Double trouble

Two for the price of one.

Today, I’m going to share with you two tips, from my frequent encounters with productivity gurus, that seem to be mutually exclusive. (Like those old adages that contradict each other. Great minds think alike. Fools minds run in the same channel, etc.)

These are To Do list tips. Productivity proposals.

Here’s the first tip:

Often, we are advised to do some of the simplest things on our task lists first. The theory is that it gives you a sense of progress. It’s encouraging. Crossing things off makes you want to cross more things off. You feel like you are actually accomplishing something.

For that very reason, one of my friends sometimes retroactively lists tasks she has completed just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. In this case, they aren’t necessarily simple tasks, but they’re already done! This is a variation I particularly like because you run no risk of the uncrossed item becoming an incomplete burden.

Remember, this works best if you actualize your list—by which I mean that you have to actually write it down. Or type it up. It’s got to exist in a somewhat tangible form—even if the form is the one-step-removed version on your monitor. It can’t just be in your head, or you can’t cross anything off. (It’s much less satisfying to just let something fade away out of your memory. Big red check marks. Big black lines. That’s the ticket.)

So, that’s one way to go. Do the easy stuff first. Build momentum. See results.

The second tip is the exact opposite:

Do the hard thing, the thing you’ve been avoiding, the thing that’s hanging over your head like that old sword of Damocles, that’s a lead weight in the pit of your stomach. Just get it over with—because the energy that comes from being released from that pressure will sweep you through the next several items on the list in no time flat.

Chances are, in fact, that the thing you’ve been avoiding is a thing that will make a much bigger difference than five or six of the easy things. That’s just one of those unfortunate realities of life. Most things worth doing are hard. Most difficult things, when accomplished, move us farther forward than the easy things. (Broccoli is better for us than potato chips, too—and isn’t that unfair?)

Tackle the hard stuff. Just do it. Get ‘er done, as they say.

Which of these methods is the best?

It kind of depends—on how much sleep you had the night before, on how easy the easy stuff is and how hard the hard stuff is, on a lot of things. I tend toward the first way—doing the easy stuff—because I’m lazy. And it works in a lot of ways a lot of the time. But I’ve also, on occasion, leap-frogged forward by forcing myself to deal with big, complicated, difficult tasks.

The most important advice, I guess, is—whether you go the easy route or take the harder path—do something. Keep moving forward.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
—Theodore Roosevelt

Words matter.

They have meanings.

And you can make that work in your favor.

That’s the tip for today.

Stop worrying about a “deadline.” How about trying to reach the “finish line,” instead?

Does it have to be such a horrible, scary thing? Horror movie scary? Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Dead Ringers.

What’s the drop dead date? we used to say at work. Meaning the absolute, unequivocal, unbreakable deadline.

Who wants to drop dead?

Not me.

Finish line makes me think of success. Most of the time, when I think of crossing the finish line, I think of coming in first. (Well, really, only when I think of somebody else crossing the finish line. I never came in first in my life.) Coming in first is success in anybody’s book.

Even if you don’t come in first, crossing the finish line means you finished the race. That’s an achievement in itself. You stayed the course. You finished.

A finish line is something you race toward. It’s not something that looms over you, something the clock ticks toward with the inevitability and concomitant dread of an armed explosive device.

Plus, one definition of “finish” is “a highly developed state of perfection; having a flawless or impeccable quality.” I’d sure like to achieve that in my writing, wouldn’t you?

Shiny, polished, finished.

I’m not setting any deadlines any more. I’m going to be crossing finish lines.

That’s redundant

And a good thing, too.

Yesterday, I was talking about how I got lucky with a computer crash and how that luck was based on preparation. So, today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what those preparations were—and are.

First, hang on to all installation disks. If you download a program from the internet, copy the installation file to a CD or a DVD. And don’t forget the operating system. My laptop has a built-in system recovery feature. A portion of the hard drive is set aside to store the installation files. That wasn’t anything I did. That’s how it came. It’s not my preferred method, though, because who is to say the drive itself won’t crash. Often, a disabled hard drive can be resuscitated by a complete reformat. At that point, you’d need the installation disks. In my case, there are no disks for the operating system. I won’t make that mistake with any future purchase. A recovery partition is great. I won’t turn it down. But I want the installation disks for the operating system, too.

Second, backup all your data. All your word processing documents, all your videos, all your photos, all your databases, spreadsheets, everything. Back it up twice. Keep one backup offsite, if possible. Sure, a set in your desk drawer is great if your hard drive crashes. What if your house burns down?

I used to leave a backup at my mom’s house. Hard drives got bigger, and it became impractical, both in terms of time spent and DVDs used. Now, I use Carbonite. For a low yearly fee, Carbonite backs up a single local hard drive to their remote servers. If you change a file, a new version gets backed up. It happens in the background. After the initial backup, it happens quickly, quietly and without slowing down your computer. I highly recommend it. (Just remember it’s not an archive service. What Carbonite is doing is synchronizing your hard drive with files on their server. If you delete something, they will too—after a specified period, of course, because what good’s a backup if you can’t restore things you’ve accidentally erased?)

I also use Second Copy. It works in much the same way as Carbonite, except that it’s making a local copy—to an internal or external drive or to another PC on your network. There’s no yearly fee. You buy the software, install it, and that’s it (unless you decide to upgrade to a newer version at some point). I use it to synchronize the files on my laptop with those on my desktop machine as well as to make a backup to an external USB drive.

At any given moment, I’ve got three copies of my data in my office and one in the cloud. Could I still lose it all? Sure. But, at that point, I think we’re all gonna have bigger problems.

My point—and my tip for this Tuesday—is that bits and bytes are fragile. Do you know where your backups are?

You can do everything

Just not all at once.

Here’s a tip for you.

Multi-tasking is a myth. So, there’s no point in wishing for that third hand. Your brain can’t manage as much as you are already giving it, let alone more.

The modern world—and, for all I know, the ancient one—has led us to believe that we are faster and more efficient if we try to do more than one thing at a time. Check your email while you make phone calls. Write the report while you watch 60 Minutes. (Trying to be charitable there. Most of us are watching Dallas—or Honey Boo Boo, I guess.)

It’s all a juggling act, we say.

The truth is even a juggler is only handling one thing at a time: a ball, a bowling pin, a fire baton. The juggler is handling each one quickly, to be sure, and switching her attention more rapidly than most of us to the next, but she’s only handling one. (I know. I learned how to juggle in college. Don’t get me started on what my dad said when he realized that’s where my tuition dollars were going!)

Think about it.

Your computer multi-tasks.

Or does it?

If you’ve got any of those tools that analyze its performance, you know that it really doesn’t. Resource allocation is the term. Your computer is switching resources rapidly between tasks. It looks like it’s doing more than one at a time, but it really isn’t.

Thus, the extremely annoying paradox of modern life that you have to do less to do more. You either have to set things up so that you can focus exclusively on your most important task—which is likely to be impractical—or you have to allocate your resources so that you can focus serially on several important things.

There are things you can do to help make that easier—and some of them are sure to come up later in this blog—but they all tend to involve a few tasks in themselves.

Scheduling. Prioritization. Organization. Automation.

I’m sorry.

That’s just the way it is.

Stay tuned for more suggestions, but for now. . .just slow down.

A wacky weight loss tip

…or maybe not.

Maybe it’s not so wacky. And maybe it’s not a weight loss tip. And maybe everybody else already knew this.

But maybe somebody else will find it useful.

Who knows?
Here goes. (little poem)

It suddenly occurred to me, a few years ago, and just as suddenly recurred to me this week, that you don’t have to eat breakfast food for breakfast.

“Duh,” you say.

But hold on a minute, and let me explain.

I’ve been reading all kinds of things all my life that say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When I was a kid, there were all kinds of articles and little news stories about helping your kid do better in school.

Then, just a few years ago, the Readers’ Digest ran a story about how most people’s weight loss programs fail because they try to make too many changes all at once. The story advocated making one small change a week. (I think it was a week—maybe it was a month—but you get the idea, right?) And the very first change they recommended was to have a good breakfast.

And we’re back to “Duh.”

The thing is—I’m not that wild about breakfast food. I don’t like oatmeal, eggs—yeah, okay, sometimes but that involves cooking and it doesn’t usually go well for me, soggy cereal—not a big culinary delight, and most other breakfast foods seem way too sweet for early in the morning. Toast and bagels, I do like, but no one could argue they provide a solid nutritious meal.

But I was reading about this “change one” idea and lamenting the fact that I don’t really like breakfast food when I remembered that runners “carb up” before a marathon by eating pasta.

Pasta!

In the morning.

“Well, why not?” I thought.

So, for a while there, I would have pasta for breakfast. Or a smoked turkey sandwich. Or, sometimes, a warmed up plate of gaucho chicken, lemon chive potatoes and broccoli from the previous night’s dinner.

It all tasted much better than donuts and pop-tarts.

I had more energy throughout the day.

And I was skinnier.

That last may be a prost hoc ergo propter hoc* fallacy, but it hasn’t been disproven yet. So, now, in addition to being back on the treadmill, I’m back to having dinner for breakfast.

Try it.

* Latin for ‘after this, therefore because of this‘ which is the kind of faulty logic that lets you assume that you broke your favorite glass because a black cat crossed your path earlier. (If that’s one of your superstitions, I’m sorry, but it’s just not true.)

Two Timing

Another way to improve your descriptions.

So, we’ve been talking–intermittently–about descriptive writing. I believe it started with me mentioning that I don’t think I’m very good at it. Then, last Tuesday’s Tip was the I look up and I see… exercise.

Today, I have another exercise for you. Once again, I don’t remember where I got it and will have to add that information if and when I can.

The idea is this:

Take a scene, a setting, and describe it twice in such a way that the passage will convey completely different moods. You might use words that impart a sense of danger and dread in one iteration and then sketch the same scene in joyful and exhilarating terms.

For example, here’s some practice writing I did for this exercise. Try not to consider this the best example of my work, okay? It’s just to give you an idea of how to explore this. In this case, it’s two descriptions of the same boat ride:

Hundreds of rolling wavelets marched toward her like an advancing army, broken only when the jet ski roared by. Looking at the dark slice it cut through the gun-gray water, her heart beat in sudden panic. That chainsaw buzzing of the motor. . . .the accompanying sound of the dozens of horror movies she and Eddie had watched in their teens. Maybe it was that subliminal memory of blood and gore that was making her feel queasy and not the unstable floor beneath her feet rocking and rising and falling with every shudder of wind and water, giving her the sensation of an earthquake’s aftershock.
Hundreds of rolling wavelets marched toward her like a crowd of eager children on parade, the procession broken only when the jetski bounced across the shimmering wake bubbling out aft. Looking at the gray-green line the other craft sketched through the green-gray sea, her heart lifted. The darker patch was there in the water, in her life, but it was behind her now, and she was free of it. Maybe it was that subliminal sense of liberty that made the simple act of balancing on the gentle rise and fall of the deck as exhilarating as surfing.

So, any purple prose aside, do you get the idea? Give it a shot. And if you’d like to share the results, feel free to post your work in the comments.

Happy Writing!

Make them less skippable

Digging into descriptions.

Last Friday, I wrote about finding Ruth Rendell–an excellent writer–and how much I admired her facility with description (description often being the “parts that people skip”). I also mentioned that I was not so good at descriptive writing. (“Suck” is the word I think I used.)

That got me thinking about description, and I remembered a couple of writing exercises that seem very useful to me. It seems appropriate to include one in this here Tuesday Tip.

Unfortunately, I can’t immediately remember where I found them, but I will be looking through some of my really-helpful books and including those titles in future Friday Finds and Tuesday Tips. So, when I locate the source of these ideas, I will come back and update this post. Meanwhile, the best I can do is to acknowledge that it did not originate with me.

Anyway. . .

The exercise can be called “I look up and I see. . . .”

What you do is this.

Sit down with a notebook and maybe a timer. I think a notebook–the actual old-fashioned kind with pages that requires you to hold a writing utensil in your hand is better–but you could use a new-fangled computer-type notebook if you must. It’ll mean you may be somewhat more restricted as to location, but it will save you that pesky transcription step if anything you write looks worth saving.

Now, this is an exercise, so it’s quite possible that what you write won’t seem worth saving–and that’s okay. We’re priming the pump, greasing the wheels, and implementing assorted other industrial clichés.

Set the timer for ten minutes. (If you’ve only got five minutes, fine. If you’ve only got two, use the two you’ve got!)

Your starting point is the following phrase: I look up and I see. . .

So, write that down, and finish the sentence based on what you can look up and see. Describe what you see literally and figuratively, and keep going until you run out of things to say. At that point, shift your focus, jot down another I look up and I see. . . , and keep writing.

Every time I’ve done this, I’ve been really astonished at how well I can describe things when I really look at them and focus on it. In fact, some of these practice writings are distinctly non-sucky.

Got your notebook?

Got your timer?

Ready, set, go!

Bad to the bone

Try to be, anyway.

This is a tip about getting past that streak of perfectionism that is keeping you from achieving your goals.

Somewhere along the line, most of us got the idea that doing something badly was–well–a bad thing. Maybe we missed a fly ball on the softball field in second grade, and the next time teams were chosen, we were one of the last players picked. Maybe it started earlier–like when we got yelled at for spilling our milk.

Mistake = bad. Dangerous, even.

In the interests of survival, we started to be careful. We started to try really hard to do things “right.” Over time, that can be paralyzing.

But, there is an easy way around it. Just decide to do it–whatever “it” is–wrong. Announce that intention, if necessary. After all, how can someone blame you for not getting it “right” if you’ve already told them you are intentionally doing it wrong?

If that sounds crazy, let me tell you a story about the first play I ever wrote.

The first draft was promising enough that Abingdon Theatre Company was willing to give it a public reading. Jan Buttram, the artistic director, being an experienced playwright and a wise woman, suggested we should have a private reading first. “If you hear it for the first time in front of an audience, you’re not going to be able to hear it,” she said.

So, we had the private reading, and I got some very valuable feedback. I went off, with great enthusiasm, to do a re-write. And promptly froze. Oh, no! What if I ruin it? I wasn’t sure how I’d come to write it in the first place. It seemed to me there was a good chance that, in re-writing it, I would lose whatever had made that first draft halfway good.

I was so stuck that I went back to Jan some weeks later and announced that we would have to cancel the reading. In a further demonstration of wisdom, she said, “No, we’re not going to cancel. We can always read the version you have now. Meanwhile, why don’t you go back and try again? If you don’t get anywhere, don’t worry.”

I sighed and groaned and gnashed my teeth–and I went home to try again. When I got there, I remembered “We an always read the version you have now,” and I promptly saved the file under a new name. Then, I said to myself, “Okay. You’ve got the original saved. Now, you’re going into this version, and you’re going to ruin it.”

The re-write began to flow. We read the new version, and that is the version that launched my great playwriting adventure. Once I gave myself permission to do it badly, I did just fine.

Try it.

“A fulfiller of good intentions”

Get paving.

I told you, didn’t I, that I was reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt? Actually, it was three biographies, all by Edmund Morris: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt. (All quite good, by the way.)

The final volume ended with a quote from a schoolboy writing a report on the former President in 1922. Thomas Maher called Theodore Roosevelt “a fulfiller of good intentions.”

There’s something wonderful about that phrase.

You know what they say about the road to Hell? Paved with good inentions. You can’t fulfill a good intention, though, unless you have them. So, Tuesday’s Tip is to get paving–and then get fulfilling.

I hope someday the same could be said of me–“a fulfiller of good intentions”–although I am absolutely certain I fall far short of Teddy

What about you?

Advice from Agatha Christie

Be a tradesman

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography. Now, let’s not kid ourselves. The Dame has got some game.

Dame Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time. She is the most translated individual author, and her works are the third most published books. Whatever criticisms may be leveled at her literary skills–deserved or not–we’d have to agree she knew something about building a career as a writer.

There’s a fascinating passage in the autobiography about the necessity for a writer to take “account of the market for his wares.”

If you were a carpenter, it would be no good making a chair, the seat of which was five feet up from the floor. It wouldn’t be what anyone wanted to sit on. It is no good saying that you think the chair looks handsome that way.

She goes on to say,

It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius–some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman–a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas; but you must submit to the discipline of form.

So, what is the point of me quoting this?

Take a couple of Tuesday Tips from Dame Agatha.

I’m about to embark on another round of play submissions. So, I’m going to read the guidelines carefully and adhere to the rules for each submission. My chair–or play–can be as handsome as you please, but if it doesn’t fit the rules, why bother to submit? And if it doesn’t fit any rules. . . well, I suppose a miracle might happen. But, it’s probably going to involve self-producing or self-publishing. If you want to market your work, you have to know the market.

The other tip — “It’s no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius.” I thought of this recently when a friend reported on a play reading that was less than wonderful but for which the writer and director wanted to hear no criticism. It seems to me that Aaron Sorkin (another writer who knows something about building a career) had it right when he had a character say, “If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.”

A whole lot of praise and approval is nice for the ego. Constructive criticism and a mind open enough to hear it is better for the play.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Tuesday Tips