Not Getting Things Done: Are You Wasting Enough Time?
We all want to be more productive. Get more done. Outperform others. Be the best version of ourselves we can be. But what if that’s all just bullshit?
Every other blog you read seems to be about being more effective or ‘Getting Things Done’… Piles of guru books, apps that block your social media so you can be more productive (which do not help if you have a guitar next to your desk — just saying)… I saw an ad once for an app that ‘defragments’ your calendar, automatically rescheduling all your meetings in a ‘more effective’ way.
Leaving other people’s feelings aside (how would you feel if a bot rescheduled your 10 AM meeting to 1:34 PM, because that makes one attendant ‘more effective’?), it’s all part of the religion that says you have to get the optimaximaltopmost out of every day, every minute, every second. To be the best you you can be.
Plenty of time, until there isn’t
And I participate in this dumbness. I make lists, puzzle over priorities and, before the pandemic abolished commuting (and traffic jams, for that matter), got up at 5:30 to beat the traffic…
But I know that’s not the real me. Because, deep within me, there is a Great Procrastinator. How I know this? The Authorities sent me a letter. It said I had three months to renew my driver’s license. Three months. That’s plenty of time. So I left the letter on my desk for a while. And then for another while… Well, you see where this is going: when I finally took action, I found out my new license wouldn’t arrive in time, leaving me unlicensed for at least a day.
Important client session, of course…
This was, of course, a day that had an important session planned with a client (it was 2019 and Corona was still a yellowish, remotely beer-like beverage). Working from home was not an option. It was, coincidentally, also the day my youngest was leaving for school camp. It was also extremely hot. Too hot to ride a bicycle carrying a 12 year old and a suitcase. But that is what I did.
“Why aren’t we taking the car, Daddy?”
Yes, why indeed.
For those of you wondering: where I live, the consequences of causing a car accident while not in the possession of a valid license are quite severe. Life-changingly, bankruptingly, spend-the-next-5-years-in-court severe. So no, I wasn’t risking it.
With Junior safe on the bus, I cycled to the train station, uncomfortably sweating in my jacket and tie. At this point I realized that I was never going to catch my train…
A high performer’s nightmare
This would be the moment the personal effectiveness aficionado, the high-performing best-you-can-be professional, would start to panic and find ways to make up for the time loss. You know, the laptop-and-phone people you see on the train, making calls and typing at the same time. And, like I said, normally that would be me. I don’t know if it was the heat or something else, but that day, it wasn’t.
Am I going to be in time for my session? Yes. I have literally hours to get to the office. Are there any other deadlines that day? No.
So I got some coffee, put my phone away and decided to just enjoy the ride. Which was about to get a little longer than I anticipated…
Because, of course, I missed my connecting bus. So I got a share bike and asked Google Maps to guide me to the office.
It didn’t.
Despite all its data and machine learning power, Google has not yet figured out how to guide cyclists through the backstreets of small, globally unimportant European nations. Pocketing my phone once more, I figured the day couldn’t get any more inefficient than it already was and proceeded to get completely lost.
Eventually, I found the office where my team, used to seeing me come in at 7, had a good laugh at my story and my red, sweaty face.
Starter, main course and coffee
When the work day, or what was left of it, was done, I got back on my rental bike, got hot and lost all over again but eventually found my train and made it to my dinner appointment with an old friend. Over two courses of Indian food in a busy market square, he pitched me a startup idea and we decided to follow up on it, while ordering another round of beers and then coffee.
Around 11PM, I got on my bike again and whizzed back home through the cooling summer air to my house in the woods, meeting no one but a million insects and the setting sun over the river.
High cost, low yield. Or was it?
All in all, it had been an incredibly inefficient day, yielding high travel expenses for only two billable hours. But it didn’t feel useless at all…
I got to see my kid off to school camp.
I got to be outside, instead of in an office, on one of the most beautiful days of that summer.
I had dinner with an old friend.
I saw the sun set over the beautiful IJssel river.
And yes, the session with the client was also very good.
What if…
‘What if,’ I said to myself. ‘What if the best version of me is the version that spends a summer morning aimlessly cycling through a strange city, not worrying about time and place too much? What if sitting on a restaurant terrace discussing work, life and crazy startup ideas is the goal and the rest, the billable work, is just a means of enabling us to do so? Maybe, the product I actually produce is me, looking at the sunset from the old iron bridge that connects my little town in the woods to the rest of the world.
There will never be an app for that.
