How To Take Back Your Time And Attention – Merlin Mann – InformationWeek

Wow. Mitch Wagner did an ass-kickingly thorough job of summarizing my talk at Macworld about wrangling your time and attention. Really nice work, Mitch – thanks, man.

“When the value of your times is set too low, or not at all, it leads to waste and abuse,” Mann said.

This is a particular problem for knowledge workers. (How do you identify knowledge workers? “Look for someone with girlie smooth hands who can go to lunch whenever they want,” Mann explained.) Knowledge workers have huge amounts of freedom in how they work, they aren’t micromanaged, they just have goals to achieve. That freedom is dangerous. “You can find yourself at two in the morning staring at Wikipedia covered in pizza crusts,” Mann said.

Up top is a snap of the slides from my talk, which I’ll try to get up on Slideshare when I get a chance to tidy them up.

[Pimp: here’s information on my speaking gigs and how to bring me in to speak with your organization]

update 2008-01-21 12:39:42: Okay, she’s up. As ever, I’m not sure these’ll make much sense without me standing there, yammering, but here’s a clickable version of my slides:

| & Time Burglars' on SlideShare">View