productivity / energy
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/10/…
What Accomplished People Do Differently
From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. If they’re organized, this might happen in scheduled chunks. If they’re not - like many – this might happen in all-nighters. But they get it done. Fast and consistently.
I look around at folks not too much older than me – Marc Andreesen, a bunch of economics bloggers, some blogging law profs, etc., and regard myself as pathetically unaccomplished.
However, many of my friends think of me as the “hard charging, get stuff done” type.
I suspect that we’re both right: I push harder at completing tasks than maybe 70% of the population, so I’m technically getting more stuff done than the average person…but I’m still hopelessly outclassed by tons of other people.
And, what with everything under the sun being a power law, those people who are more productive than me, while not amounting to a majority, are still – in total – probably getting 10 or 15 times more done than those who are less productive than me.
The real zinger about these power law thingies is that as you strive to improve, the mountain gets steeper and steeper as you go.
I’m doing my 50-hours-per-week thing, and checking in on things another 1/2 hour a day from home, and being pretty serious about knocking tasks off my list, and not taking vacations…and above me are people who are in the office 70 hours/week, and are twice as productive while they’re there, and – maybe most importantly – are twice as good at picking the right things to work on at all times.
Grrrr.
I’m especially easily set off right now, because I was home sick yesterday, and work piled up in my absence…and I spent the first 8 hours of the day today just getting through email (and writing features for backend code as I went, to make it easier to get the data that I needed to deal with the email).
Grrr.
I’d like to have about 10% more energy, so that I could work 12 hour days M-F.
Of course, the first thing that someone with 10% more energy wants is another 10% more energy…
< sketchy voice > Say… anyone got a supplier for amphetamines ? < /sketchy voice >
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