How I’m becoming more prolific, for fun and profit
Do you ever lack focus, drift around projects and barely-related information and news and feel daunted by an ever-growing todo list?
Of course you do. You’re reading this post, the headline alone means you’ve self-selected as the above type in at least some small way. I’m going to hammer out a few pointers that I’ve recently found useful in the quest for actually getting the stuff that counts done. At this point I presume you’re on board and want to get something epic done? Read on…
A little background
My own issue developed into a problem because of my circumstances. Probably most people’s case. Feel free to skip to the ‘goods’ below, but this paragraph gives a little context. In my situation I started over ten years ago as a full-time freelancer, translating French (and some Swedish) corporate copy, legal and technical texts into English. All well and good, a pretty simple setup. I then added an agency operation, handling the requests I was getting for languages I don’t cover (i.e. >99% of the world’s languages). Slightly more complex, but manageable. Then I started thinking about scaling things up further. I got into setting up a translation platform to almost remove me personally from the transaction.
Along the way, on top of all this, I’ve set up and shut down a small handful of projects (teaching French online, a linguist database, a book, among others) that provided further dilution of my focus. I think any one of these projects could quite easily have doubled in size if I had been focused on just one of them, but as it stands they are all moving along at a steady pace, with just enough resources allocated. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t done badly out of it, but I know I could have done better.
“Could do better”
And this is the crux of the matter for most people, from what I read. That knowledge that if you could relive those last 5–10 years knowing what you know now, you could have leapfrogged many wasted hours, days, months and grown your pension pot much larger from much earlier on. Like the echos of your former teachers’ “constructively negative” comments ringing around in your head years later, we perhaps all think we “could do better”.
What could I have known to have done better, then? Here are some examples of the things I’ve learned over those ten years, thanks to general work/life experience and lots of reading:
- Budgeting is best done in advance
- Sleep is very important, but 8 hours might be a myth
- Choosing what not to work on is as important as the inverse
- Procrastination is best solved by tackling the root causes
- Yet, habits and repetition are great ways to become more productive
- Automating the menial tasks gives compounding benefits
- Waking early buys you free time, and doesn’t deprive you of anything
- Being ruthless with tasks gets you further in less time
- Getting out of the house is important
So those are the basics of my small revelation for late 2016. If you get those, intuitively, then feel free to jump ahead to the areas for improvement, otherwise I’ll explain a little more about each of the above.
Budgeting
If you want to get in control of your cashflow and always have some aside for contingency planning, the envelope system promoted by the popular YNAB team (you need a budget…) is a fairly robust option. I don’t religiously stick to this method, but I have a spreadsheet I try to keep up to date which plots expected income and costs as closely as possible. It doesn’t match to the penny, as YNAB helps you to do (it didn’t work great with my UK banks, unfortunately) but it gives me an early warning as to any cashflow holes and keeps me more or less on task of having some funds allocated for the ‘unexpected’. Those unexpected things we all know happen at least once a year.
Sleep
After hearing Nick Littlehales on the radio recently, explaining what’s behind his new book, I quickly read up on his previous interviews and got the gist of what he was saying. I still want to read that book (Sleep — The myth of 8 hours) but the gist is that we don’t need 8 hours to perform at our peak. We need a certain number of sleep cycles, preferably started earlier (pre-11 pm) and you can’t catch up on the previous night’s sleep by lying in. Apparently sleep debt is a myth, and the body prefers routines, to fit in with our natural circadian rhythms etc. So 4–5 sleep cycles of 90 minutes, which he quotes in a podcast interview, is enough for many. Napping in the afternoon can also boost performance, and it doesn’t even have to involve sleep, just shut down for up to 30 minutes to get most of the benefits.
Now from my own experiments over the years I know I react well to napping, feeling refreshed after just 10 minutes of shuteye sometimes. I also know that my aversion to tiredness is irrational because the tiredness usually wears off within 15 minutes of waking anyway, depending on how active my waking start is. Nick recommends natural light to bring you up to a wake state, as well as in reverse to bring you down. I’ll just use artificial light of a screen for now as winter draws in — if they keep you awake, they must wake you up too! Having had a little treasure of a child brought into our lives 2 years back, sleep has certainly been an issue. One thing I did learn from the experience so far though is that you can operate just fine on 5 hours of sleep, every now and then. That alone gives me the confidence to try to permanently reduce my sleeping hours to 6–7 hours, starting from 10–11pm.
In a fortuitous turn of events, these tips from one of the world’s foremost sports/sleep coaches, all evidence-based, have arrived at the same time as a few other pieces of productivity advice. Together, they have made a difference to how I see work again. I know it’s too soon to tell if they’ll really work over the long term, and in isolation I’m not sure they would, but read on and you’ll see how the combined advice I’ve recently pieced together works in a quite powerful way…
Choosing what (not) to work on
Having known for some time I’ve needed to become more prolific if I’m going to be able to better promote my business(es), I’ve been looking for ways to help in the area of writing productivity. I first took on an office outside the house. This has been good for productivity in general but once the novelty wore off (approx. 2 months, post-summer holiday) I kept going back to drawing blanks when faced with a block of time to write. Last year, pre-office, I set myself a challenge to write 1000 words every day. Then reduced those to 250, just to get me started. Both worked for a while, but soon faded as habits. I bought a Psion, thinking a non-internet-connected machine with a great keyboard would get me writing more, but even there there was too much friction. So that faded. I even have my computer read me out motivational quotes periodically throughout the day to give me a boost. I typically ignored them.
So all of these systems, methods and attempts were skirting the major issue: I wasn’t motivated because I had forgotten the whole purpose. Added to that I might even have lost belief in the likelihood of that purpose coming to fruition, i.e. a big break. The problem with procrastination is that it’s easy for the brain to evade your systems trying to tie it down. It learns how in a very short time. I need something much more motivating than a system to get me on track.
And I’ve found something along those lines in a recent recommendation to read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. The recommendation said that despite the sheer obviousness of the concept, it’s so well put that it really can help to read it. So I took a few hours to skim it for relevant parts one evening. And it did help. It reminded me of what I need to be focusing on, and more importantly what actions I need to reject. He also talks about budgeting your time just like the finance budgeting I mention above, not in so many words, but he says to account for every minute in your day, while being flexible with your schedule. Employing this method helped him to be extremely prolific, and gain career-wise in the process. Suddenly all of the motivation is back. The inspiring quotes read out by my PC mean something again, I no longer have the same blocks. And it gets better. Read on…
Habits do help
Earlier in the year, or was it last year… I read Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, again on recommendation from another prolific person. It cemented (through typical self-help book repetition) the idea that habit-forming is crucial to getting things done. The book itself didn’t motivate me at all, but acted as the foundation for an acceptance that I won’t get much done without some better structure. To become more proactive than reactive. Autopilot only works in certain circumstances. Building savings and a business and having as much family-time as possible is not one of those circumstances.
So I signed up for Habitica. Initially I was searching for HabitRPG, it’s former name, as I’d come across it years before and thought that if I ever get desperate enough it could be useful… well, here I was, back again, signing up.
I added my daily tasks, which if I don’t do I lose health, which eventually leads to losing your hard-won ‘level’ points. I added occasional tasks, which give me boost-points if I do extra-work (such as this post!) and some long term goals which give big points if you ever achieve them. I leave this open in the browser and complete it daily. Aside from keeping me on track for my fitness, karate practice and amateur radio studies, it has provided a system for what needs to get done every day to reach those long-term life and business goals. Again, none of this really motivated me as much as the Deep Work book, and as an isolated system it doesn’t do much. I really need to understand what’s important so that I can cut the cruft and get productive; then the tools become much more powerful. I can recommend checking out Habitica once you’ve got your motivation down.
Automating gives compounding benefits
I’ve been working on automating the menial, de-motivating tasks for years. I want as little friction as possible in getting them done. My email is a command-line client called Mutt. It’s not for everyone, but it allows me to chew through large amounts of messages in pretty much the time it would take for Thunderbird or Gmail to load.
There are improvements to be made in business bookkeeping still, in invoicing and in my translation tools for freelance work, but overall I’m dealing with much less ‘admin’ than I have been in the past. This will probably be the subject of a more technical post in the future, so I’ll leave it there for now. Suffice to say that opportunities for automation should be sought out!
Waking early gives you free time
This is an obvious point that everybody knows. But I’ve never managed to implement it. I’ve never been motivated enough and have always been very precious about my sleep, thinking it one of the key motivating factors of being self-employed: a healthy body and mind. Well having George 2 years ago shook that up somewhat. He redefined sleep’s importance. I became accepting of the concept of 5–6 hours sometimes being a great night’s sleep. But still not motivated to get up early to write or work.
Cue the landing of an ebook in my inbox from Chris Fox called ‘5000 words per hour’. I knew this claim was dubious if we’re talking typed prose sustained for 5–8 hours. As a translator I know that at my best I can’t approach anywhere near there. 5000 words is a long day’s work, and just for a first draft. Sometimes it can be done quicker, using translation memory tools, but in general anyone putting out 5000 words a day of anything deserves a (gentle) pat on the back.
But the timing was right, I knew he was a smart fellow from previous readings and so fired up the ebook and burned another hour or two on the good-old self-help. Turns out it’s entirely possible to crank out several thousand words under certain conditions. 1) Silence/distraction-free. 2) The use of voice recognition or a very fast typing speed. 3) A solid framework over which to write.
This all made complete sense to me as I’ve used voice recognition in my work in the past, also in ‘typing up’ handwritten manuscripts, either live or via recordings. I know also how horribly it can mangle your words if it gets the wrong idea, leaving you with errors you can’t actually detect with a spell-checker, because they’re valid words; just the wrong ones. I’m not keen on using voice recognition every day, but the framework and silent work period struck a chord, because that’s exactly what I’ve been missing. My typing speed isn’t bad, either, so I’m happy to tap away, provided the dreaded RSI doesn’t creep back into play. But I’ve also set up autocomplete in my text editor so I can claw back time, pain and speed on many of the longer words.
Now I don’t have a silent, distraction-free period at any period during my day, which is crucial to getting the writing structure/framework in place. Chris recommends carving that time out of your day in the morning, offering sound advice on how to do so, including the line from Mark Twain, where he recommends ‘Eating the toad’ in the morning to save it from croaking at you all day. I.e., ‘eat bitter’ and do what needs doing first, so you can get on with enjoying the rest of your day.
Here we get around to the key point here: how the heck do you motivate yourself to get up with the birds. Or even before them, now that the now proverbial ‘winter is coming’ (I haven’t watched Game of Thrones yet, btw, so no spoilers). Well, I’m only a few days into the new routine, but I’m quite certain that it’s here to stay. It seems to be the only way to become and remain prolific, which is exactly what I need at the moment to produce what I’m planning on producing.
For me, it has been a case of accepting that I don’t need 8 or more hours, that that is in fact counter-productive. What I need are 4–5 solid sleep-cycles (6–7.5 hours), starting from somewhere between 9.30–11pm. Those times I typically sit up and watch a TV series or read something that I hope will help something about some part of my life… Not any more. In my case I need to wake well before 7 as that’s when George seems to wake up. I’m aiming for just before 6 now. Chris recommends spending half an hour planning the structure of what you’ll write, and the rest on the writing itself.
I’d recommend not to worry about getting up on day 1 — as long as you’re woken at your new routine time, it ought to set you right for the next day, provided you go to bed early enough. The bonus of it is that if you do get up early, it’s easier to go to bed earlier. It’s definitely doable, you’ve probably had periods of your life where you’ve done it before, or if not, could if it was imposed (military, study with 8am lectures, children…).
A quick note on structure; I’d highly recommend this piece on using the ‘Snowflake’ method to structure a novel. Full credit can be found therein, but it makes being Mr./Ms. Prolific just that bit easier. You can structure anything you’ll write this way, so consider that if you have blog posts etc. to write.
Being ruthless
Simple one here, but bears mentioning: being ruthless with only progressing key tasks, long-term goals and ignoring distractions makes you more productive. How do you know what to focus on though? That was my own missing piece until the Deep Work book showed up on my reading list. The freebie you get with this ruthlessness is more guilt-free time doing non-work things. That can only be good. Read Deep Work to find out how to focus on what matters to you.
Get out of the house
To me this is very important. I’m honestly fine being alone for hours/days on end, but when it comes to years, strange things start to happen. I of course saw/see my wife when working at home, and George, some friends and family, but a different kind of detachment crept in after a while. An uncertainty about how the world outside is going. It’s quite destabilising. Taking this office 20 minutes away has really helped with that, even if just to see the regular commuters and workers around you carrying on as normal. Hard to explain for me at this point, but I feel like it should be at least mentioned in a post like this.
I think a separate post on mental health for remote/home workers is probably something I could tackle, but perhaps next year after this whole office experiment is done with.
Traps avoided, still to avoid
Other things I’ve figured out over time, mostly without self-help literature ( :) ), are things that apply to my situation specifically. Things like not hiring people if it could be avoided. All reports I’ve heard to date seem to indicate that hired help can only start to help grow the business past a certain point — a point I’m yet to reach — otherwise they represent a cost and obligation that only adds to stress levels.
A stable home life was another thing that I needed/need and have striven to maintain, including a home, family and friends, for most kinds of support day-to-day. Finally I figured that a scalable web business *should* secure the long-term financial future of my family, but failing that the freelance work should be developed in parallel, like the athletes, musicians, writers and artists who go to school in case their big break doesn’t come right away. But big breaks don’t come if you don’t show up, so it has to be done in parallel for now.
Areas I could still improve on
- Charging more. In general. See Patrick of Kalzumeus’ posts.
- Selling better. Getting messages across better and reaching more people.
- Being brave enough to invest in the business.
- Managing budgets to ensure that the option to invest is always there.
- Reining in the desire to start new projects before completing what I have on.
Hopefully this post can help anyone about to face a period like my last decade to leapfrog the wasteful learning curve and start to focus in a little better than I did.
Of course some people can do this naturally, perhaps being brought up that way or just figuring it out themselves. Some have the discipline to apply themselves methodically and strategically to their life goals. I’m only just coming into that ability in my early 30s, but it’s hardly rocket science. I’ve just been somewhat distracted until now.
Can you sympathise with any of that? Hit the heart or let me know, it’d be nice to hear.
