I’ve said it before but it bares repeating…If you want to get some quality work done, turn off your phone. Of course, this may not apply to some of you. If you work at a call bank, obviously, or if your job requires you are able to be contacted, then you have to keep it on. But if you do creative work, or if you are able to go two to three hours without a phone, I think you’ll find the time remarkably productive. Here’s how I structure my phone-free time: 1. I wake up early. I’m usually awake by 5 or 6AM. I respond to e-mails and text messages using my phone. I check the news on my phone too. Then, even before people can respond, I shut the phone off. This marks the beginning of my phone-free hours. Because the hours are so early, few people are trying to reach me anyway. Most people, even on the east coast, don’t start calling till 8AM or even 9AM, after which I’ve already gotten a couple hours work done. 2. I am very intentional about the phone-free hours. I go for a walk to start the morning, letting the dog [...]
I’ve been using twitter for about three years now, and as I said yesterday, I’m enjoying it. I use it primarily to keep tabs on my friends, on bands that I like, on a bit of news (though that hasn’t proven very beneficial) and a sports team or two. You can see who I follow over at @donmilleris. That said, there are a few people I’ve followed and then stopped following. Everybody has different preferences…here are mine: 1. If people tweet more than three or four times per day, every day, I usually unfollow them after a while. It’s nothing personal. And if you’re trying to gain twitter followers, I hear you should tweet more, not less, but there’s rarely five things worth tweeting about a day in my book. Do I want to know what you ate for dinner? Actually, I do. I mean I want to know what my friends are up to, but just a few times per day. 2. I stop following people who try to be funny. It’s so, so painful to read a bad joke. I’m pretty sure I’ve sent a few out myself. I’d stop following myself. In fact I have. 3. I [...]
A couple years ago I killed my Facebook account and haven’t looked back. I’ve greatly enjoyed having one less web page to check. These days I check comments on the blog, twitter feedback and my e-mail. That’s about it. This frees up space to work on other writing that isn’t instant but takes a year or more, and that’s the world I enjoy most. I learned a good lesson spring cleaning my house years ago, and I’ve continued to apply it. Whenever I go through the house on a deep clean mission, I place anything I haven’t used in a year in a pile on my bed. Clothes, shoes, electronics, cooking utensils, anything. The first time I did this, I had a valuable pile of perfectly good stuff on my bed. It was hard to do what came next: I gave them all to Goodwill. Yes, I could have sold the stuff in a garage sale, but honestly, the work days lost hosting a garage sale would have cost me, and a few other charities, more than the garage sale would have made. I got rid of all the stuff. I remember holding separate pieces wondering how I was going [...]
I’m not much of an outline guy when it comes to writing. And I don’t ask who my readership is going to be. I write what I think is interesting and hope there are other people out there wired the same way I’m wired. It’s a lesson I learned from William Zinnser, and I wonder if we can apply it to more than just writing. We can apply it to business, if you will, and even leadership. When we are ourselves, we tend to find the people who understand us and there is a natural chemistry and so productivity. When we read a business book and try to become what the writer says we should become, we lose something in the translation. That’s not to say we shouldn’t read business books, but that those books should shape who we are organically, and we should continue to be ourselves leading from authenticity.
If you liked the movie Little Miss Sunshine, you may have discovered the band Devotchka. Not sure if Michael Arndt, who wrote the brilliant little movie intended for the soundtrack to sound Greek or Slavic or Romani, but alas the music worked. And lots of us got to discover a new favorite. Enjoy Devotchka:
