Procrastination Enhancement Tools
April 13, 2005
I first got caught up in the world of "productivity tools" in the summer of 2004, when my friend
Brian Kerr showed me a little program he had installed on his iBook that allowed him to launch programs, open files, and even route things to and from the terminal with a few keypresses. This was, of course,
Quicksilver. I was pretty impressed, but at the time I was using a beater Dell laptop, and even an Apple ][ was out of my pricerange. The ease with which he bounced from task to task with that little white laptop stuck with me, though, and QS hovered on fringes of my radar for some time after that.
Before long, I was using a Mac at work, and spending a lot of time in front of my PC at home, working on personal writing projects. First came Quicksilver, and then the natural progression led to Merlin Mann's productivity uber-warehaus
43 Folders. It's a clearinghouse of information related to productivity, the "mental overclocking" we the internet know as "life hacking" , and "gee-whiz, isn't OS X great?"-related tidbits. I was caught up in the world of organization, motivation, and efficiency. Much like Mr. Mann, I love systems, organizational schemata, cute little stacks of data, and shortcuts. Unlike Mr. Mann (so I assume), sometimes I feel I don't have enough raw data to process with it all - it's like I've found an elaborate sock-sorting machine, in spite of the fact that almost all my socks are black.
I began to fall into the trap of convincing myself that what I was doing was "thinking" and "accomplishing" when a large amount of my activity centered on processing and reorganizing data that really didn't need any more processing and organizing. I was restless, and needed to settle that restlessness by doing something. Rather than doing something productive, though, I was spending a lot of time refining and preparing notes. Eventually, I realized what was going on and refocused, moving to a workflow in which my tools enhanced my efforts instead of replacing them. That said, I still notice myself slipping a bit in the wrong direction from time-to-time, and I imagine it's not a problem unique to me.
In short, these "productivity tools" can turn into a system where we satisfy our drive to do something without
anything actually getting done. What's the solution? I'm not sure - but I don't think it's productivity tool management tools - maybe a mix of "know thyself" and "thy self control"?
ms yarn commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Dan!There is a lot to be said on some stuff that you only touched on tangentially--like the inability to remain still, the necessity to be busy while not actually getting anything done. El husbando is reading Ellul, and he has a TON to say on this, also I recommend Henri Nouwen (Reaching Out), for an insightful analysis into that problem.