Marc’s Productivity Pr0n.
Just had to jot down a few reactions to Marc Andreessen’s personal productivity guide. Yes, this is a perfect example of his description of Structured Procrastination: I have a bulging inbox to get to (ooo, there’s another pr0n analogy!), but once in a while I allow myself to do something else beforehand as long as I keep it short. Kind of like sneaking in a doggie treat to keep myself going longer on the other stuff.
Structured Procrastination, though, sounds like it’s a new cool invention, when any compulsive multitasker will simply recognize it as something you do when you have an extremely long To Do list and can’t afford any downtime even when you want to procrastinate. If I hate making phone calls, I figure that the least I can do if I’m not making phone calls is to get something else done, like answering email. If I go through my priority list and can’t stand to do any of the top things, I work my way down the list until I find something I can stomach. If I can’t make myself do anything, I try at least to sit there and think something through, like writing a memo in my head that I’ll commit to bytes later.
The whole thing about refusing to schedule any meetings is hilarious. This works only if you’re so important that people will bow to your scheduling will, and you’re the only one they need to meet with. Must be nice. But if you’re like the rest of us poor working schmoes, who are just one cog in the productivity wheel and have to mesh with several other working parts in any given meeting, you don’t have the luxury of making them all bow to your lack of scheduling. And the alternative? “Let’s just meet now”? How well does that work when you get several meeting requests in a day? Isn’t that every bit as disruptive to your “flow” as answering the phone or reading email when it comes in?
Besides, as a manager, one of my big responsibilities is being available to my staff. If they need direction from me, or need me to influence someone else on their behalf, or need information from me, then it’s highly irresponsible of me to make them wait until I feel like talking to them (not to mention just plain rude). They need to plan their days, too.
There’s a much more sensible middle ground. This bit of advice comes from more than one columnist who’s had to help a person with a demanding parent who keeps wanting constant contact. The trick is to schedule regular times with them, so that they know when they can count on talking to you and you can feel better about putting off the demands in between. If you have a regular meeting scheduled, say, once a week, and someone brings you something that you know will take more time than you can afford right then, you can say, “Let’s talk about it at our next meeting.” They won’t get instant gratification, but they know when they can plan on getting it at all.
So block out times when people know they can book you. Or, conversely, block out time for yourself when people know they can’t interrupt you. It lets you have better control of your time without totally dissing everyone else on the planet.
Now, getting to the 3x5 cards. This is a problem I have all the time. My to-do items are in discrete chunks, as are the notes I take. I want to be able to move them around, toss out the ones I don’t need any more, and keep the other ones in sight. I’m reduced to Post-It notes, because those are the only things I can lay out in an overview, carry with me in a notebook, and rearrange at will. I hate flipping through pages of scratched-out lists to find the items that I haven’t gotten to yet; it’s a sure way for me to lose track of them. And rearranging electronic text isn’t as convenient, ergonomically speaking. I haven’t found a better solution yet, and 3x5 index cards seem both like a waste of paper inches (just to write down a phone number, for example) and are just, well, twee. They remind me of junior high school outlines and my college honors dissertation (which never got finished and is still buried in a large envelope somewhere, both the typed manuscript and the juvenile index cards).
The Anti-Todo List just wouldn’t work for me either. If I spent all that time writing down everything I did do, it would cut my actual productivity in half.
I work at a frenetic pace, most days. I don’t have time to leave Pandora running (much as I enjoy it), because it’s just one more noise source that I can’t pay attention to. In the one hour I had off from a training class today, I listened to all my voicemail messages, caught up on my unread email, answered a bit of it, ate lunch, and met with four different people (it’s amazing how many meetings you can pack into fifteen minutes when you don’t let anyone else talk 
).
And yes, now that I’ve taken all this time to compose this blog post, I’ve lost a lot of time that I could have spent doing work. But sometimes I’ve just got to shift gears to get my traction back.
Off I go!
Posted by shrdlu on Friday, June 08, 2007(2) Comments • Permalink •
