This piece originally appeared as part of “The Human In The Machine”, a publication about productivity. Published on @superyesmore, by @alexduloz. Many thanks to Alex for inviting me to be part of such an amazing project.
The clock snaps to 2:17am on an early Wednesday morning. The room is silent yet I find myself suddenly awake staring at the ceiling. As I rollover I find myself eye to eye with a set of identical twins. Flashes of identical twins might evoke memories of the classic film The Shining, yet this is a common occurrence in our house.
“Daddddd, what are you doing?”" says Isabella.
“Is the moon still out Dad?”" says Evelyn.
So begins another productive day.
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According to articles sent to me by alleged friends and the too often common banter on the bulletin boards of the internet, I suffer a great disadvantage to my ability to be productive. The first disadvantage I’m told is that I have children, three little girls ages eleven, five and five. The second disadvantage is truly devastating in that I continue to be unable to defy time as I fade into the sunset of my late 30’s to nearly 40 years of age.
Such claims always amuse me; without fail they come with a note along the lines of “you must be concerned!”, the overuse of the exclamation mark rolling Twain in his grave.
The notion that these so called disadvantages result in an inevitable unproductive existence is a fiction defined by those terrified that a person can be productive in the face of what appears to be complicated circumstance. The grand secret is neither grand nor a secret; my children and my age do not harm but rather inform and shape the way I approach any given day.
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The focus on productivity and how people work intrigues me. You run into the topic in all kinds of places; from Franklin’s autobiography to macroeconomics studies to the classic software efficiency and productivity paradox. Twitter overflows with productivity quotes, Facebook with images of those quotes, and the arm chair productivity philosophies of a thousand YouTube videos.
Yet my intrigue into this wide spanning topic fails to shift my personal definition. I consider productivity to be something usable, derived from trial and tribulations tempered by people and technology. Productivity is deeply personal. Hemingway was quoted as saying the best writing comes when you’re in love; I find a similar theme with productivity.
My children have helped me become more productive. My love for them, seeing their creativity expressed in a Lego explosion caused by a dinosaur riding Rainbow Dash, doesn’t result in some great loss of productive time. Rather that time is well spent drifting into imagination that only children can bring out, an endless ocean of creativity with little to no constraint.
You can’t be productive with kids and have a professional life you say Justin.
The last five years alone would beg to differ. I give more talks, lead and participate in more organizations, and contribute more to open source than I did in my 20’s. This wasn’t because I decided that implementing the latest productivity craze was going to allow me to be everywhere. As I’ve gotten older, my process has been more refined to work within the constraints of daily responsibilities but the overarching process is still the same. I define goals that are important to me, important to helping my children, my wife, my professional existence and my community. Those goals often require tradeoffs and I accept them, and then I move forward with steps of varying sizes to complete, leading to what you might well call productivity.
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The technology to make my goals into productive output is terribly complicated. I require heavy investment in paper and writing instruments, coffee and morning silence. If all is going well, two of those things are reasonably in order on any given day.
My heavy investment in paper and writing tools is little more than whichever notebook or pen is within reach. They are inexpensive items, filled with differing blocks, arrows and scribbles decipherable by only the most patient linguist.
As my oldest daughter Allison told me last week “I think our chickens write clearer than you do, Dad.”
Coffee and a quiet morning allow me to collect my thoughts and place into order a given set of goals for the day. A quiet morning is of course relative; the kids running around looking for misplaced shoes and books before school as the dogs give chase while the chickens roost outside is anything but quiet. This is little more than an average Tuesday.
This of course isn’t to say that technology doesn’t play a role in the course of my day. Shared calendars for my wife and I keep us in sync, tickets and specifications define the code that needs to be written, and a soft chime of a calendar invite reminds me to head to a meeting over the wordless film scores that I play as I work. I continue to fill notebooks and scraps of paper with thoughts and notes as the day proceeds.
The process is simple and not complicated. As Chekhov had written near the end of the 19th century, the least possible number of movements over some definite action is grace.
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You can be productive, children, relative age, and the voices of the internet be damned. Can you be productive doing exactly what I do? I can’t claim that the way I do things is magical. There are imperfections on any given day, things that fail or don’t go according to plan. Life happens. Avoiding life is energy wasted and happiness lost.
Write some notes about where you want to go about what works for you. Take the first step, any small step, and just start moving. Productivity tends to follow even the smallest action.
As for me, I’m going to pour myself a cup of coffee. I’m going to kiss my wife and tell her I love her. I’m going to play with my kids and listen to their stories. Those are good goals for today. If it’s the only thing I get done, then I’ll feel productive.