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.

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.

People need to stop sending emails that say “did you get the email I sent you earlier today?”.

My solution (this goes in my email signature):

I reply to most emails within 24 hours; if you need a faster response, please call me.

That’s it: if your message can wait a day, email me. If not, call! Simple.

I really should download a copy of PeepCode’s advanced command line tutorial, but I’m a bit of a cheapskate so I just scanned the screenshots instead! They reminded me of how it’s possible to set aliases for your UNIX shell.

(more…)

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!