.00 am and here I am only just getting going on my personal development blog - at just before.   These posts take me about 20 minutes so that is another target missed.

A Media Diet

I am and have always been a bit of a news junkie.  One of the first things I do in the morning is check the newspaper online.  I typically wake up to news on the radio, so by the time I am doing that I already have an idea of the main events and I am looking for comment and analysis.  I have well thought out opinions on most of the major issues of the day.  This is all something that is so deeply ingrained in me that to do any different seems not only unthinkable, but almost a betrayal of my being.

Early Rising Update II

The Bank Holiday and a trip damaged the development of my early rising habit development programme rather more than I had hoped, intended or expected.  But I am climbing back on the wagon now.  It is rather a glorious feeling to tapping away at a blog post this early in the morning - it is just gone half past six -knowing that this is the second bit of writing of the day and that I have already had a run.

Batching Jobs

No, not that kind of batch

One tip from time management experts is batching similar jobs together.  The advantage is obvious.  You focus on one type of activity at a suitable time when you have all the resources you need together.  That way you work most efficiently and get the most done.   It all sounds good.  It has the further less obvious advantage that you need to be well organised and on top of your tasks in order to be able to batch tasks.

Today's Strategic Plan

I'll be doing a strategic plan every day in May.  I think it makes most sense to do them in a hardback notebook, using pencil.  But I will do this first one as a blog post.  The exact format is one of the things I will be working on during this month of experimentation.  So here is the first iteration.

Getting More Things Done Quicker

I have got into a position where there are quite of lot of profitable things I can do with my time, and also quite a few people waiting on me coming up with the goods.  I have tried really long hours in the past.  My experience was that it wasn't all that productive.  There are a number of reasons I wouldn't normally recommend it.  The two most important are that long hours aren't satisfying and they aren't focused.  Tumbling into bed late and then not being able to sleep doesn't feel good.  You also lose the ability to focus on what actually matters.  If you are planning to put in 10 hours solid you don't apply much thought to how much of what needs to be done can be ditched.

Why I Like Everybody

It isn't always easy to live up to your ideals.  Christians often sin.  Socialists can be very anti-social.  Exponents of the virtues of the free market are often surprisingly short of cash.  One of my personal ideals is social solidarity, which if it means anything at all must mean being positive about one's fellow human beings.  It is of course easy enough to be sympathetic about distant tragedies unfolding on the television.  And I have no problem with my friends.  The sticky bit is people I come across who seem to do nothing but frustrate and annoy me.

Set Compelling Goals

I have a potential crisis on my hands.  A big customer is being a bit slow paying a big invoice. This just might leave me unable to pay my salary next month.  (I don't think it will actually come to that in fact - but lets think it through.)  The obvious and logical thing to do is to try and get enough smaller jobs processed and billed to meet the shortfall.

Getting Back Into A Routine

I enjoyed seeing in May Day at 6.00 am in Oxford

I shouldn't be too hard on myself.  Over the last three days I have driven to Birmingham, given a talk there, driven to Oxford where I got up a 4.30am and then spent a couple of hours celebrating May Day at the crack of dawn followed by a long day of interesting but demanding lectures and drove home again not getting back until gone 8.  Perhaps it isn't that surprising that I got up late this morning and although I have made some progress, it is nearly 11 and I still not actually working.

Silence

I got stuck with a few hours to while away on a motorway service station.  I used them to enjoy some silence.  I shared my thoughts  about it on this video.

Basically I think we need to create periods of silence for ourselves so we get a chance to listen to ourselves.  We run about all the time being busy and multi-tasking.  This might be great in some ways but it means we never devote our whole brain to what is important.

Early Rising Update

Easing myself into the early rising habit is working well.  I have been generally getting up at 7 and getting an hour's work done before the day has started.  I have managed a couple of 6's, but still only got an hour done.  The earl;y hours of the morning are not as full of distractions as the rest of the day, but you still have the same work to do to keep focused.

I haven't yet succeeded in actually getting up early and doing my full planned 2 hours work before breakfast.  But I can see that it is practical and is a highly desirable thing to do.   For example, the last six posts on this blog wouldn't exist without it.  I am not sure whether I want to keep up this blog at its current rate of production.  It is a handy resource, and writing it is a good daily reminder of what I am trying to achieve and how I am going to get there.  But perhaps the law of diminishing returns will set in soon and I will transfer my efforts elsewhere.

But for now I will make sure that whatever else I do I'll at least jot a few notes on my thinking here.

 Photo credit: James Jordan via photopin cc

Breaking Bad Habits

In an episode of Breaking Bad the hero is in a store where he notices a young customer buying the components needed to make drugs.  He instantly goes into teacher mode and rather disparagingly points out what he has got wrong.  It is only a little later he realises that he is helping the competition and goes and threatens dire consequences for not respecting his patch.