{"id":875,"date":"2016-10-11T12:52:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T16:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=875"},"modified":"2016-10-05T12:54:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-05T16:54:14","slug":"the-two-productivity-gurus-you-meet-in-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2016\/10\/the-two-productivity-gurus-you-meet-in-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"The Two Productivity Gurus You Meet in Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good Buddy AMEM<\/a> writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

You ever write a piece on productivity?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To which I reply:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Sorta!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve written scads of advice things to folks who’ve emailed me expressing interest in freelance editing\/copywriting, but nothing sort of generically about productivity in the “GTD<\/a>” sense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, when it comes to that, two pieces of advice jump to mind.\u00a0 The first is something a rabbi said during High Holidays<\/a> services once, which amounted to “God doesn’t really give a shit about something you did one time; it’s when you repeat things over and over again that God takes notice<\/b>.”\u00a0 The rabbi was talking about sin, basically advising against beating yourself up over a single fuck-up.\u00a0 <\/span>Instead, make good and move on to Do Good Things (which may or may not square you with any Magickal Sky Fairy, but is certainly a helluva lot more socially productive).\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

But this position\u2014that the thing you do one time isn’t what you are\u2014goes for everything, good and bad:\u00a0 You aren’t a thief just because you stole something one time, and you aren’t a writer just because you wrote and sold one good thing.\u00a0 <\/span>The last story\/book\/article\/brochure does almost exactly jack-shit to help you write and sell the next one.\u00a0 You are a writer because you write every day.\u00a0 So, decide on the thing you want to be, and be that thing for at least a little while every day.<\/span><\/p>\n

This sounds sorta stupid\u2014or, at best, equal parts stupid and profound, like the Wise Men of Chelm<\/a>\u2014but still, every story I’ve sold in the last, I dunno, eight-ish years has been mostly written 25 minutes at a time weekday mornings while children slept.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other piece of advice is straight from Ramit Sethi<\/a>, who is sort of a huckster and sort of dead-on about most of what he says (albeit in a huckstery life-coach-ish way).\u00a0 Anyway, one one his big pieces of advice (at least a few years ago, when I was more actively following him) was to stop saying “I don’t have time for X<\/b>.”\u00a0 All of us are busy and all of us blow precious minutes and hours dicking around on Facebook and leafing through shitty magazines and watching crap we don’t care about on YouTube and whatever.\u00a0 We have time for it.\u00a0 You can get up 25 minutes early every morning and write stories and novels 25 minutes at a time.\u00a0 You can get in shape\u2014great shape, really\u201425 minutes at a time.\u00a0 You can learn about retirement savings or knitting or how to eat all vegan 25 minutes at a time.\u00a0 We use time as an excuse, because we don’t really\u2014in our hearts\u2014give a shit about the things we say we want. Just like TLC warns, we are scrubs “always talking about what we want \/ then we sit on our broke ass<\/a>”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n