In the movie “13th Warrior”, Antonio Banderas plays the main character who is an Arab who finds himself out of place on a quest with a bunch of burly Vikings (makes more sense when you actually see the movie). When he is given a sword by one of the Vikings, he complains that the sword is much too heavy and asks how the hell he’s supposed to fight with a sword that he can hardly lift. To this, one of the Vikings replies:
“Grow stronger, little brother.”
That’s basically the approach I’m taking in regards to personal productivity.
Less is Less
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m usually busy with many different projects. I run two blogs and a growing number of different websites, I am involved in the computer hardware market, where I have marketing/promotion and customer service tasks to do almost daily, I create lots of videos and write for different websites and I teach self-defence to a small group of security personnel with two friends, to name just a few.
Next to all that, I also try to keep up with my own training, find enough time to read good books now and again and all the other stuff that entails a “private life”.
In the blogosphere around productivity, there’s quite a trend towards simplicity (see Zen Habits, at the spearhead of all this). No doubt, reducing your task-list to the essential, saying no to everything but what truly matters and generally cutting down on tasks and distractions is a huge blessing for anyone’s personal well-being. But what if there are just a lot of things I’m passionate about?
In short, there are many things that I want to pursue. And my hope is that I can build a working productivity system for myself that allows me to do more without being stressful or overly complicated.
My goal is not to reduce the amount of things I do, but to grow “strong enough” to be able to fit all of my projects into my days.
Wish me luck…