(Part 3)
While Shawn Blanc schedules every minute of his day so he can make “make sure I do all the things I want to do”, the investor Marc Andreessen, in a famous 2007 blog post, described the polar opposite:
Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule.
He’s crazy, you say!I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t — this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity. By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day. As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.
Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it! Want to spend all day coding? Do it!
You don’t have to follow either extreme – although if you do and find that it’s working, I’d like to know and learn.
The three important principles here are
Be mindful of the fact that distractions will fill up space that you don’t actively schedule.
Be mindful of what you schedule for yourself.
Set aside time for mindfulness.
For the last, I point you to my twenty-minute daily solitude practice.
Since your life is the sum total of how you spend your time, a reset of the boundaries of your time means a reset of the boundaries of your life. This year is an opportunity to change power balances, almost all of which involve you trading your time. Seize it.
(ends)