I first heard of clicking your amygdala forward when a guy contacted me on Linked In and had this as part of his signature. (Something like 'have you clicked your amydala forward today'?')I was intrigued and immediately Googled it. It's all very interesting and for those of you keen to access your creativite zone, here's the low down.

The amygdalae are two almond-shaped structures (in fact amygdala means 'almond-shaped') located on each side of the brain in the frontal lobes. To find them approximately, imagine a line drawn from the corner of your eye to the top of your ear and about halfway along and an inch in is the amygdala.

The frontal lobes are responsible for pleasure, emotion, psychic ability, intuition, creativity and all the 'good stuff' and various things can 'click' us into this positive states, including smelling something nice, meditating and laughing. The problem is trying to access this at will.

Neil Slade has a very interesting site about the amygdalae backed up with solid research and describes various techniques to make the brain jump into frontal lobe mode. Here are three ideas he mentions that I use when I remember!

• Imagine tickling all over each amygdala with a feather - this simple technique creates blood flow to the frontal lobes and improves with practice.
• Think of the amygdala as a switch and imagine putting this switch to the 'on' position.
• Imagine flicking each amygdala with your finger as if it was a pencil eraser and 'see' it moving back and forwards in response to the flick. This is a very good technique that I read on Neil's forum and have used myself with some success.

Have a go at clicking your amygdala - it's harmless, painless, free and let's you access the best bits of your brain. What more could you ask?

I am an avid lapper-up of business books and am currently re-reading Richard Koch's The 80/20 Principle. The premise on which the book rests - what Koch calls the universe's "wonkiness" - is that 20 percent of effort reaps 80 percent of rewards. This has been proved to be the case for everything from the wear on carpets to the percentage of the nation's wealtiest individuals. It was first highlighted by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto while studying wealth and income in England in the 1800s. Apart from noticing the unequal distribution pattern, Pareto also noticed it could be reapplied succesfully to other situations and time periods and thus the Pareto Principle (or Pareto's Law) was discovered.

Of course 80/20 is a catchy simplification. Often the proportions are 70/30 or 90/10, but the truth is there staring us in the face. A lot of us waste our energy and efforts doing stuff that brings little or no satisfaction and no benefits.

How does that affect business - in my case the writing business? Well, contrary to popular belief, being busy busy busy really does nothing at all. What we are after is focussed 'busyness' - analysing the work that brings you the most satisfaction and the greatest revenue and being ruthless about the rest. An example is the client who takes up hours and hours of time and energy through calls and emails and then wants a free article or massive discount. We all know people like this, energy vampires who think of you as their own private bloodbank. In your personal life they are bad news. In your business life they are catastrophic.

Speaking personally, I know that I often do far more than is necessary for far less than I should. Equally I know that I can't apply the 80/20 principle too ruthlessly as I have too soft a heart (and yeah yeah, I know there is no sentiment in business, but a little doesn't hurt). So I will continue to help where I can and deliver more than expected. But I know I must also do some hard thinking and make sure that my skills and talents are used to their best advantage on the 20 percent of things that bring me the greatest personal and professional rewards.

"So, how many words a day do you write?" a friend asked me the other day. And on the surface it seemed quite a simple question. I thought for a moment. "I guess I must write well over five thousand words a day if you include daily journal, non fiction book, proposal,  emails, blogs, web articles and letters." (Yes, I actually do put pen to paper to write to my Mum!)

"I mean for a novel," she said. Ah. Now that is different. "Well, I think I'm comfortable writing between five hundred and a thousand a day, " I said. "On my own stuff." She was shocked. I asked why.

"I thought it would be about ten or twenty thousand or something!"she said.

I think it's a pretty common preconception that novelists churn out thousands of words a day. Some do. Barbara Cartland, that doyenne of the romance genre, used to write beween six and seven thousand  words a day, but she used to dictate her novels to an assistant, which kind of doesn't count.

Steven King says in his book On Writing that he usually manages two thousand words a day and that he even writes on weekends, holidays, Christmas... a true labour of love.

But actually writing a story? When I'm working on my own material, I know from experience that I average about 600 words a day (per novel) and that I only work Monday to Friday. It may not sound a lot, but it means that in eight months I have written 80,000 words, which is an average novel length. For clients, especially those who have already got a plot outline, this output doubles - even quadruples sometimes. But as I work on several projects at once, mixing all kinds of writing work, I don't write novels full time.

Once I'd explained this to my friend, she was relieved. "That seems kind of doable," she said."Maybe I can write a novel after all!"

So to encourage people faced with the daunting task of writing a novel, I'd say this. Take it steady, don't go crazy, stick to your 500 words a day - don't make it a chore - and you'll get there.