Raymond Chandler had an interesting approach to getting things done. In his case: Getting things written. Here’s what he said, according to Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their book, Willpower:¹

Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically very morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.

[…]

Write or nothing. […] I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.“

Interestingly enough, it seems like Flannery O’Connor used the same strategy. Here is what she recommended to a young writer in 1959:

“You ought to set aside three hours² every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. […] If you don’t write, don’t do anything else.”

I have experimented with this for a while now: At some point of any given day³ I open a time slot dedicated to nothing but writing. Normally, this time slot will span over one hour to start with. During this time, I don’t do anything but write – or sit in front of my computer, looking at a black screen with a green cursor on it.⁴

Theoretically, it would be okay to just sit there and wait. But that’s the only alternative: Write or do nothing. More often than not, some good stuff gets written during this time. More often than not, procrastination isn’t an issue. Actually, the results have been so positive that I’m thinking about expanding this “Write or Nothing” slot to three or four hours myself. My next book might be just around the corner!

Here’s Why it Works

1. Clear Rules

When I start a session, my phone is switched off. I went to the bathroom, I got some coffee and water. There are many temptations inviting me to procrastinate a little, but the rules are so simple and crystal clear that I won’t break them: I may sit and look at my screen. I may look out of the window. Or I may write. Other than that? Nothing. No email. No Twitter. No reading. No sleeping. No talking. Write or nothing.

2. Limited Time

Many writers prefer to have a word minimum for the day. Or a word limit, like Cory Doctorow. While I get his point, I prefer a time minimum to get started. It lowers the barriers and it’s easier to schedule. It never means that I may have to spend seven hours just to reach my 1000 words for the day. If I sit down to write at 10am, I’ll be finished at 11 if I wish to.

The fun thing, of course, is that once I start writing, I’ll often get into flow. I’ll enjoy the process so much that I keep doing it for longer than initially planned. But when I don’t, I’ll just spend the hour doing some editing or outlining (or window-watching) and call it a day.

3. Idleness Included

I sit down to write, but I don’t really expect anything great to come out of it. Often, I’ll actually spend a minute or two looking out of my window, feeling quite fine because I’m sticking to the rules. But then, after those couple of minutes, I generally find it to be more interesting to write than to keep looking at my neighbor’s realty. Turns out their house isn’t all that exciting after all. So I look back at my screen and just start to work.

This may sound silly to many, but don’t discard it before giving it a try: The great thing about the Nothing Alternative is that you  actually are allowed to “do” something else than your work: You may be idle.

Having the permission to drop work for a minute seems to be just what my inner idler needs. It’s also something that can help any writer to clear their head a little, think about their phrasing, or get inspired by some random memory that pops up in the moment.

P.S. The Flow Bonus

Apart from helping me to get something written each day, this approach has another advantage: If I manage to find this hour of writing time at any point in the morning, the generated flow will fuel my whole day: Doing things leads to doing more things.

After getting some writing done, I’ll often be eager to work on other things I care about: Clearing my inbox, editing some photos, outlining an upcoming project. Or, as mentioned, I’ll just keep writing.

While I’m not an early riser, getting something done soon after rising will create a productive mindset for the rest of the day.

1. More on Willpower very soon. That book really is a blast if you know what to take from it.
2. Do you notice how she says “three hours”? Another case of a writer admitting to be working less than most people would expect. Three to five hours writing time seems to be the sweet spot for most great writers, as I already noticed here on TFA! But then, three to five hours of quality writing each day is still more than most of us would manage, I guess.
3. From Monday to Saturday, preferably in the morning hours. See the last part of this post to learn why!
4. Yes, I still love Writeroom.

Last week I rambled about workplaces beyond rules. But when it came to naming my favorite workplace of all, I noticed how dependent it is on the work I want to do or the mood I’m in. But, as I said, if I’d have to choose one single place, it would probably be on board of a train somewhere in Germany.

The Marvels of Working on Trains

Why a train, of all things? As with the other places, vibe is a major factor. The atmosphere on a train is leisurely yet overall somehow concentrated: People are reading, watching a movie on their laptops or engaged in a relaxed conversation. Depending on the train, they might be talking some pretty weird (and often inspiring!) stuff – but if it gets too much, I simply put up some music and gone they are. (Ear plugs might work if you need silence to focus.)

There’s no dreadful radio music (as in many coffeeshops!) and, most of all, no wi-fi! I know that many people hate that and prefer taking one of the newer trains or routes that provide internet access for their passengers, but I personally hope that most trains continue to be offline territory. It’s precisely what seems to help to create the atmosphere that I enjoy so much.

On trains, dead time can easily be transformed into creative time. Watching out of the window and seeing the landscape pass by helps me more than anything to find the right words when crafting a new article or book chapter. You can get a coffee or some simple food in the dining car, but apart from that, distractions are low. You can walk around a bit whenever you feel like it, but it isn’t really incentivized. Preferably, you just remain seated and do some work. (And keep watching the landscape, of course!)

Talking of seats: Even the second class in the German train system is nowhere near as cramped as economy class on airplanes. Seats are bigger, there is sufficient space to use a laptop, and more often than not you’ll be lucky to have another free seat right next to you, allowing you to use two tables to have more space for your documents and paperwork.

Best of all, working time on a train comes with a hard deadline. As a regular reader, you might know already how important I deem these to be for higher productivity. A train ride might last 30 minutes, four hours, or maybe even a whole day. But when embarking, you know already that by 8.26pm you will reach your destination. That’s the time you’ve got, so there is no excuse not to use it.

The Cons

How about the downsides? Screaming children account for some of the negative experiences I have had. They simply aren’t helpful if you want to focus on your work. Overcrowded cars are worse. (Expect them during rushhour on commuter trains and before important holidays, like Christmas.) Overcrowded cars with lots of crying children… well, you get the idea!

The worst thing to encounter on a train, to be honest? Drunken football fans (that’s soccer in the US). They mostly ride regional trains (because they are incredibly cheap, especially for larger groups) and if they are in a bad mood, they will not only make work impossible, but life on trains in general. Fortunately, these guys are easy to avoid by simply not traveling during their peak hours. (Saturday afternoons, mostly. Sundays aren’t that bad, probably because most of them have to work the next day or face their spouses at night.)

One other major downside of working on trains might be the price! While competetive in comparison with airline prices, travel on German trains isn’t cheap – especially if you are a spontaneous traveler that doesn’t book his trips weeks ahead. A regular ticket from Hamburg to Munich, for example, will set you back 135 euros.

There are several discount cards available, though, that normally pay off over the year: Buy them once and get 25 to 50% discount on any ticket you buy later. The biggest temptation for me is the “BahnCard 100″: For about 4000 euros ($5200 USD, give or take) you get to travel as much as you want during a whole year. Just think of the possibilities!

Given my addiction to working on trains, I’m pretty sure that if I ever have that much spare, I might as well just get one of those cards and become a full-time train writer exploring every single city in the country. Until then, I’ll probably continue to work on the cheap regional trains, as long as there aren’t any football fans around!

Appendix

On December 25th, I embarked on an 8-hour train trip to Cologne, in order to join a big Christmas dinner on December 26th. That train trip wasn’t work-related, to be sure: One of my best friends and a good bottle of red wine accompanied me on that unconventional Holiday celebration on the road, and made 8 hours seem like 20 minutes. Conclusion: As a nice office, trains lend themselves for much more than just work!

After the release of Productive Anywhere, a couple of readers asked me about my favorite place to get things done. Over the last few years, dozens of spots have been my home and my workplace, but which of them did I prefer?

As with many tough questions, it’s probably better to start at the opposing end and look at the workplaces I dislike: Cubicles! Luckily, I only had to work at one twice in my life. The first time was during a short job as a callcenter agent and the second during an internship with the European Commission’s Delegation to Colombia and Ecuador.

The callcenter job was hellish and mind-numbing by itself, as you might imagine. Screaming into a cheap and nasty headset trying to interview pensioneers and stay-at-home mums about their shopping habits is about as bad as it gets once a country moves beyond creating employment opportunities in sulfur mines. Now multiply the people screaming into those cheap headsets by 30 and put all of them into one large, overheated room and you’ll understand why I became highly motivated to get a different job immediately after starting out at the callcenter.

Work at the Delegation was much nicer and also way more interesting. I was even so lucky to have some great and smart colleagues – but my desk in the 11th floor of a random office building in Northern Bogotá simply didn’t feel like the appropriate place to do great work. Somehow, the atmosphere there did confirm the stereotypical image of a slow EU bureaucracy. As much as I enjoyed my stay there, I doubted that working in a cubicle (or even a normal office environment) would be something I’d enjoy doing in the long run.

Experimenting with Work Environments

To improve matters, I ended up cutting some of the office hours towards the end of my internship. To compensate, I transferred part of my work to the studio apartment I had rented in the lively Chapinero area. Even though it was a very simple place, this move alone spurred my productivity, as it entailed a whole new freedom: Suddenly, I was able to decide on my own about when to work and when to relax, when to walk around thinking and when to isolate myself from my surroundings in order to focus completely on my job.

In the following years, I continued to experiment with different work environments while finishing my academic studies in Germany and Colombia. Coffeeshops did work, but not for everything: Until today I love to go there for brainstorming, simple reading and light writing. Preparing exams, reading more complex texts or doing final edits, in contrast, is best done at other places. Libraries work great for this kind of stuff and also to get things done I don’t enjoy particularly: I remember locking myself away for whole weeks when preparing a painful linguistics exam. Being at a place full of quiet and concentrated students (most of them reading and memorizing data for their respective exams) simply created the right ambience.

Going Beyond Rules

Over the past couple of years, I took experimentation even further: I spent time working in parks and in beach bars, in the apartments of friends and strangers, on airplanes and airports, on buses and boats. All of these had their allures, and I’d love to go back to many of them because of the good experiences I made.

I experienced two of my personal highlights during the creation of my first two books. When I started to outline Beyond Rules¹ I discovered my personal “author’s paradise” on Earth: A cozy hotel right at the beach in Cartagena. In the shadowy patios, artists, writers and part-time philosophers of all sorts encounter Colombian tourists, elderly world travelers and the occasional group of students. The resulting energy provides the ideal surroundings for me to let my mind wander, get inspired and put a text together.

Later on, I made major breakthroughs for both Beyond Rules and Productive Anywhere at the shores of the North Sea in Denmark and Germany. This was a great environment to dive deeply into the chapters of the books and slog away for a couple of hours. Whenever it got too much and I felt like my head was exploding, going out to breathe some fresh air and get myself almost blown away by the stormy winds was just perfect to get unstuck!

My Favorite Workplace

So were these my favorite workplaces? In some sense, yes – but only in the context of what I was doing at the time! I believe that being able to choose our workplace on our own brings two huge advantages. First of all, our motivation will be higher, as described above: Choosing freely about when and how to work is an empowering experience. Secondly, different environments lend themselves better for different kinds of tasks: The library for concentrated editing, the beach hotel to get inspired, and so on.

The major downside to choosing our own workplace is probably friction: Finding out about what works and what does not is only in some part a matter of common sense or scientific research. To a large degree it’s a question of personal preference and also of the circumstances of your life. Also, procrastination can be much more tempting if there isn’t anybody around controling you. Choosing your workplace wisely thus becomes much more important.²

So what’s my favorite workplace, then? It’s hard to say. But if I’d have to choose one, I’d probably go for… no, I won’t put this here. It’s worth a post of its own, so I’ll keep it up for next week! Be sure to come back or subscribe for free to my RSS feed!

1. Still available for free at the link. I will take it down later this month to start working on a 2012 update, so be sure to grab it now if you’re interested!
2. More thoughts on these issues can be found in Productive Anywhere, of course! In her interview, Lea Woodward shares some very interesting thoughts on how sometimes even a great place can be a bad fit for us to get things done.

Yes! I managed to do the impossible: I got Chris Guillebeau, probably the most productive traveler on this planet, to admit that he could relate to the concept of idleness as described here on TFA!

Idlers, rejoice: Even productivity mavens know the value of disconnecting, relaxing, and letting the idle brain do its job!

Of course, this is only part of the story! Because the real lesson from talking to Chris was that being productive isn’t just a matter of the right tools and tricks. Ultimately, it’s about doing the right work: Work that matters, work that you love, and work that helps other people.

All in all, I can honestly say that my Productive Anywhere interview with Chris was amazing! I was happy to talk to someone so smart and inspiring, and he was a perfect fit for the great line of interviewees I was lucky to talk to during the creation of the guide.

As a special treat for you and for the benefit of working travelers everywhere, Chris and I decided to give this interview away to you for free! Just listen in right here or feel free to download the MP3!

Productive Anywhere Interview – Chris Guillebeau

Additionally, a full PDF transcript is also available!

Enjoy!

The photo is CC-BY-NC directly from Chris’ Flickr account.

“Remember, Remember, the 5th of November…”

Yes, it’s true! That day! Here it is… again! This means: The Friendly Anarchist is now two years old! What an exciting time it was! We went from zero to more than 3000 monthly visitors on this site, all by writing extremely long (and some surprisingly short) posts on idleness, action, and living an interesting life!

Thank you all for being here!

This second year has been especially interesting, as it was the year I wrote my first book, Beyond Rules, and then created my first e-guide, Productive Anywhere.

Productive Anywhere was released in a special “founding buyers” edition back in September, in order to gather some feedback before releasing the full edition.

And thankfully, the feedback was very positive! As it turned out, people not only called it insane and ridiculous, they told me it was insanely useful and ridiculously cheap!

Some of them begged me to raise the price. (Well, one of them did. True story!) Some of them told me the Toolbox alone was worth the money. (That’s probably exaggerated. But the toolbox is pretty cool, I think.) And all of them who read it certainly became much more productive!

Not one of them told me it sucked!

Which is probably a good sign.

And now, Productive Anywhere got even better!

Apart from the 28.000 (or 180-page!) Core Guide, the Toolbox, and the four expert interviews in MP3 format, I just finished to create a pretty nice update:

• I developed an Anti-Overwhelm Guide to get you started easier than ever!
• All the interviews come with transcripts now for those of you who don’t like to listen to MP3s.
• The (Mighty!) Toolbox was enhanced and now features all the best applications for productivity and GTD, communication, travel-booking and much, much more.

I really believe this is a very nice piece of work!

Get it now!

So, without any further ado, here it is – just in time for TFA’s second birthday: The full edition of Productive Anywhere.¹)

For the sake of simpleness, you can buy it right here, blindly. Just because you trust me that it’s cool stuff and worth your 39 bucks. (It is!)

Alternatively, you can go here to read the sales page in which I relentlessly use all the shady marketing tricks I could find in order to persuade you to buy it. That will probably be more fun for you, but it will also take some of your precious time that could be used to read the guide. And to start implementing some of the useful tips right away!

Anyway, your choice.

But whatever you do, buy it!

(Ehem. Or don’t. I will still like you if you don’t, as long as you are a nice person. But I would appreciate it!)

For now, a happy 5th of November, wherever you are!

We are living in interesting times. If there ever was a great moment to take life back into our own hands, adapt a mobile lifestyle, and become productive anywhere, it’s now!

Thanks for being a part of this!

1. I hesitate to keep calling it the “final” edition, because this is a living product: As I learn new stuff, encounter new and useful tools, or interview more people, the guide will continue to receive updates. (Those updates will be free for every buyer, just in case you wondered.