Productivity

Greetings, Training for Translators readers!! This week’s post is pretty basic, but something all of us think about: a few of my favorite resources that might also be helpful to you.

Here they are, in no particular order, and with no affiliate deals

• The Neuron. You can hate AI, you can love AI, you can be terrified of AI, but the one thing you really don’t want to do is ignore AI. I wanted to subscribe to an AI newsletter written in human-speak, and my friend and colleague Veronika Demichelis recommended The Neuron, which I’ve really been enjoying and from which I’ve learned a ton. They have everything from a daily newsletter (it’s short and engaging; I do actually read it most days) to a free class about the basics of ChatGPT. Even if you see zero use for AI in your own work, The Neuron is a great resource.
• I wanted to buy a new interpreting headset, because I’ve had my current headsets (two Sennheiser SC65s, one for my office and one for home) since I did the Glendon MCI in 2020. I really like them, but a headset is a single point of failure (can’t interpret without it!) so I wanted to get a backup and try a different brand just for kicks. Unfortunately, my first try, a Jabra Evolve 40, was a fail. I love the rich, warm, sound of the microphone on Jabra headsets (contrasted with the crisper sound of Sennheisers), but the headband was way too tight (admittedly, I have a very large skull) and the ear cups felt like pleather muffins gripping my ears and blocking a ton of ambient sound, which I need to hear (my own voice!) in order to interpret. So I returned that and bought an Audio-Technica open-back gaming headset, and I love it! It’s super-comfortable, the incoming sound quality and microphone quality are excellent, and it’s light on my head (no neck strain). Definitely a win!
• Setting “dormant client nudge” reminders in Todoist. I’ve been a huge fan of the to-do app Todoist ever since my friend and colleague Meghan McCallum turned me onto it. It’s basically an electronic to-do list, but it’s way better than a reminders app, because you can pre-schedule things for way in the future (a conference that you want to attend next year), and you can set whatever reminder interval you want (I have mine set to remind me to meditate with the Calm app every weekday, to reconcile my accounting on the 5th of every month, etc.). And here’s another good use for it: Remind yourself to nudge your dormant clients at the beginning or middle of June and the beginning or middle of December. Why? Because in June, you’re “letting them know your availability for the summer,” and in December, you’re “letting them know your availability over the winter holidays.” We all struggle with nudging: it works, but it feels annoying. Make it less annoying by having these reasons to contact clients!
• Using TextAloud for text-to-speech proofreading. I love TextAloud so much that I wrote a blog post about it, and every once in a while, I’m reminded of how much I love it. I struggle with detailed editing because I read too fast. I recently did a complex legal translation that needed to be completely error-free for a court submission. TextAloud slows me down, helps me identify errors that I would miss if I were just reading the document, and it has a lot of convenience features that are missing in the MS Word “Read Aloud” function (see the blog post for details).
• Melanie Padgett Powers’ podcast The Deliberate Freelancer, and Jennifer Goforth Gregory’s new newsletter, “Goforth and freelance.” These are two freelance writers who I really admire, and I listen to/read pretty much everything they produce. I have long admired Jennifer’s blog with detailed monthly income breakdowns (including even a lot more detail than I put in my yearly income breakdown posts), so I really enjoy her new “for all freelancers” newsletter!

Thanks for reading, and I hope these resources are useful!

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! I hope that you’re all doing well! Registration for our annual March Marketing Madness challenge group is now open; and I’m excited that so many of you have already joined! The price is the same as last year ($90) and you get 20 motivational videos, 20 marketing challenges, and an optional (but very fun!) Slack group.

Speaking of challenges, this week I wanted to talk about what I’ve learned from giving myself a different 30-day challenge each month (or sometimes even more than one challenge per month!). Here’s how it happened:

In September of last year, I was looking for a new planner calendar. I still use a paper calendar, not because I’m a Luddite, but because I like the visual aspect of being able to flip through the calendar, and I actually find that I make fewer scheduling mistakes (setting something at the wrong time, on the wrong day/week) when I use a paper calendar. I came across the Commit 30 planner (not an affiliate deal), which, as luck would have it, is a woman-owned business right here in Colorado. At that time, they were running a special to get the 2023 planner for free when you ordered the 2024, so I jumped on it.

Here, a digression. Some of you already know that one of my current obsessions is Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies principle. A good friend turned me onto this when she participated in Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. Basically, the Four Tendencies (please, please take the quiz if you haven’t already) is (are?) about finding out how you respond to both inner and outer expectations: demands you put on yourself, and demands that the outside world puts on you. Cut to the chase, I’m an Upholder in the extreme…the Upholder’s slogan is “Discipline is my freedom,” and (for better and for worse), that’s me, to a T. I love the Todoist app, and every night before I go to bed, I go through my Todoist list and mark every task as complete, or recategorize it to another day. We could spend a lot of time talking about the pluses and minuses of being an Upholder (I’ll tell you the downside: I have a lot of trouble dealing with people who aren’t Upholders, and I have a lot of trouble doing things that have no purpose or goal, even if I enjoy them), but the point being, I respond very well to challenges where you set a goal and tick off your progress, which is exactly what the Commit30 planner is about. It has a spot to write your personal 30-day challenge for every month, it has a list of suggested challenges, and then you get to tick the bubbles for every day that you complete your challenge.

So far, I’ve given myself the following challenges (sometimes I do more than one per month)

• Meditate with the Calm app every day
• Walk for an hour or more per day, at least 20 out of 30 days (this didn’t seem realistic/necessary to do every single day because I often go skiing, hiking, or biking for a full day on the weekends)
• Drink a 20 ounce glass of water with every meal
• Practice music (I play the cello and the Renaissance lute) at least five days a week
• Do a 10/20/30 workout (10 minutes of body-weight strengthening, 20 minutes of deep stretching, 30 minutes of yoga or weightlifting) every weekday

Here’s what I’ve learned, in case you’d like to try this out for yourself:

• I, like most people, waste a lot of time. It really surprised me how many of these activities I could fit into my day without sacrificing other things I needed to do. Basically I think that the “good stuff” crowded out pointless stuff.
• Doing a 30-day challenge is a good way to form a habit that you don’t have to maintain every single day. For example, doing the Calm app every day was so enjoyable that I set a goal (which you can do in the app) of continuing with it four days a week. That seems doable even over the long haul.
• Consistency really does help you improve at things. I’m the one who’s always saying, “You don’t have to stay motivated, you have to stay consistent,” and it’s true. I’m admittedly a pretty mediocre musician, but I have really been amazed at how much my playing improves when I practice every day.
• Doing something every day helps me focus why I’m doing it. One of Gretchen Rubin’s tips for Rebels (people who resist both inner and outer expectations; slogan, “You can’t make me, and neither can I”) is to focus on your Why. If you’re a freelancer because you want to have more time for your triathlon training, focusing on that can help you do what you need to do in order to stay profitable. If you’re working for a particular client because that income is going to help you buy a house, focusing on that can make deadlines more doable. I’m not a Rebel (far from it…haha!), but I found that focusing on something like, I’m practicing cello every day because I need to send my online practice group a video of me playing, or I’m doing this 10/20/30 workout because I sleep so much better and my body feels so much better, really helped me.

If you’d like to try some 30-day challenges of your own, let me know how it goes!!

This week, I wanted to introduce you to a tool that may help you figure out why you do what you do; or why you don’t do what you should do or what you plan to do. It’s Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies quiz, which you can take for free right here (none of this is an affiliate deal, I just really like Gretchen Rubin’s stuff).

I had never heard of Gretchen Rubin until one of my close friends participated in The Happiness Project. As part of my friend’s Happiness Project work, she asked me to have dinner with her once a month for a year (in 2022). And, minus the month that my friend had COVID, we did it! After learning more about Gretchen Rubin’s work, I became really intrigued by her Four Tendencies concept and how it can help us better understand ourselves and other people.

Basically, Gretchen Rubin theorizes that there are four main personality types when it comes to meeting external and internal expectations or demands:

• Upholders find freedom in discipline, and usually have no trouble meeting external or internal expectations (I’m an Upholder; more on that below)
• Questioners meet expectations if (and only if) the expectation makes sense to them
• Obligers meet expectations that are set by other people, but struggle to meet expectations that they set for themselves
• Rebels resist both external and internal expectations (tagline: “You can’t make me, and neither can I”)

Like other personality tests (Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, etc.), some people aren’t going to be easily categorized, or are going to answer “it depends.” But, knowing my “expectations-meeting personality” has helped me so much, in the following ways:

• As mentioned above, I’m solidly in the Upholder category. If someone else tells me to do something, I’m going to do it. If I tell myself to do something, I’m also going to do it. This seems like a positive thing overall, but reading more about the Four Tendencies has helped me see some ways in which it’s actually a hindrance.
• I often struggle to understand or give advice to people who can’t get things done. While I know, intellectually, that people who fall into the Rebel or Questioner categories don’t always “just do it,” and I really, really know that neurodivergent people (including several of my close friends) often cannot “just do it,” I still find myself thinking, “Make a list! Set a timer! Get the Todoist app! It’s not that hard!” And in reality, it is really hard or even impossible for a lot of people to do what Upholders find totally normal and natural: break a daunting task into sub-goals and chip away at them consistently. Knowing this has prompted me to “pause and understand” people whose productivity wiring is very different from mine.
• I have a lot of fun and joy in life, annnnnnnd a great deal of that fun and joy involves checking a box, which is something I’d like to work on. I do a lot of box-checking in both my personal and professional lives: I’m highly motivated by the trackers in my apps, whether it’s getting the pat on the back from Todoist for accomplishing all of my tasks for that day, or seeing how many times I’ve gone to yoga in a month. If I blow off work to do something fun, it’s often (OK, Rebels, don’t laugh), because I have a policy of blowing off work in a particular situation. For example, I did actually blow off work a few weeks ago to go out for ice cream and get my nails done, but only because I have an internal expectation that when an interpreting assignment gets cancelled, I don’t work during that time. So, while I was definitely having fun and putting the “free” in freelance, I was also checking the box, “Don’t work during a cancelled interpreting assignment.”
• And by this, I don’t mean, woe is me…my biggest flaw is that I can’t stop being productive, I mean that all of these Tendencies have their pluses and minuses, and I think that learning more about yourself and how your brain works is always a good thing.

If you poke around online, you’ll also find various people’s tips related to these Tendencies. I found it particularly helpful to look at tips for people who are Rebels (the exact opposite of my personality), like this article, which suggests that if you’re a Rebel, you should try working in small bursts, always keeping your “why” in mind, and having a robust accountability system.

Whatever type you are, I hope that these tips are helpful!

I’m fortunate to love my job, but we all have days where we need a boost, or where we have to do tasks that we don’t feel like doing: here are three things to try when you’re having a low-energy day, you’re having trouble getting motivated, you have to work on something you don’t want to do, or you’re just generally not feeling it.

1. Make a list of what you need to get done. This is a simple thing, but it really helps me to have a visual to focus on when I’m having trouble getting going. Something about a) the concrete nature of a list, and b) the satisfaction of ticking things off, is often what I need to get going. My colleague and friend Meghan McCallum introduced me to the app Todoist, and I’m now a huge fan. Of course you can just use the reminders or notes app on your phone or even a piece of paper, but I love that Todoist allows you to easily set recurring tasks for things you do every day, things you do on the same day every week, month, or year, and even things with weird recurring dates (i.e. set a reminder to reconcile your accounting on the first weekday of every month).

2. Work in smaller chunks. When you’re feeling unproductive, tasks tend to feel larger than they really are. Personally, I often spend more time complaining about something I don’t want to do (hello, accounting) than it would take to just do the stupid task. I find it helpful to break it down using the Pomodoro timer or something similar. The classic Pomodoro interval is 25 minutes of work followed by a five-minute break, but you could even break that down to 15 minutes of work and a five-minute break. I find that this small increment of time helps me talk myself into the task: like surely I can work on accounting for 15 minutes??

3. Take a movement break. Physical activity is my happy place, so this may be specific to me, but I find that short movement breaks really help me stay productive. I have a couple of Karin Dimitrovova’s home yoga practice courses (not an affiliate deal, I just love them); the daily routines generally take 15-30 minutes and give me an excellent energy boost when I need it. Plus, I find that having a pre-loaded course avoids endless scrolling on YouTube trying to find a core strengthening or stretching routine that I want to do.

If you have other techniques you use on low-energy or low-motivation days, let’s hear them in the comments!