In About a Boy, by Nick Hornby, the pro/antagonist Will divides his listless life into units of time. Hours.
- 1 unit: game shows on “telly
- 1 unit: lunch
- 2 units: “exercise” at the pub
Will is worthless, mostly, but the theory holds and is really interesting: you really can divide your life into units of time. For me, the list currently looks like this, not in chronological order:
- 9 units: work (8-5 or 9-6ish)
- 6-7 units: sleep
- 1 unit: morning ritual
- 1 unit: dinner
- 1 unit: breakfast and lunch (combined)
- 1 unit: commute (combined)
This leaves me with 4 hours per day. To do everything else. This realization, plus my recent embrace of the GTD philosophy, has led those 5 hours to be, usually, damned productive, and to relish the weekends. One of the distinguishing features of the GTD system for me is that a project is anything that requires more than one step to get done, and that those projects must be listed and constantly appraised and updated. A simple maneuver, but powerful.
The flipside of this is, of course, the fatigue factor. I worked a 12-hour day yesterday: 8:15-8:15. When I got back to Providence at nearly 9PM, the last thing I felt like doing was checking my projects lists to see if there were next actions I could plausibly do and check off. I just wanted a passable Cabernet, reheated pizza, and sleep. To hell with productivity.
I’m fascinated by eminently productive people (my Uncle Barry, for instance, or L Boogy at OSU): what, at a fundamental level, do they do differently than I? The thought has occured, more than once, that perhaps all this GTD system does is help the rest of humanity approximate the native productivity of these exemplars.
Then again, at the end of the day, this is all b.s. The luxury I and we currently enjoy is hard to picture as being on the same planet as someplace like Bihar, India. I wonder how the units of time breaks down on average there?
- 18 units: hungry
- 4 units: run from bandits…
The list goes on. We are spoiled and ignorant here. It’s seductive to think that everything is alright right now. Sure, there’s the spectre of terrorism, shocking healthcare costs, rising oil prices, but when you’re sitting in comfy sprawl, watching a mind-blowing DVD, eating good food, it’s so easy to just wash it all away, even for someone who actually cares about the rest of the world like me.
Thomas Jefferson once said that “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” We are not paying that price for what we have right now. Part of me thinks that we don’t even know how, and an even stronger part of me thinks we wouldn’t even know why it was incumbent upon us to do so.