What’s the deal with all these fucking ‘Productivity’ blogs? How have we come up with an entire caste of productivity gurus, each with their own foolproof 13 step ‘how to get things done’ system? Who, more to the point, would possibly put their faith in some idiot on the internet whose only demonstrable labor is utterly useless blog posts? These people are hardly the Buckminster Fullers of our generation; their only activity is churning out omphaloskeptic1, entirely self-unaware (and poorly written) drivel about how they organize their socks (and, of course, about blogging). I leave out entirely the fact that GTD and its numerous brethren are, as a rule, simplistic, ineffective, and anyway ill-suited to anything but a life whose only meat is wall-to-wall trivia and minutiae.
Except Merlin. He’s cool.
And I mean, Jesus! Who the fuck cares, anyway? Where is the mass of people so fucking dull that they spend their free time pining, “If only I could be more productive! If only someone could provide me with simply daily habits, so I could answer my email faster, and save 3 minutes every time I go to the fucking supermarket!” What waste of human potential feeds this particular industry, whose chief value in life is productivity, who every day refresh their newsfeeds for new ways that their employers can squeeze more work and money out of them, being as they are obviously good for very little else?
I imagine a lot of it comes from the fact that there are so many legions of boring, undeveloped office workers (who nevertheless 15 years ago imagined themselves to be intellectuals, or at least have some talent or flair beyond accounts management), with a hard-on since childhood for technology and no actual interests, who cling desperately to the programming class they took in highschool, or maybe never took at all. Now there is an entire industry devoted to doling out the kind of ‘handy time-savers’ heretofore relegated to the back pages of Reader’s Digest, and these poor saps get to pretend that they are really ‘hacks’. They’re not ‘hacks’. They’re tupperware party fodder. You do not become a programmer, or an engineer, by making more efficient use of your toothpaste tube any more than you become a writer or a great intellectual light (or close personal friend of that eternal hack, Scoble), by demonstrating that all the wisdom you’ve accumulated in life can be summed up in 6 handy tips and posted to the 3rd spot, for 6 hours, on del.icio.us.
- Zenhabits, which I had the good fortune to get linked to by Reddit, has actually reached such levels of content-free living that they have begun an extensive series of interviews with other productivity bloggers.↩
45 Comments
You sound like a miserable prick.
Amen, brother. 13, or 6 or 3 steps are for losers …. just see “Reach Your Goals More Easily Using One Simple Step”
Agreed. And there are also way too many stupid ass tutorials for doing basic shit in linux or css. How to change your Ubuntu desktop wallpaper in 15 easy steps OMG!
This post deserves this song:
http://bahbeck.vox.com/library/audio/6a00cd978cc23af9cc00d4141cde4e685e.html
I’m so unproductive it HURTS. AHHHH THE PAIIIN
Well, I was not going to take this blog seriously but now that you have use the F- word liberally, I am forced to. Thank you.
(not that I have anything against the F-word..whatever that means).
Finally a blog post that makes some sense :P Keep up the bitching it saves me hours a day from doing it myself.
Thank you. I’ve been wondering why all the GTD crap out there was bugging me, but it hasn’t clicked until I read your post today. As if relaxing and enjoying life at a slow, easy pace makes one less of a person. Quite the contrary.
only drones worry about productivity
procrastination is where it’s at, baby
It’s called trolling. When you have nothing left to do with your life, you just start picking on the other guys that you see, the picking itself giving you a brand new identity and motivation. This is all there is behind this post. I don’t know the person and I’m not judging him, I onlly consider his attitude.
Although I haven’t had the honour to be quoted in this ratholing post, I consider myself a GTD’er. Yes, I am a manager. Yes, I own my own company, which hapens to be internet related. Yes I have employees but I never teached them GTD by brute force. Only if they asked me to. And yes, wining a 3 minutes pack at the supermarket can be extremely important for me, as I consider those 3 minutes a win for my family time. And yes, my business benefits from the last 7 months of GTD. “My miserable blog” is only making 200 feed readers a day, but my network of websites (which are not even in English, oh, blasphemy!) is making a good deal of 1.000.000 (one milion) unique visitors each month. And I’m not doing porn. Although, if I had to do this, I would made it with GTD. It helps even here my friend ;-)
All bitching about problems and no solutions. being cynical doesn’t make you smart. I dare you to give a damn.
Nicely done.. sometimes instead of shaving minutes off this or that task, perhaps people can ponder whether its worth doing altogether..
The fixation with the clock and calendar is pervasive..
Well, you certainly did manage to say “fuck” a lot. So you’ve got that going for you.
Tip: to keep your superscripts and subscripts from screwing up your line spacing, set the line-height attribute of the sub/superscript to zero in your stylesheet.
fuck yeah…
Here Here!
And to healthbolt: he did give a solution, well, demonstrated that one isn’t necessary.
The solution is that it’s not that important to eek a tiny bit more productivity out of your life using moronic and overly simplistic sets of steps. And such extra productivity isn’t gonna make you a better programmer/writer/burger flipper.
-dr
Productivity is being yourself.
Amen! It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who thinks this current trend of “work harder and faster and be HAPPY about it!” is a bunch of bullshit.
Dude, you’re patehtic… you use a word like omphaloskeptic, it’s not even in my encarta dictionary. Pretentious asshole.
Been thinking along similar lines recently: Check out this post:
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/a-productivity-filled-day/
It’s along the same lines without all the vitriol.
And yes, wining a 3 minutes pack at the supermarket can be extremely important for me, as I consider those 3 minutes a win for my family time.
If you consider 3 extra minutes a “win for your family time” then you have some serious problems regarding your family time!
All bitching about problems and no solutions.
A solution to what? He showed that the problem is NON-existent. In fact, he argues that the so-called “solution” (GTD) is what constitutes the real problem.
Props man, I fucking hate whiney middle-aged people who complain that their lives suck.
Hey, glad you like my blog, Zen Habits. :)
Seriously though, if you aren’t interested in it, why read it? Just move on to something that is more useful/interesting to you.
The truth is, many people are interested in this stuff (including myself), which is why I write about it. I don’t think there’s one answer for everyone, though, and I’ve tried to make that clear on my site.
It’s great to hear an alternative viewpoint, though, and I’m sure it felt good to get all of that off your chest. Thanks for sharing.
Man, I couldn’t agree with you more. What a superbly executed rant. If I see another top 10 list I’m going to cry, which of course means I’m going to be very, very depressed for a very, very long time. There is a voluminous amount of trash out there in blog land.
This is the most refreshing thing I’ve read on the internet in my whole life. Thank you.
Fuckin A, mate.
I’ve had the domain name gtdplusplus.com reg’d and setup for a while now.
Funy Thing - I’ve been too busy doing stuff to actually blog on it for a while now.
I’ve often thought all these GTD bloggers should have a post/page/something explaining how much they actually do get done & why we should believe they are really so productive.
Or is it the case of Robert Kiyosaki?
The real $$$ is to be made in telling people how to GTD, not actually getting things done yourself (besides blog posts). :)
Beautiful typesetting! Although the courier in this box makes me sad.
Your web page is very boring in appearance.
Hey, thanks for the link to LifeReboot, that one slipped under my radar ;-)
Frank, thanks for the tip. That had been bugging me for months. Everyone else: glad you like the fonts.
Props man, I fucking hate whiney middle-aged people who complain that their lives suck.
So you’re whining about how terrible it is that other people whine?
For what it’s worth, for me the whole “productivity” thing isn’t a way to get more work done - it’s how to get the work I have to do done quicker and more efficiently so I can stop f*cking working. When I don’t have to worry if I forgot to do something or where I put that file or when this project needs to be done I can go home, sit down, and relax. Some people are workaholics, I’m just an extremely efficient lazy person. :-)
Thank you for posting this.
I agree.
Productivity is not the Holy Grail. There is much more to life, and, sadly, many of those who produce to live rarely get to the living part. Their crusade of production ruins the capacity to simply enjoy life, so once they reap the benefits of their hard work they can’t even enjoy it.
Amen brother- I’m stupidly rich and I fuck around more then anyone I know.
I understand where you’re coming from - fads are irksome.
But have you considered that many people pursue GTD not because they want to be more productive, but because the pressures life puts on them demand that they be more productive, or their job/family suffers? Someone whose job is so demanding, that their life is full of anxiety and they’re unable to complete all their tasks, and more organization alleviates these problems? It’s not a myth - it happened to me.
Holy crap, have a cry why don’t you? If you don’t like the look of an article, don’t open it! Complaining about too many sites on the web is like… well there isn’t even a comparison to that.
Youre just as bad as you say they are, grow up.
You should also make a rant about all the websites that offer you to be part of the community, as Trendirama, our project. Unfortunately, when everyone is doing something similar, even the ones who really make it for a good reason are put in the same box: “oh, no, another community” “someone else that wants me to sign out” “I have enough friends already, thank you!” “no, thank you, I don’t want to invite my friends!”
I am at the other end now, but I would put most social networking communities in the same box as GTD blogs. “People who liked this also liked…” god!, when you’ve seen it enough times, you just feel like asking “and who asked you what others liked? who cares what others liked?” But the answer, and why these systems work, is because many of us seem to have no life out of the internet! Or infinite times in our hands. Maybe that’s why people “end up” in the get things done blogs. The problem is that in those blogs now they spend the time they used to spend somewhere else, but at least they feel better about it, I guess…;)
About the lists that bloggers do, it is all a well documented technique to be featured in Digg and similar websites. All these “make money online” “bring more traffic to your blog” gurus alway say: “make it as a list”. And so, there you are, everyone doing it…
quite irritating and boring.
(and I have even done one myself in my blog, to see what’s all about, so I can’t point to anyone!Conclusion: writing in lists is antinatural anyway, and a technique geared to people with the attention span of a drunk mosquito)
As long as the internet is fed and read by…let’s say…”not so smart people”, this is what we’ll have for still some time ahead…fasten your seatbelt and close your eyes!
Regards
Javier, Founder
Trendirama.com
“What’s the deal with all these fucking ‘Productivity’ blogs?”
Funny that you don’t get it. It’s a religion (of sorts). Serving the same social function that western religions have served for millenia.
Religions themselves aren’t that bad, it’s the problem they’re supposed to solve (and don’t), that needs to be addressed: that we are small cogs in the corporate scheme.
These productivity gurus feed on our need to feel good about ourselves.
I have more empty drivel like this on my self-hacking blog.
Productivity is about doing what you want to be doing in life, and about feeling good doing it.
I wonder if David Allen, founder of GTD, blog’s?
Well, he used to. Here’s his last one, posted a year ago, on why he stopped blogging:
http://www.davidco.com/blogs/david/
Dude, you are awesome. Thanks for saying what needed to be said, and saying it so well. By the way, the site is gorgeous (can’t believe someone said it is boring in appearance?!)
I like Lifehacker, but I’ve got to agree with this. These theories are so banal as to be humorous (http://lifehacker.com/software/procrastination-buster/do-your-toughest-task-first-256975.php#viewcomments)
or just downright fascistic:
“Currently I am using My Life Organized and have >1600 tasks over a couple hundred projects that have to be completed over the next 5 years.” (from http://lifehacker.com/software/lists/why-paper-to+do-lists-work-better-254290.php#viewcomments)
BTW this site looks great, Jon.
“You sound like a miserable prick.”
Nice.
Of/c every trend has its mediocre exponents, but the shift from products to services does neccessitate a shift in mindset. Working on an assembly line probably doesn’t call for a weekly review the same way that being a freelance electronic hobo does. The point of GTD is actually to free up not just “3 min. at the supermarket” but to allow you to dawdle at the greenmarket enjoyably knowing that you have some handle on the rest of your life.
Excuse me, I have to go polish my space pen now…!
Why is it inordinately hard to find yourself in the septuagint and vulgate but not to share about the congruence between, for example? This channel is pubicly logged so don’t mention where you’ve hidden the bodies.
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