If you are excited about business travel, thinking it’s a free ticket to see the world, you should stop reading now. But if you are having trouble maintaining your personal life in the face of tons of travel, these tips from a cynical traveler will make life easier for you.

1. Stick with your priorities. When people travel to another city, why do they throw out their to do list for sightseeing in random museums? If you have on your top three things you want in life: go to the gym, stay in touch with friends, read a book a week, then sightseeing is not on the list. You don’t need to do it when you travel. You need to stick to your priorities. If sightseeing is on your priority list, then get a new job, because you have no control over where you sightsee if you have a job with a lot of travel.

2. Eat really well. First of all, you’re not paying for your own food, so you should eat really good, healthy food, which is always more expensive than junk food. Second, if you have a rule for yourself that you always eat well when you travel, then you will actually be healthier from traveling. Most people eat crap when they travel because they are tired and they feel like the calories don’t count because they are across state lines. That attitude will make you burn out faster. I can’t find a link but I’m sure there’s a study to support the hypothesis that you deal with the stress of travel more effectively without McDonald’s.

3. Think of balance in terms of weeks, not days. I know I want to spend time with the Farmer, spend time with the kids, be around for dinner invitations, and tooth-fairy moments. I used to worry about this every day. If I didn’t have breakfast with the kids, then I had to have dinner. Now I think in terms of weeks. If I was gone all week, I take off a day from work to have extra time for my personal life. If you are good at your job, and you travel a lot, no one counts how many days you take off.

4. Get elite status. Somewhere. Anywhere. When everyone is staying overnight at O’Hare, the people who are platinum are getting rebooked first. When you are waiting on the tarmac for an hour at LaGuardia because air traffic control cannot remember how many planes are in the air (which, really, is like, every day) if you get upgraded to first class, you’re drinking free wine and eating firm grapes while you are a prisoner of the airport. To get elite status, it means that every time your company wants to save $50 to put you on another airline, you have to say no. If my company will save more than $300, I’ll travel on an airline that I am not platinum on. Make sure your company knows you’re doing them a favor.

5. Do not agree to stupid meetings for geographical reasons. Just because someone you never want to hang out with lives in Saskatchewan and you’re gonna be there doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you should hang out with him. You have a life. And you surely have stuff you can do that evening besides hang out with a loser. Or maybe he’s only a half-loser. The thing is, you don’t have time for half-losers at home. They are the same everywhere: Still just a distraction from the real work of living the life you want.

The bottom line is that you need to  respect your life. Your life cannot be on hold while you travel. The travel, if it’s really frequent, sort of is your life. So the values you have—be spiritual, be frugal, be healthy—have to prevail during your travel. This is not vacation travel. This is not a vacation from your life. Business travel IS your life.

Left uninterrupted, we are likely to interrupt ourselves. The Internet, everyone’s interrupter of choice, is the most tantalizing type of reward system to our brain: intermittent but unpredictable rewards, in the form of a randomly great video or a juicy email here or there. (This is also why kids love to whine to get what they want. Parents give in only when they are at their wit’s end, creating, from a child’s perspective, a similar, randomly yummy reward system.)

Each time we interrupt ourselves at work, the process to get us back to that point of focus takes twenty-five minutes.  So we spend nearly a third of our work day recovering from interruptions, trying to recover our focus.

The time management gurus are all over this problem.

Winifred Gallagher is the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The thesis of the book is that the ability to positively wield your attention is the key to your quality of life.  Gallagher says (in either her book or in the article that I am liberally quoting from – I’m not sure which, but I am distracted enough by the issue that I feel compelled to distract you as well) “You can’t be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.”

That sounds true to me. We each have a certain amount of attention, and our quality of life depends on how wisely we invest our attention. I have written about how self-discipline is the key to happiness. And then I have written about how knowing that has not helped me much because self-discipline is not an easy nut to crack.

Now I am wondering if attentiveness is the way to achieve self-discipline. You find your goal—the stuff that is really super important—and you focus on it. That focus creates enough self-discipline to do what you need to achieve the goal.

But that isn’t just my idea. There are others thinking the same thing.

Merlin Mann has one of the most popular productivity blogs, and he’s raking in money teaching executives (who surely are too focused to have time to read blogs) to be more productive in their workday. Merlin Mann says that the key to productivity is attention, not lifehacks.

Here’s a gem from Mann’s interview with Anderson in New York magazine: “On the web there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need. But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There’s very little advice right now to tell people that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.”

Okay. So notice this about focus: You are not actually able to be productive without focus. So we can stop looking for the ultimate moleskin notebook or the perfect Firefox extension because those are actually productivity distractions. The hardest thing about productivity is figuring out what is the number one thing on your to do list.  After that, you need to focus on doing that one thing.

Mann says, “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here.”
Maybe what you need instead is Adderall.

Officially, Adderall is prescribed to treat ADHD. Unofficially, it is the drug of choice for Gen Y.  Adderall, or other drugs that treat ADHD, give a typical brain an intense ability to focus for long periods of time.

I got most of my Adderall information from a great article in the New Yorker by Margaret Talbot titled Brain Gain: The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs. In it, Sean Esteban McCabe, from the University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Research Center says that at some universities, up to 20% of the population is using these drugs: “White male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuro-enhancers.”

Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania , coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the trend of taking drugs to enhance ordinary cognition. He says, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.”

That resonates with me. I have already decided that cosmetic surgery is a must-have career tool for the high performers. So why not consider cosmetic neurology as well?

Joshua Foer wrote about his own Adderall experiment in Slate, and it sounds glorious: “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new emails in my in box apparently shut down.”

So I decided that maybe I should give the Adderall a whirl.

But then I started getting worried. Because I read research from Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse that shows Adderall is addictive. Not addictive like crystal meth. But addictive like, if you have a proclivity to addictive behaviors, you are a sitting duck for this one. “Because drugs that increase dopamine have the potential for abuse, these results suggest that risk for addiction in vulnerable persons merits heightened awareness.”

That scared me.

But what really scared me is that the cost of gaining extreme focus is often losing extreme creativity. A good example is Paul Philips, a professional poker player who won more than a million dollars after taking Adderall to help him. The scary thing about the Philips example is that Adderall also helped him resist the impulse to keep playing losing hands out of boredom.

I think we have some of our most creative moments when we are doing odd stuff to quell boredom. That is, when we are not focused at all.

“Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “There is evidence that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative.”

Maybe it’s better just to do lots of things at once without great focus but with natural creativity.

Focusing on focus seems to distract from the real issue, which is knowing what you value most. Do we know that? And if we did know that, maybe our focus would come naturally from that. And our lack of time management comes from a lack of self-discipline which comes from a lack of focus which comes from a lack of knowing the meaning of life.

And we’ll never know that. So maybe we should just be happy that we have our lack of focus because that enables our creativity. And we don’t know the meaning of life, but we do know that we each get to create our own life, and that, in the end, may be the only guarantee we have.

Here’s what I am going to start saying to those people: Only losers say they don’t have time to read blogs. Because everyone has the same 24 hours in the day. So it’s not that you somehow are more busy than everyone else – no one is actually too busy for anything – the issue is that reading blogs is not high enough on your priority list to read them.

So the real response, when I say, “I’m a blogger,” should be “I stay away from blogs so I can shield myself from alternative opinions to mainstream media.” And you wouldn’t want to be that person, right? In fact, you’re probably not that person, because look, you’re reading this blog.

But the problem of saying “I don’t have time to read that” applies to anything – it could be blogs but it could be those really long articles in the Atlantic that scream: “I know no one is reading this article! I only wrote it to get a book deal!”The reality is that you have time to read everything.

Here's what to do if you feel like you can't get a grip on your reading pile:

Stop talking about information overload. That term is for weaklings. Guess what? Generation Y never talks about information overload. That’s because they know how to process information better than anyone else. That’s actually what they were doing when their parents told them to turn off the TV and the music and log off of IM and do their homework.

Information overload is actually the feeling that you cannot sort through the resources in the world in order to figure out what’s important. If you feel like you are overwhelmed it means that your career is at risk, because the best employees in today’s workplace are information synthesizers. And information synthesizers don’t feel overwhelmed by information – they either use it or they don’t, but they don’t whine that there’s too much.

(Here’s a way to test yourself for how fast you can process information online. Look at these two blogs for three seconds each: On Simplicity and Marginal Revolution. Can you tell which is the bigger? If you can’t figure it out that quickly, you won’t be able to sort information quickly. Solve the problem by practicing: You don’t need to read more stuff to decrease your sense of information overload. You need to read a wider range of sources.)

Stop talking about good and bad media. Just because you don’t read it doesn’t make it bad. There is not any type of media that is so stupid that you can categorically dismiss it. I have found that I learned things from romance novels, People magazine, and even books that, in hindsight, were time wasters. So instead of saying, “I don’t have time for xx,” talk about time like you have a grip on it. Say, “I don’t have that type of media at the top of my list because of xx.” It’s a great exercise to make yourself talk this way, because good time management is actually about understanding your priorities, and you cannot explain your reading choices without also explaining your priorities.

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better. Look, if you wanted save all your time, and sit around and do nothing all day, then you would be gunning for a 4-hour work week. But most people actually enjoy being busily engaged in interesting things (which is why I think Tim Ferriss is a scam) so we are not so much saving time as figuring out the best use of our time.

So focus on meeting your goals rather than saving time. Information is not something you have time for or don’t have time for. Information is either helping you meet your goals or not.

And anyway, maybe your real time management problem is that you are a perfectionist, you spend too much time doing research, or you work too hard on Mondays (yep, that’s right, you should plan to do the most on Wednesday and Thursday).

My problem with consistency is that I am a tornado, and I have found my tornado nature is both wildly inconsistent and difficult to change, which makes me think that co-dependency on a stable (read: low-maintenance) boyfriend might help. So I think I need an ENTP. So, I’m only dating those from now on. (Yes, the 25-year-old is an ENTP. Personality type is ageless.)

But my inconsistency is no small problem. Here’s an example. I agree to new photos of me for a publication even though I have done tons of photo sessions already and have a gazillion expensively-lit ten-people-making-it-happen photos of myself.

Not only do I say yes, but I agree to do it the day before I leave for the SXSW conference. And I tell the magazine I’ll get a fake tan. Because it’s a summer issue. I’ve never gotten a fake tan and it seemed like maybe it would be fun. Maybe I’d end up looking like I’m in an artsy Versace ad where everyone has big attitudes and big tans.

But at the tanning place I got extremely nervous that maybe tanning places in Madison, Wisconsin suck. I realized that a messed-up tan was no problem for the photographer. He can Photoshop it. But I cannot Photoshop myself at SXSW.

But I already said I’d get the tan. And I am trying to be more consistent. Following through on getting a fake tan would be the consistent thing to do. After all, I didn’t have a commitment to just the photographer, but also to Jan. Jan is the spray-tan lady.

I tried to be trusting but once I got my clothes off, there was no more trust: It occurred to me that I would have this tan for my sex romp with the 25-year-old, and I imagined all the ways that spray tanning could be done incompetently. I ask Jan a barrage of questions: Should people with freckles get a tan? Is that too much too wrong in a Michael Jackson sort of way? Does the spray stuff pool in my belly button? And what about under my breasts? Will that part be white?

Jan charges me double because of the questions. I pay, because maybe it’s true that you get what you pay for.

Four hours later I do the photos and we end right at five because it’s family dinner night, even though my ex and I are not the family you’re thinking of. And I worry a lot about being consistently there for family stuff, because, remember, you never have a problem at work that you don’t have at home as well.

I get home to dinner and scoop up my three year old and kiss him. He says, “Something smells like dirty socks,” and starts taking off his socks.

I panic. I ask the Ex if I smell. He says, “I don’t want to smell you.” He is working on setting boundaries. Then he says, “Do you have a fake tan?”

Crap. I can’t ask the ex if I look too stupid to go to SXSW. Bad boundaries. And the risk of smelling like fake tan seems very bad in the 25-year-old department. So I take a shower.

Then I call my friend Sharon who is a hairdresser. I am a very inconsistent friend to Sharon and do terrible-friend things to her like only call when I need something. Fortunately she’s a hair stylist to the rich and famous in LA so her knowledge of how to groom to perfection complements my own lack thereof, and I call her a lot.

She says buy Nioxin. And she says, “You are doing too much.” Sharon consistently gives me good advice.

I tuck the kids into bed. After I sing to them so that they will have childhood memories of me being a consistent parent. I take one more shower for good measure. I answer email, return phone calls and IM the 25-year-old to see if he is feeling excited to see me which takes a while since he’s not the type to say so without prodding.

Then it’s 1am and it’s time to pack. I pack almost every week to go on business trips. But SXSW is not a normal business trip. It is prom for bloggers. And I’m not sure what to wear. So I pack everything. I take two suitcases for five days.

I speed on the highway and I make the flight.

But my suitcases don’t.

I tell myself, fine. I’ll get them on the next flight. I tell myself, be calm. Consistent people do not come undone over late baggage.

I get on my plane to Dallas. I sleep. I land. I get on my Blackberry and answer emails because consistent people do not let emails pile up when they travel. I call into the office. I find my gate, and I do not miss my connecting flight.

Then I go to the bathroom. I stand in the stall while I finish an email. I sit on the toilet and I am amazed at how dark I am. I pull down my pants to my ankles to inspect my legs. The airport bathroom light is not flattering, but is likely true. And the truth is that people will know this tan is fake.

I tell myself not to panic. I can have sex with the lights out. But there’s no way SXSW is happening in the dark. Crap.

So far, I have somehow maintained consistency.

Then I leave my Blackberry in the bathroom stall. And I fly to Austin before I notice.

I fall behind on emails. I miss a phone call at 10:15. I also miss the 10:45. Two more people who think I’m unreliable. And I miss my radio show. My guests call in and listeners tune in, and I’m not there. And neither is my consistency.

It's clear that the deep, fulfilling experiences in life are when we are very focused at what we really enjoy doing. So goals should start with that premise, and aim to create more of that in our lives. Here are five steps to create goals that encourage you to do more of what you love.

1. Stop thinking about the goal, and start thinking about the process.
The things that matter most for success in life is how hard you work at what you want to achieve, according to research reported in Scientific American. So formulate goals that focus on working hard at something you like working at.

For a lot of us this means we need a bit of self-discovery. What are we great at? What do we love doing? If you are not spending a lot of time and energy on what you think you should spend it on, then maybe that's not quite right for you.

The act of being lost in this world is actually the process of figuring out what are appropriate goals for ourselves. Where should we spend our time developing our talents?

2. Discover your best goals by watching what you like to practice.
One of the most disappointing pieces of news for all pushy parents is that innate talent is never enough–there’s always a need for practice. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt explain in the New York Times that the most successful people who have extreme talent also had an extreme love of practicing, which enabled them to cultivate that talent.

Dubner and Levitt use musicians to illustrate their point. But A-Rod is also good example of the idea that it's a passion for practice that makes someone great, according to reports from Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. A-Rod was obsessive with the details and goals of his practicing from an early age – focusing on the process of greatness as much as on the result.

So focus on the process when you pick your goal. Stop thinking about the end goal just for a minute so you can test yourself – would you really enjoy the life that would require all that practice time? Find something where the answer is yes. Because you will naturally restructure your day to accommodate that process if you are aiming to be great at something you love to practice.

3. Take action where your passion lives, and the other stuff will follow.
I don't have a link for this. But I'm sure of it. Because positive psychology coach Senia Maymin has spent hours on the phone explaining to me that if you just start living a conscious life, you can start meeting lots of disparate goals, not particularly related to the area you focus on for raising your own level of consciousness.

I have blogging goals. I want to go back to posting four times a week. But really, what I love, is sitting down with a block of time and a bunch of quiet, and writing whatever I feel like writing. So my goal needs to be to change my schedule so I lose myself in those moments more often. The extra blog posts will come naturally from me loving what I'm doing.

4. There is only one, real goal. So acknowledge it.
The moment when you reach a goal is so short, and almost immediately deflating. Because it is our nature to want something else, next. And that is not about crossing an item off a list.

The goal of taking care of one's body, or sitting down to write is really the goal of being more of your true, best self. It's about finding your best self – always changing, always elusive.

And any goal worth having is a goal to change your life to suit that best self.

5. Aim for flow
There is a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about called flow. It's when you are so involved in what you're doing that you don't think about anything else, and you are performing at your highest level. To get to this state you need some degree of mastery in what you are doing, and a large degree of passion. Arguably, the two go together in a world of practice.

But when your goal is to practice what you love to do, you are generally happier than if you have a specific, end goal. Here's how Csikszentmihalyi says that flow is related to happiness: "Being happy would be a distraction, an interruption of the flow. But afterward, when the experience is over, people report having been in as positive a state as it is possible to feel. Autotelic persons, those who are often in flow, tend also to report more positive states overall and to feel that their lives are more purposeful and meaningful." (Here's the link. Sort of. Click the second reference.)

So flow is about a process, not a goal. You can set a goal and then be in a state of flow every day as you try to meet that goal.

When you restructure your day you get more self-discipline spread all over your day. And when you put yourself into that state of Flow every day, then your body gets used to that, and you elevate your whole life to one that sort of demands that state on a regular basis.

I didn't blog about it because first of all, I'm sure the buzz about me is that I'm difficult, too. And also, his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was a bestseller and mine wasn't. So I figured people would say that I'm jealous. And really, what author is not jealous sometimes? I mean, every author wants to write a bestseller.

But at this point, two years later, my hatred goes way beyond jealousy. My hatred is more selfless than that. And while I do understand that Tim is great at accelerated learning, the time management tips I have learned from him stem from the energy I have spent hating him:

1. Don’t hang out with people who don’t respect your time
This all started at SXSW conference in 2007, right before Tim's book came out, when he was promoting the hell out of it to bloggers. Of course, this was not a bad idea, and to be fair, Tim was brilliant to start this book marketing trend. But that is beside the point. He approached me after my panel and said, "Can I get you coffee? I'd love to talk with you."

I said, "Uh. No. I have plans."

And he asked who with.

I wasn't really sure. I knew there were cool people to hang out with after my panel, though, and I knew he wasn't one of them. I gave a vague answer.

He said he was also meeting three people, and he name-dropped them. I can't remember who they were. But they were fun, interesting, and I wanted to have coffee with them. So I said okay.

Then Tim couldn't find them and I had coffee with only Tim.

Then I realized this was his strategy all along.

I told myself not to be pissy. I told myself bait-and-switch is the oldest sales tool in the world, and it's my fault for falling for it.

I even wrote a blog post that included his book.

2. Cut to the chase: Tell people who are full of sh*t that they're full of sh*t
When his book came out, there were vacuous, annoying comments all over my blog directing people to his book. Like, "The topic of priorities is an interesting one. I like how Tim Ferris handles that in his new book,blah blah" and then there's a link to the book.

At this point I knew Tim, sort of. And I called him on his phone and told him to tell his employees to stop spamming my blog.

First he implied it was his fan base and he had little control.

I said that I thought he was full of sh*t.

He said he'd make sure there were no more comments like that on my blog.

3. Self-centered people are more likely to waste your time
Really, when I found he was spamming my site, I didn't call him first. First, I emailed him. And I got some sort of crazy response about how he is only checking email twice a day and then instructions on what to do.

I emailed him back to tell him that I do not want automatic emails from him every time I try to contact him.

Which generated another, identical response about how he doesn't check mail.

So I called him to tell him that he is generating spam back to me to tell me about his email checking and I don't care. If he wants to check twice a day, fine, but don't clog my in box with emails about it.

He said he'd take me off his list.

I am STILL getting this sort of spam from him. But the scope has widened. For example, now, he has commented on my blog and he forgot to say that he doesn't want to be alerted to new comments. So every time there's a comment, he spams everyone in the comments string, telling them that he doesn't answer his email.

It's insane. I cannot believe how many automated announcements I receive saying that Tim does not have a Blackberry. (Yes, the email really says that.) What if we all sent automated emails like that? Email would be totally nonfunctional. What if Tim just shut up about his email and if he thinks its fine to answer twice a day, then he should do that? And not spam everyone about it.

4. Productivity is about meeting your goals, not getting out of doing work
The week that Tim actually works a four-hour work week will be a cold week in hell. Tim got to where he is by being an insanely hard worker. I don't know anyone who worked harder at promoting a book than he did. But the thing is, he didn't call it work. Somehow, sliming me into having coffee with him to talk about his book is not work.

Fine. But then his four-hour work week is merely semantic. Because everything Tim does he turns into what the rest of us would call work, and he calls it not-work. For example, tango. If you want to be world-record holder, it's work. It's your job to be special at dancing the tango. That's your big goal that you're working toward. How you earn money is probably just a day job. So most weeks Tim probably has a 100-hour workweek. It's just that he's doing things he likes, so he lies to you and says he only works four hours. He defines work only as doing what you don't like.

It's childish. It's a childish, semantic game. And it reminds me of him winning the Chinese National Kickboxing Championships by leveraging a little-known rule that people are disqualified if they stop outside the box. So he pushed each of his opponents outside the box to win.

He is winning the I-work-less-than-you game with a similarly questionable method: semantics.

5. Time management is about making time to connect with people
The idea of time management only matters in relation to how important the stuff is that's competing for your time. The stuff that makes time management the most difficult is relationships. Which Tim does not excel in.

Fine. Not everyone has to be good at making real connections.

But Tim runs around telling people who have lots of relationships competing for their time how to think about work/not work, forgetting that in the real world, where people are not assholes, time management is not an equation or a semantic game because relationships really matter. And figuring out how to judge time in terms of competing values is the hardest thing of all.

Tim is all about time management for achievement and winning. But there are not trophies or measurements for relationships. There is only that feeling that someone is kind. And good. And truly connected.

And Tim is not.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/feed/ 445 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/10/01/intentional-non-productivity-can-be-a-productivity-tool/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/10/01/intentional-non-productivity-can-be-a-productivity-tool/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:58:15 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=1347 Almost 95% of Jews do something to observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I want my kids to be part of this when they grow up, so the only way to do that is to model it for them now. Because it's completely clear to me that people who believe in God are fundamentally more optimistic and more connected to community, and I want my kids to have that.

Also, I try not to work on the holidays because I want to be known, somehow, as a Jew who blogs about being Jewish. And if I'm going to do that, then I want to be known as someone who does not work on the holidays. It's part of being Jewish, I think, to struggle with what to do on these days. So I want to struggle, too.

Every year it is hard for me to stay away from work, even when every year that I have worked has felt terrible. But even if I could feel okay working on these days, it's not the person I want to be. Here’s who I am right now: the person who just two years ago moved to a state I knew no one in, and then got a divorce. So I'm not exactly the queen of community right now. A holiday like Rosh Hashanah emphasizes this, but makes me more committed to fixing the problem.

This is also the time that I start gearing up for Yom Kippur, which comes in a week. Yom Kippur is about being sorry for not being nice to other people, so I try to fix as much as I can in the next week so I can be less sorry.

I think first of my not-quite ex-husband. And I cry. Maybe you didn't think that I cry about the divorce. I didn't ever start crying about it until he became a little nicer, which was once he was sure he was getting a divorce. He really wants a break from me. I'm not sure he totally hates me, but I am sure he totally hates being married to me.

But we have great moments, too. He came to the house for Rosh Hashanah. I usually leave the house to give him space to be with the kids. But he agreed that we could all eat dinner together for the holiday because he knows how important it is to me.

I cooked. Which I'm thinking is a primal instinct thing for someone you love. I mean, cooking is very easy to outsource, (since I outsource almost everything already) but it doesn't feel right to me. I want to cook for people I'm close to. But it doesn't feel right to do a primal-instinct-I-love-you-thing for the guy who wants a divorce, so I also bought sushi, which he really likes.

Then my not-quite-ex, who is not-quite-convinced that religion matters, said the prayers with us before dinner. Which almost made me cry.

Then, I said, "Oh. There's a fly. We need a fly swatter."

And he said, "You should hire one."

And we both laughed.

That's what made me cry.

We had a nice dinner, and then after dinner, I had to leave the house. Because the not-ex and I have a deal that he doesn't have to have me around when he's parenting. I think I make him nervous. Or I make him want to kill me. It's a fine line, really.

So I left. Usually I love leaving. Because I work. I usually have phone meetings booked when I leave the house until midnight. But I didn't want to work. I thought reading would be more appropriate. But I didn't want to buy a latte at Starbucks and read there. I can't be a self-respecting Jew and buy a latte on Rosh Hashanah.

So I sat in the car on a dark street and thought about work. I thought about what work I would most like to be doing instead of sitting in the car in the dark.

And here's what I thought of: The three blog posts I owe to people who have been really nice to me. I have made three promises to write posts and broken all three of them.

One of the promises is more than a year old, to ERE. It's a great organization because they are  at the cutting edge of online recruiting. Actually one of the best speaking gigs I've ever had.

Then there's the post for Tony Morgan. He's a Christian blogger who reads this blog—I love that blogging helps me cross cultural lines to people who I wouldn't normally come into contact with. I want him to know that I love being part of a Christian community when he links to me. (And I love watching how the Christians leverage the blogosphere to make being Christian interesting. Why can't the Jews do that? Probably because we just blog about High Holiday guilt.)

The last one is that I owe Leo Babauta a blurb. He asked me to write one for the back of his new book that's been sitting on my desk for a while. It is about to be the next thing that I've waited on so long that I have actually been inconsiderate.

So I decide that as soon as Rosh Hashanah ends, I'm going to write these three things. And write this post.

All this to say: you don't need the Jewish holidays in order to learn something about yourself. Force yourself to isolate for a day. Don't allow yourself to do all the usual things. You will learn something about yourself. It's impossible not to.

Generation Y is known for rolling into work late while wearing headphones, and dressing as if every day were casual Friday. We're often seen TXTing in our cubicles, taking breaks, and instant messaging. While these images don't exactly encourage others to view us as bastions of uber-productivity, we're often a hell of a lot more productive than previous generations.

Here are seven reasons why my generation (Generation Y) is often more productive than yours:

Reason 1: We use the best tools
Generation Y is more than comfortable doing the experimentation necessary to find the right tools and technologies for most effectively completing a task. We understand the company's project management software better than you do because we are comfortable playing with it. And we can probably recommend 2-3 other tools that would work better in the situation because we're not afraid to rely on nearly-free, online productivity tools from unknown companies. Our to-do lists are carefully maintained, prioritized daily and synced with our PDAs and iPODs.

Reason 2. We're good at automating
Generation Y has grown up with technology and we believe that computers can do just about anything (or that they will someday). So when we're receive a task, the first question we ask ourselves is: "how can technology make this task go faster?" Sometimes our efforts to employ technology make things more complicated, but quite often we end up successfully automating a repetitive task, saving ourselves and our companies thousands of dollars.

Reason 3. We get better sleep
Previous generations have lived by Ben Franklin's aphorism: "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Generational Y intuitively knows what psychologists have confirmed: that a significant percentage of the population is much more productive when they go to bed late and get up late. Simply put, you're more productive when you follow your biologically determined circadian rhythms and get up when your body tells you to.

Reason 4: We're much more likely to love our jobs
Since Generation Y switches jobs much more frequently than previous generations, we're much more likely to be doing things that (1) we're good at, and (2) we actually like. All the job switching and repositioning we do means we're much more likely to end up with professions that are actually suited to our passions and talents. And every productivity guru knows you're most productive when you're doing things you actually care about.

Reason 5: We stay up to date in our fields
Another upshot of changing jobs so frequently is the need to stay on top of the latest developments in our fields. Because job searching is a somewhat continual process for Generation Y, we're likely to teach ourselves new skills, or pay for training, even if our employers don't because we want to stay competitive. We see training and skill-building as our own responsibility – not something that our employer will necessarily do for us. And our lifestyle choices reflect a passion for constant learning and development .

Reason 6: We're experimental
Generation Y is continually doing research and development at the individual level. And because Generation Y cares more about getting new experiences and learning new skills than about not making mistakes , we're willing to try new things, be creative, and take new angles. While this experimental approach might not result in quantifiable productivity, it leads to the kind of shifts in thinking that save time and money over the long haul.

Reason 7: We don't "go through the motions"
We've seen our washed up parents work shit jobs they hate, and we won't go through the motions for the sake of job security. If you're an old-school boss, then this won't be comfortable. However, not going through the motions for the sake of going through the motions actually makes us more productive in the long run.

Clay Collins is author of The Alternative Productivity Manifesto, and Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack. Clay also writes about lifestyle design at Project Liberation.

The Blackberry actually gives you the freedom to effectively mix your personal life and work life so that they don't have to compete with each other.

Don’t talk to me about the idea that the Blackberry undermines your ability to have work-life balance. First, the idea that you could ever have it is ridiculous. But a Blackberry at least gives you hope.

Without a Blackberry, you always had to choose one or the other. Work and life were always competing for large chunks of time in the day. But with the Blackberry, you can have a blended life where work life and personal life complement each other. What I mean is that the Blackberry makes it so you can always do work but also always do your personal life, so you choose which one has priority, minute to minute.

In the 80s, if you went to your kid’s soccer game, you could not do work. Today, you can go to your kid’s soccer game and take the call from the CEO that will change your life (or have a fight with a co-worker) and then go back to soccer. You get both. It’s not one or the other. If you could not take that call, you could not have gone to the game. That's why the Blackberry is great for your life.

The challenge that the Blackberry brings is that you always need to know your priorities, at any given moment. Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily describes this process as really focusing on one or two things and that’s it.

Then ask yourself: Given what you are doing right now, which emails and which calls are important enough to take? If you are not clear on the answer at every given moment, you are constantly having to make difficult decisions about answering emails or not and you feel a false sense of overload by the demands of the Blackberry.

If you are having sex, you have a good sense that very few emails in the whole world need your attention right then. If you are at a birthday party for ten year old boys and they are screaming up and down a soccer field, you are probably bored and emails look a little more enticing. This is not about addicted or not addicted; this is an issue of knowing when email is essential and when it's a distraction.

You have probably been out to dinner with friends and they checked their Blackberry. This means you are not their most important priority at that time, just for that moment. You of course hope that your presence would make you most important, but in fact, it did not. Does that mean your friend is addicted to her Blackberry? No. It means your friend is prioritizing and she's letting you know that you rank high enough for in-person, but you don't trump everyone.

That seems fine. Normal, really. If people would just call a spade a spade and stop complaining about the device and start thinking about how to make better choices for their priorities.

If you want to see a whole generation make great choices about their priorities using the Blackberry, then latch onto Generation Y. They have been managing multiple steams of conversation simultaneously for more than a decade, so they are aces at it. And they are fiends for productivity tips. The most popular blogs are productivity blogs, and David Allen is a rock star in this demographic. So young people are constantly using prioritizing tools to make their information and ideas flow more smoothly for both work and life, back and forth, totally braided.

Blackberries are tools for the well-prioritized. If you feel like you're being ruled by your Blackberry, you probably are. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is to start prioritizing so that you know at any given moment what is the most important thing to do. Sometimes it will be the Blackberry, and sometimes it won't. And the first step to doing this shift properly is recognizing that you can be on and off the Blackberry all day as a sign of empowerment.

Here are four ways to get out of a rut and start making progress again:

1. Pay attention on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Tuesday is our most productive day at work, according to a study from Robert Half International. Apparently, Monday is the day we get our lists in order, and Tuesday is the day we plow through them.

Bill Driscoll, from Robert Half, recommends that you recognize your peak performance times, and schedule as few interruptions during that time as possible. This is one of those pieces of advice that makes sense, but very few of us manage our calendars so carefully that we are actually implementing the advice.

But also, what about being as gung ho about Wednesday and Thursday as you are about Tuesday?

2. Stop obsessing over your choices and just decide.
Most people overestimate the regret they'll experience after making an emotionally charged choice, according to research from the University College London. In fact, Karim Kassam, a psychologist working at Harvard, shows that we figure out how to justify most of our big decisions, no matter how good or bad they were. He calls it our "psychological immune system."

The Harvard Business Review also reveals that we are not good at making decisions with a lot of data points involved. Which means that frequently, the longer you spend on a decision, the less productive you are. This research, maybe, gives you the temerity to take a leap, knowing that your decision won’t get smarter or easier to live with if you take longer.

3. Go to church.
Lisa Cullen reports that girls who go to church work harder than other people. Maybe you think this is because church girls are so bored in their upstanding lives that they can't think of anything better to do than work. But I think it actually has something to do with optimism.

People who go to church regularly are more optimistic people in general, and optimism makes people feel more positive about their work. If you feel like you will affect your work in a positive way, you're more likely to dig in and do it. (Here is a small study to support my claims. There are a ton of these studies, and I'm hoping the Christian bloggers who read this blog—there are a lot, surprisingly enough—will aid in this cause with some more links.)

4. Put a treadmill in your office.
People think better from getting a little exercise. Not the kind of exercise where you feel like you are going to pass out. But the low-level, reasonable-pace type of exercise. The difference in mental capacity while we are active and passive is huge.

Leverage this knowledge about yourself and do your work on a treadmill. I thought I was a genius taking work calls at the gym, on the elliptical trainer, (until the manager told me absolutely never again because people were sick of overhearing my calls.)

But now everyone's got an idea for working while walking, and there are workstations designed especially for use on a treadmill. Ask your boss to buy you one. They’re $3,000, but that’s a great company investment if you can get your to do list done every day.