21 Struggles Only Productivity Nerds Will Understand

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1. You wake up in the morning (at five am naturally) and after thirty press-ups and twenty minutes of meditation, your first question is: “What’s my next action?”

2. You wonder if it’s better to upgrade your phone, tablet, car, house, wife or husband now or wait a few months until there’s a new, faster, shinier release.

3. A thousand unread emails in your inbox isn’t just an inconvenience, an oversight or an unfinished job; it’s a psychic weight that bears down on your soul. You’ll probably burn for it.

4. The only thing more unnerving in life than a full To Do list is a blank To Do list.

5. It’s perfectly acceptable to spend eight hours researching a hack for your computer that will only save you five minutes.

6. Nobody writes in full sentences anymore. That’s what text expansion tools are for. What do you mean you don’t use them?

7. And toilets? They’re for sending emails, reading articles you saved in Pocket and Instapaper, and for updating your status on every social media network at once.

8. If you can’t automate it, then it’s either not worth doing or you’re doing it wrong.

9. Real productivity nerds stopped using Apple products three years ago. Then they went off and released some sort of watch. Life really is cyclical.

10. No, you can’t get real work done on a tablet. That argument was settled years ago, but yes, you still need one. It’s important to keep up.

11. There are a few big questions in life: are we alone in the universe? Why do good things happen to bad people? How many monitors is the sweet spot for getting things done?

12. You’re waiting for the day when it becomes publicly acceptable to build a church of GTD, gather a crowd of converts and start referring to David Allen as ‘The Leader’.

13. You decide to keep a journal but instead of writing an entry, you post on forum after forum asking if it makes more sense to record your thoughts in a Moleskine notebook or in Evernote. Days go by. You don’t shave. You don’t wash. There is only the search for the perfect tool.

14. People who don’t document, quantify and review are people without a system. And those are the worst kinds of people.

15. Pictures and videos of people’s desktops, workspaces and offices are like porn. And you suspect you may have a problem.

16. Meditation is a great way to focus on the natural world, but it’s impossible to do without the right app. It’s out there and you’ll stop everything you’re doing right now to find it.

17. You accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.

18. Your most treasured possession is a Franklin Covey planner (1st edition).

19. When your wife or husband suggests going out for dinner, you ask, “Is it urgent, is it important or is it both?”

20. The world would be a better place if everybody did away with this ridiculous habit of sleeping for eight hours at time and switched to four hour sleep cycles. Estranged families would reunite. Peace would break out. We would return to the Garden of Eden.

21. You spend more time searching for, installing, setting up, updating, forgetting about and removing productivity apps than you do actually using them.