My sons are eight and five. In the time it takes to read this, one of them will have asked me a question I will not remember answering.
That is the actual unit of measurement for everything I do with technology now.
The wrong question
"Will this make me more productive?" is the wrong question, because the answer is always yes and the follow-up is always toward what?
The right question is: what will I do with the hour this gives back? If the answer is "more work", then I have not saved an hour, I have borrowed one at a terrible interest rate.
What I want it to buy
Not more output. Three things:
The walk. The one where nobody talks and you notice the weather. It sounds trivial written down. It is the thing I miss most in a busy month.
The boring conversation. The one with no agenda, where a child tells you about a snail for eleven minutes. There is no shortcut for this and no way to do it efficiently.
The long think. Ninety minutes on one problem without interruption. Almost all of my good ideas come from this block and almost none of them come from the other fourteen hours.
The honest accounting
Most weeks I fail at this. The tools give me back four hours and I spend them on email, because email is legible and a walk is not.
So I have started scheduling the walk first and letting the email find its own level. It is a small trick and it works more often than it should.
What I'd want on my headstone
Not "he was very productive".
Something closer to: he noticed. He was there for the snail.
