The Productivity Dork’s Guide to Murdering Your Free Time

Part of being able to produce a large amount of output is being able to use the little blocks of time that show up, often unexpectedly. This is a relatively elementary principle among efficiency dorks, honestly – but it’s also a good habit for creative folks to get into, I think, because it allows you to incrementally move things forward without requiring that you be at your favorite writing table with your favorite fountain pen drinking your favorite German white wine with a block of 12 uninterrupted hours in front of you.

For instance, the other night I was tasked with retrieving dinner for my wife and I at the local Chipotle eatery. Being the big techie doofus I am, I naturally placed my order from the back of the line using their iPhone app right before walking right past all the luddites to the register, where I announced that I was ready to pick up the electronic order I’d placed about 30 seconds before. They didn’t look it, but I know they were impressed.

Do Short Thinking

Anyway, this left me with some time to kill while they threw our meal together. I parked it at one of the two-top tables near the counter and pulled out my trusty notebook. I knew I’d have between five and ten minutes to kill before our grub was ready, which is more than enough time to knock out any of the following actual, not-made-up tasks I had been meaning to get to:

• Outline or very roughly draft a blog post
• Make a quick list of the core database tables I’d need for an upcoming project
• Brainstorm some fun things I could do with my son

All of those things would have been easy to complete within the allotted time and none of them required anything more than the pen and paper I had with me. As you can see from the image below, I went with the first option (which is how this post was born – click the image to embiggen):

Brogan talks a great deal about writing when you have the time, even if it’s short and uncomfortable. That was another driver behind this – I knew I wouldn’t bang out an entire post in my tiny notebook in 10 minutes waiting for a take-out order, but I could at least get started.

Stupid Work and Smart Listening

While I generally think “multitasking” is a bunch of horse shit (since you’re not actively doing more than one thing at once – sorry), this is one grey area for me that I like to call “stupid work and smart listening”. The basic idea is that you can be doing mindless work like cleaning dishes or arranging matches while listening to something interesting. I look forward to doing this type of work because it generally means I get to spend some quality time listening to my favorite podcasts or enjoying a new audiobook. Hint: long solo drives are awesome for this.

Some of my go-to’s for great audio content:

• The Minimal Mac podcast (my newest favorite)
• The excellent 5by5 podcast network (especially The Pipeline, Build and Analyze, The Talk Show and Hypercritical)
• Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio from Copyblogger
• My Audible Gold Account
• The archives of the now-defunct Stack Overflow podcast.

Grab any of these gems and shove them onto your phone/music player for the next time you have to collate your HOA newsletter – you’ll want to send me a fruitcake (but don’t – thanks though).

Empty Your Head

Yet another concept boosted obviously from the GTD folk, but just writing down what you’re thinking about is a fab way to plow through a few spare minutes waiting for somebody to hand you something over a counter. This may not be incredibly beneficial if you don’t have some sane way of tracking all the crap you have to do, but worst case, you might end up having a brilliant idea you wouldn’t have otherwise had because of all the other shit clanging around in your head.

The big takeaway here is that you should always have something to write with and something to listen to. You already know about my weirdo notebook thing, but I’ve also recently gotten in the habit of carrying my iPhone headset with me all the time just in case. It doesn’t get a ton of action, but every now and again I’ll get to spend an extra 10-15 minutes with Dan Benjamin or Brian Clark.

Whether you’ve got 10 minutes to wait at the taxidermist or three hours at the DMV, see if you can’t make or consume something awesome.

Photo by asdf