Tag: productivity

The Procrastination Trap

by MAÔ, posted in Advice

There’s a saying: “Why put off to tomorrow what you can put off altogether?” It’s a riff off the more popular: “Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can get done today.”

In the age of doing so much, staying on all the time, busy schedules and busier inboxes, it’s easy to procrastinate.

What I’ve realized is, the longer you put it off, the less likely it is to get done. Regardless of your intentions.

There is a cumulative power in putting this off, and two days postponed is greater than one plus one: it compounds.

Of course, this applies to work without deadlines. That’s a different form of procrastination, and any of us who have jobs or went to school recognize putting things off until the deadline looms.

Most of this insidious form of procrastination – putting off until it’s a vague notion in the back of your mind – spring up from personal projects. Things you might actually like doing. Yet, it put them off for the more “important” things.

If that’s the case, maybe it’s time to reprioritize.

Advertisement

Increased output necessitates decreased input

by MAÔ, posted in Advice

Increasing output by decreasing inputs may seem contradictory. But if you read yesterday’s post, you’d know that given diminishing returns we may already be reducing our potential productivity. In nearly every case, we are. We lump so much into our lives that it’s impossible to create as we should be creating. Barely getting enough done.

So, if our productivity suffers from too many inputs, we must reduce them to reach peak productivity. Hence entire movements on time management and minimalism.

Maybe peak productivity isn’t the goal. Maybe it’s a simpler life. Or fewer bills, less stress, less to clean. Maybe it’s just the search for more happiness.

Whatever it is, it can’t be found by throwing more and more at it. It’s better to try and remove one or two things at a time until you can find some breathing room.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Abundance Trap

by MAÔ, posted in Work

How easy is it to get lost in the minutiae of having so much? So many emails, or obligations, or *gasp* books to read.

You would think that the more inputs we put into our life, the more product we should have to offer. In economics, the downward side of that bell curve is an example of the Law of Diminishing Returns. “Advantages gained from slight improvement on the input side of the production equation will only advance marginally per unit and may level off or even decrease after a specific point.”

And it seems that we all run in the mode of diminishing marginal productivity. We don’t realize it, but we constantly reach input overload, causing our productivity to level off, or even decrease.

So where is that sweet spot? The point on the graph where you’re at optimal performance, not wasting any input while maximizing your output?

Finding it may be impossible, but we can try to get as close as we can.

Are you being productive, or are you just keeping busy?

by MAÔ, posted in Work

When I was directing fundraising programs, this question was written on a sticky note and attached above my desk so that I could keep my attention focused. If I felt myself straying, I could look up and ask myself that question. Was I just sending emails, or was I working on something with more purpose?

Since that development contract ended, I’ve seen that sticky note float around every now and then. I hadn’t thought about it much until recently since I’ve been working an extra gig. Now, I find my calendar full most days, and that’s great!

But, am I making time for the deep work? For my creative endeavors? Am I writing for the blog, for instance? Working on some of my other projects, whether in writing, publication, or film/tv/stage? Sadly, the answer more often than not was no…

Now in the new year I have to remember to keep my attention focused. Yes, the jobs I do must be done, and done well. But also, don’t neglect the deep work. The nourishment for the soul. That thing I get to leave behind me.

So again I get to ask myself: “Am I being productive? Or merely keeping busy?”

Week’s highlights

by MAÔ, posted in Social

Some of the interesting things I have been thinking about this week:

  • First – my new car. I’ve seen this ad a number of times now, and I have completely fallen in love with this vehicle. Now, it won’t come out until 2020, but I’m on the list for initial test drives. I. Cannot. Wait.
  • Thanks to the above ad, I’ve resisted a song I listened to three years ago a lot. Simon & Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence, performed by Disturbed. It was a haunting take on a classic song, and listening to it again this week was a bit cathartic.
  • Humble Bundle. Another revisit that I seem to have been discussing a lot this week. Several years ago I purchased the Neil Gaiman bundle, and have since added comics and other ebooks to my library, with some money going to charity and some going to creators, with only a little bit going back to the company. It’s a good model, and I appreciate the work that they do there.
  • Why I don’t need to be superproductive. It was nice coming across this week, when it’s felt so hectic that I just didn’t seem to get near enough accomplished. So, thank you Outside. Thank you Brad Stulberg. Thank you Oliver Burkeman, of The Guardian. And thank you me, for letting me slow down a bit.

 

Trying to try

by MAÔ, posted in Begin Again

Making a commitment (again) to more consistent posting. For this, I’m batching. A set time slot for my writing, most of the week’s blog posts, in an hour or two time slot.

We’re given 168 hours each week to do the work. Assuming 56 hours (ideally) is spent in sleep, 40 hours in a 9-5 (or some iteration thereof), that leaves 72 hours a week for growth, health, restoration, and/or housework.

Devoting several hours each week to one growth activity, doing it at one time to maximize impact, is the batch.

Aug-Dec 2018 Reading Lists

by MAÔ, posted in Reading

Quick note: Though this had started as a monthly posting, I’ve found the longer I waited the harder it got. My intention for the coming year is to post this monthly. So, good luck me!

Books Bought:

  • The Eye Never Sleeps: Striking to the Heart of Zen – Dennis Genpo Merzel 
  • Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers – Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
  • Essays and Lectures – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The Crystal Shard – R.A. Salvatore
  • Streams of Silver – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Halfling’s Gem – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Legacy – R.A. Salvatore
  • Starless Night – R.A. Salvatore
  • Siege of Darkness – R.A. Salvatore
  • Passage to Dawn – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Silent Blade – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Worm Ouroboros – Eric  Rücker Eddison
  • The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath – Ishbelle Bee
  • Spring – Karl Ove Knausgaard
  • The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins – Clint, Griffin, Justin & Travis McElroy
  • The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
  • Enlightened Vagabond: The Life and Teaching of Patrul Rinpoche – Matthieu Ricard
  • The California Field Atlas – Obi Kaufmann
  • Dungeons & Dragons Waterdeep: Dragon Heist – Wizards of the Coast
  • Dungeons & Dragons Players’ Handbook – Wizards of the Coast
  • Monster Cinema: Quick Takes – Barry Keith Grant
  • James Thurber: Writings & Drawings – James Thurber (Library of America Edition)
  • Wilderness Essays – John Muir
  • Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process – Edited by Joe Fassler
  • Robin – Dave Itzkoff
  • Tools of the Titans – Tim Ferriss
  • The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling – John Muir Laws
  • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Dylan Thomas
  • Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, The Golden Ticket, and Ronald Dahl’s Most Famous Creation – Lucy Mangan

Books Read:

  • Sojourn – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Crystal Shard – R.A. Salvatore
  • Streams of Silver – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Halfling’s Gem – R.A. Salvatore
  • The Legacy – R.A. Salvatore
  • Starless Night – R.A. Salvatore
  • Siege of Darkness – R.A. Salvatore
  • Passage to Dawn – R.A. Salvatore
  • Little Women: The Musical – Libretto by Allan Knee, Lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, and music by Jason Howland
  • Getting Things Done – David Allen (unfinished)
  • Start with Why – Simon Sinek
  • The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging – Charles Vogl
  • Influence – Robert B. Cialdini (unfinished)
  • Tribe of Mentors – Timothy Ferriss (unfinished)
  • The Collected Letters of Alan Watts – Edited by Joan Watts & Anne Watts (resumed)
  • How to Watch a Movie – David Thomson (unfinished)
  • Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process – Edited by Joe Fassler (unfinished)

This will inevitably be a long, and somewhat frightening list. Admitting to the sheer numbers of books bought, attempted, settled into, or set down… It’s like the first step is admitting that there is a problem.

However, I have a love affair with books and would never admit that these purchases, nor the hours spent sitting, laying, or some manner of status in-between, with a book in my hands would be a problem. Mark Cuban is said to read three hours per day. Bill Gates plows through 50 books in a year. Though I don’t know off-hand how many I’ve read this year, I could look back through these posts and find out. (Looks to be 28. Okay, 2019 – Let’s aim for 30 books.)

Amid two productions that I was involved with (one a full-blown musical, the other a small, variety, Christmas cabaret); a week in Costa Rica; two bouts of illness (the first being a cold, and the second some sort of respiratory infection): work engagements, including two other productions, both running four weeks; a second job; a burgeoning Dungeons & Dragons campaign; and familial obligations for the holidays, I managed to put down a decent number of pages.

I’ve made a large chunk in RA Salvatore’s Drizzt saga – books 4-10 mostly in August and September. November, I read two of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Saga books: Name of the Wind and Wise Man’s Fear. Wind was released in 2007, and I just purchased the Tenth Anniversary Edition from DAW Books, partly on the recommendation from a bookseller I’ve befriended through a work partnership, but also owing to the glowing review Lin Manuel Miranda gave the book, thoughtfully printed on the back face of the dust jacket.

“No one writes like Pat Rothfuss. Full stop. Read this book.”

It was only after buying the novel (some time later in face, perhaps a month or two) that I heard the first of several recommendations for ir through The Adventure Zone, the McElroy Brothers liveplay podcast on D&D, followed by several romps through other dice-controlled fantasy games.

His novella on Auri (a somewhat minor/important character from the first two books), The Slow Regard of Silent Things, is up next on my Rothfuss reading list.

I tend to bounce around when reading. I’ve fallen in love this year with the language of Sontag and Watts, as well as this past month with the essays of John Muir. I’ve got a shelf with them, also holding Emerson, Thurber, Whitman, Joseph Campbell, Karl One Knausgaard, Neil Gaiman, and Rilke. It’s the fluidity of language, and how words can be used to showcase more than just their definition.

“When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness, though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation, With red-blooded playmates, wild as myself, I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields most every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.” John Muir, from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.

They paint with words, and in the way that I can watch (and listen) to Bob Ross depict happy little trees, so too can I spend hours with these authors – absorbing their words in ways that just reading a sentence (or writing one) cannot accurately describe.

Then, there were the others… David Allen’s seminal work on time management and efficiency is a useful tool. But flowing from line to line it does not. I implemented a couple of his suggestions, but still find my workflow cumbersome. I’ll be resuming that endeavor and attempt to become more productive, now that we’re in 2019.

Sinek has a way of lighting a fire under your ass. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. They don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Great advice. So, what is it you do, and why do you do it? (No, making money doesn’t count.) It’s been a process. I was introduced to Sinek’s work at a nonprofit conference and instantly felt its power. I don’t have a Mac because I think it’s a good computer (though I do). Dell makes a good computer, and I was on PC up until 2006. I buy Apple products because I believe in the image that they project. It’s a creative’s tool – and I learned Photoshop on it, oh, so many years ago.

This holds true for many things that I like to purchase – camping and hiking gear; automobiles; notebooks. Anything I use on a daily basis, or look forward to using in the future.

The books by Ferriss have similar effects, and I love deep diving into his work: books, blog; website; podcast. I don’t know that he has the life I would want, but he’s done a lot of the work that I would also like to do… if that makes sense.

I’m going to gloss over the purchase list. I did buy most of the Drizzt books used from a shop I really like, and several books were digital online items during the Christmas season. Obi Kaufmann’s California Field Atlas is one I’ve wanted since seeing it first released, and I finally picked up a copy. It led me to the Law’s Nature Journaling. Now, I can’t draw. I doodle geometric patterns from time to time, a la Paul Klee. But anything that resembles an actual thing, it’s all wrong. That being said, I thought that I would give it a try. I’ve made a few hikes out through some parks nearby, and started taking photographs and labelling plants for future attempts at watercoloring. We’ll see what happens.

And that’s about it for this. I recommend Rothfuss, Ferriss, Sinek, Muir and Watts highly, if you’re interested in those topics (fantasy, business, nature, and buddhism). Really, nothing up there was something I had to just set down. I fully intend to complete all unfinished books on this list.

Also, gifts of books were made this Christmas, and friends received copies of 4-Hour Workweek, The Jaws Log, and You are doing a Freaking Great Job. I received the Dark Horse Comics book on Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion.

I’ll let you know what I read this month sometime in February. Here we go, 2019!