Merlin Mann eschews "productivity pr0n" and shifts the focus of 43 Folders | Hacker News Reader

Merlin Mann eschews "productivity pr0n" and shifts the focus of 43 Folders

43folders.com

43 pointspius38 comments

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

That's clearly a stab at Twitter. It'll be interesting to see if Merlin's new focus will cause others to question their Twitter use (and interesting to see if it makes any difference in Twitter's traffic.)

Can anybody on Twitter tell me how Twitter is at all a useful service? I've read all the "Twitter is opt-in goodness" but every time I've used it it just seems like another self-whoring arena.

It depends on who you follow.

I followed Merlin. :-/

Seriously, most of the things people would say there - Merlin and Zeldman especially - were more geared towards humorous than they were towards at all interesting. RSS worked a lot better if I was looking for productive content.

half of my updates on twitter are replies to friends or coworkers, so it's mostly about communication about current projects, discussing news, etc.

and I only follow people that I've met irl

Then I guess it's a matter of different social spheres. Where I am nobody uses Twitter.

depends also on what you do. i work with many companies and many entrepreneurs so that's where twitter is useful. solo-entrepreneurs, consultants, bloggers might also find very it useful.

also, if you go to local programming/hacker meetups, you're bound to find a few who use twitter.

But that's the problem. I dislike most programmer/hacker types. While I think I've something of a hacker personality, I'm far more a critic than I am a hacker. And most hackers are completely unpolished and unfocused. The people who follow my account on Twitter, for instance, are the sorts of people who constantly linkspam. I can't stand that. And I find some people on Twitter funny, but that isn't productive and it's not thought-provoking. Blog posts at least provide some thought: Twitter, I find, rarely does.

Wow that's a lot of generalizations.

What if you just stuck to following friends only? Or is it the chicken/egg problem?

Just because they follow you doesn't mean you have to follow them. :)

An interesting take: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.htm...

Restaurant, music and book recommendations alone have been worth it. Also, it's an easy way to keep in touch with people without much work.

But you're right - if you don't have a solid group of friends using it - it's retarded.

"...those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends."

What's funny is: even though there is a ton of of things to criticize Tim Ferriss for, he chooses something that is actually pretty awesome: outsourcing repetitive, mundane tasks. The point of 4 hour work week is not to lay in a hammock the rest of your life; it's to do what you enjoy. I think Tim's an epic dbag (auto responder? - please.) and even I picked that up.

Sidenote: What the heck are those "digital nomad" ads? Those people sound like they should be writing the sequel to the Secret. Ugh.

What I don't understand is why everyone who praises Ferriss feels compelled to trash him in the same breath -- Merlin and yourself included.

It's like admitting that you like him or his ideas in front of the cool kids means you're some kind of sucker.

"Epic dbag" because he recommends auto-responders . . .?

No. It means that I generally don't like him, but some of his ideas are good. Like Ron Paul, or Michael Bloomberg or Jason Whitlock. That's all it means - nothing more, nothing less.

And because he's polarizing, which he admits and actively tries to do. Also he's a glorified scammy sounding pill pusher who is a master of PR and good at articulating ideas. The pill advertisements for BodyQuick and BrainQuicken, which he owns, are reminiscent of weight loss or penis pills.

Any time you praise someone who's done a lot of good and bad I think it's essential to qualify the parts you like about them.

But I do understand your point and should have elaborated in my original post. In addition, to the autoresponder (btw, what's hilarious is emailing him, getting an autoresponse and then a reply from him a minute later), here's a list of some of the other things he does or actively promotes that I think qualify him as an "epic dbag" or rather take a lot away from his successes, ideas and good qualities:

1. Shady pills making ridiculous claims

2. This is his world record: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9pWKB2D23k

3. He "won" Wired's greatest self promoter of all time

4. Read about the Chinese kick boxing championship

5. Self claimed "Advisor to more than 30 world record holders in professional and Olympic sports (not substantiated)."

6. Self claimed "Cage fighter in Japan, vanquisher of four world champions (MMA)" and a "National Chinese kickboxing champion" (not substantiated)."

7. Self claimed: "Actor on a hit TV series in mainland China and Hong Kong (not substantiated)"

8. Plagiarism? http://www.johnwinsor.com/my_weblog/2008/04/was-another-new....

Ivygate (yeah, I know) has a pretty hilarious write up as well: http://www.ivygateblog.com/2007/05/timothy-ferriss-out-vayne...

http://is.gd/2pjW

Background:

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/48588149/better

http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/08/gears-shifting

I have never understood the concept of a "productivity blog." Assuming a person can be maximally productive each post read would have diminishing returns for the reader.

To put it more simply -- how can following a productivity blog make me more productive?

Actually, a few years ago, after I started implementing a couple of tips I found on Lifehacker and 43 Folders, like Merlin's great "Inbox Zero" talk, I did become a lot more productive. I no longer spent several hours a day on email. I never had to spend time wondering what it was that I had to do "now," because I had a list of ongoing projects in one central location listed by priority.

The only problem is that the marginal returns on such implementations diminish very quickly, so after you've got the big ones down--like breaking down big, intimidating tasks into smaller, doable ones and realizing that you don't need email to auto-update every 5 minutes at every hour of the day--there's not much to gain from reading productivity blogs.

The big problem is that is it easy to get caught up in the huge initial improvements and fail to realize that the time you gain from implementing these marginal improvements is less than the time you already spent on implementing the improvement itself. It's especially bad if you're the typical geek like me and enjoy fiddling with programs and plugins and constantly trying to solve "third order" problems, even when they don't actually do anything in practice. However, exploiting this weakness is exactly what most productivity blogs do to keep their traffic up, so I now have a lot more respect for Merlin, who's actually trying to do something about this problem.

That's what I found too: install 1-2 of those lif-hacks and you are way better off. Fiddle around with more and you just wasted your time. Thanks, though, for the (not very deep but stil profound) analysis.

There are very rapidly diminishing returns, and keeping up with all the new time-saving tricks takes a lot of time!

I have to agree with this. I've found out the BEST advice in GTD was the 2-minute rule. If you try to do everything immediately that can be done in 2 minutes, you'll find out you'll be able to do a lot of things :)

>>more bullshit than a limo full of lifestreamers

Love it!

Oh thank God. This needed to be said so badly. "GTD," "life-hacking" and everything in between are just things to make feel like they're getting stuff done without working. Plan, work, and learn, especially from your mistakes. That is the "life hack."

Just to be clear, the phrase "productivity pr0n" is used in the headline not because it's a direct quotation, but because it succintly describes a lot of what Mann is eliminating.

Judging from his famous blog, he is also creating it. :-)

Hehe, indeed. I think he just woke up one day and got disgusted by the irony of people putting off real work to read his blog.

That's what he's reacting to. He's found that after a certain point tinkering with your productivity system is in itself a form of disguised procrastination (as is reading the Internet, PS).

Also, once his "productivity" blog became so popular, others who smelled easy money started their own blogs that seem to capitalize on keeping people caught up in maya* to draw traffic rather than actually helping them solve their own problems, productivity or otherwise.

* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29#Concepts_an...

Looking forward to part 2!

The thing I take from this is that productivity (in how these modes define it) isn't a end in itself.

A useful hack is one that takes you from one mode of operating to were you want to be.

My God, there's a "43folders"? Are there any blogs not following the awkward-two-digit-number-plus-a-noun naming convention nowadays?

86monocles.com is available, if anyone is interested.

43folders is a name that actually makes sense. The one item of productivity pr0n that is t unique to GTD is the tickler file. An arrangement which consists of 43 folders.

Just for clarification, it's a rotating file with 31 folders for calendar days and 12 for months, 31 + 12 -> 43.

I'm pretty sure it also preceded the great majority of those domains.

Yeah.

The other big one, 37signals, is named after the signals sent into space in search of intelligent life. No clue re: 43things. All the other numbers exist because every other url was taken.

Didn't know that about 37signals. That's cool.

I think the other 43 domains followed 43folders, they succeeded it by a year or three IIRC.

Unique to GTD? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file

Perhaps not.

Mann's twitter stream is full of cock jokes.

To whom are the quotemarks referring?

No one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Signaling_unusua...

Thanks for the link. I stand corrected.

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