Triple Uranus

So, after reading Steve Pavlina's article on how to triple your productivity (Yeah, his eyes are too close together. Yeah, the whole thing smacks of icky self-help Christian nerdliness. But I can't help reading his posts because they are disturbingly accurate), I started taking stock of how much actual work I do. Now, much to my dismay, I discover my eight hours a day largely consists of yacking to people and reading blogs and mail. On Tuesday, for instance, I did Three hours of what I would call productive work. Three Hours!

Now, I suppose that some of the yacking is actually productive - and that some of the blog reading could be described as productive by a skilled lawyer. But the fact remains that I'm not actually producing much for the bulk of my day..

Being the project manager guy who's tracking everybody else's performance, the one key question Fuzzy and I sit down with on a weekly basis is this:
"What are we kidding ourselves about today?"

And now, I'm starting to wonder if it's the whole fact that people don't do anywhere near the eight hours I expect them to. I don't, and I don't think I'm the least productive person on the team. Maybe my whole schedule is a farce...

Anyway, so today I sat down to do eight hours productive work. And in order to do that, I did something I haven't done in ages - I wrote a bunch of code. It was so fun! Truth be told, I'm not the worlds best developer. But man I had a great time. And those eight hours flew by.

(Of course, I neglected a bunch of management responsibilities to do that. But whatever. I still have some tasks on my task list that haven't gone red yet. )