Stress-free productivity does exist

Sir John Whitmore, British racing driver and author of the classic book Coaching For Performance, used to say that if you know the basic principles of what he called coaching, you can not only help others reach their goals, but also apply them to any aspect of your life to improve constantly your own performance and, for that matter, the obtained results.

In forums regarding personal productivity, GTD, and mainly, personal management apps, I always find quite a big percentage of people who are really worried about questions regarding speed. Why do I need to double click, when I could just click once? why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for every operation in the app? why does it take a few minutes to perform a specific process instead of just seconds? etc.

Imagine that after a crazy urge to gamble all your life savings you enter into a casino. You have in front of you a line of slot machines. To be capable of becoming a millionaire you should play the one that has the highest probability of winning, but obviously, you don’t know which one is the right one. So you need to try all of them an indefinite number of times to determine which one’s better. If you play too much in each slot you can end up wasting all your money in losing machines. If you decide to stay in one that seems the one after a few tries, but it isn’t, you’ll end up losing all your money to it.

Writing a paper is often imagined as a burden that no one likes, but has to carry on. Though, don’t be so critical about the way you perceive writing. It doesn’t matter what kind of paper you are dealing with. Every task is a new experience and new skills to master. No knowledge of that kind will be useless. The single thing you have to do is to concentrate on the bright sides of writing activity.

What’s the life of a modern man or woman like? George Carlin said it well: “A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond.”