How To Gain Freedom
There's one simple tool that's helped me get a lot of work done over the years, and I'm sharing it here this month.
I’ve just handed the first draft of my new book in to my publisher. Like the first draft of anything, it’s a lumpy mound of loose thoughts, early interviews, personal stories and rough ideas that will be pummelled into proper shape over a series of rewrite and rethinks during the second, third, fourth and fifth drafts. Because that’s creativity’s dirty little secret that we don’t speak about enough: the first draft of anything is sh#t.
That’s a quote that was supposedly uttered by Ernest Hemingway but it doesn’t really matter who said it, anyone who has ever created anything - that’s you, and me, and everyone you know - can attest to the fact that you need to start somewhere, or you’ll never end up anywhere.
My third book is ostensibly about the future of work, but as my research and writing evolved I discovered an undercurrent of a movement of people exploring how and why we work that can help anyone take advantage of this fascinating work revolution we’re all going through. I think it’s the biggest, and more important, topic I’ve ever written about, but I’ll have more to share on that over the coming months as the final form emerges out of my drafts.
Some people have a romantic notion that authors sit down at their desks and everything just flows out poetically. One of my favourite quotes about writing - although again, no one is certain who said it first - is this: “Writing is easy. You just sit down at your typewriter and bleed.”
Writing is work, like every other job, that has good moments and hard moments. It’s sometimes tedious, sometimes revelatory, sometimes fascinating and sometimes repetitive. Probably just like your job.
But, there’s one useful thing that I do when I open up my laptop to write. I have a creative ritual that I detailed in Killer Thinking: I put on the same music soundtrack every time. If you really want specifics, mine is Missy Higgins’ best-of album The Special Ones. As soon as I hear the hypnotising guitar lick introduction on the song ‘Arrows’, and Missy begins to drawl, “Heavy were the nights, when the fire burned low”, I’ve trained myself to basically switch into a trance. It’s a neat trick I use to enter my creative zone no matter if I’m on a plane, a couch or a desk in a co-working space. You should try it out with an album, or playlist, that you like. The choice of music is personal, but if you want somewhere to start, at any given time tens of thousands of people are listening to this free, live non-stop YouTube channel of super chilled music.
However, it’s not just repetitive music that helps me to switch into that mode, there is also a very useful computer program that I click on almost every time I need to get serious work done.
One Useful Thing for March 2023: Freedom App
Let’s talk attention. It’s something that, as Johann Hari explains in his excellent book Stolen Focus, has been systematically taken away from us. Ironically, if you don’t have enough time to read an entire book right now, you really should listen to a great summary of the ideas in it on the Offline podcast.
There are lots of research studies that show how terrible our attention has become. A small study monitoring American university students showed they switched tasks they were doing every 65 seconds. Another study of office workers observed that the average adult stayed on one task for three minutes before switching to the next one.
It’s pretty shocking, and real, and common. And it’s something that we all need to actively fight against, and that where’s this month’s One Useful Thing comes in.
Whenever I need to write, think or properly concentrate I click on a simple app on my computer called Freedom. It does just one thing : it disconnects you from the internet to give you as many minutes of “freedom” that you need from the rest of the world to try to address some of our attention problems.
When I first started using Freedom years ago, it was a sledgehammer of an app that literally interfered with your entire internet connection to your computer. The only way to turn it back on again before your allocated time ran out was to switch your entire computer off and back on again.
But now, after several updates, the Freedom App is like a surgical scalpel that you can dictate what types of websites you want to block (ie. social media, news sites or Gmail) and on which devices (like your laptop and phone). If you are working, for example, you can keep your emails on and turn off all social networks, news sites and anything else distracting. Or if you want to continue to have access to the internet, but want work to slow down your workload for a bit, you can just turn off emails for a set period of time.
You can also add devices so you can get freedom from your computer and your mobile phone too, however I have a more simple, luddite way of doing that with my phone when I’m trying to work: I place my phone outside my reaching distance. That way I’m less inclined to just pick it up and look at it.
The Freedom App is so damn useful to me that I use it most days. It’s been my secret tool that I’ve used to write three books now (on top of a bunch of other things of course).
You can check out the Freedom App for yourself right here and decide if it will be as useful to you. This isn’t a sponsored post, and there are other tools that do similar things, but I don’t mind paying a little bit for guaranteed concentration when I need it.
This is the third issue of One Useful Thing Literally Every Time, and the number of readers has almost doubled since I began (thank you!). That’s all because of wonderful people who have told their friends about the very useful things like the treasure trove of research information, and the RACI matrix.
So to keep this momentum going, for this month only I’m going to pay for the Freedom App for a whole month for every reader who forwards this email to at least 10 other people who you think will also find OUTLET useful.
Want to know the easiest way to do that? Just send it around to everyone in your office. Then forward me the email and I’ll pay for a whole month of Freedom for you.
So that this doesn’t bankrupt me, this is limited to the first 30 people who do this and it’s very much appreciated in advance. All the content in OUTLET is primarily work-related, and I’ve got a great One Useful Thing lined up for next month that will help you be a better work colleague all-round.
After a busy few weeks in Sydney, my husband and I are currently enjoying the bustle (and street food) of Bangkok. It’s hot, chaotic, humid and wonderful.
Until next month,
Tim