James Wilding's Weblog

In this post I want to share some advice on how you can work fewer hours without compromising productivity.

If you’re self-employed or freelance, the goal here is to free up more of your time to relax and enjoy yourself or to work on other projects. If you’re an employee working for the man, our aim is to cut down on the hours which you have to work to accomplish your key tasks (leaving you more time to either catch up on your todo list, or play solitaire).

For me, cutting down your work hours is a matter of asking three simple questions about your work:

1: Does This Work Need To Be Done?

The first question is the most obvious — cut out the things that aren’t absolutely essential, and you’ll save yourself time. The criteria by which you judge a task’s importance will vary, but a good rule of thumb is this: if you don’t do this “important” task, will the consequences be irreversible? You’ll be surprised how many times you’ll answer “no” to that question.

2: Do I Need To Be Doing This?

Often it’s faster and more productive to have someone else do something for you — especially when the other person is an expert and you’re not. Don’t be afraid to delegate and free up your time to focus on the essentials.

By the way, this question is different to “Do I want to be doing this”! Sorry. Sometimes you have to work on something that you don’t want to work on: that’s unavoidable. The idea is to delegate work which can be done equally well, or better, by someone else.

3: How Can This Be Done Better?

Not “done faster”; “done better“. This question helps you future-proof your work: the best way to avoid emergencies and panic in the future is to do a good job now.

Make a list of the key goals of whatever project you’re working on, and ask yourself whether you’re going about accomplishing those goals in the best way. Change isn’t always necessary, but sometimes you’ll realise that a lot needs to be altered — that can be daunting, but it’s worth putting in a little more time now to save yourself a lot of time in the future.

The Results

Does this work in practice? For the past three months I’ve been using this strategy and I’d say I’m around 25% more productive, and 25% less busy. Most importantly, I feel much more relaxed and on top of my work. So give it a try — I hope you get the same results.

Real productivity comes from creativity, and to get creative you absolutely have to let your mind relax. That’s when the good stuff comes: clever ideas, cool solutions to old problems, and that magic feeling that get when things get done effortlessly.

Work is too much like work

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been thinking long and hard over a particular problem: your head feels like mush, your eyes hurt, you can’t focus. Your mind feels tight, it feels like you’ve lost touch with your real energy. After close to ten years’ of meditation, I can tell you that this is a Bad Thing.

My suggestion is that “work”, in the traditional sense of the word, is one of the worst ways to get things done. Work means mental exertion, which in most cases nowadays means a ridiculous focus on logic, and the idea that “nose to the grindstone” is the only way to get results.

Doesn’t that sound awful? How about relaxing and letting your subconscious take care of things, instead. It really works: I’ve lost count of the numbers of times a solution to a difficult problem had come to me, without effort, while I’ve been walking, cooking, or playing guitar.

Stop thinking, stop trying

The burden of “work” is too much thinking. Logic, planning, analysis: all of these are good as part of an holistic approach, but bad when they take the lead on business decisions. They serve a purpose, but intuition and the subconscious are much more powerful. Yes, that’s right: I run my business on gut instinct. It’s so much more effective!

My advice is to let your mind slip back into alpha waves, and let “important” decisions take care of themselves. My approach nowadays is to arm myself with all the facts, then completely ignore the situation for a few days: meditate, go walking, work on something else. After my subconscious has had the time to work on the problem, the answer presents itself naturally, and without effort.

Making it work for you

This all sounds very Zen, but how does it apply to you? Well, just try it. You can’t control your own mind, but you can give your mind a break: next time you catch yourself thinking away too hard at a problem, just drop it. Leave the office, go outside, listen to music, do something relaxing. And I think “relaxing” is the key word here: you need to put yourself into situations that allow you to unwind, situations that don’t require logic: this gives your mind the space it needs to work creatively.

Ignore the received “wisdom” that says you have to work hard (and think hard) in order to get things done.

A quote from a Derbyshire dry-stone waller:

When you pick up a stone, you have to use it. Otherwise it’s just wasted effort.

If you’ve ever watched a dry-stone wall being built, you’ll know that it’s a beautifully haphazard, half-planned process of improvisation. Strikes me that the same is true about business (and life). Don’t think too much; just act. Do something with what you have to hand. Improvise as you go along.

I’ve seen hundred-strong government organisations here in the UK waste weeks — literally weeks — of working time because they planned too much up front. Completely false veneers of “this is what’s going to happen when” strangled everyone’s ability to think on their feet! This kind of over-ambitious forward thinking is pointless: you don’t know what’s going to happen in six days, let alone six months, so why pretend otherwise?

In most cases the best, and most realistic, course of action is to keep in mind a general sketch of the outcome you want, and fill in the details as you go. Like building a dry-stone wall, this approach empowers you to act in the moment, intuitively, without having to stop and think, “what happens next?”.

Photo by jansmith on Flickr (license)

HTML has just reached a major milestone with the publication of six working drafts of the markup language’s specification (via).

Despite being technical documents, these specs also make for interesting reading if you’re at all curious about the evolution of the web’s mother tongue. A great place to start is the history of HTML in the main HTML5 spec: there’s some detail here about how HTML5 came to be, as well as some brief information about the aborted XHTML2 effort. This section helps you understand why HTML5 exists at all.

Next, you’ll want to know what elements are available for HTML5 authors: for this, start with “The elements of HTML” (again, in the main spec). This section lists HTML5′s tags and explains how to use them; new tags such as section, nav, article, and aside are covered here.

As a web developer, you’re going to be writing HTML5, so also read “The HTML syntax” for more detail on how HTML5 documents should be structured. The section called “Writing HTML documents” is especially useful, and includes information on the doctype (previously important but now “a mostly useless, but required, header”).

If you’re put off by technical language, be reassured that the spec makes an effort to be readable by humans too: after the spec for doctype syntax, for example, we get this summary:

In other words, <!DOCTYPE HTML>, case-insensitively

Despite all the HTML5 websites out there, I think it’s really important for developers to go to the source and read the original spec: it’s surprisingly accessible, and even glancing at it will help you understand where HTML5 is coming from.

Every so often, I read about how the internet is massively changing the way businesses and customers interact. Today I read a Guardian book review that explained how

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organise [...] People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.”

A lot of people think that the internet creates new forms of customer behaviour. I disagree: I think the internet primarily gives more emphasis to existing forms of behaviour.

Anyone who’s ever worked with small businesses will know that word of mouth is extremely important, and that customers will naturally organise themselves into ad-hoc groups which support individuals and offer a way for newcomers to get information on what the Guardian calls “vendors”.

If that sounds too theoretical, think about restaurants. You probably know a few friends who can offer restauarant reviews or suggest a new place to eat — even explain wine lingo if you’re new to that side of things. There’s your self-organising community: all the information and support you need.

Here’s the important point: you don’t have to go online for any of this. These customer communities have existed for hundreds of years: do we really believe that before the world went online, everyone just called up their local restaurant and said, “Hi. Are you good at cooking?”…?

The power of the internet is that it supports and encourages these communities, and in some cases makes them possible where they wouldn’t have been before. But the communties themselves aren’t new phenomena: there’s no magic here, just progress — old things appearing in new ways.

We really should be cautious about claims that the internet is changing the basic nature of business: it’s not. What’s happening is closer to evolution than revolution, and those who tell you otherwise are probably trying to sell books.

I’ve heard it said that jazz = blues + improvisation. It’s the same with a career (well, almost: no guitars).

While a few people are lucky enough to have a single job that lasts for life, the rest of us can enjoy the adventure of a changing career: shifting from job to job, adjusting skills and focus depending on the changing demands of our position current position. Which can be fun (I mean it!). (more…)

That I should even be writing this is a mark of the way email can take over one’s life. But it does, and not just because people are emailing us all the time, but because we love the little buzz of attention and (sometimes) accomplishment that answering emails gives us (and, I think, we have a weird subconscious sense of obligation to reply to messages as soon as they’re received. Applicable to telegrams, post cards, and letters, maybe, but completely unnecessary for email).

Anyway: this is how I avoid spending the entire day in my inbox.

Read Occasionally

The number-one rule of having a sensible relationship with your email is not to leave your email app open. Close it now! That little ‘ping’, or ‘click’, or red badge, or whatever announces a new email, is a distraction from what you should be doing: working. And answering emails is not working, it’s a supplement to working: something you do so you can get on with doing what’s really important (making money, saving the world, writing a book).

I open Mail once at about 10 in the morning, once again at about 2pm, and maybe once more at 4pm if I think something really important might be coming in. Most of the people I work with take around twenty-four hours to reply to an email anyway, so it doesn’t really matter how I time things.

(Regardless of what my old managers used to think, email is not suitable for urgent messages. If something is urgent [i.e. needs to be dealt with now urgent], then use the phone. This takes the pressure off the whole send email, receive email, read email, reply cycle and avoids giving clients/friends the impression that it’s OK to send you very urgent messages by email at eight in the morning (setting sensible expectations around email is important, you see, but that’s another blog post).

Filter Messages

I have a smart mailbox that only shows unread messages: this is my ‘inbox’. The mailbox doesn’t hide messages as soon as I’ve read them; instead, it updates when I switch to another mailbox or restart the app. So I can open Mail, read my latest messages, read some again if I want, then close the app. When I come back, my smart ‘inbox’ is empty and I’m not distracted by the display of a hundred messages from the past few days. Clear screen == clear mind.

Do Something!

When you get a message, do something with it! Don’t leave it sitting there, because you’ll mount up an awful debt of work that you’ll have to repay later, and you’ll have to dedicate a small portion of your brain power to remembering to answer those messages.

You really have three choices when it comes to a new email:

1. Delete it. This should be a more frequent option than you think: anything irrelevant, spammy, or otherwise uninteresting can be deleted immediately.
2. Reply. Reply now! Don’t wait until tomorrow, just send a reply (even if it’s a quick “I’ll get back to you”).
3. File it. If a message is important but doesn’t warrant a reply, move it to a separate folder. That way, everything stays organised.

Very occasionally — if I’m stupidly busy — I’ll read a message and then mark it as unread as a ‘deal with this later’ flag. That way the message will still appear in my smart inbox when I come back next time (I don’t use flags for this, because it adds another level of complexity which I’d much rather avoid).

So that’s it: read occasionally, filter your messages, reply immediately, and be ruthless about deleting and filing your messages. This works for me — if it works for you too, email me ;)

(Further reading: Inbox Zero).

How do companies like Apple to get a massive foothold in a market that they’ve previously had no involvement in? By relentlessly focusing on customer experience.

Take the iPhone: there are plenty of mobile manufacturers out there, but before the iPhone the whole market was a complacent mess. Before the iPhone, there was no world-class customer experience in the mobile phone market. I’ll put it another way: until Apple came along, no-one in the mobile phone market was doing a good enough job. Many people would have loved to switch phones, but they didn’t have a better option.

When a business which can provide that better option comes along, wow — everyone else gets blown out of the water. It makes me wonder: how many businesses are just sleep-walking through corporate life, waiting for a keener competitor to come along and give them a nasty wake-up call?

If you’re a small business, you’re lucky: you have a much greater chance of failing if you don’t focus relentlessly on your customers, so there’s an incentive to concentrate on what’s important right from the start. There are no million-dollar savings accounts to fall back on, no equity in property, no investors — just you and your customers. Give those customers what they really want, and you’ll be a great position to compete with the sleep-walking giants around you.

On Thursday I posted an advert for freelance IT support people on Gumtree. By Thursday evening, I’d had around twenty replies — by this morning (Monday), I had nearly fifty more.

How do you process these things? I can’t work with seventy freelancers. The applications vary wildly — in the quality of writing, in the relevance of information, in the presence or not of a CV. This post is an attempt to work out a strategy for filtering through all this and making sense of everyone’s information.

After thinking a bit, I’ve settled on a three-stage process:

1. Be ruthless: pare down the applications to those that are completely relevant
2. Go into detail: read the applications and pick those which stand out
3. Finally, call people: speak to the best applicants by phone

Be Ruthless

So, to begin with, I’ll throw out any application which:

• Isn’t directly relevant — I asked for freelancers: many people have replied as if I was advertising a permanent employment contract. Points off for not reading the advert.
• Uses txt speak, or is unusually abrupt — several people sent one-line replies that didn’t include their name (the worst: “plz send me more information about this job.thnks”). They’re out.
• Is too long. With respect to people who are desperate for a job, I don’t want to read a two-page email about your work history — that should go in your CV.

I should say that some applications came from people whose first language is other than English: for them, my language criteria won’t be so strict :-)

The basic idea here is to filter out the people who don’t meet the basic criteria of good communication skills and attention to detail. It’s amazing how many people aren’t up to scratch at this point — just by having read the advert properly, and replied politely, 25% of applicants are already ahead of the field.

Go Into Detail

After getting rid of the chaff, I hope to look through the remaining applications and work out who has the skills I’m looking for: good communication, attention to detail, professionalism, and of course the ability to provide IT support.

At this stage, I’ll also be keeping an eye open for stuff like exaggeration and irrelevant or missing information. If people have missed an important piece of information that I clearly asked for, that’s points off. If the information is blatantly off-topic, that’s also bad. In short, I’m after clear and concise application forms that answer my questions.

Call People

This comes last: only when I’ve got a good shortlist will I call people and speak to them about their experience in IT support. Everything I’ve mentioned above is as important as experience: you might be great with computers, but if you can’t answer questions or read a job application properly, you’re not what I’m looking for.

The second aim of calling people will be to find out what they’re like — friendly, gruff, impatient, calm? Because I want these people to work with my clients, I need them to be approachable and relaxed.

Conclusions

What’s struck me most about this process is the number of bad applications I got. I’d say 50% of the replies I sent involved me correcting someone about a misapprehension: usually the idea that I’m looking for contract employees. Maybe the quality of job hunters on Gumtree is lower than normal (sorry Gumtree users!), or maybe it’s the fault of the ad I wrote.

I hope it’s not the second but just to make sure, the full text of the advert follows at the end of this post. And if you take anything away from my ramblings, make it this: get the basics right on a job application, and you’ll already be ahead of the pack.

Website design firm looking for friendly, reliable Windows support professionals to work with us on a freelance basis.

We’re looking for people to help our clients set up their new email accounts. If you can guide people through a tangled web of POP, IMAP, and Outlook Express, we’d like to hear from you!

== How To Apply

Please email James Wilding (through Gumtree) and we’ll send you more details.

== About Us

We’re a website design and development firm based in Wiltshire. We build websites for small and medium-sized businesses.

When you have a good idea, it’s easy to be discouraged by the time, effort, and cost involved in putting the idea into practice. Well, don’t be put off. If you plan well and make simplicity your maxim, you’ll be fine.

Start small

Most good ideas are best begun as a tiny project. When I started making websites, I redesigned my parents’ site for free. Later, I made a CMS site for an author friend

It didn’t cost me anything except time to make those sites. I already had my iBook, and TextMate, which was about all I needed, and there was no rush — neither my parents nor my friend were likely to start breathing down my neck or shouting about deadlines.

Be a cheapskate

Another way to start small is to ruthlessly save money on the tools and materials you need. Some people think they can’t start web design until they can afford to buy DreamWeaver: rubbish — you can buy TextMate for Mac, or the equivalent for Windows, for under £50 and learn more about HTML and CSS along the way. Small tools can make you more of a craftsman; the best quality furniture is often made by hand.

Know how to grow

The key to growth is growth — not trying to accomplish everything all at once. If you have high aims for yourself, brilliant, but you’ll get there by taking baby steps, not trying to rush to the finish line. Life’s not a race — start small and enjoy the process of getting where you want to go!