More of the Same, but Better

I’ve been giving some thought to ubermensch Merlin Mann’s recent manifesto for change on his site 43 Folders (and begun on his personal site).  It’s caused me to re-examine my approach to my own blog, where I have and haven’t been true to my aims.  Clearly this is a more lonely exercise with far smaller consequences than for a mega-blogger such as Merlin, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

He wants his blog to be “a focused resource for people who do work that they love and make things that matter to them”.  So, favourite ways of fiddling with your GTD setup are out it would seem.

He bemoans the spread of productivity blogs offering endless lists of contextless tips and hacks that the author may or may not know to work in reality.  In creating this blog and its now-departed predecessor, being yet another voice in that crowded, windowless room was squarely in my crosshairs.  But I shifted my position to account for two things: I didn’t have too many useful tricks to share, and trying to gloss over that by making them up made me feel deeply uncomfortable.  By the way, it also made me wonder, if I was making it up, what was to stop everyone else?  We’d end up with a closed productivity community gradually eating its own tail.  I think Merlin might think that’s what we’ve already got.

To distinguish between what’s in and what’s out, I love this quote:

So, we’re going to talk about what goes in the notebook; not the fact that it’s pretty and has a little bookmark. Then I want you to leave here.

Wow.  As Merlin might say, inspirado.  How many hours have I spent, however enjoyably, reading posts on how to set up my Moleskine notebook to contain my entire, beloved GTD system?  And what do I have now?  A Moleskine that I actually, you know, use just to write shit down.

Surveying the horizon

My aim for this blog was to inhabit some small fold in the bedcovers between the familiar warm bed of theoretical productivity tips and the harsh reality of a real world that doesn’t care what your favourite blog said about quitting meetings or firing your boss.  A trip to the about page will tell you that.

Yet on occasion I have ventured onto the rocks, lulled by the siren calls of ‘14 ways to put your pants on faster’.  I guess somehow I wanted adulation and the bright lights.  But the majority of posts around here contain more questions than answers, more musings than lists, my own gentle perambulations around the byways of little things that pique my interest.

As a blogger it’s easy to have clear goals: n hits.  x subscribers.  Six-figure ad revenue.  Even I, on my own very modest scale, have goals of the first two kinds.  They are yardsticks of success, appealing in that they are quantifiable.  You’re either succeeding or you’re not.  You’re either making progress or your not.

But if you’re a peddler of productivity pr0n your first duty, in my humble view, is to those you seek to guide and advise.  Even if the person you’re really speaking to is yourself.  It doesn’t matter how many comments you get from people trying to promote their own blogs.  And it doesn’t matter that you can’t get Google to draw you a wizzo graph of how successful you’ve been.

So, for now at least, pantsonfaster.com is happy to continue tooling along in the shallows.  If we make it big it should be for the right reasons and, hell, we’ll enjoy the ride.  But that’s not the endgame.  It’s the satisfaction in the creation that matters and keeps me coming back for more.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk

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