Getting Real About “Productivity”
I just finished reading Getting Real, a book about running a software company, creating a product that people actually use and pay for. 37Signals have been doing it for a while and doing it well, so it makes sense to listen to them.
But that’s not why you called. Or maybe it was. Who knows? What was I saying? Oh, right. Thanks.
There are some central themes to Getting Real that, as the authors point out, can apply to other arenas of life and not just to software development. I’d like to discuss a few of the salient points and how they might apply to how we go about doing all the stuff we need to do.
Stay Lean
One way to do things better is to do fewer things. Simply do less. Start with “No.” Make something stand on the porch for three days to show it’s serious. If it’s still there bugging you, then you open the door. But recognize the hidden costs of anything that you allow into your world. Not only is it demanding your time and attention, but it’s doing so at the expense of other things that also want your time and attention.
Instead, spend some time giving some serious consideration to what it is you actually want to do. The list should be short enough that you could recite it on demand even if you were stinking drunk.
Find your epicenter and build out from there. If the central component of your life is making stuff, then start there and build outward. So what if you end up carrying a camera around like a douche?
Another helpful thing to think about is the things you don’t want to be doing. I don’t want to get sucked into two hours of watching funny videos on Youtube. I don’t want to read the same news story eight times from eight different blogs on the same day. (Haven’t figured out how to solve this one yet.) I don’t want to watch this TV show just because it’s on.
Most importantly, staying lean means you can change without it costing too much. Cost can be measured in time, money, or anything else. If it costs you a lot to make a change you need to make, you’re less likely to do it.
Don’t Do Dead Documents
In Getting Real, this means to forego all the useless documents that “software engineering” tells us we need to produce in order to produce software. (It’s a soul-sucking waste of time, my friends.)
So, what’s unnecessary? Anything that isn’t tied to the actual finished product. What is your product? It’s you. What’s not related to what you want to be doing? Consider its worth and put it on notice if it’s stealing what it’s not been granted.
Forget the lists. You know the things that need your time and attention right now. You can name them. You don’t need anyone or any list telling you what they are. I have a Backpack page for each of my projects as a parking place for stuff I don’t want to waste cycles on remembering, but I don’t need a list of projects. I can name you the projects I have going on right now without batting an eyelash.
I don’t keep lists of next actions even on my project pages. When I set to working on a program, I know where I left off and it takes me less than a minute to think of what needs to happen next. Deciding on your next actions too far in advance will increase the cost of change for you. If you have to re-plan that list of 35 actions each time something changes, you’re incurring a large time overhead.
Forget feature requests. For your life, this means do not keep a Someday list. Throw it out. The things that you really want to do will keep showing up. If every year vacation time comes around and you say, “Gee, I’d really like to go to Italy. Maybe next year,” you don’t need that on a list to remind you.
Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
Break your projects down into tasks that you can do in an hour or two at the most. I have started doing this with my development work and it’s ridiculously rewarding. When I recently saw NSLog() write out the custom URL I had invoked for my app, I was ecstatic. I showed Ann Margaret, who was happy about it but mostly because I was. This was a small victory that made a big difference for me. For now, I’m courageously sucking at being a Mac developer.
This is Raw
I haven’t really proofread this much. I hacked it together in a fit of some emotion I am too tired to name right now. But I think that in this post-GTD, post-Productivity situation, there is room for applying principles like those in Getting Real to the problem of how we effectively do things. I encourage you and the other reader of my blog (See what I did there?!) to read Getting Real or at least skim the TOC and see if you can’t start Getting Real about what you’re doing and what you really want to be doing.
