Innovation in Software

A friend just sent me a link to an article on 43folders asking the audience:

How do you know when it’s time to move on? What makes you make up your mind?

You have no idea how many shelved ideas I have right now: that’s why I built vagueware, so I could take my ideas and put them out there for others to work with. Right now, I’m not getting the time for that that I need, but will do shortly.

There are then the small number of ideas that I do want to work on but can’t afford to right now. Those ideas are ones I intend to hire people to help make reality for me as they’re just too big for one guy on his own. If they’re not rolling by January, I might shelve them too and concentrate on what I do to make a living (which incidentally, I enjoy).

The question I have is for the readers here: I know you all have ideas you’re not doing anything with. So what’s stopping you putting them on vagueware? Do you really think you’re going to work on it in the next 6 months? Don’t you want to be like Frank Schmitt who in answer to that question said:

Finally an oddball outlet I have is halfbakery.com. I have a lot of what seem like semi-decent ideas that I’ll never realistically have the time and/or resources to pursue. If I post them there, I can at least claim bragging rights when someone else gets rich off the idea.

Halfbakery is a great site in all sorts of ways, but I always found it satirical. What about those software ideas that can really make it but we don’t have time for? What if vagueware helped teams of people come together and produce open-source versions of your ideas? Isn’t that something donating ideas you’re not working on to?

In other words, why are you not posting ideas to the site right now?

Let’s take a couple of ideas driving Innovation in the software arena right now:

• Work should be more like play
• 3D alternate Worlds are useful in some way
• People are finding it difficult to deal with the incoming flow of information

Each on their own can lead to ideas like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Second Life or better Bayesian filtering. In short, when you focus on an idea you can find ways of making software better. Some people ask themselves, wouldn’t it be great if you mixed some of them up? Say a 3D World where you work? Or handling information flows like a game?

What happens when you try and mix all three up? Well, I concur with TechCrunch when I say this example is just pure evil.

Yes, I can’t quite believe it myself. And I thought the ads in GMail would harm productivity in a mail application…

Nat Torkington writes about the effects data flows are having on him. I also find that once every 2-3 months I suddenly notice there are many sources of information I’m not really reading any more, and so I have a purge.

He makes a point about Facebook which I find interesting. With some customisation, it is possible to tailor what you see and what you don’t (yes, you can turn off the stuff you’re not interested in). As such, we’re able to tailor how we spend our time on Facebook to make it useful for us. That doesn’t mean we spend any more time on Facebook, it just makes that time more productive.

What if all applications were able to work like that? What if we took the “News Feed” concept of Facebook and dropped it into the front page of all our applications and then allowed the user to specify what they wanted to see more or less of, and allow them to tailor the productivity?

A mailing list I’m a member of has just started a thread on The Beryl Project which is a very pretty way of being able to dress up your Linux desktop. My response was:

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about this kind of tool. I’m not convinced it increases usability.

What’s the point of a transparent window – do you use the transparency? Do you want to see your film transposed onto a 3D cube, or do you just want to watch it? What does a window wobbling when you move it tell you about that window? Does any of this help you become more productive and get more/better work done quicker or with fewer interactions?

It looks nice, but that is not in itself indicative of a set of problems having been solved in the best possible way: 100,000 troops marching in front of a dictator looks impressive, but it doesn’t mean

the underlying ideas for that parade are good ones, or that such a parade is a sensible solution to a problem.

I was then asked if I was comparing a 3D cube to Fascism. Harsh, but fair: I probably should have used a better analogy.

My point however is that innovation in the desktop space seems to have stalled at making things look like a game or something Hollywood would dream up. It might look aesthetically interesting, but where is the real innovation in improving productivity.

A few years ago I saw some agent technology that would grab data from across your system and make it available to you as you needed it – say you were typing my name, a panel at the side of your screen would pop up with my address book entry, most recent blog posts, links to entries on social networking sites, etc. – and that would be far more useful than being able to make a window transparent. However, that tech seems to have stalled, but I expect it’ll resurrect sometime in the next year or two now we have much more useful data plumbing in the form of RSS and micro-formats.

However, there has to be more areas of innovation that we could tap into than making a film appear on a 3D cube. Anybody reading this have any ideas on where to start looking?

I remember once having a boss that had what seemed an endless supply of energy. He was at his desk from 8am and normally didn’t stop until 2am the next morning. His energy was seemingly infinite and it was rare to see him flag. At the time I thought that was amazing. It wasn’t until after I’d left the company I learned he was a regular user of cocaine. Ah. Yes. Well…

As it is, in recent days and weeks I have discovered my own way of being able to get an endless stream of energy, all without illegal narcotics. I have been working 9am until 3am – occasionally 10am until 4am – for the last couple of weeks, and feel fine. I’m not tired, I’m not bored, I’m getting real stuff done, and I figured I’d share how I got here for those who need a hand getting focused for a year-end coding rush:

• Variety is the spice of life. Right now I have 5 open projects which means when I start getting tired of one, I can move to another. It’s all Ruby, true, but they’re different problems needing different approaches. This helps break the day up.
• 50 minutes work, 10 minutes break. Every hour. Without fail. Get up, walk around, have a drink, listen to music, stretch, whatever. Don’t sit there all day.
• Don’t read RSS, Mail, Usenet, IRC, whatever, unless you really have to. You have no idea how easy it is to get distracted.
• Time slowly becomes irrelevant, and that has interesting effects. I now look at a clock reading ‘00:12’ and instead of thinking “gosh, it’s late!” I think “Classic FM get less adverts now, I’ll put that on for the next few hours”. I can’t quite remember how many days ago it was that I listened to the opening session of the Ashes, nor am I quite sure what day it is today without looking at the top right-hand corner of my screen, and I don’t remember the last weekend I had. This is an acquired taste, and would scare most people.
• Coffee is my new friend. This is not an excuse for drinking it constantly though, I find if I drink more than four or five cups in a 24-hour period, I can’t concentrate.
• Taking a break for an hour is not cheating. This morning I went for a walk for an hour. I enjoyed looking up and seeing sky and clouds, which is odd but necessary.
• No alcohol. I used to drink quite heavily, but about a month ago I read a book on alcohol which left me not wanting to touch it ever again. The last month has been the most productive of my life, which I could have predicted: I knew that if I had even one pint, it would change my ability to concentrate with the level of intensity that is optimal for me for perhaps 24-36 hours afterwards.
• Lists. There is more power in ticking off an item on a list than you can possibly imagine. Looking back at a list of things that have been crossed out makes you feel as though it was worth it.
• Let your body do what it wants. The other night I went to get ‘a quick hour’ of rest around 8pm with the intention of working through until about 5-6am that night. I woke up the next day at 9am. Clearly my body needed the sleep. It would be unwise in the extreme to ignore it.
• Also it is important to realise this is only a temporary measure. If I tried doing this for a year, it would kill me. I’m doing it for a month to get a load of work out of the way, and then from the 15th December to the 15th January, you will do well to find me near a line of code or a phone

Momentum is definitely the best productivity tool I know of. Years ago I read a book on procrastination that suggested you promise yourself to “just do half an hour”, and then you would just find yourself carrying on – that is basically what I did, except I did it weeks ago and haven’t let the momentum slide yet. When you see pieces dropping into place, and you ignore the boundaries of time it is easy to say to yourself “oh, I can do just one more bit here and it’ll be loads better”.

I can’t stress how important it is that this is something I can do for a month, and then need to take a month off. If people start thinking “that’s insane”, they are right, and I wouldn’t advocate it for somebody who doesn’t know what they’re getting into. Nor would I suggest it to anybody who isn’t single. It’s also a false economy in terms of the long game because whilst I might be able to get over 100 hours a week in right now, I won’t get 5 hours a week done for the next six weeks. But that’s not the game I’m playing this month.

You might wonder what game it is playing, and why I’m prepared to put myself through this. Well, my company has its first year end at the end of December, and I want to put everything outstanding to bed by the end of November giving me a month to tie up my accounts and outstanding invoices. Two projects have ‘hard’ deadlines that can’t slip. One is for a friend who wants a site for her business. The other two are important for other reasons.

I would never do this if it wasn’t my own company, and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to do it either even for their own company – I accept the madness this entails. Hard work is always part of running your own business, but like I say, it’s a temporary measure. If your mind is moving towards New Year resolutions this early and you’re thinking about setting up your own business, ask yourself if this kind of work blitz is something you feel you could do once in a while whilst still enjoying it and if the answer is not an unequivocal “yes”, perhaps you should just stay on your comfy salary and stick to 9-5.

One of the most pleasurable places for a developer to be in is “the zone”. It’s where everything else – the local environment around the desk, the street outside, the family at home, the bills, the workload, even sometimes hunger and thirst, are all completely forgotten. The only thing that matters at that moment is the problem in front of you. For some developers – particularly those who are Unix systems administrators at heart, like me – it can go on for days at a time. I sometimes call it “my coding head” – I hunger for the problem, and nothing else can get in the way.

Getting into the zone is not always easy. Different people have different techniques, nearly all of which involve a bit of peace and quiet and no interruptions. You need to start somehow and somewhere, and I’ve heard that people sometimes procrastinate fearing that they won’t get in the zone – they’re worried about phone calls to make, etc. so they’ll do those first. I find saying “I’ll just do half an hour” to myself, can sometimes result in a ten hour coding marathon.

Once you’re there, the worst thing that can happen is to be interrupted – I frequently shut down mail and IM clients when I want to make progress. When I used to work in shared offices, I would find a quiet corner. I shouted at people who interrupted me with trivial problems and put signs on my desk saying “Please don’t disturb unless building is on fire”. My bosses hated me because of it. Even now, I sometimes set alarms on my phone to remind me to eat – it has been known for me to forget, and suddenly think “hmmm, think I’ll have a bit of tea”, only to discover it’s 4am.

Today, the zone is just jumping and down all over my head and the feeling is wonderful – I can slip in and out of it even with light interruption. My technique involves a decent high-carb meal, some coffee, headphones and iTunes. Musically, almost anything that isn’t too heavy is fine, and my playlist gets tailored based on the kind of code I’m dealing with. I tend to do weird abstract things better with pop/rock (although strangely, always with female vocals), and simpler but more ‘big wedge of code that needs sorting’ projects get shifted easiest with some Mozart, Saint-Saens, or Delibes. I think that’s because drudgery is easier to cope with when I have some complicated music patterns going on in the background, and abstract/complicated work needs nothing more complex than a simple and melodic tune playing.

Another reason that The Zone is so useful, is that it actually relaxes me. My workload right now is very high – almost stressful – but I’m getting through it. I’ve been beset by problems with my development environment this week, clients’ work is backing up in the queue and I’m trying to get to grips with two new projects whilst simultaneously putting two old projects to bed for good. Last night I had a pretty restless night – this morning I overslept – to be greeted on the phone by a client who themselves was so worried about a deliverable that she hadn’t been sleeping properly. For a few moments this morning, I was relating to Atlas – the World upon my shoulders, etc.

This afternoon though, it was smiles all the way. I became detached from it all and was able to just make progress, gliding forwards, pieces of code jigsaws suddenly came slotting down into place, and the rest of the World could go to hell. It was relaxing, fun, enjoyable. Me, code, my mp3 collection, and a handy kettle.

Then, something odd happened that triggered an old memory. ‘Sunshine on a Rainy Day’ by Zoe came onto the play-list. A dodgy piece of cheese you might think, but it’s in my collection for one reason and one reason only: it was once used on a Commodore Amiga advert. The kid in the advert was playing Lemmings, looked out onto a rain-swept street, and just didn’t care: he was in the zone, happy with the amazing tool he had in front of him. Geeky, but happy. I didn’t know any hardcore geeks when I was learning to code, and that was the first time I saw somebody else enjoying the zone.

I looked up, and outside saw on my balcony that it was raining, just like in that old advert. Peering out into the gloom I could see Manchester was wet, rainy, cold. But it didn’t matter, I was warm, dry, my face lit by the glow of the screen, just like the advert. I was in the zone. Removed from the reality of the World, I was playing my own version of Lemmings – coding and strategy games are remarkably similar from a problem-solving perspective – and I remembered what it was that got me into this gig in the first place all those years ago when the Amiga was the ultimate computer, but all I could afford was a beaten-up second-hand Amstrad CPC6128: The Zone.

It’s not the money. It’s not the freedom of my own business. It’s not even the end product. It’s the process, the thinking, the working stuff out. It doesn’t matter how stressed I feel about the code that needs to be done, I can escape it all by doing the code itself. How many people can honestly say they have a legal occupation that gives them a buzz and helps melt away stress without the need for chemicals?

As you might imagine, my RSS feed collection is quite ‘ambitious’. I can speed-read comfortably which is why I don’t normally have a niggle about being signed up to many dozens of feeds at a time. In recent weeks however, I’ve been a little busier than normal. I’ve also been taking time off away from screen. Last Sunday I only checked my e-mail twice for about half an hour each time – I think that’s the least time spent looking at a computer in a 24-hour period in some six months at least.

As a result of this pursuit of leisure, working silly hours, running around Manchester and so on, I compeltely forgot to check out bloglines. I had two week’s worth of articles to catch up on. I decided that I would use this as a barometer to unsubscribe from useless blogs and feeds – as I scan read, if something didn’t stand out and grab me, then that blog just isn’t worth my time. Some of my ‘unsubs’ surprised me, but I figured I’d share them as I think some who pass by here might find the feeds I was subscribed to of interest. I’m not going through my entire RSS collection here – that would take forever – but thought I’d go through the highlights.

I got rid of The Long Tail despite the message it evangelises being an important and interesting one. I think I need to have a deep understanding of that message, so it surprised me that I was prepared to drop it. The book is great, but I just don’t need a daily reminder of how applicable it is – I get it. My attention is needed elsewhere. I will check in on the blog, but instead of reading articles within hours of them being published, it’ll be a lazy Friday when I just think ‘I wonder what’s been going on over there in the last couple of months?’ or if it’s super-important, I’ll hear about it anyway.

I just about kept OpenBusiness because one of the projects I’m working on uses open source as an underlying economic model, and I need to keep an eye on this, but it very nearly disappeared – there has to be a better blog out there covering this material, but I’m damned if I can find it. OpenBusiness just ‘feels’ like a cut’n’paste press release blog a lot of the time. The Open Rights Group however have purpose, momentum and a lotta love for your digital rights, but they only cover the risks, not the potential or actual successes of alternative business models.

I kept Seth Godin and Paul Graham (they don’t need links, they’re omnipotent in the blogosphere) because I like their writing and they aren’t posting huge chunks of info every day. I can afford to be distracted by them. This is an interesting measure – if my hour of time reading RSS is worth £x, would I pay these authors that money if I had to? Godin and Graham might be two of the few I’d umm and ahh about.

You have no idea how close I was to dumping that other omnipotent: TechCrunch. The writing is truly awful and I’m fed up reading YAAOYASNS (Yet Another Article On Yet Another Social Networking Site). However, there were two articles in the last fortnight that gave me a heads up about players in a project area I’m working in. TechCrunch UK is even worse, but because the players might be in the same city as me, I decided to keep that too. GigaOM is gone though, and the moment I am convinced rev2 (much better writing, much more selective of the stories they cover, better analysis, more focused on innovation) covers everything I need, I’m going TechCrunch-free.

Johhnie Moore’s blog went because it seems a little ‘Hallam Foe’ at the moment, but I’ll be checking in once a month I expect. I kept gapingvoid.com because cartoons are FUN and quick to absorb, but Hugh does seem to be a little absorbed (understandably) in all things Foe-ish right now. Not sure if this is better or worse than talking about Stormhoek all the time. ;-)

I got rid of Jeremy Zawodny because I couldn’t figure out from the last fortnight of traffic what his blog was actually about any more. Serious. The RSS description had a SQL statement in it, but it didn’t look very codey in content. I just can’t remember…

I dumped Escape from Cubicle Nation because, well, I already have escaped – that and the fact there are better entrepreneur blogs out there for what I do, but if you are thinking about setting up on your own, give it a scan. You might think you need to get hyper-organised to run your own business, which is true in part – accounts are a killer – but I got rid of 43folders because life is too short to be that obsessive about my ‘next actionable item’.

IdeaLog was kept mainly because its main push out was a weekly collection of stories that are nice for a Friday morning with coffee and toast, and the content doesn’t feel like work, even though it’s related to what I do. It’s a keeper, but I’m suspicious I’m not doing that because I want to slack off once in a while. Same thing goes for we make money not art – it satisfies the artistic bent in me whilst still being vaguely related to work.

Although the content is entertaining, gossip is mean and pointless and I don’t care about the day-to-day lives of the people mentioned on ValleyWag – unsubscribing actually made me feel clean. If you want to make a difference in this industry, I’d suggest that reading about the personal habits of industry-movers/shakers makes little sense but Creating Passtionate Users would be a very productive exercise. Kathy’s articles are definitely keepers.

Not for the first time, SlashDot has gone. It’s worth checking in on the developer section – never the front page – once a week at most, but it’s only one step up from The Register which I refuse to read at all (poor writing, no research, OCD-in-a-bad-way readership). Don’t even get me started on The Sun of tech journalism: The Inquirer. I wouldn’t waste a second of my time there in any given month.

Another over-hyped blogger is Scoble who, quite frankly, I can’t see the point of reading. Sure, when he was at Microsoft he was able to give an inside story of what was going on. Now he isn’t, so he can’t. If he produces an earth-shattering insight I will – as I did before when he was at MS – read about it elsewhere in all probability. For similar reasons Dave Winer is no more in my RSS sub list. He can keep his ‘rivers’.

LifeHacker went when I realised my life was already hacked. It’s called ‘becoming a pawn in the capitalist collective’. I don’t need more widgets to remind me how behind schedule I am on speed-reading French and tricking out my toaster. I’ll check in once a week to remind myself how much in need most of the planet seem to be to make their lives better. What’s more the quantity of what they produce is staggering. I don’t have time for 10 articles a day! Leave me alone!

I really have no idea why I was subscribed to Google’s Press Releases – I don’t even use many of their products. They also create a lot of press releases. Glad they’re gone.

I’ve still kept some 77 feeds – many of them developer feeds and some of the more esoteric cultural and Mancunian feeds. Some of them haven’t published anything in the last fortnight, and so I’ll make a call on them the next time they put their heads over the parapet. Others belong to friends and I would never unsub from them whilst they remain so.

That said, this exercise has really surprised me on one level. Firstly, how much cruft the supposed ‘A-list’ produce. Secondly, the content itself is incredibly narrow. Whilst nobody in my sub list seemed too bothered about the fact that North Korea is now a nuclear power (4 articles), it seemed that the only news worth talking about was Google giving a kid who started a pirate video station in his garage 1.25% of their stock (300-400 articles). The sense of perspective of my subscriptions makes me glad I’m getting rid of so many of them – they’re no longer part of my life, and for that I think I can be glad.

Incidentally, I won’t be upset at people deciding to unsub vagueware – right now I’m not getting the time to write the articles on innovation and software development I want to. Your life is short, so I recommend you think how much of it you want to spend listening to me. ;-)

”I want to be left alone” – Greta Garbo

In my review of Getting Real I made a passing reference to ‘alone time’, something the book covers with its own small chapter.

The concept is quite simple, and something I’ve been talking about for six or seven years now: coders who get interrupted can’t code. It doesn’t work, never has worked, and managers (or clients) who think it’s OK to ‘just ask a quick question’ don’t realise the damage they’re doing to another person’s day. Coders need to be able to ignore phones, IMs, e-mails, physical interruptions, whatever, otherwise absolutely nothing gets done.

People who don’t write code don’t understand this, but it’s something that relates to the fact programming is not a pure engineering game – we’re not production line guys who can just stop, do something else for 30 seconds and then go back and pick up where we left off before.

Most people who aren’t coders are in jobs where interruptions are the norm. If you spend all day fielding sales calls, you’re used to chopping, changing, dealing with little snippets of information. If your job is composed of lots of tasks that take 10 minutes or so each, you will never understand why a coder who is three hours into a coding problem can’t risk you passing by and asking what they’re up to for the weekend. I think this is part of the reason why sometimes coders can be considered rude and unhelpful – it’s actually really, really distressing to be interrupted when you know your brain is going to lose where you are in a matter of seconds.

I used to argue in one job that if I was doing something particularly complicated in code, a 30-second interruption could cost me an hour of productivity. Colleagues thought I was joking and kept on interrupting. As a result, productivity slowed. They thought I was being lazy. I took a laptop out to a coffee shop, took some noise-cancelling headphones and didn’t come back until I was done coding. Eventually I was able to convince management that coders and sys admins doing complicated roll-outs could not afford to be disturbed if they wanted any work done, not because they were being prima donnas, but because coding requires a level of concentration I doubt they can even relate to. Most people don’t concentrate like coders do at any point in their life after they’ve left school – they forget what it feels like.

Even now though, people don’t believe me. I used to get on average 10-20 interruptions a day between 9am and 4pm. They would be a mixture of IMs, e-mails and phone calls. As a result, my ‘8 hour day’ was wasted with stuff other people thought I should consider important, but could just have easily waited for a few hours.

My first response used to be to ‘go dark’. Turn off all e-mail and IM clients, turn off the phone, tell customers that I’d get back to them when I had the chance. This just isn’t practical for me though on several levels. Firstly I’m “on call” for some clients in case they have problems – if a friend’s server goes down, he needs to get it back up quickly, and I don’t mind helping him. If somebody wants to discuss a contract with me, I don’t want to blank them. If a guy has a bit more work for me if I can do it that day, I don’t want to pass it by just because I was busy on some loop that was causing me problems.

The solution then, has to be a compromise, and the solution I’ve been testing this week has been remarkably successful, although it’s not for everybody.

First, I get up early. Very early. I’m awake at 5:45am at the latest. By 6:15am at the latest I’m showered, dressed and fed (porridge and banana a must now we’re heading into a typically Mancunian Autumn) and ready to start work. True, I now need two cups of coffee first thing to get started, but I’m awake, and more importantly, I’m alone.

Nobody normally calls me or IMs me between 6am and 9am. If somebody is calling me with a server problem at that time of the morning, chances are it’s worth the interruption. The US is asleep, most of the UK hasn’t got to work yet. Admittedly if I started taking on work in the East, timezones would mean I might get hassled, but I’ll consider that if and when the time comes.

Secondly, I work late. I’m often working at 10pm-11pm, again using that period from 6pm until late where nobody is talking to me. It’s more interesting than TV, and more productive than working during the day.

I also work on the weekend. Nobody calls on a Saturday or Sunday usually – but I take at least one of them off completely – and life in general is quiet. I’m in ‘alone time’ for huge great swathes of time at weekends.

By now you must think I’m mad. I must be working 16 hour days, 6 days a week. It’s true that sometimes workload means that is exactly what I must do. However, normally I take my time during the day to do other things than coding. I don’t mind a customer phoning me whilst I’m sat in a coffee shop reading the paper – he’s not interrupting something important. I don’t mind getting an IM asking for help when I’m just browsing some RSS feeds or playing Code Golf or doing some background research. Or I might be doing my accounts, writing an article for the blog, going through the mailing lists I subscribe to, preparing a proposal, whatever. Being interrupted then doesn’t bother me, because it requires less than 1/10th of the concentration coding takes.

In other words, my solution to ‘alone time’ is to work early in the morning, slack off for a bit or do something non-intensive during the day if workload allows, then get back on to work late in the evening when people aren’t going to be asking for proposals, invoices or other forms of attention.

Yes, my social life has had to change a little bit. I’m not going to the pub as often – probably a good thing – and I expect that if I were in a relationship right now things would be a little ‘strained’ to say the least, but at least I’m getting productive coding time to myself and for now, that’s the important thing. I also still get that feeling of liberation by being able to occasionally spend the afternoon browsing, meeting a friend for coffee, or doing my shopping. Très Français. :-)

Regardless, if the above option isn’t available to you – and I understand that if you’re in a regular job, your boss may not be open to the idea of working early or late – you still need to find alone time if your work requires concentration. If I were hiring a programmer, I would make sure their desk didn’t have a phone on it and they didn’t share an office with anybody whose desk did. If I were hiring a programmer, I’d know the only way I’d get a good day of work from them would be to make sure that any ‘interruptions’ were scheduled, controlled, managed and agreed in advance. Otherwise, I reckon I’d just be wasting my money. You should try and convince your boss you need the same if you want to raise your own level of output, or at least find a reasonable work-around.

Kathy Sierra asks the question ‘What kind of genius are you?’ with an observation on DHH and Doc Searles and the type of people they are.

Articles like this can induce a sense of paranoia and insecurity in some people. It’s OK to say that you might not get started until you’re in your 50’s or 60’s, but most of us who are in our younger years look at people like DHH and Bezos and the founders of Google, Yahoo!, e-Bay, etc. and we are confronted with one thought: Why am I not moving at that speed?

And it’s a depressing thought. Right now I have 4 projects I want to get off the ground, another one that should have gone live in February and about a dozen others in planning stages. I don’t really have time to get on with any of them. Last night I was working until 3am dealing with a few paid projects that need progress making on them. They don’t make a lot of money, but they pay the rent, my bills. People are relying on them being done.

In recent years there has been a big rise in productivity geeks. 43folders is the most popular shrine to the people who carry around ‘Hipster PDAs’, read Getting Things Done as if it were a religious text and will only carry a pocket notebook if it’s made by Moleskine.

The purpose of this almost obsessisve-compulsive desire to increase productivity, get rid of anything that stops us in our tracks is quite simple. It’s not because we have a desire to be efficient as ourselves. We want to actually be in the same ballpark as DHH, or Linus, or Stallman, or that kid who was in our class at college who always got their assignments done in half the time we did. We’re acting as it’s all a big competition and we’re losing right now.

It’s not a unique trait to the geek industry. This week the Labour Party held their conference in Manchester, my hometown, and I have been constantly amazed at how young most parliamentary researchers are and how hard they feel they have to work. They want to get ahead, looking at the likes of William Hague or David Miliband and they think “My God! By my age they had already been elected!” and so they push, push, push, push.

They all miss the one simple truth though: you can’t be those people, you can only ever be you. Life is a journey, not a race or a competition. Your projects are likely to fail at first, so take the time to work out why. What’s more, DHH, Linus, Stallman, Hague, Milliband didn’t plan to be where they got as quickly as they did – if they had, it probably would have taken them three times longer.

My angle on productivity is rather different to most people’s. Instead of building lists of things to do in a set of ‘contexts’, I’ve gone counter-intuitive: I rest. I’ve recently taken to not working at weekends. I tend to just collapse into a big heap on the sofa or in bed with a stack of books and a supply of fruit and let my body recover from the 80-90 hour week I’ll have just completed. And yet when I do that I feel guilty – I should be using the time better. It’s a tough choice.

However I’ve recently nolticed the early part of the week is more productive than the latter part of the week, and so the next stage is even more daring: stop working at 5pm, every day. I don’t know how I’ll manage it, but I’ll find a way somehow.