Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Small black flies invaded the office, before taking over the whole city. It got so bad you had to wear a mask to avoid breathing them in. They formed a fine black film over everything, including your skin.
People went mad.
One day, all the flies died. It was over.
This is a 50-word short story. Read more by me on CTTS or by others too on Facebook.
[fr] Une clé pour procrastiner moins: faire les choses à mesure. Evident, bien sûr, mais important. Pour pouvoir faire les choses à mesure, ralentir, prendre le temps. Comprendre au fond de soi et pas juste dans sa tête qu'une tâche effectuée maintenant ne sera pas à faire plus tard.
This is the fifth post in my ongoing series about procrastination. Check out the previous ones: Five Principles, Perfectionism, Starting, and Stopping, Getting Thrown Off and Getting Unstuck, and Not Running (Firewalls and iPhone alarms).
Obviously, doing things now (as opposed to later) is the remedy against procrastination. If you do things now, then you can’t procrastinate them, right?
Now that the obvious is out of the way, let’s dig a little. Doing things now is both the result of not procrastinating and part of the cure against procrastination. This means that if we understand what’s going on, and manage to make a habit of doing certain things immediately, we have a key to easing the accumulation of incoming tasks on the procrastination list.
At one point in my life (the “when” is a little fuzzy here) I really understood (deep down inside) that if I did something now, then it meant that I wouldn’t have to do it afterwards. I’m sorry for stating the obvious. Everybody knows this. But between knowing it in your head and knowing it in your gut, there is a difference. The procrastinator’s gut believes that if you don’t do it now, with a bit of luck you’ll be able to continue ignoring it safely until the end of time.
So read this again: if you do something you need to do now, you will not have to do it later.
I know that one decisive “aha!” moment in that respect was when I reached the “2-minute rule” part of GTD. Here’s what this rule is about: when you’re in the “processing” phase of GTD, going systematically through a pile of stuff and deciding what you need to do about each item — but not actually doing it, just making decisions and putting tasks in the system for later — well, there is one situation where you do what needs to be done instead of putting your next action in the system, and that’s when it takes less than 2 minutes to deal with the task. The logic behind this is that putting a task in the system and retrieving it later is going to take two minutes or so — so you’ll actually spend less time if you just do it now. Also, a 2-minute interruption in your processing is not the end of the world.
The trick here is to use a timer — if the timer goes off and you haven’t finished what you thought would be done in 2 minutes, then you stop, put the task on the right list, and continue processing.
Now, I’m not saying that this is where I got the “do it now” revelation, but it’s definitely one blow of the hammer that helped drive that particular nail in.
Another moment I remember is when clicking around on a few links on the FlyLady site brought me to Bratland. I like this metaphor of the “inner brat”, the part of you who finishes the toilet roll but doesn’t put a new one on for the next person (who, if you live alone, is going to be you). The brat who spills the milk and doesn’t clean up, so it ends up caking the kitchen counter and it takes you 5 minutes to get rid of it instead of 30 seconds. I started keeping a kind but firm parental eye open for my inner brat, and that is something that helped me not create more work for myself by letting things drag along.
One area I managed to put this in practice rather well is e-mail. If an e-mail comes in my inbox, and I answer and/or archive it straight away, it won’t be sitting there looking at me next time I go into my inbox. I know this goes against the “deal with your e-mail only twice a day” (or whatever) rules — I’ll write more about why I think my way of dealing with e-mail works, though.
But clearly, if you are the kind of people for whom tasks tend to go onto todo lists to die or weigh on your conscience for months, there is a decisive advantage to not letting them get on the list in the first place.
Related, but not exactly in the “doing things now” department: I have a trick I use when people ask me if I can do something for them (I’m usually tempted to say yes, because I want to be helpful and I want people to like me, and then I feel horrible because I let things drag along and don’t do them). I ask the person to send me an e-mail to remind me about it. This has three advantages:
One important element to be able to start doing things that need it “right away” (you do not want to be putting things like cleaning up spilled milk on your to-do list) is to slow down, run less. If you’re trying to run out the door because you’re late for an appointment, you’re not going to clean up the spilled milk. You’re not going to do the washing up right after your meal. You’re not going to put the laundry away today if you haven’t planned that you need time for that. Yes, household chores, but it’s the same thing with work-related stuff: accounting, invoicing, getting back to prospective clients. You need wiggle space in your days, and that will not happen if you’re running from morning to evening.
I had forgotten about this when I wrote my previous post in this procrastination series, but one thing that helped me break out of the vicious running cycle was heading up into the mountains with no internet for a few days, in summer 2008. Up in the mountains, with nothing to do but eat, sleep, walk, and read a bit, I slowed down. I started taking the time to do things. And I kept a taste of this when I came back to my work-life.
I’ve found that, in the spirit of incremental changes, it’s no use deciding “from now on, I’m going to do all the regular stuff I should be doing as it comes in, à mesure“. Picking an area or two where you stick to it, on the other hand, is helpful. It’s helpful because it means one area where you will be accumulating less procrastinable material, and one area where you can experience the change, the slowing down, the “less backlog”, and get a taste of what it can be like to encourage yourself to make these changes in other areas of your life too.
[en] A few tips on writing for a blog: don't advertise, be interesting, use your authentic voice, remember the media is conversational, and be a real person writing something. This is not easy to do if you've been formatted to spew commercial copy or marketing-speak, but it can be learned. Learning requires exercise, and often help from others (peers or a trainer).
Hier, séance de formation chez un client. Deuxième séance, quelques mois après la première. Les bases techniques du maniement de WordPress sont acquises, on parle donc plus en profondeur de:
Voici quelques éléments intéressants qui ont émergé de nos discussions, et que je reproduis ici.
Publicité
En y réfléchissant bien, peu de personnes vont volontairement aller chercher du contenu publicitaire à lire. Toute l’industrie télévisuelle tourne finalement autour d’un but: attirer des gens devant un écran pour pouvoir leur enfiler de la publicité (oui, je suis un peu cynique). Mais sérieusement, la publicité c’est ce qu’on met sous les yeux des gens quand ils ne peuvent (ou ne veulent) pas s’échapper. Si on leur propose de s’abonner à du contenu purement publicitaire, peu de chances qu’ils le fassent.
Avec un blog, et en ligne en général (je pense aussi à Twitter), le public n’est jamais prisonnier. Il peut s’en aller d’un clic de souris. Si on veut utiliser un canal en ligne pour faire passer du contenu publicitaire, il faut le faire avec beaucoup de délicatesse — au risque de crier dans le désert.
Etre intéressant
Du coup, la logique rédactionnelle d’un blog ne peut pas être purement publicitaire (ou purement “marketing”, au sens de “pousser à la vente, à la consommation, promouvoir directement”). On privilégiera du contenu véritablement intéressant pour le lecteur. Pour le lecteur — pas du point de vue de l’entreprise.
Qu’est-ce qui intéresse vraiment les gens, du coup? C’est ça la grande question, mais voici quelques pistes:
C’est assez vague, tout ça, et il est possible (malheureusement) d’aborder ce genre de sujet de façon totalement inintéressante… Ce n’est pas une recette magique garantie!
Un ton authentique
La clé réside le plus souvent dans le ton utilisé. Le language marketing, “communiqué de presse”, pub, ou trop journalistique est à éviter. Oui, me direz-vous, mais comment faire?
Ce qu’on cherche, c’est à parler comme des êtres humains. Il faut pour cela souvent se “dé-formatter” (beaucoup de professionnels de la communication sont des crispés du “je”, par exemple). Le ton juste, c’est celui qu’on utiliserait dans un e-mail à un ami, ou bien dans une conversation avec des amis autour d’une table. Bien sûr, c’est de l’écrit, mais on se rapproche de ça.
Pour faire ça, quelques trucs:
Un petit tuyau: quand on est passionné par ce qu’on écrit, ça vient plus naturellement!
Un média conversationnel
Le dernier point de la liste ci-dessus est capital: avec un blog, nous sommes dans une conversation. Bien sûr, pas dans une véritable conversation en face-à-face, mais quand même, dans une dynamique d’échange.
Vous avez déjà certainement dû subir des cours ou des conférences où l’orateur lit son discours ou débite un monologue assommant. Comparez cela au bon orateur, qui n’est pas en train de parler au public, mais de discuter avec les gens dans la salle (même si ce n’est que lui parle).
On cherche à faire la même chose dans un blog. Si on parle comme une brochure de marketing, personne ne nous répondra. Un être humain, par contre, c’est autre chose: on peut discuter avec!
Autre avantage d’un style informel et conversationnel: votre lecteur retiendra mieux ce que vous lui dites. En effet, il a été démontré que l’utilisation du “je” et autres marqueurs de la conversation dans le language écrit informel donnent au cerveau l’illusion qu’il est dans une conversation. Du coup… il est plus attentif! Kathy Sierra explique très bien tout ceci (en anglais).
Une vraie personne qui écrit
Bloguer nécessite de se dévoiler un tout petit peu. Pas de raconter ses pensées ou envies les plus secrètes, bien entendu, mais quand même de se livrer un peu. Si le blog “marche”, c’est qu’il met le lecteur en contact avec quelqu’un d’humain, d’imparfait, d’atteignable. Quelqu’un comme lui — pas une organisation ou institution désincarnée.
Il est important pour cela que le blog soit formatté de façon à ce que le nom de l’auteur apparaisse à côté de l’article — ou le cas échéant, que les auteurs signent leurs articles. Si c’est Julie ou Sophie ou Robert qui écrit, ce n’est pas la même chose! Je veux savoir qui me parle, et à qui je parle si je réponds.
Comment changer?
Le problème de beaucoup de personnes qui se mettent au blog, c’est d’avoir été “formatté” à écrire dans un language pseudo-neutre, impersonnel, journalistique, ou marketing/commercial. Il faut “désapprendre”.
Heureusement, on sait tous avoir des conversations avec nos amis, ce qui nous donne un point de repère.
Il vaut la peine de se mettre à plusieurs, de regarder ses productions et celles des autres avec un oeil critique et impitoyable:
Puis, si nécessaire, retravailler, récrire. Ça ne vient pas tout seul, mais ça peut s’apprendre.
[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.
Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).
Les réseaux sociaux sont asymétriques.
Je ne parle pas des réseaux sociaux en ligne, mais bien des réseaux de relations et de gens, les vrais réseaux que les sites comme Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn et autres cherchent à modéliser.
A mon sens, la grande majorité de ces sites nous proposent un modèle de relations comportant une erreur fatale: les liens entre les gens y sont symétriques, alors que ce n’est pas le cas dans la réalité.
Pensez aux gens qui font partie de votre monde: il y a fort à parier que vous trouverez sans difficulté des personnes qui sont plus importantes pour vous que vous pour elles — et vice-versa. On aimerait, idéalement, que les gens que l’on aime nous aiment autant en retour, que ceux que l’on admire nous admirent en retour, que ceux que l’on enrichit par notre présence nous enrichissent pareillement en retour. Mais souvent, et à des degrés divers, ce n’est pas le cas.
Et dans le monde professionnel, encore moins.
Pour qu’un lien soit établi entre deux utilisateurs de Facebook ou LinkedIn, chacun doit l’approver. Chacun doit dire “oui, je le veux”.
Du coup, un tel réseau social ne capture que les relations symétriques, ou bien (et c’est ce qui a tendance à arriver) fait passer des relations parfois fortement asymétriques pour des relations symétriques, parce qu’au bout d’un moment, on “cède”, et on accepte également comme amis les gens que l’on connaît peu, voire ceux que l’on ne connaît pas mais qui voudraient nous connaître.
Il existe cependant des réseaux sociaux en ligne (ou presque) qui permettent de rendre compte de ces asymétries.
Twitter est celui qui occupe le devant de la scène ces temps. Sur Twitter, vous pouvez suivre qui vous voulez, sans que cette personne doive vous suivre en retour (c’est d’ailleurs ce qui en fait un outil de veille si puissant, bien plus que Facebook).
Dopplr, un service permettant de partager ses déplacements et projets de voyages avec son réseau, vous laisse simplement décider qui peut accéder à votre profil — la réciprocité n’est pas requise.
Plus ancienne, la liste de contacts d’un service de messagerie instantanée permet également l’asymétrie, même si la pratique penche vers la réciprocité: je peux apparaître sur la liste de contacts d’une personne et avoir supprimé celle-ci des miens.
L’ensemble des blogs peut également être considéré comme un immense réseau social peu formalisé, où les “blogrolls” (listes de liens vers d’autres blogs appréciés du blogueur) révélaient les relations entre blogueurs, avant de tomber en désuétude (les blogrolls, pas les blogs).
Plus proche de chacun, peut-être, et pas tout à fait en ligne, la liste de contacts dans son téléphone mobile. Vous avez enregistré mon numéro, mais ce n’est pas pour autant que j’ai le votre.
Facebook, d’un certaine manière, tente de se rattraper avec les “listes d’amis”. Chacun peut maintenant en effet classer ses amis dans diverses listes (qui restent privées) que l’on peut utiliser pour donner ou non accès à certaines parties de son profil. Ainsi, je peux être connectée à Jules, à qui je donnerai le droit de voir tout mon profil, alors que lui ne me donnera qu’un accès limité au sien.
Sans ce genre de subtilité, les réseaux sociaux qui imposent la réciprocité parfaite finissent par devenir invivables avec la multiplication des contacts de tous bords, ce qui amène à leur désertion par ceux qui les faisaient vivre.
[fr] Je réfléchis à un rythme pour mes semaines. Même si elles se suivent sans se ressembler, certaines choses se répètent de semaine en semaine. J'en suis ici: lundi, courte journée consacrée essentiellement à m'organiser et à planifier la semaine, et à faire un sort à autant de tâches routinières que possible. Mardi, journée bureau. Mercredi, journée bureau ou meetings suivant les besoins. Jeudi après-midi, workshops ou meetings. Vendredi pour m'occuper de ce qui a passé entre les gouttes durant la semaine et faire des tâches "légères" (annoncer et promouvoir Bloggy Fridays et autres p'tits déjs, mettre le blog de l'eclau à jour, compta, paperasse, socialiser en ligne, mettre à jour ma présence sur les réseaux sociaux, etc...)
Attempting to plan my weeks has left me wondering if I should try to settle into some kind of weekly routine — especially when a week like last week comes up, where I realize that I have only one office day planned for the whole week, and on a Friday.
One thing I need to do in advance is plan my office and meeting days. Sometimes they are decided for me: a client wants me to come and give a talk on this or that day — well, that makes it a meeting day. But most of the time, I get to choose. So, which choice is best? What are the best days of the week for me to stay in the office, and what are the best days for me to be running around or seeing people all day?
Though my professional activities vary a lot for week to week, my personal ones are pretty regular. I finish early on Mondays and Fridays to go to judo. My Monday mornings and Thursday mornings are usually booked. I sing on Wednesday nights, or go sailing in summer. People from the coworking space often go out to eat together on Wednesdays.
There are also professional activities that I do or want to do each week: plan my week, for one. I’m the editor for a couple of blogs, and I have the choice between scheduling publications for the whole week at one moment, or publishing day-by-day. I write my column every week (on Sunday, so far). I want to write a few blogs posts every work, do some research, work on my business development, keep up with administrivia, and of course do my client work.
So, with all these different activities, and different types of days, maybe there is an optimal way of organizing my week.
Here’s my thinking so far (and many thanks to Suw who patiently listened to me thinking all this out loud over IM).
Planning my week is something, I realized, which can take upto half a day (scary!) because I’m still learning how to do it. It often involves rethinking priorities, doing a mind sweep (or an inbox sweep) to capture stray tasks that have slipped through the cracks, and sometimes dealing with actual emergencies. As I write this, I realise that my “plan my week” moments have a little “GTD weekly review” ring to them. They aren’t the weekly review, I’m aware of that, but there is some kinship.
I guess in an ideal world I would plan the next week on Friday afternoon, and make that a proper weekly review too. Unfortunately things do tend to crop up during the week-end, and I’m usually pretty tired by my week on Fridays, so I’m not in an optimal state of mind to be doing something new and a bit challenging.
As my Monday mornings are spent out of the office, and my Monday afternoons are pretty short, “Monday” actually turns out to be a good day for me to plan and get organized. Of course, if it doesn’t take the whole afternoon (which I hope!) I will get other things done — but I’ve learned it’s better to plan larger time slots than tight ones.
So, there goes my Monday.
Friday is another interesting day in the week: business is slow on that day, and meetings tend to happen earlier in the week. I’m tired (everybody is). Traditionally for me it’s an office day, and a rather quiet one: not many phone calls, not many incoming e-mails. If my brain is still functional it’s a good day to get things done, but most of the time it’s just not that productive. It’s useful to have it as an office day rather than a day full of meetings or errands, though, because it serves as a safety net to catch any emergencies that might not have been dealt with during the week. When I plan my week, I don’t usually *plan* to do much on Friday, apart from do the stuff I didn’t manage to do during the week.
Ten days ago, I was thinking about the type of activity that would be suitable for a low-energy day like Friday, and actually came up with quite a few ideas:
A lot of these activities are actually more important than they might seem at first glance, and therefore they tend to slip through the cracks, grow hair and legs, and turn into scary emergency-monsters after a few weeks or months.
So, let’s say I declare Friday a “casual office” day, to catch up on the leftovers of the week and do the above. That leaves me with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Tuesday is a great office day. I have nothing planned in the evening, so it really gives me a clear day to just get on with work. Wednesday is also a good office day when I’m singing, as I can hang around until 7pm, though not so great when I’m sailing, as I’m likely to head out around 4pm. Thursday is usually only half a day, but will turn into a complete day similar to Tuesday in a few months’ time.
So, for the moment, it looks like I’m going to declare Tuesday a regular office day, Thursday afternoon a regular meeting/workshop time, and Wednesday will be office or meetings, depending on whether I have more “office” client work or more “meetings” client work.
Mondays are there to plan the week and get as much of my regular tasks out of the way. Friday is there to catch up on the “overflow”, deal with emergencies, and “casual” stuff. I’ll continue writing my column on Sundays.
What’s important to note though is that this is the framework. Many of my weeks will not work out like this — just like my days don’t always follow my daily routine. But having this framework is going to allow me to plan ahead better, I think.
Do you have some kind of weekly routine, or do you just go from week to week and deal with them as they show up?
Lucy hasn’t been tending her inner swamp lately. It’s starting to overflow, dripping from her eyes and ears. She knows the swamp monster is feeding on the gloom and growing each day.
With Patrick, she sets off on an inner journey to kill the beast.
They prevail, but remain forever joined.
This is a 50-word short story. Read more by me on CTTS or by others too on Facebook.
[fr] Je ressens généralement le besoin d'être à jour avec les "affaires courantes" avant d'attaquer le travail "proprement dit", comme lorsque j'avais besoin de ranger ma chambre ou mon appart avant de commencer à étudier pour mes examens, lorsque j'étais étudiante. Je ne suis pas sûre si c'est une bonne ou une mauvaise chose.
Over the last months, I’ve noticed how important it is for me to keep more or less up-to-date with daily business before dealing with “proper work”. Like when I was a student, and I needed to clean the flat before getting to work on my exams.
Non-done daily business floats about in your brain and distracts you. It’s the stuff you might forget to add to your next action lists because you do them pretty regularly all the time, like checking e-mail, responding to the easy ones, writing down expenses, keeping your desk clean, getting back to people who leave voicemail, writing a blog post.
This is the stuff that I’ve got in the habit of dealing with pretty much as soon as it comes in.
Maybe it should go on my lists too (in pure GTD terms, it should probably).
I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
It is linked, in a way I don’t quite grasp yet, to what I’m going to talk about in the next post of my procrastination series: getting into the habit of doing certain things immediately.
[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.
Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).
Vous avez sûrement déjà entendu que le FBI a diffusé une photo de Ben Laden, artificiellement vieilli, puisque le dernier portrait du monsieur très recherché date d’il y a une dizaine d’années, et qu’il a dû un peu changer depuis. Le hic, c’est que le FBI s’est vraisemblablement basé pour ce faire sur le portrait d’un politicien espagnol, Gaspar Llamazares, trouvé sur internet. (Ce monsieur-là, du coup, n’est pas très très content, comme vous pouvez l’imaginer.)
“Mais j’ai trouvé la photo sur internet!” s’est sans doute exclamé le responsable de ce mauvais photoshopping. “Je ne savais pas qu’il s’agissait d’un homme politique espagnol!”
En l’occurrence, le fait qu’il s’agisse d’une personnalité publique n’a en fait aucune importance.
Ce qui m’interpelle ici, c’est que même au FBI, on semble se satisfaire de l’idée naïve qu’une photo trouvée via Google Images peut être utilisée comme bon nous semble. Eh ben non.
Mesdames, messieurs, accrochez-vous donc bien à vos fauteuils: pour changer, je m’en vais me ranger cette fois du côté des droits d’auteurs. Il faut varier les plaisirs dans la vie, non? (N’ayez cependant crainte, il n’y a là rien de contradictoire, sauf peut-être pour les adeptes de prises de position simplistes.)
Ce n’est pas parce qu’une photo a été trouvée sur internet qu’elle est libre de droits.
Souvenez-vous de vos premiers cours de traitement de texte ou de fabrication de pages web, si Google existait déjà à l’époque. Un des exercices consistait très probablement à aller chercher une image “quelque part sur internet” pour l’incorporer dans votre document. Fatale erreur! On enseigne ainsi à une génération d’internautes que tout ce qui se trouve dans un moteur de recherche est “à disposition”. On confond allègrement “à disposition pour consultation” et “à disposition pour réutilisation”, voyez-vous.
Oh, c’est une erreur répandue, et je passe mon temps à remettre les pendules à l’heure: auprès d’élèves et de parents, mais aussi auprès d’enseignants et de professionnels de la communication. Et j’aurais peut-être dû faire un saut au FBI…
Alors je le répète ici: si vous trouvez une image “sur internet”, cela ne signifie pas qu’elle fait partie du domaine public. Il y a toutes les chances qu’au contraire, quelqu’un en détienne les droits.
Cette problématique trahit en fait une méconnaissance bien plus grave à mes yeux: une méconnaissance de la nature même des contenus qui composent internet.
Tout ce que l’on trouve sur internet y a été mis par quelqu’un: un particulier, une entreprise, une association, un gouvernement ou une organisation quelconque. On peut espérer que les personnes qui mettent des choses en ligne en aient les droits (ou au moins le droit). Mais même si ce n’est pas le cas, ce n’est pas parce tout le monde copie et recopie à droite et à gauche que cela nous autorise à le faire, comme on nous le répète à l’envi lorsqu’il s’agit de musique ou de films.
[fr] Après Paris, la pause hivernale, et la reprise un peu chaotique, le planning hebdomadaire a un peu de mal. Mais on s'encourage et on tient bon!
After the two busy weeks of Paris and post-Paris came two weeks of winter break non-planning, and two weeks of “getting back into it” semi-planning (including the one that is ending now). The two-week winter break allowed me to understand that I need a certain amount of structure in my time to feel good — long unending days of “whatever” don’t sit that well with me.
A consequence of the winter break was that I came back to the office for a week packed with workshops and talks (well, not completely packed, but more packed than is comfy), a rather long list of e-mails and incoming calls to prioritize, and a pile of urgent things “to do”. I good exercise in disruption, if you ask me.
What I’ve learnt is that it takes much more time than I expect to:
So, basically I spent my first week running a little (nothing so bad as what it was in the past, though), ended up exhausted and not having done a pile of things I expected to be able to, and spent this week drilling down my inbox, calling back prospective clients, doing client work, and dealing with a hundred little things that needed dealing with. This makes for days which seem horribly unproductive, because the “big stuff” that’s on my conscience is not getting done, but which are in fact quite productive because all these annoying little things (like emptying one’s inbox) do need to be done.
So, where’s the weekly planning with all that? Answer: in difficulty.
One thing I’ve kept up is keeping my various lists more or less in order. Evernote is always open or just one click away, and I seem to now have the automatic discipline of adding things in my lists whenever I think of them.
I’ve kept my list of week days and placed the urgent/important tasks on days where I had a chance to do them, but as I’ve been running a bit too much, I ended up pushing back the day I’d “plan my week” and end up doing it on Wednesday, because Monday and Tuesday would be taken up by doing “urgent things”.
Clearly, one of my issues now is when to plan my week and how long it takes. I’d like to do it on Friday afternoon but I’m often too exhausted. Monday morning sounds nice but I’m out most of it for judo, and so planning tends to take up the whole afternoon too. Maybe I need to write Monday off as a “planning and administrivia day”. I really do not want to be planning my work week on week-ends, though I might end up looking at what’s in store for me and doing some light pre-planning on Sunday (I do write my column on Sundays).
I’m also realising how hard it is for me to stick to including seemingly “not vital” tasks in my planning: business development and research/writing, specially when I’m a bit under pressure from too much “paid work” stuff to do. (Please don’t understand this at me wanting less paid work. I’m very happy to have more paid work. I just struggle a bit at times to balance what I spend my time doing.)
Next week only contains one office day (eeeek) so I’ll spend the first four days of the week running from one place to another on errands. Ugh, not really happy with myself for taking bites out of what were my office days for various errands. But I’ll live. Thankfully I have three office days the next week to make up for it. I will take whatever free time I have on Monday to plan, and report back on my progress by the end of the month.
Wish me luck! Hopefully things will be “back to normal” by February.
[fr] Je ne cours plus. C'est un pas important: si on court tout le temps, on est toujours en train de remettre à plus tard, et ça ne nous aide pas à résoudre nos élans procrastinateurs. Une vie un peu plus calme est un bien meilleur terrain. Je me souviens de deux éléments importants qui m'ont aidée à changer ça: premièrement, délimiter strictement du temps non-professionnel, plutôt que de travailler tout le temps (un piège surtout pour les indépendants). Deuxièmement, utiliser les alarmes (multiples!) de mon iPhone pour rythmer mes journées et mes semaines (ne plus partir stressée au judo parce que je n'ai pas vu passer l'heure, mais avoir une alarme placée assez tôt pour que je puisse y aller tranquillement, par exemple).
This is the fourth post in the series. You might want to read the first three ones: Five Principles, Perfectionism, Starting, and Stopping, as well as Getting Thrown Off and Getting Unstuck.
At some point during 2009, I realized that I had stopped running. I had stopped being late, doing things in a rush, and being over my head in emergencies. As with all virtuous circles, not running was at the same time a consequence of my decrease in procrastination and one of the elements that led to it.
If I look at my life now, I see clearly that I am doing many more things immediately (they never end up on a to-do list, and therefore reduce the number of procrastinable items in my world) — and doing things immediately is only possible when you’re not already running for your life.
I’ve been thinking back and trying to understand how this change happened, and I can think of two important things that I started doing during the course of 2008:
The first, firewalling off “non-work” time, might not seem immediately linked to a decrease in running, but actually, it’s very important. To stop running, you see, you need to learn that things can wait. You need to teach yourself that even though you’re behind on the deadline, you can still stop.
Lots of people stay trapped in a life of stress and running by saying things like “I have to finish this”, “I can’t afford not to”, “I don’t have a choice”. We always have a choice. We always choose to stay up late to finish something a client is expecting, for example, rather than face the consequences of not doing it. Not much of a choice, you may say. But it’s still a choice. And being aware that you are actually making a choice, rather than just enduring a situation you are powerless over, will in fact making you feel better.
More importantly, it opens the door to revealing your priorities: I am staying up late to work on this project for the client rather than relaxing in front of the TV after an already long day of work, because it is more important for me to avoid having a pissed off client than having a healthy balance in my life. Sounds a bit guilt-inducing said like that, but the point here is: what does this choice reveal of your priorities? What is more important, the client, or you, or your health, or your relationship, for example? All the time, we make these choices, but our priorities are so hard-wired in that we don’t realize anymore that they are choices, and we end up being victims who “have to do it”.
The time I learnt to make time off work a greater priority for me was when I was organizing the Going Solo conference. It was a huge amount of work, and though I had a great support network, I was carrying the whole thing on my shoulders and doing more or less that had to be done. I was under a lot of stress. I would wake up in the morning, grab the computer from under the bed, and collapse in the evening after trying to squeeze in some food between two e-mails or Skype calls. I didn’t know what a week-end was anymore. I was exhausted.
One day, one of my advisors said to me something like “there’s only so much you can do in a day” or “at some point, you have to call it a day”. I can’t remember the exact words used, but the point was this: even if you have a ton of work to do, even if you didn’t do what you expected today, even if you’re behind… at some point, you have to stop. Turn off the computer, turn off work.
So, I stopped feeling guilty about calling it a day. I also started implementing mandatory lunch-breaks: I would leave the computer, set the kitchen timer on 45 minutes, and go about making myself food. 45 minutes was the minimum time my lunch-break was to last. Yes, at least 45 minutes.
And that’s where interesting things started to happen: I started cooking again, for one. In 45 minutes, I had time for more cooking than just grabbing a piece of bread and cheese — so I did it! I also started relaxing a bit in the middle of the day. I’d read something, or lie down. “Time out” like that is important, because if you’re using to your whole life being taken up by work, you tend to forget what living is really about.
If you’re less stressed, in a general way, you’ll be more fit to tackle your procrastination issues. You can’t tackle procrastination issues if you’re running around in circles from morning to evening. So first step: run around in circles only during “work” time, and have “non-work” time when you don’t run.
End 2008, I opened eclau, the Lausanne Coworking Space, and started working there. That was a tremendous help in the “firewalling non-work time” department. Without really trying to do so, I gradually and naturally stopped working at home, to work only in the office. I’d be able to relax better at home. I never implemented real office hours (and don’t want to), but I started going down there in the morning (it’s two floors below my flat!), coming back up for my lunch break (leaving my computer behind!), and closing house in the evening at some point when everybody else started going home.
And that’s the context in which I made my second big step: using iPhone alarms to pace my day. iPhones allow you to set loads of different alarms, repeating any way you like over the week. So I set a daily alarm at noon to encourage me to take my lunch break (otherwise, I would forget about it and end up without having eaten at 3pm — doesn’t make for a very functional Stephanie). I set an alarm in the evening at 6.30 to think about dinner, except on the days when I’d go to judo. On those days, I set a mid-afternoon alarm to remind me to have a snack, and one early enough to remind me to stop working, pack and leave. I set one to tell me when to get ready for my singing rehearsals. I even set myself a “go-to-bed” alarm at 23:30 and a “Cinderella” alarm at midnight, because I was going a bit overboard with late-night DVDs.
Of course, all these alarms worked because they were there to remind me of some important decisions I had made. I wanted to start getting ready for judo soon enough that I wouldn’t arrive late. I wanted to have lunch at regular hours and take lunch breaks. I wanted to be in bed by midnight so I would have enough sleep and still have a morning the next day. But as I know my sense of time is bad (and being in front of a computer is a killer), I used my iPhone to help me. It made my coworkers laugh that every midday, my quacking alarm would go off — but I knew it was an important crutch for me in applying my priorities to my life.
And that’s when the magic actually started to happen: I had the time to prepare my judo and singing things and set off without being in a rush. I had spare time during my lunch break — I would actually use it to do the washing-up. I even had a moment in the evening, in between 23:30 and midnight, to think about my next day and plan it a little (inspired by FlyLady). I would look up train times the evening before if I had to go somewhere rather than sometime in the morning, and then realize I was running late.
Gradually, some areas in my day and life started to slow down. It wasn’t chaos from start to finish. And slowly, that slowness started creeping into the rest of my life, including work. It doesn’t mean I do things slowly, though. But I take the time to do things. I’m not running anymore.