Experience has taught me that there's a significant problem attached to being the kind of person who gets excited by productivity systems - to-do lists, time management techniques, personal organisers, expensive notebooks and the like. Two problems, in fact, if you count the one about being ostracised by friends and widely regarded as not quite right. But, for now, let's focus on the other one, which is that an obsession with productivity is, of course, anti-productive: a day spent tinkering with your system for getting things done is another day when you didn't get anything done. Faced with books and websites offering a multiplicity of methods for living life more effectively and happily, the temptation is to borrow bits from each until you've built some huge, Byzantine structure with the twin disadvantages of requiring hours of maintenance and being useless.
So I'm pleased to report the arrival, on the web, of a backlash - not from the smug, non-anally-retentive people who gambol spontaneously through life like lambs, but from within the ranks of the nerds themselves. This is a radically stripped-down approach to productivity, championed above all by the blog Zen Habits (zenhabits.net), which focuses not on grand systems but on heuristics. A heuristic, loosely defined, is a rule of thumb: a very simple behavioural guideline, easy to remember and implement, which, when repeated over and over, will end up helping you achieve your aims. The idea is to drop all your finickity systems and just live by one or two of these principles. Here, culled from various blogs, are some of the most promising:
1) Just pick three things. Don't make a list of everything you plan to do each day - that way lies failure. Instead, choose the three most important things you'd like to get done, preferably including one that's meaningful-but-not-urgent (or you risk spending the whole day putting out fires, which is fulfilling only if you're a firefighter). On a good day, you'll do plenty more, but you get to count as a success any day that you do your three.
2) Do the least enjoyable task first. Otherwise known as the eat-the-frog principle: if you eat a live frog each morning, you have the satisfaction of knowing that nothing else that day can possibly be as unpleasant.
3) Think quantity, not quality. If your life is unstructured, or you often worry about whether you're doing things well enough, return to the rigidities of the factory production line. Decide how many hours you'll dedicate each day or each week to a project, and the reverse of Parkinson's Law often kicks in: the work gets done in the time available.
4) Do one thing every day that scares you - a heuristic from Eleanor Roosevelt with good sense behind it, so long as you don't apply it to how you cross the road or under what circumstances you eat puffer fish. Risk-taking is how everything significant gets achieved, but it's much more comfortable to act according to habit than to take risks - ergo, turn risk-taking into a habit.
