Category: Productivity Tips
Getting Things Done with Nirvana
If you are an avid reader of self-help books, or a fan of productivity ‘lifehacks’, then it’s very likely that Getting Things Done ranks highly on your all-time list of important reads. David Allen’s seminal business book has proven a massive hit across all ages, drawing widespread acclaim and spawning multiple time-management applications.
In 2007, Getting Things Done was touted by Time Magazine as the ‘ultimate self-help business book of its time‘. Strong words, no doubt, and I agree with them 100%.
If you have ever used Omnifocus, Things or Remember The Milk, you will be familiar with David Allen’s methodology – even if you’ve never read the book.
The latest application to digitalise the Getting Things Done system is Nirvana, and thankfully for any Mr. Shallow Pockets among us, it’s completely free to use.
What is The Nirvana System?
Nirvana follows the same blueprint touted by David Allen in Getting Things Done. Allen’s system relies on two core principles – perspective and control. Any task that occupies our mind, whether it be doing the laundry or launching a high profile website, needs to be recorded and removed as a distraction to free up valuable ‘thinking power’.
Allen argues that our minds are comparable to the RAM in your computer. A complex library of thoughts, reminders, things to do, and things to act on. He believes that we create ‘mental blocks’ by attempting to carry so much information in our short-term memories, and that we can make immediate progress by using a workflow system based around 5 stages.
1. Collect things that command our attention.
2. Process what they mean and what to do about them.
3. Organise the results.
4. Review as options for what to do next.
5. Do it.
So, how do these steps result in improved productivity with Nirvana?
An example, not my real account!
The interface is segmented in to 4 key areas.
Inbox – Where you record tasks and to-do items as they enter your mind.
Actions – Once a task has been entered in to the system, it can fall in to four focus areas.
- Next means it is the next required action to move a project along.
- Waiting means that the task cannot be completed until a certain requirement is met (e.g. your colleague sends you the files you need to work with).
- Scheduled means this is a task that you have planned to do on a certain date.
- Someday is for all those arbitrary tasks that would be nice to complete, but can’t be worked on in the present. It’s an incubation folder for all the tasks that you might do on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the future.
Focus – Once you’ve decided what tasks to work on for the day, you can star them. It’s essentially your to-do list. If you have scheduled tasks for the future, they will appear here once their ‘doing day’ has arrived.
Projects – Here you create projects for every conceivable group of tasks that you might want to work on in the future.
Launching FinchPremiums.com was a project with about 60 tasks that I slowly chipped away at, focusing on 6-7 every day.
Similarly, planning a trip to America is a ‘project’ in the sense that several processes have to happen before you can tick it off as done and dusted. Buying tickets, choosing hotels, finding a dog carer and etc.
To get maximum value out of Nirvana, you should first add a project for every single “I want/need to do this” that enters your mind. Most people will have at least 50 projects that they’re working on at any given time, from arduous 3 year work projects to preparing a fancy dress outfit for the weekend.
You can assign the projects to the same subsets of Next, Waiting, Scheduled or Someday. Maybe you don’t want to plan a trip to America, but you do want to travel round the world by the time you’re 40. One is a next action, the other is for someday.
The key to freeing up your mental RAM is to get the thoughts documented and contained within Nirvana so you don’t have to carry them in your short-term memory. The ultimate goal is to free your mind so that you can focus only on the task at hand.
The GTD system is a very effective framework, and Nirvana makes it easy to follow. But to do so successfully, you’re probably going to need to spend an entire weekend getting your projects added to the application. Not only that, but you will need to define the next actions for each and every project.
It’s no good saying “I’d really love to do this project“. Your projects must have next action steps so you don’t have to waste valuable mental energy thinking about what you need to do next when you come back to them. You just do it.
Tasks can also be set with contexts and priority ranking. You can group tasks based on where they need to be done (at home, in the office, at the store), or even how much energy they require.
So if, like me, you find yourself sagging on a Friday afternoon with only an hour to go before you’re done, you can filter for tasks that match the requirements of ‘in the office’ and ‘low energy required’. This is one of my favourite ways of getting the most out of my least productive time.
There’s nothing worse than sagging at the end of the day and feeling overwhelmed by the lofty ambitions of what you hope to achieve in the bigger picture. Setting low energy tasks gives you small victories to keep you moving forward.
Nirvana vs. The Competition
How does Nirvana stack up against the rest of the apps based around David Allen’s system?
Arguably the biggest player in the GTD marketplace is OmniFocus, an excellent and comprehensive application that has the added advantage of being compatible with iPads and iPhones. Sounds great, and it is great… if you’re an Apple fan.
My phone is a Samsung S2, and I have no desire to get an iPad…so no benefit there.
The desktop version of OmniFocus only works on Macs. While I do have a Mac, I also spend a lot of time on my laptop which is Windows-based. Needless to say, there’s very little point in having a life management tool if you have to be in front of an iProduct to use it.
Nirvana has an advantage here. It’s accessible on both Windows and Mac. There doesn’t seem to be a smartphone application for it yet, but you can email tasks to your Nirvana address and they will show up in the system.
I’ve never used Remember The Milk, and I’m not a big fan of Things. You’ll have to let me know if I’m missing out.
Whereas most of these applications are not 100% free, Nirvana is, and it’s lightning fast to get started with (5 fields and you’re in). For anybody who wants to try the GTD system, but doesn’t want to spend $80, I highly recommend checking it out.
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The Perils of ‘Saving It For Later’
If you’re anything like me, you will have a desktop that resembles a barren wasteland of hastily named Jpegs, ‘To Sort’ folders, and a trash can that hasn’t been emptied since 2009.
To the naked eye, it looks like I have some serious hoarding issues.
Who collects dating site logos, I mean, seriously?
I have a bunch of text files filled with nothing but numbers – future projections of traffic stats, conversion rates and earnings. They meant something at the time. But two weeks later, I’ll be damned if I can remember what my calculator was smoking.
Call it poor organization, call it a cluttered desktop, call it whatever the hell you want. I prefer to blame the perils of my worst enemy – the little voice in my head that says “Oh, nice. I’ll save that for later.”
How are your bookmarks doing?
If I had a dollar for every bookmark I’ve saved for future reference and never touched again, I’d probably sell this blog on Flippa, migrate to the Caribbean and never speak to any of you ever again. It’s insanity.
Just forraging through my links today, I found some genuinely very useful articles that could help my business moving forward… if it only it were 2009.
If I were to teleport in to your office and glance to the side of your keyboard and mouse, what would I find? If you’re like me, I’d find a notebook tainted by coffee stains. After picking it up and scanning through the pages, I’d find the 101 ‘light bulb moments’ that you scribbled down in excitement, only to bury under new pages never to be referenced again.
Let’s be real. ‘Saving it for later’ means you’re probably not going to see that shit ever again.
And that’s a shame, because it’s retaining the occasional light bulb moment that separates the creative minds from those who are equally creative but hopelessly inept at proving it outside their own heads.
How Can We Get Organised?
It’s quite simple.
If you are the kind of person who stores snippets of a thousand bright ideas, make sure you’re storing them somewhere that you’re going to reference, and act on from time to time.
Unless you set aside a specific time to venture in to your bookmarks, re-read what you’ve saved, and decide whether you want to act on it – the whole gesture is futile, a bloody stupid waste of time. Worthy of a slap in the tits.
The same applies to the notepad on your desk.
I am distancing myself from notepads altogether. They are a nice organization tool in theory – “Mhm, moleskin, I bet this changes my life!” – but in practice, as soon as you’ve turned the page, the scribbles might as well have jumped through the fire exit of your mind.
Instead of using a notepad, I’ve started to record my brainfarts on to post-it notes. This may come across as vapid, or slightly psychopathic, but it’s also very effective.
As soon as I’ve splurged the idea on to my post-it, I’ll drop it in a transparent box next to my Mac.
At the end of every day, or sporadically during the week when I’m having a downtime, I will empty the box and decide whether I want to save the idea for a future project (in which case it gets filed under Maybe Projects), or burn it while fisting myself in the bollocks for even contemplating the lunacy.
You could argue that replacing a notebook with post-it notes is a tiny change, and it is. But the principle has nothing to do with how you document your brainfarts. It has everything to do with remembering to set aside time to trace back and act on them.
Too many light bulb moments get lost in the back of notebooks that serve no purpose other than to make you feel organized. ‘Saving it for later’ only makes sense when your collection tool is not interchangeable with the trash can.
It’s something to remember as you click and drag your entire desktop contents in to a new ‘To Sort’ folder!
If your ‘To Sort’ folder runs six directories deep, your sorting skills probably extend only so far as fiddling with your balls on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. No shame in that, but it’s not particularly smart.
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Tell Your Boss: Brainstorming Is Dead
It’s not easy to come up with creative ideas. One of the great myths of the ‘innovation gurus’ suggests that actively brainstorming possible solutions is the best way to stumble across a brilliant idea.
The reality is slightly more complicated. Brainstorming can only truly be effective if you give your brain the opportunity to serve up more than the same useless ideas your conscious mind is already familiar with. True creativity stems from the subconscious mind, of which traditional boardroom brainstorming rarely ever seeks the guidance.
My favourite explanation for how this process works is to imagine a small room with two men sat by a whiteboard. One of the men is imaginative and sublimely creative and yet hopelessly shy. The other man is extremely passionate and committed to his ideas, but is equally dominant and unwilling to listen to others.
If you were to enter the room a pose a question that required the men to work together creatively, there should be no prizes for guessing how the subsequent brainstorming sessions would unfold. The dominant man would lead the way, pitching his ideas with relentless enthusiasm but failing to tap in to the creative thought patterns of his colleague.
So what if we don’t want to harness the passion and conviction of Mr. Confident? What if we’re striving to dig deeper in to the creative mind of his shy colleague? The popular solution is to distract Mr. Confident. Let him watch TV, give him an iPad, do whatever is necessary to allow his creative colleague to take control of the session and present some truly creative ideas.
This drawn out metaphor is actually a very close match for the relationship between our conscious and subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is very loud, objective and logical – but it crucially lacks the ability to ‘think outside the box’. The subconscious mind, although not shy by nature, is a passive and reluctant observer to the thoughts we decide to run wild with. Just like the quiet colleague, it sits and waits for the room to turn silent.
Of course, the subconscious is infinitely more capable of producing breakthrough ideas, but to allow those ideas to develop we need our conscious minds to ‘tune out’ and delegate the job. This is what leads to the moment of inspiration in the middle of the night, or the comical lightbulb effect where brilliance strikes while you’re busy cooking dinner.
The subconscious mind never stops working on the questions you present to it, which is why it can be hugely beneficial to pose any questions that require creativity immediately before you distract your conscious mind.
If your favourite TV show is about to start in 5 minutes, it can be damn near impossible to get ‘real work’ done in the interim. So don’t bother. Instead, turn over your most challenging questions to the subconscious.
It’s a big help to write down the question, even if you feel like an embarrassment for doing so.
As an affiliate marketer, I might find myself reading the following dilemma over and over again: “How can I increase the profit on Campaign X from $100/day to $500/day?” Now if I turned over that question to my conscious mind, or worse – started to brainstorm the possibilities on my whiteboard – I would probably come up with the same ideas and the same problems.
But after repeating the question, and then sodding off to watch some TV, I can interrupt my usual line of thoughts and let the subconscious go about finding solutions. Those same solutions would rarely make it on to the whiteboard with the loud guy in the room doing all the talking.
You don’t have to watch TV. Simply keeping a puzzle book by your desk is a brilliant way of short-circuiting the conscious mind. As long as you’re kept busy with crosswords and number games, you’ll be unlikely to interfere with the subconscious genius at work.
The next time you’re seeking creative inspiration, don’t dwell on it. Pose the question, hand it over to your subconscious, distract yourself, and wait for the delivery. Having seen how stuck in its ways the corporate battlefield can be, I would suggest mentioning the process to your boss beforehand. I’m glad I work at home!
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Productive Desktops: Red, Blue or Whimsical Dolphins?
So cometh the confession hour…
Who has a desktop that looks like this?
Given my rich celebrated history in front end web design (*snortle*), I am all too familiar with the sight. It screams to me… Friday afternoon.
You can forget the blue screen of death, it’s this rainbow of crackling static that poses a much greater risk to our hairlines.
While I do agree that productivity can be improved by culling the desktop clutter, you will also find a great deal of research which goes much further, suggesting that even our choice of wallpaper can affect working habits.
Is there such a thing as a productive desktop? Have I been shooting myself in the balls all this time with those whimsical dolphins, or the lovely sweeping Apple landscapes on my iMac? According to this University of British Columbia study, there is.
The study looks at how colour can affect our brain performance, using red and blue desktops to measure any cognitive boosts. It was established that test subjects with a red desktop performed better in tasks that required attention to detail and memory retrieval. However, the blue desktop was noticeably more effective for tasks that required brainstorming and creative thinking.
Juliet Zhu, author of the study, sums it up best: “Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution. The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”
“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquillity. The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”
In the light of this information, maybe I should change my desktop to vivid red whenever I’m feeling brave enough to bust open the accounting software? It would probably reduce the arse-numbing pain I associate with monthly reconciliation. Perhaps, if I’m short on inspiration for my affiliate campaigns, a swish of the ocean on my wallpaper would help.
Further studies have shown that solid colour desktops tend to work better than background images, which can steal attention away from the task at hand. Even if you don’t notice the distractions, your brain is latching on to every last glimpse of the image. So as tempting as it can be to place an affectionate image of your newborn son on the desktop, or your beloved pets, it’s probably not a smart idea.
It’s the same principle as listening to music on the job. You may think it boosts your comfort, helps you focus, and makes working a more pleasurable experience – I’m sure it does, on the pleasure scale – but the jarring influence of subconsciously following the lyrics (or furiously out loud, if you’re my girlfriend) shouldn’t be underestimated. And that’s why I am a huge white noise junkie, with some binaural beats thrown in for good measure.
Some people will go to crazy lengths to give themselves the best possible chance of staying productive. If you’re super cautious about your work, or perhaps enjoy indulging in the odd bit of freelance proofreading, you could go one step further.
Don’t just use a red desktop…
Paint the walls red. Buy red curtains. Force any visitors to enter your office lair in stark red overalls. Hell, you could become the devil’s child if you’re committed to the cause.
Likewise, if you’re missing the inspiration gene, you should probably just decorate your workspace in glorious royal blue Chelsea colours. Not only will you be boosting your creative thinking, but you’ll be supporting a real team in the process.
I’m shortly going to be running a case study on my affiliate marketing blog showing the effects of red and blue on consumer decisions. It should reveal some tasty tips for marketers, so for all my good fellow scumbags out there, keep an eye out!
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How The 80/20 Rule Applies To You
It’s not rare to find that 80% of your sales are generated by 20% of your customers, or that 80% of your time is spent handling 20% of your chores.
This skewed outlook on life and business was first observed by the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who lent his name to the theory.
Pareto established, in the early twentieth century, that 80% of Italian land was owned by just 20% of the population. He later famously observed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. Spurred on by the unusual correlation, his work continued and the Pareto Principle became lodged not just in economic folklore, but in business minds alike.
By running a business that is effectively a one man show, I have become a great believer in the Pareto Principle.
I’m convinced it can be applied to productivity. The principle is a great marker for ensuring I don’t become bogged down in tasks that waste my limited time.
I don’t think I’m alone in confessing that when I look at my to-do list, I can easily find tasks that satisfy my need to appear busy; tasks that contribute very little to my bottom line.
As an Internet Marketer, I often find myself profiting from one particularly lucrative advertising campaign. On a good day, it makes my other efforts look like a complete waste of time. If the lucrative campaign earns more than the rest of my work combined, why would I insist on wasting 80% of my time chasing those dead ends?
Probably because seeing the skewed reality is one thing. Acting on it is completely another.
The desire to appear busy is something that has been ingrained in us since childhood. Can you imagine the uproar at school had you refused to go to 80% of your classes? Or the backlash from your employer if you only worked 2 hours of your contracted 8?
Where our productivity is concerned, we are highly trained animals. To stay busy is better than to look lazy, even if the results are not always as we’d expect in doing so.
Sometimes it’s a welcome relief to step back and analyse where your success is coming from. What work is bringing in the bacon? Which tasks are you splurging blood, sweat and tears over for little reward?
These may seem like stupid questions. But I believe there’s much more potential in becoming a specialist, somebody who plays to his strengths, than a jack of all trades who couldn’t see his skill-set if it slapped him in the tits.
Recommended This Week:
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Check out Filthy Rich Mind, a brand new project I’m collaborating on with a couple of other writers in the self-improvement market. It’s a fun project so if you like off-the-wall advice for improving your lifestyle, subscribe here for updates.
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Hire Good Cheap Workers With EasyOutsource
Outsourcing to India is no longer as cheap as it used to be. The race to the bottom of bargain basement prices for skilled workers has shifted in a different direction, a little further east to be exact.
If you’re constantly on the hunt for cheap labour, you’ve probably already heard that Filipinos are doing it cheaper, and doing it better. Well, certainly if you’ve spoken to enough Filipinos.
I am a firm believer in outsource arbitrage. If somebody abroad is willing to do work cheaply and to a high standard, I have no problems in taking business away from my own country. This has become widespread not just on a small business level, but in worldwide corporations that are desperate to maximise profits.
In an economic sense, it’s a disaster. How can America and the UK continue to thrive if jobs are being sent off-shore? We hear a lot of media scaremongering about jobs not being created but everybody knows, this is bullshit. Jobs are being created. They’re just being filled with cheaper labour from a warmer climate. It’s tough to envision a situation where that trend will be reversed.
So it’s on that basis that I recommend EasyOutsource as a good stomping ground for those looking to hire labour without paying the premium.
EasyOutsource was recommended to me by a friend when I asked him who had been responsible for the swish custom coding job behind one of his sites. I was pretty stunned when he told me the wages he was paying his staff, and it was much more competitive than the rates you typically see on Elance and oDesk.
EasyOutsource is free to use, and is essentially no more than a portal bringing buyers and service providers together. There are zero hoops to jump through. Just register a profile and post a job, or cruise through the profiles of workers and message them directly if you so wish.
It’s very easy, though I can understand why serious project managers would have apprehension about dealing with workers in such an uncontrolled marketplace.
I say this time and time again, but it never loses relevance. Outsourcing is an art. You cannot expect to simply bagsy a foreign worker, throw them a brief and expect it delivered to spec without any hiccups along the way. This applies to EasyOutsource and every other freelancing site on the planet.
You really need to spend time weeding out the pretenders from the legitimate workers who can add to your business. Get them on Skype and ask to speak directly to the individuals who will be responsible for the work.
I once took on a highly skilled University graduate who wrote like a fluent subcontinental Shakespeare in her briefing. I was impressed, almost shamed by her writing. But that means very little if she delegates the actual work to her bumbling school children and their shaky grasp of ‘Indlish‘. Which is exactly what she did.
Also beware of the super talented programmers who tell you they’re capable of working full-time, but take 2 days to reply to the shortest email. (ie. “Hello, are you working, you cheeky little shit?“)
Outsourcing effectively is a skilled art. Outsourcing unwisely is a waste of time, energy and subsequently your will to live. If you’re going to do it, put some thought in to it.
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If you’re looking for a more professional outsourcing solution, definitely take a look at Pepper Virtual Assistants. They were featured on ProBlogger last week and stand out as reliable, if slightly pricier, proposition.
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The Night Owl vs. The Early Bird vs. The Office Chimp
There are 8760 hours in a year, and the average employee spends exactly 2000 of them at work. I won’t scare you with the total number of hours you are expected to work in a lifetime but rest assured, it’s a lot of bloody hours.
Small business owners and self-employed professionals can rightly claim to lose many more hours outside of the set Monday to Friday 9-5 routine. Personally, I would bet that I spend up to 50% of my 8760 hours thinking about work. If I’m not brainstorming business concepts, I’m going over accounting figures in my head. And if I’m not daydreaming, I’m battering my keyboard as I speak.
This post is about stereotypes. That means understanding them, acknowledging them and hopefully becoming more productive by living up to them. I’d like to introduce you to my three furry friends, Mr Office Chimp, Mr Early Bird and Mr Night Owl.
Consider them your new messiahs.
There’s a question I get asked a lot – usually by my friends – that relates to staying productive while being my own boss, and it goes simply, “When do you find it easiest to work?” Usually followed by “Or do you not work?” Followed by the snap judgment of my unshaven face and pizza beard “Christ, show me how you make money. It can’t be that hard…”
For the longest time, I thought it was cool to reply that I worked whenever I felt like it. And in essence, it was true. But whether you believe it or not, routine is one of the great gamechangers in the productivity equation. We are designed to function better when there is routine in our lives.
Routine doesn’t have to be the recurring disgust of wedging your face in somebody else’s armpit on the tube, and it certainly doesn’t have to be the sight of the same fake plastic faces at the watercooler during lunch. Routine need only be an environment lavished with the correct ingredients to bring out the best of your working habits.
Mr Night Owl, Mr Early Bird and Mr Office Chimp sum up, quite suitably I think, three very different professional personas that I have encountered.
I often jest that Night Owls are online sleazeballs and bohemian graphic designers, the type who make money in darkened basements while scattering cheesy wotsits over their boxers.
Likewise, I love to ridicule the Early Birds for being psychomaniac marathon runners, the type you catch whizzing past in the park at god knows what hour because they have to get back to their squeaky clean apartments to do some fucking life consulting on why I’m such an unhealthy bastard.
And then there’s the Office Chimps. Those who arrive at their Macbooks by 9:01am with a large cup of Starbucks and the desire to ‘touch base’ over some useless corporate shit, always worth sacrificing a lunch break over, in the distant hope of success while they plan the only two week vacation of their year to Benidorm on a second minimised browser.
Am I stereotyping? Probably, but fuck that, right?
My point is (yes, there’s a point), that it doesn’t really matter which of these personas you choose to adopt for your professional career. What matters is that you embrace the necessary challenges and learn from our three furry musketeers. Take a peek below to work out what the hell I’m talking about.
The Night Owl Lifestyle
He who works between 9pm-4am.
The Night Owl enjoys a working environment of less distractions, less interruptions and more late night Channel 5 porn. He doesn’t have to answer the phone every 5 minutes, but he does have to contend with Ryan Eagle announcing on Twitter in 17 minute intervals that he’s still awake, and still got a bigger dick than you.
Unfortunately, being a good Night Owl requires a perfect knack for balancing your social life with those late surges of productivity. It’s not healthy to lose every Friday night to your work, but then neither is it healthy to batter your liver in to submission while your latest project gathers dust.
Doing it wrong:
Following the Night Owl work routine while courting a demanding girlfriend is a recipe for your balls to look like mashed potatoes by the end of the first week. Be sure to spend a lot of time with friends, family, loved ones and pets in the afternoon hours when you’re not working.
You must be able to distinguish between Night Owling for the right reasons (it’s your most productive working period) against finding a simple excuse for your insomnia. If your problem is that you can’t sleep, work is not the answer.
Doing it right:
If you’re going to be a night owl, you have to embrace the lifestyle and remain in bed until at least 12pm. It’s not feasible to expect to be working at your full potential in the early hours on little or no sleep. If you choose to ignore this advice, please allow me to recommend a local business that can probably serve you well. Just search… crack dealers in *my town here*
On a serious note… maintain a healthy diet, avoid reliance on caffeine stimulants, and use proper lighting to avoid blitzing the retinas of your eyeballs with chronic monitor glare. Working in the dark, every night, is really fucking stupid.
The Early Bird Lifestyle
He who works between 6am-1pm.
The Early Bird sums up a lifestyle I have never quite managed to embrace. The last time I was up at the crack of dawn, it was to retrieve a bag of Argos cutlery from an apartment I was running away from. Long story, but clearly such early activity has never come naturally to me.
I guess it’s the way forward for those who enjoy a good pre-breakfast workout, love the smell of morning dew, and don’t like late night Channel 5 porn.
The great appeal of getting work done early is to be able to enjoy the rest of the day. This may require a streak of independence, since most of your friends are likely to still be working when you’re finished!
Doing it wrong:
If you’re going to be a professional Early Bird, stick to your guns and obey the cut-off point in the day when work becomes secondary. The Office Chimps will be trying to badger you in to conversing after their 3pm pub lunches, but don’t be having any of it. If you become the pushover who is first in to his home office and subsequently last to close down Outlook, you have to question the merits of your lifestyle.
I always feel a little pissed off when I see that even the Americans on my Twitter have finished work, while I’m still plugging away in the UK. Thankfully I don’t have the fist in the balls of knowing I got up at 5am to add to the bitterness. Take note, Early Birds.
Doing it right:
The smooth sophisticated Early Bird doesn’t just do it right, he looks like he’s doing it right. These are the kind of bastards you see chipping on to the 16th green at 2:30pm because their work is dealt with and they’ve already maxed out the MuscleBlaster.
The successful Early Bird wakes early with a fresh mind, plows through the to-do list and crucially manages to maintain the momentum until his work is done. A fake Early Bird, a Finch in Disguise, may start off brightly at 6am. But when 9am comes, he’s such a virgin to the sudden rush of distractions and attention stealing emails that his best laid plans crumple and fail. He retreats to his natural environment and far from having the golf clubs out at 2pm, he’s drowning in a mug of caffeine and wondering where the morning went.
To be an efficient Early Bird, you need concentration levels of steel, Ivan Drago-esque discipline and the ability to give me those snotty looks as you sprint past in your sweat stained jogpants.
I admire you, Early Birds, but I hope the sunrise swallows you whole.
The Office Chimp Lifestyle
He who works between 9am-5pm.
If there was a God, the Office Chimp would clearly be his projection of how employment should proceed. Right from an early age, we are nurtured in to a routine that for 95% of the suckers on this earth, will become ‘The Routine’ for the rest of their lives. Monday to Friday, 9-5, with the occasional token gesture of holiday to avoid a certain mental breakdown.
The Office Chimp is scoffed at by those of us who are no longer constrained to the traditional work day, and yet many of us choose to work those conventional hours regardless. Oh, but we carry our work through the evening and the morning too. So who is laughing now? Just us unfortunately.
The Office Chimp is encouraged in all of us from an early age. There’s no shame in working to the tune of a lifestyle that regularly brings out the best in our performance. Unless it doesn’t, of course.
Doing it wrong:
As effectively as we are trained to work during the 9-5 grind, we are just as seasoned in the art of wasting time. Most of us have nurtured the skill through years of dossing around at school, pretending to be hard working students and browsing Facebook while the boss isn’t looking.
I can plead guilty to all of the charges above. But the moment I started my own business, the old adage became true. The only person who paid the price of those crimes was the idiot who was guilty of them. Procrastination is like masturbation, you’re only ever fucking yourself.
Adapting your work ethic to that of the Office Chimp requires that you be prepared to immerse yourself in the traditional work day. The phone will ring, emails will arrive and there’s bound to be that annoying queue in Tesco to separate Man from his Meal Deal. Can you stay focused?
Running your own business and still managing to waste time means that you’re definitely doing it wrong. But hey, at least you still have that sense of camaraderie with your fellow chimps. It’s always somebody’s fault but never your own, right?
Doing it right:
The successful Office Chimp is distinguishable by the fact that he looks like everybody else, but he’s a lot richer, a lot happier, a lot healthier and spends a lot more time basking in the sun on vacation. But how does he do it?
The tale of the successful Office Chimp is usually told with a recurring detail, and that detail is hidden in the actual nature of his work. Unlike most chimps, he will choose to only devote his energies to work that is high-value. You’ll never find him processing spreadsheets of meaningless data entry, or ‘touching base’ on matters that could be solved in an instant with a little common sense.
He starts his work at the conventional hour, and just like you and I, he finishes in time for an early evening drink. The difference is simply the value he places on his time, and thus the value he generates from his work.
You won’t catch the Office Chimp galloping through parks at a ridiculous hour, and you probably won’t see him covered in cheesy wotsits in the recess of the night. But just like with these other critters, there is method to his madness.
So which are you? And more importantly, are you doing a good job of being him?
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Man, Laptop And World: How To Travel Efficiently
Over the last seven months, I feel like I’ve spent more time logging in to hotel Wifi systems than I have in my own office. When you make the decision to travel, whilst working on the move, efficiency becomes a major issue. How can you get the most out of your time, while severing many of those hours in pursuit of greater thrills?
I recommend travelling to anybody who has the chance. If your business is self-managed, it makes little sense to constrain your time and freedom to a single city, especially if you already know that city inside out. Many people cite the influence of outside factors for not being able to travel.
“The wife won’t let me…”
“The kids are too much work…”
“I’m tied in to a rental contract…”
Admittedly, those with less ties than myself have more problems to solve before they can take off around the world, but none of the factors are hammer blows to the idea. They just take a greater leap of faith and/or commitment to overcome.
If you’re stuck between indecision and lack of information, here are a few pointers I’ve picked up along the way:
1. Travel as lightly as possible.
If you are a notorious hoarder of junk, traveling is an excellent excuse to throw out the crap that’s being cluttering your garage for so long. When I moved to Thailand, I completely overestimated how many clothes I would need, and indeed what type of clothes I would need. Sticky heat-trapping shirts barely cool enough for the English winter? Definitely not going to be needed in Bangkok. Did I bring them anyway? Of course I did.
It’s tempting to fit a lifetime’s accumulation of crap in to your suitcase, but ask yourself one question. Is this so important that I can’t buy a replacement while I’m away? The answer to most items will be no. Traveling light makes moving around much easier, not to mention saving you many many pesos in excess baggage charges.
2. Hotel Wifi has a recurring tendency to suck balls.
I’ve learnt that if I don’t do research beforehand, fate will typically conspire to hand me a shitty hotel Internet connection. Working from a laptop instead of a dual screen Mac took some adjusting. Working from a laptop on 56K dial-up speeds merited a full blooded sucker punch to the balls. If you’re staying in a hotel, make sure the Wifi is good and included free of charge. Or risk paying £30 for a few hours of patchy usage at somewhere like Novotel Rim Pae. Screw you, Novotel.
3. Don’t stay in flash, rich, luxurious hotels.
Wifi is worth investing in if you’re running a business from your laptop. But I’ve never understood the craze behind booking hotels for $500/night. Ultimately, a bed is a bed. Unless you plan on doing something other than sleeping in it, why pay through the nose for something that rarely gives you a true taste of the place you’re visiting? Overpaying is considered by many to be a macho display of ballin’. Invariably, traveling with set requirements of the pampered existence you need to get to sleep at night defeats the bloody purpose of traveling at all.
4. Learn the language.
My biggest regret as I move on from Thailand. It’s difficult to truly appreciate a culture if the standard conversation leaves you scratching your head and whipping up Rosetta Stone on the smartphone. Learning a few basic phrases is a must, while learning conversational basics will give you a much better understanding of what’s happening around you. Not to mention, a whole new world of local prices become accessible once you display a better grasp of the native vocab than a regular tourist.
5. Dropbox.
Dropbox is the new rage. Okay, to most people, it’s yesterday’s new rage. I was slow to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m glad that I did. By using Dropbox, you can afford to pull a Tim Ferriss. Sod off the face of the Earth completely, leave your laptop behind and restrict work to bursts of activity in an Internet Cafe just outside the Angolan Jungle. Dropbox gives you access to your important files anywhere, synchronizing them across devices and affording you the title of Digital Nomad.
6. Use time differences to your advantage.
Initially, I was concerned about the time difference when I first moved to Asia. Companies and reps based in the UK, Canada and America would still be asleep while I was busy with work. What if I needed to talk to them? It didn’t take long for me to figure that this was a great blessing in disguise. Zero distractions and zero interruptions. By the time those in America had woken up and replied to my emails, I would be happily relaxing and unwinding in the sun.
7. Have back-up support in place.
When you’re traveling, even with laptop in tow, it brings peace of mind to have somebody ready and waiting to act on any emergencies. I hired a Virtual Assistant from EasyOutsource.com, which is by far my favourite place to recruit cheap but talented labour.
You can have all your mundane tasks handled by a full-time VA for as little as $250/month, although I would recommend you invest a little more for quality’s sake. It’s also better to hire a combined workforce rather than a single employee. An individual is just as prone to “sick days” at inconvenient times as you were back in the day job. Hiring a team removes this worry.
8. Reduce any unwanted papermail before leaving.
In the UK, I use the Royal Mail’s redirection service to have my post sent to family while I’m away. If it’s important, I’ll have them send it on for me. This costs £8/month for domestic redirection and up to £30/month to have mail routed overseas. It’s a good idea to deselect paper statements from your online credit and store card accounts. Who needs to be reminded of yesterday’s vanity purchases, anyway?
For tax purposes, I have any important documents from HRMC sent to my Thai based address. This is easy to do by updating your current profile after receiving the Government Gateway ID. For everything else, I don’t stress. If it’s important, I’m sure the sender will find a better way of contacting me.
9. Tell your bank and credit card issuers where you’re traveling.
Very important and the source of much frustration while I’ve been attempting to use ATMs overseas. Fraud detectors are sent in to a frenzy if you withdraw £500 from a Cambodian street market. Your bank will routinely cancel payments and refuse to process ATM withdrawals if you don’t make it clear over the phone that you will be traveling to a particular region on a certain date.
For this reason alone, I chose to open an HSBC Advance account before moving to Asia. They have a strong presence abroad and it’s reassuring to be able to walk in to a branch that knows your name if you have any problems.
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