First of all, productivity is overrated, I’m just sayin’. Discover this truth and your life will become much richer.

Once you are enlightened, go ahead and read Marc Andreesen’s take on productivity. I love his essay, even though I’m no longer in one those privileged positions of corporate cog-itude. I might make minor amendments to his “keep no schedule” directive (if you work with any other human being who is not inferior to you on the vocational food chain, at least a skeletal schedule is a must), but I have not owned even the simplest of planners since 1993, and the ones I owned I never used. That’s why I stopped buying the stupid things. Today the only things on my google calendar are my route assignments (and that’s only so I can check my pay stub for accuracy), and the occasional freelance appointment. My own rule for over approximately twenty years of graduate school and three disparate careers has been to never put more onto my schedule than I can remember without having to write it down. I’ve never missed an appointment, and my short term memory sucks. I think Andreesen is on to something.

He also makes mention of structured procrastination, of which I am an expert practitioner. I didn’t know what I’d been doing had a name, I simply called it procrastination and thought it a misunderstood virtue. Andreesen points to this essay by John Perry. It made me laugh out loud, so I’m linking to it.

Another beautiful item in the list is strategic incompetence. I’ve always enjoyed thinking that my incompetence was somehow strategic.

Perhaps Andreesen was simply trying to be iconoclastic with his recommendations, but I think he was quite serious and you might give his list a shot. I dare you.

 

I found Andreesen’s essay via Web Worker Daily, through which I also discovered a piece about web friendly franchises. I almost blogged about that yesterday, but everyone who reads this blog already knows about Panera which is the only chain in their list worth mentioning.