Guest Post by Jeff Wheeler

I am excited to welcome Jeff Wheeler to the blog today. Wheeler is the author of, amongst other titles, The Killing Fog, the first in the Grave Kingdom series.

Today Jeff is tackling the topic of how to stay productive while working at home, a challenge I know a lot of us are facing at the moment!

Two Bits of Advice for Working at Home during the Apocalypse

By Jeff Wheeler

During the two decades I worked at Intel Corporation, I saw how working from home went from impossible to expected. Back when I first started at Intel in the early ‘90s, if I got sick I couldn’t work from home because my computer was strapped down at a desk in a cubicle. By the time I left in 2014, it was mostly expected that you’d work from home if you had the sniffles.

As a full-time author, I’ve been working from home for almost six years and I know a thing or two about how to stay productive when there are so many distractions—like incoming texts, social media, and now with the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic. There are two lessons I’ve learned over the years that might be helpful to re-think where you’re at during this crisis.

The first idea came from the business author Jim Collins and it’s about an expedition two explorers made to Antarctica in 1910. If you think social distancing is bad now, imagine being isolated from the rest of the world in a blizzard that lasted 99 days. The other team made it to the south pole but died on the way back. In his book Great by Choice, Collins talks about how the successful explorer used a technique where he set and stuck to a daily goal of moving so many miles. Regardless of weather conditions, terrain, or setbacks, they went at a certain rate—twenty miles a day. Even when the weather was beautiful (for Antarctica) and conditions were easier, they stopped after twenty miles. That was the cadence of their march, day in and day out. It was measurable, doable, and repeatable. The other team, on the other hand, only trekked when conditions were good. On blustery days, they’d hunker down in their tents and wait out storms that could last for days. I’ve found during my writing career that setting and sticking to output goals creates a virtuous cycle of consistent performance. Back when I was working full-time at Intel, raising a family, and holding down significant responsibilities at my church, my goal was one chapter a week, one book a year. Now that I’m writing fulltime, it’s three chapters a week, three books a year. Having a measurable and consistent goal—and sticking to it—is a powerful technique that has helped me remain a prolific writer.

The second idea I learned during a major business downfall at Intel in 2005. The timing is important because it happened right before the last economic downturn when the global real estate market crashed. What we are going through right now is a once-in-a-century kind of social and economic shock, and I’ve lived through major earthquakes, the dot-com boom, and many other downturns, but this one is one for the history books. Back in 2005, an idea began to spread through the company called “Possibility Thinking.” It challenged the status quo with the notion “I know we’ve always done things certain ways, but what is the fastest way we could do this process?” At Intel, we made microprocessors—the computer chips that are the brains of any smart device. They are complex chips that require billion-dollar manufacturing plants to make atoms line up precisely. It took over 40 days to run the processes that would create these chips. Back then the head of manufacturing used possibility thinking by asking what the fastest time they could run the process and produce a chip? They ran some experiments and just gave it a try, which began to break down assumptions and thinking that had been hard-coded in the company since the beginning. The manufacturing process was cut almost in half. Thankfully, these learnings happened just before the global downturn, which enabled Intel to scale down production quickly and then scale it back up again quickly when demand changed. That nimbleness wouldn’t have been possible without possibility thinking. I’ve used this idea for my writing as well. It used to take me a certain number of hours to write a chapter. I’ve learned to cut that time almost by about a third by examining my creative process and learning how to streamline it. I won’t get into all the details, but I’ve examined my writing conditions in great detail to weed out distractions.

We’ve all been given a strange gift of time during the self-isolation caused by COVID-19. As we’ve told our kids, let’s use the time to improve ourselves, to learn more than we might have learned otherwise. To develop new skills, new interests, to read new books, to practice new skills. During this pandemic, I saw a meme which delighted me. In 1665, Isaac Newton had to take a break from the University of Cambridge due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague. He used that time to develop Calculus and his theory of gravity.

How can you improve during this time that will make your life and other lives better in the years to come?

Jeff Wheeler is the bestselling author of The Grave Kingdom series, the Kingfountain series, the Muirwood series, and many other fantasy novels. To learn more about the Antarctica march and possibility thinking, see his book “Your First Million Words: Finding the Story Inside You.” His new book, The Killing Fog, is also available now.

Huge thanks to Jeff for being on the blog today and to his publicist for organizing the post!