Commentary

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities

Merlin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:28:18 -0400

Thanks to my funny, literary pal, Jason B. Jones, today, I’m visiting lovely, warm Connecticut to do some talks and whatnot at CCSU. I mention it because I’d started typing this little post mid-way through the long eastbound ﬂight that delivered me here from three fun (but very long) days doing a comedy thing with You Look Nice Today and Jordan, Jesse, Go! over on that other, top-left, edge of our nation.

So, I was tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where your wallet hurts your butt, and coffee tastes weird, and you try super-hard to sleep, but – well – you’re just too tired to sleep. And, I was ﬁne with all that. Who can complain about being sleepy from hanging out with Adam and Scott? Exactly.

Except. The lady in the seat directly behind me was having grave problems with her “mud room.” Big mud room problems. I know this because she talked about it for several hours in excruciating detail.

I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts of the numerous and surprising ways that the room in which wealthy persons remove their shoes might contribute to causing a carefully-coiffed, 60-year-old woman to come unglued over “priorities.” Sufﬁce to say, ﬁxing this problem was a “high priority” for her. So, she said, repeatedly, as I shifted my wallet, let my coffee go cold, and balled the little blue pillow under my neck.

“Priority! Mud room!” I audibly mumbled, just loud enough to be heard exactly one row back.

Priority. Man, that’s a tough word. Because, depending on who you talk to, most people say “prioritizing” is either a giant problem, an underused skill, or a “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Me? I think priorities are simple to understand precisely because their inﬂuence is so staggeringly clear and unavoidable to behold, then act upon. Ready for this one?

A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.

Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something.

An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.

Why all the fussiness, Mr. Fussy?

When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” – to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and “n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.

Kind of unique. Sort of pregnant. “High” priority.

This is why I say priorities can only be observed. In my book, a priority is not simply a good idea; it’s a condition of reality that, when observed, causes you to reject every other thing in the universe – real, imagined, or prospective – in order to ensure that things related to the priority stay alive.

Even though their inﬂuence informs every decision we make on the most tactical level, thinking about priorities happens at a strategic, “why am I here?” level. Right? Maybe? Disagree? Pretty sure you can make priorities like biscuits or shufﬂe them around like Monopoly pieces?

Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

Related example. You ever had a loved one – especially a very young relative – pass away unexpectedly? Brutal. What did you do when you found out? Did you “re-prioritize” your day and move a few things around? Or did you drop everything and join his or her loved ones in taking care of what needed to be taken care of? You just saw what needed to be done and likely had no compunction about telling everybody at work they’d either have to wait or move on without you.

And, let’s be clear: this is not all about “urgency.” Yes, an injured child and a grieving family need help now in a way that an M&A discussion or a CPR class may not. But, again. It’s not a question of order or shufﬂing. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.”

Day One Buddhism.

Because, once you see what’s really there – once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture – you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more. Even in spirit.

Because, if you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkward and unsure?

Maybe a mud room is a priority. I think more likely it was this lady’s emotional obsession. If I were the sort of person who coached people on these things, I’d ask her what piece of information she needed to get moving on the “mud room” project, then get it, do it, and move on. That said, dozens of thousands of feet in the air seems like a crummy place to realize a mud room is your “priority,” but I’m not here to judge. Much.

What I will tell you is that these ideas about scarcity and mutual exclusivity ﬂy in the face of most “productivity” and “effectiveness” nonsense, and frankly, they make most people bristle. Big time. When I tell someone who’s making 10 times the salary I’ll ever make that it’s literally impossible to have seven priorities, they look at me like I’m the biggest, dumbest hippie in the world. Sheesh, right?

For the Cult of Priority folks, two things:

First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely? Have you ever “re-assigned” “priority” to some task? Really? Because that sounds more like procrastination than management, let alone “effective” action and decisive execution. Sounds more to me like getting paid $10,000,000 a year to re-arrange your spice rack – then wondering why your company, marriage, and back porch are all crumbling under your “prioritization.” Sounds like maybe you’re just feeling crummy about not understanding your job and your life. Once you know a tree is falling on you, you don’t take a meeting to drill down on strategies viz. arboreal exit strategies. You just run.

Also, number two – and this is a biggie – I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is deﬁned by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terriﬁc opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.

No, no, no, no, sorry, later, nope, forget it, later, no, no, no.

Because only babies and crazy people get to pretend that reality actually changes when you close your eyes and hum. And, reality is the thing that priorities hang on. If you think you can change it by taxonomies and meetings, you still have only two arms, only now you’re also screwed.

So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don’t ask yourself whether it’s a “priority.” Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of.

Once you see and accept real priorities, the rest just turns on the mechanics of fearless completion.

”Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 28, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Free as in "Me"

Merlin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:29:33 -0400

This unbelievably long article is related to (but not necessarily about) a discussion that I and several other people have been participating in online over the past few days. It’s about (and not about) the increasingly popular practice of re-publishing someone’s online work on another site without the attribution, formatting, and linking that many bloggers regard as standard, ethical, and fair.

It’s admittedly a polemic (which is what people who think they’re clever call, “a rambling rant”), but what may seem to many to be a childish and ungrateful pout about trivial status and self-esteem beefs turns out to be a kitchen table issue for me. Because, how people decide to reuse and attribute my work directly affects my career, my livelihood, and my ability to thrive based mostly on giving things away for free. I know. Paradoxical, right? Believe me, I know.

Anyhow. To get up to speed, please read these in order: Matt said something, Josh said something, I said something, Andy wrote this awesome post, Jason responded, then, Anil responded. For extra credit, and to get you in the mood, go back and re-listen to Gruber’s and my talk from this year’s SxSW.

I will wait here. Please read them all. This will take a while, and you should only continue if you’re okay with that. As ever, it’s kind of the whole point.

[Time passes, and then:]

Privileges, Fiat, and the Consequence of Guessing Wrong

Weird thing you eventually realize is the extent to which we all rely upon a certain amount of guessing about other people’s motivations. Call it a heuristic or a shortcut or whatever, but in order to make scalable sense of a very strange world, we each have to apply existential algorithms and SWAGs to help us turn a lot of unrelated crap into a sensible story that we can live with.

But. It is important to remember that it is just a story. And the truth behind our assumptions is often not only different than we thought or hoped, but can even be really difﬁcult to understand, summarize, or ﬁt back into our original story.

Eventually, you also learn that it’s sketchy to blame the truth instead of a broken story.

Which is why I said what I said about how All Things D’s Voices section obtains and presents the work of writers who do not actually write for them. It’s why I’m uncomfortable letting other people decide, by ﬁat, that their insight into my own motivations gives them permission to reuse my work however (and, importantly, wherever) they please while unilaterally setting the licensing and compensation to terms they’ve decided are appropriate.

In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and – what? – I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant for-proﬁt corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-proﬁt corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

Well. In my own case, anyone who guessed that motivation has guessed amazingly wrong. And, it’s not the kind of wrong without consequences. So, before I take up the rest of your morning, I’ll try to say this well and mostly once:

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And – if and when I choose to give away the things that I make – nobody but me is allowed to deﬁne how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

But, let’s start at the beginning. With a series of computer networks that were designed to help scientists keep talking after a nuclear holocaust. The network, of course, is the internet, and its oldest and best-known profession is advertising.1

Days We Were and Weren’t Working for Mad Men

As giant, popular websites have begun to struggle with a years-old decision to hang every nickel of their fortunes on CPM ads (and, consequently, on constantly increasing the volume of page views that make those ads theoretically proﬁtable), readers, fans, and independent makers of content have been forced to watch, ﬁdget, and, wince at their increasingly awkward tarantellas.

Because, as my friend, John Gruber, and I have grown fond of saying, page views and CPM ads can become a corrupting inﬂuence on whatever thing you really want to do – on the stories you hope to tell, and, cardinally, on the long-term success of reaching the niche audience who totally gets whatever unbelievably odd thing you’re uniquely capable of producing. Yes. Even if that thing involves not “just being a blogger”,2 maybe a few of us have the temerity to eventually crave something alongside or way beyond toiling in this noble, grinding, and often ghettoized occupation.

But. If your motivation is solely to be a blogger with a site that runs ads, it will necessarily mean thinking a lot about how you’re going to generate page views. Because without ads, most blogs would be lucky to generate bus fare.

When your sole metric is the number of times that pages on your site are loaded (and, that those delicious and life-sustaining ads are served along with them), it becomes unbelievably tempting to start doing things that you know are total bullshit. God knows I’ve done it. Probably dozens of times. Few of us haven’t followed that siren’s song in one way or another, but hopefully you evolve. Sometimes, you don’t.

The Lumpen Metrics of Page View Addiction

And, that is where things start turning to shit.

You “page” your articles to the point of hostile unreadability. You disguise or bury links to source articles in a way that makes your article seem a little more canonical than the real thing. You encourage unmoderated comment threads in which cheering an uncivil race to the bottom of the Port-O-Let means triple page views. You may even compel your indentured “writers” to hew to a stiﬂing regimen of post volume, pointless stock art inclusion, and even compulsory word count – simply because the cargo cult of statistics whispers which coconuts make the best headphones. You conspire to trick, deceive, annoy, and badger your audience up to precisely that moment when they say, “Screw it,” and just never come back.

You ruin the fun for surprisingly little money and eventually discover, to your surprise, that whatever shred of credibility you originally brought to your enterprise has disintegrated into a light dusting on some backﬁll banners.

Also, “links.” Wow. Links used to really mean something different. When I ﬁrst started enjoying blogs (maybe 11 years ago), links represented a semantic, curated map of the places where one writer’s attention tended to go.

Today, links have been converted into a wildly inﬂated currency – farthings that get hoarded and begged, then pushed around, re-counted, and stacked in ways that make you seem a lot less Charles Dickens than Ebenezer Scrooge.

Then, Presently, the Dark Night of the Soul

When page views run your life, you eventually start ﬁbbing about what you really care about. You start pandering to an audience whose depressing lust for new pellets keeps them pecking at a feeder bar for every waking hour. And, yeah, these pigeons eventually become the sole leverage behind your going concern; lose the pigeons and there’s no point pushing pellets, right? Why else would you bother tending the coop?

And, ﬁnally, as this weird darkness metastasizes, you may unintentionally abandon those ﬁnicky but inﬂuential creators of culture and content upon whose work and authority your whole rag and bone racket ultimately depends. Because, let’s be honest: people who make things tend to recognize bullshit the second it plops into the domain where they have expertise. So, a smart blogger knows horeseshit page games like a veteran carpenter can tell you which chair’s made out of masking tape and balsa scraps. (“Dude! No! Don’t sit there!”)

Thing is: the silence or indifference of the readers and fans you lose will never register in SiteMeter, or Mint, or Google Analytics. There’s no overt trace to warn you when things have gone awry. So, you may never know when someone awesome has decided you’re a charlatan.

Because, friends, when page views run your life, you get dumb. Fast. And you start making terrible decisions.

The Ingratitude. The Temerity.

So, where does some small-potatoes nobody like me (or, in this instance, my pal, Matt Haughey and Delicious.com founder, Joshua Schachter) get off? Some giant for-proﬁt publication (whose most evergreen topic, like my own, seems to be “How Everyone on the Internet Keeps Doing It Wrong”) shows the largesse to republish some digital peasant’s scribblings in their esteemed forum – and they complain? The very idea. Guys, this is a GIANT compliment, right? Because it “drives trafﬁc!”

Hey, trafﬁc. Right. I guess I’ll need that for all those page views, right? Well. Only kinda.

See, links and trafﬁc are great. Seriously. Especially when you’re getting started and when they come from a site run by people you respect and admire as much as I admire Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (this beef aside, those two are the real deal). Links and trafﬁc are, as I said, the coin of the realm in some sense. They build awareness about what a person does, and they expose a person’s work to a large enough audience that one even hopes a few “ideal readers” might end up landing somewhere in the mix.

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if – as I said in that email to Andy – what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

So, Who Died and Made You So Fancy, Mr. Fancy?

Anyone with the patience to read or hear anything I’ve had to say over the last year knows that saying what I have to say in the way I want to say it is orders of magnitude more important to me than driving a lot of pointless page views from people I never cared about reaching anyway. No offense, internet, but right now, I need links like Chasen’s needs chili.3

And, to clarify why I include myself in this particular discussion, even though ATD did not boost my own articles for their site, this kind of unilateral and dodgy “repurposing” of my work has happened to me many times. Even setting aside the truly black hat scraping that happens dozens of times a day, I’ve received this kind of left-handed compliment numerous times over the past 4 years.

The example that, for a variety of reasons, sticks out most prominently in my mind happened in May of 2007, when I awoke one morning to discover that the much-more-giant-and-ﬁnancially-lucrative site, Lifehacker, had suddenly started republishing my entire feed on their ad-crazy home page without even bothering to inform me, let alone ask if I was cool with it. Hey. Wow. Just look at all that honor. Lucky me.

I immediately complained about the nonsense to now-emeritus Lifehacker editor (and long-standing Top 10 human) Gina Trapani, and she was kind enough to remove me from the mix with all haste (thanks, Gina).

But, should I have had to ask? As I said in an email to Gina at the time:

I wonder how [Lifehacker’s hilariously Dickensian publisher, Nick Denton] would feel if a site like Engadget started automatically reposting every article from Gizmodo w/o permission or compensation – but wrapped it in Engadget’s ads. Maybe he’d love it. Who knows?

Personally, I think it’s always nice to be asked about this kind of thing ﬁrst.

Was it about “the money?” Was it because I think Nick consistently sets, funds, and promotes many of the most execrable examples in the history of publishing? “Not really,” and “kinda,” respectively.

This was about taking something I did and putting it someplace that wasn’t mine, and then acting like we’d both agreed it was a good deal. Like snatching the card off the gift-wrapped toaster I brought, scribbling your name above mine on the card, then handing the whole thing to the bride with a kiss. “Yay! Presents! Thanks, Nick!”

Money is only an issue inasmuch as the prospect of making it without effort or agency governs someone’s decision to stick their dick in my mashed potatoes and call it a birthday cake.

There’s Also No “I” in “We.” Not Until I Say So.

Here’s something like my point: there’s exactly one person on this marble who gets to choose what I give away, to whom I give it away, and under what conditions I give it away. It’s not folks who have decided via tarot or Ouija why I do anything that I do. And it’s damned sure not the esteemed employees of Rupert Murdoch or Nick Denton. It’s me, gang. Merlin is Merlin’s sole free-stuff decider. Full stop. Punto.

If it matters (and it certainly may not), my goal and motivation is to wake up early every day, drink coffee, play with my daughter, kiss my beautiful wife, and then spend double-digit hours trying to create things that will make people happy, productive, entertained, inspired, and even a little more awesome – and, on those rarest and most joyful of days, maybe I’ll even make something that combines all of those qualities.

But, all these ideas start and end with me. All the execution goes through me. If it sucks, it’s because of me. But it always has my name and my dorky icon on it, so you know where to either ﬁnd more or simply try to steer clear.

And, whether people love, despise, or feel indifferent about things I’ve made, it all comes down to me and my weird independent occupation. This is not simply a job; it’s an anxious daily adventure in fucking reinventing myself. While, I’ll note, paying my own way to keep every dinghy in this little ﬂotilla aﬂoat and barnacle-free. And while it’s undeniably the richest of ﬁrst-world problems, funding your own independence is the most insanely costly and addictive project you’ll ever love.

Okay, Shakespeare: WHY Do I Care?

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today, is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really “mean.” Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the ﬂoor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign. No matter what.

And, even in the face of change that will be gut-wrenching for literally everyone, I pray that for each person whose occupation relied on a 100- to 900-year-old business model, maybe one or two might get to ﬁgure out something they can make and vend in a way that does not require the intermediation of the people who are currently steaming their unsinkable vessels into some surprisingly pointy and resolute chunks of ice.

Again: There are Many Like It, But This One is Mine

This is just my opinion and I speak for no one but myself. But, when somebody moves my work onto their shelf without asking me like an adult, one of the last things on my mind is stealing or piracy. Seriously. I know. Crazy.

Steal my stuff? Sure. Go nuts. Grab it. Read it. “Pirate it.” Put it on a Kindle. Put it in a torrent. Make it into LaTeX (whatever that is). But, man. Don’t sell it without asking me. Don’t be a dick about pretending I made it for your project. And, don’t try to shortchange me on copper pipe, then call it a special discount. None of that’s your call, chief.

I can make words and videos and pretty much anything to replace or augment the ones people consume; but I absolutely can’t do it if you rub my name and address off of the label. And, here’s the funny part: when people like me quit making stuff, guess what? Your shovelblog fodder and pigeon pellets start drying up. You’d have nothing left to churn. So, it actually beneﬁts all of us to take this stuff seriously.

The Niche Shall Set You “Free”

And, ﬁnally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and ﬁduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

And, if we do the right thing, we can each merge into an insane new caravan of makers who look out for each other, focus on doing great work, and who try to promote things because it made a connection with us. Not because it beneﬁts someone who pays us by the compliment.

But, the anecdote that’s on my mind today comes straight out of the warm and countless Wednesday night potlucks my family attended in the Fellowship Hall at White Oak Christian Church on Blue Rock Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Where, even if you arrived empty-handed and unable to contribute on a given night, you were welcomed and encouraged to eat all you liked. But, when you ﬁnished, you wiped your mouth, straightened your tie, and personally acknowledged every single cook who’d just fed you. Yes. Even all those amateurs who ﬁlled your belly for “free.”

I have and will continue to run ads on some of my sites, including 43 Folders. It will be left to the reader whether this is wise, well-done, or simply hypocritical, so I’ll just simply stipulate that, in my opinion, ads alone are not the problem; they’re an easy revenue stream that can be removed with trivial ease. But. Making a career out of executing work exclusively to generate page views that support those ads? That is where this gets thorny. I don’t do that (at least now I don’t), but judge away. ↩
Not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my best friends are “just a blogger.” ↩
Yeah. Totally stole that from Robert Evans. ↩

”Free as in "Me"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 10, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship

Merlin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:51:00 -0400

So amazing, so illegal. What are we going to do with you, future?

That’s my pal, Jonathan Coulton, remarking on the disruptively talented Kutiman, who has made an astounding series of YouTube video remixes that’s lighting up the web and (one imagines) generating a lot of wood amongst our nation’s libidinous entertainment litigators.

Here’s Kutiman’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords” (link includes credits for each video):

Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will ﬁgure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary ﬁles. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

In the mean time, though, you have to wonder how much artists like Kutiman (or, for that matter, Jonathan), really need the mixed basket of theoretical beneﬁts that big companies with big distribution can provide. For a long-lived career, does a boot-strapping indie artist with giant niche appeal gain enough from a big-company relationship to offset the loss in agility, equity, and ﬂexibility? I guess we’ll ﬁnd out soon enough.

Because, even in the face of bullying, obfuscating, and throat-clearing from corporations with a homemade timetable for evolution, more and more folks like Kutiman will just keep making and releasing stuff. Cool stuff, “illegal” stuff, niche stuff, and stuff that doesn’t require the benediction of a middle-aged executive in order to reach its precise audience with almost zero friction or overhead.

And, that prospect should buoy and energize anybody with a scintilla of artistic entrepreneurship or the drive to just try making and offering their own stuff in their own way.

Man. What an exciting time this is. Seriously. We may not each have Kutiman-level talent and vision, but there’s absolutely never been a better time to at least give it a throw.

Remember: the only person who can sit on your ass is you.

”Kutiman, Big Media, and the Future of Creative Entrepreneurship” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 11, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

On Thumbs, Stars, and Little Men

Merlin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:59:43 -0500

Robert Christgau: CG 70s: The Grades

I love Christgau’s original (pre-1990) explanation of how he grades the records that he reviews.

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

[… further explanations, then …]

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.

It’s not that people aren’t interested in hearing what anointed “experts” have to say about a given movie, CD, book, or what have you. And, it’s not even that the lumpenconsumertariat requires that everything be reduced to a pre-chewed paste about buying decisions.

But, disclosing the fahrenheit, celsius, or kelvin of a given reviewer’s mercury would make it much easier for readers to understand how closely a critic’s cognition maps to their own.

Because, by itself, a thumb is really just a decisive ﬁnger. And, by itself, a ﬁnger almost always beneﬁts from a little extra context.

[Note: This post originally appeared on our daughter site, “43 Folders Clips,” and we liked it enough to republish it here.]

”On Thumbs, Stars, and Little Men” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 29, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Better

Merlin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:14:11 -0500

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.

These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.

Each, in its own way, contributes to the imperative that we constantly expand our portfolio of shallow but strongly-held opinions about nearly everything. Then we’re supposed to post something about it. Somewhere.

From businesses we’ve never heard of, to countries we’ve never visited, to infants who’ve had the random misfortune to be born into a family that’s on TV – it’s all grist for obvious jokes and shortsighted commentary that, for at least a few minutes, helps both the maker and the consumer feel a little less bored, a little less vulnerable, and a little less disconnected. For a minute, anyway, it makes us feel more alive. Does me, anyway.

But, in my observation, the long-term effect of each of these can be surprisingly different.

What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and reﬁne your personality while sitting alone at a screen.

Don’t get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited ﬁrst drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.

With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato – regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be liveblogging a lot of ham-ﬁsted attempts to turn “everything” off. But it does mean making mindful decisions about the quality of any input that I check repeatedly – as well as any “stuff” I produce. Everything. From news sources to entertainment programming, and from ephemeral web content down to each email message I decide to respond to. The shit has to go, inclusive.

To be honest, I don’t have a speciﬁc agenda for what I want to do all that differently, apart from what I’m already trying to do every day:

identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
demand personal focus on making good things;
put a handful of real people near the center of everything.

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.

To underscore, I have no plan to stop making dick jokes or to swear off ragging people who clearly have it coming to them. It’s just that it’s important to me to make world-class dick jokes and to rag the worthy in a way that no one is expecting. I want to become an evangelist for hard work and editing, and I want to get to a place where it shows in everything that I do, make, and share. Yes, even if it makes me sound like a fancy guy who just doesn’t get it. Fuck it.

So, yes. I am cutting way back on trips to the steam table of half-ﬁnished, half-useful, half-ideas that I both make and consume. And, with respect, I encourage you to consider doing the same; especially if that all-you-can-eat buffet of snark and streaming produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game.

If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to ﬁnd the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes.

“Better” was originally posted to Merlin’s personal blog, Kung Fu Grippe, on September 3, 2008. Although the original post will remain available, it appears here in a slightly revised and updated edition.

”Better” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 09, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The High Cost of Pretending

Merlin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:39:50 -0500

apophenia: Warning: Email Sabbatical is Imminent .. and other random thoughts

[via trivium]

danah boyd is ﬁnishing her dissertation, then going on vacation for a month. While, she’s gone, she’s not accepting email. At all. Got that?

No apology. No “vacation message” to pretend she’ll read it later. And no implied promise that the stuff people send to her will magically be tended to by an invisble army of interns and elves. While she’s away, every message she receives is simply discarded with a friendly response as to why. danah writes:

…I believe that email eradicates any beneﬁts gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail ﬁle that sends everything directly to /dev/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I’m away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don’t worry… if you forget, you’ll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah’s deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19.

If you roll your eyes at such fancy, uppity, big-city behavior, consider the alternatives most of us suffer in order to pretend we’re listening. Even when we know we’re not.

At worst, we lie: both to ourselves and to others.

We play this pantomime game where we continue to offer contemporary life’s default level of extraordinary personal access to anyone who seeks it – even at the times when we have no intention of, or ability to, do anything about what people use that access to ask of us. And, that’s a small but telling lie.

You ever done the opposite of what danah is doing? Where you come back from a vacation during which you half-checked email from a mobile device, ignored most of it, and didn’t properly ﬁnish processing the rest? Sure, you have. And, what happened?

Well, if you’re like most people, you deleted a lot of the messages without even reading them. Right? Or, what? You spent 2 or 3 days reading and responding to everything? Even while new (and inarguably more salient) stuff piled up? Right. Smart.

So, maybe you prefer to think of it as mismanaging expectations. Because you feel guilty about just ignoring everything you implied you’d do something about, and you still feel the pressure to do something with all of it – even if it’s just responding with a template or writing back to say how busy you are, and, Sorry! but I’m still getting to this. SORRY!

Or. You could have told the truth. Don’t send me email. I won’t see it. Write me later.

danah’s decision would be so wrong for so many people that it’s mind-boggling to contemplate. But it is her decision, and doing anything but congratulating her on having the courageousness to unambiguously manage such a giant expectation would be cynical and (yep) dishonest. This is some bold shit, and, you know what? That scares the hell out of people.

In my experience, most of us are terriﬁed of being told the truth, even about something as seemingly trivial as email. It’s so much easier and more comfortable for all the parties in a relationship to fall back on the pseudo-polite non-communication that lets us pretend to pay attention to each other on a massive scale. And, right now, this is a really important thing that very few people are talking about.

Even if we call this something less than “a lie,” we’re still stuck with the depressing prospect of a secret and shameful existence in which pretending to pay attention to people is less damaging than simply admitting we don’t have the cycles to be a big phony. That pretending is a more important use of your time than doing things. That anyone who pretends to pay attention to each of us is entitled to the same nonsense courtesy.

Stress comes from dissonance. When two things in your mind can’t be resolved and you start thinking you’re going to be stuck with the incongruity forever, you stress.

But, as much as our minds and our hearts encourage us to believe the fault goes to our will or our lack of industry – rather than our thinking and cognition – the true cure for stress is to cut the Gordian Knot. To change your mind about at least one thing you think you’re not allowed to change your mind about.

You alter the game when you re-write the rules. And, in this instance, if you ﬁnd yourself more occupied with maintaining the lie than you are with doing the real work that the lie’s meant to support, it’s probably time to drop the lie. And, it also wouldn’t hurt to get unbelievably real about what you really do, rather than how and when you move bits.

Thing is, it’s not kindness that makes you see honesty as a dick move; it’s fear. And whenever you let fear drive, you’re going to end up in some dark, weird places where email ends up seeming like the least of your problems.

No, we can’t all turn off the inputs in our life whenever we want. But we can damned sure do the more signiﬁcant thing danah did here. We can create meaningful and sustainable expectations about how, when, or whether we’ll respond to each of the inputs in our world. We can be candid about the level of attention strangers and friends can expect from us. And, when the time is appropriate, we can ﬁnd the stomach to tell the world we’re not even pretending to listen.

”The High Cost of Pretending” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 09, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking

Merlin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:19:35 -0500

As I’ve started shooting photos more often, I’ve picked up on some interesting patterns: habits, if you like. And, as I struggle to absorb the insane physics of capturing light with some glass and a black box, I accept upfront that the improvements to my actual photos will be slow, incremental, and, largely undetectable to anybody but me – a fact that’s never more painfully clear than when I swoon over the work of the more talented friends who inspire me (Heather, Ryan and Chris each come to mind here).

But, being instantly great at this couldn’t be further from the point. Although I started taking photos to become a better photographer, I keep taking them because I’ve learned to love the process. And, luckily, at least as far as I can tell, dedication to the process can’t help but make you a better photographer – or a better whatever, for that matter.

An Urge to Push

I lug this clunky camera around with me every day because I want to, and because turning this hobby into a project that I work on a little bit every day ensures continuity and helps my modest bumps in skill to accrete – to make new friends with one other in ways that often surprise me (“Low ISO + giant aperture + standing very still? Wow, check that out!”).

I’m especially learning to embrace a priceless habit of shooting way more photos than I’d ever even process in Lightroom (let alone share with others). So, I’m getting more comfortable with trying different combinations of angle, framing, lighting, aperture, speed, and ISO. The calculus of capturing a “tack sharp” image encompasses an astounding combination of science, observation, and, in the fullness of time, intuition. But, to get there takes time and clicking. So, that promiscuity with the volume of photos I capture teaches me that it costs nothing to just get something in the viewﬁnder and shoot, shoot, shoot. Maybe something will turn out if I get enough of ‘em, right?

Cleft Unto the Suck

And, even if a given shot is shit – and, most certainly, the vast majority of all my photos are varying degrees of shit – you still learn from the bad ones and no damage is done. Truth is, at the level I’m playing, there’s no real cost associated with failure. Unless, you count the damage of working with unrealistic expectations or the paralyzing joylessness of the conventional wisdom that only some are “Blessed with Creativity…” [insert Tinkerbell glissando]

So, maybe, that’s what really grabbed me last night, when – depending on your perception of how this stuff works – I either started to lose The Fear, or I became one of those horrible little people who doesn’t realize how stupid they look ﬁddling with a camera.

It Starts with a Shoe

Yesterday evening, the three of us went out for pizza. And, at some point, as my wife and I took turns carrying our daughter home, Eleanor lost a shoe. This happens a lot with a 13-month-old. Of course, we didn’t notice the shoe had gone missing until we got back to the house, where I was quickly re-dispatched on a reconnaissance and rescue mission. Heading for the door, I started to grab my camera — but then stopped and winced a little.

“Oh, Jesus. Really?” some voice whined. “Now you’re That Guy? Can’t you just walk out there like a grownup, retrace your steps, and be back here in 5 goddamned minutes? You really need to drag your giant, douchey camera out for a four-block walk? Who’re you now, freakin’ Diane Arbus? Jeez, get a life.”

But, you know what? I told myself to shut the fuck up. And, I grabbed my camera and started downhill, into the darkness, toward one MIA Croc.

Fortunately, it was an easy enough trip, because there was Ellie’s shoe, upright and undisturbed, on the sidewalk at the end of the block. Of course (having the giant, douchey camera with me), I started snapping some photos.

First, I got a couple eye-level photos of the optimistic little shoe that turned out about as badly as most eye-level shots of the ground do. But, on review [always review the ﬁrst few shots and zoom way in], I thought the color looked cool on the dark street, so I got on one knee to take another. Yeah, better. But, it still looked like a lame overhead snapshot that was way too dark and noisy. So, I did something that surprised me.

I laid on the sidewalk. All the way down. On my gut on 50° of western San Francisco concrete.

And, I took my time, thinking about the aperture (all the way open for depth of ﬁeld) and the available light (very little, so I put the the camera right on the ground to steady it). I snapped a dozen or more shots with slightly different settings. No idea what I was doing. People walked by, cars passed, the L barreled by, but I kept shooting until I was satisﬁed that I might have something. Then, I grabbed the shoe, stood up, and trotted back up the hill, triumphant, with a recovered piece of footwear, plus what I suspected might be at least one pretty good photo.

I like how it turned out.

Yeah, I know, it’s no masterpiece, but I’m proud of it for reasons of my own. Because, last night, as I was splayed prone in the fog along Taraval Street, I realized I was getting a little better at this.

Not because I’d been magically touched with mythical creativity and skill, but because for a moment I was thinking more about how to use what I’d learned to get a good photo than I was about how I might have looked while doing it. And, that felt like a small turning point.

Tolerance for Courageous Sucking

Nobody likes feeling like a noob, especially when you’re getting constant pressure on all sides to never stick out in an unﬂattering way. And, in this godforsaken just-add-Wikipedia era of make-believe insight and instant expertise, it’s natural to start believing you must never suck at anything or admit to knowing less than everything – even when you’re just starting out. Clarinets should never squawk, sketch lines should never be visible, and dictionaries are just big, dumb books of words for cheaters and fancy people. Right?

I think ﬁnding your own comfort with the process (whatever that process ends up being) might just be the whole game here – being willing to put in your time, learn the craft, and never lose the courageousness to be caught in the middle of making something you care about, even when it might be shit and you might look like an idiot fumbling to make it. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could quit, because it’s too hard to make stuff you aren’t already great at. You could convert all that pointless effort and practice back into MySpace updates and the production of funny cat pictures. No, it’s not technically the worst thing that could happen, but it’s a damned common pathway for fear to molder back into an emotional impulse to put on jammies and watch Judge Judy.

I’m not doing anything special here, and I don’t claim to have a magic formula for creativity, let alone for getting a half-decent photo of a rubber shoe. All I know is that sticking with things that don’t arrive with instant mastery does have its own reward, even if you’re the only one who ever collects it. Because the more you push through the barriers for these little avocations, the easier it becomes to remember you always have everything you need to just keep banging until you’re satisﬁed with any work that’s thrown at you.

Next time I need inspiration to get through a bad patch, or to get past that persistent feeling that I’ll always be stuck in the lowest creative gear, I hope I’ll remember to stop and ask myself what exactly is keeping me from just laying on the sidewalk until I get my shot. Even if it’s cold, even if I look like an idiot, and even if I risk missing the ﬁrst crucial minutes of Judge Judy.

”Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Driving Around the Buffalo

Merlin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:46:36 -0500

It’s purely coincidental that today is my 42nd birthday, right? Eh. Maybe.

Still, seems like as good a day as any to tell you what I’ve been thinking about, so, here’s a little present to myself.

My uncommonly smart psychiatrist (hereafter, “The Shrink”) informs me that, in addition to suffering from a modest and manageable case of ADD (ICD-9-CM Diagnosis 314.00), I also have a less well-deﬁned condition that he has called, “an artistic temperament.”

I wanted him to laugh along when I said that sounded like some serious Theodoric of York shit – possibly involving humors and stomach trolls. But, he just smiled in that way that he does when I’m trying way too hard to be amusing. I get that smile a lot.

Still, it made sense in context. Especially since I’d just spent the previous 30 minutes rambling about the terrible time I’d been having with this ﬁrst-world problem of getting back into the swing of making things.

I explained how, not long after making a big show of my interest in changing the direction of the web site that theoretically constituted my “job,” I’d unexpectedly been conscripted into a half-dozen of those all-consuming personal and business projects in which a man of my advancing years so often ﬁnds himself.

And, I told him how, even as I started to pull myself out of seven emotionally exhausting weeks, I discovered that my ideas and my words weren’t returning with the clarity and cut to which I’d grown accustomed. I told him how my mood during this weirdly dark brown study had been sickeningly reminiscent of the months I’d spent not writing a book. I told him how unusual it was for me to ever feel anything approaching the D word for more than a few contiguous minutes. And, I told him that I’d felt scared.

Author’s Note

At this juncture, your narrator will remind you that he is a grown and college-educated man who had boisterously announced an intention to write about the habits that enable admirable persons to have long-lived and successful careers in which the “work” focus of their “creative work” ensures that they (almost) never succumb to bush-league problems like “writer’s block,” serial procrastination, or an inability to generate and execute new ideas in a timely, polished fashion.

[You did get all that, right? The part where I was having trouble writing about how real artists never have the problem that I was having of being suddenly unable to think cogently about a problem that people shouldn’t be having? Good. Just wanted to make sure we’re shufﬂing through the same asylum here. Back to The Shrink’s ofﬁce…]

So, then, I told The Shrink about how I’d ﬁnally ﬁgured out that my hang-up had involved a surpassingly stupid instance of what Stephen Covey has called putting your ladder against the wrong wall. Or something like that. I never ﬁnished the book (four times).

I told The Shrink how, even when the time to make had been restored, I kept hanging up on a huge expectation I’d made for myself – a buffalo-sized corpse in the road that was preventing me from moving forward, let alone getting into a groove. That dead buffalo turned out to be the content well of the American website you’re reading right now. See? Buffalo.

I hate that it took me several fractal weeks to realize the irony of feeling bad about my site that’s meant to help people feel less bad about themselves. So, here’s what I think right now.

Thinking about the work and habits that help industrious people repeatedly create things they love still obsesses me in the best way. And, I still want to contribute whatever I can to helping other people identify and remove the barriers to doing their best work. Obviously, to a certain point, this helps me very much, too.

But, I also need to chug giant glasses of my own medicine by practicing these ideas every day — not just burning cycles on retyping them for a fucking web site. At a time when I didn’t totally have the ears to hear it, advice arrived in an email from a wonderful friend. I might have it framed:

If I may offer something that might appear as criticism, but really isn’t meant that way: the Internet’s meta-content is fattening my eyelids like nothing else these days…

Commentary is always a few frustrating notches below creation. There’s a quote from Darwin on why he spent years researching barnacles, and it goes something like, “one should not write about species who hasn’t studied many.”

Anybody can have a blog and post observations about things other people said ﬁrst. I did it just now, and I want to do it again. Maybe, at some point, I can even manage to do it without all this self-referential belly-aching.

But, I’m also going to take my friend’s advice and quit acting like the world of ideas will wither if I’m not there to rephrase it in a slightly fancier way for my blog. I’m gonna post stuff here, but I’m also not going to sweat it or let it deﬁne me. I want to do that with other stuff that you can evaluate on its own terms.

So, my birthday gift to myself today is an unlimited mulligan whenever I play the links here at 43 Folders. From now on, the expectation I’m setting for myself is to go out and spend the next year, ﬁrst and foremost, making things that delight me and that, from time to time, may even delight some of you. I’ll put stuff here when it suits me. Like today.

But, even as I strive (and often fail) to do better work across the board, I really need to approach that with the knowledge that nothing is allowed to get bottlenecked behind a self-generated anxiety about updating a blog. That’s mental.

So, anyhow, I told The Shrink how I was feeling so much better about everything now that I’d given myself permission to drive around the buffalo. And that, in the insanely dumb way that only my mind could operate, I felt energized. Not just with a renewed brio to go make some videos and learn photography and maybe even play around with ﬁction and verse and vest-pocket entrepreneurship. But, that I was excited about 43f again. To maybe start returning to the original idea of sharing my trail of inspirado with the folks who might enjoy it here; without worrying whether I do it in a way that makes me look enough like a thought leader.

But, still. Focusing on the good stuff and trying mightily not to waste anyone’s time (or inﬂate trafﬁc). More as a way to own the ineffable process by which almost anything we encounter can eventually turn into something good – even when it starts as something weird that you don’t really understand. But maybe it turns into something. If you work really hard, manage expectations, and give yourself unlimited permission to try things, fuck up, and start over, again and again and again.

Maybe it’s not really a coincidence that today’s my birthday. Or that my shrink, and my ladder, and my buffalo, and my goddamned website about whatever-the-hell-it’s-about-today all make so much more sense when I stop thinking about thinking, and start doing things. It’s a lesson I’m prepared to learn and re-learn for God knows how many more times. But, anyhow, today, I’m 42, and I’m in the mood to forgive myself. So suck on it, buffalo.

End of throat-clearing. For today. (I’m also done with predicting the future for a while.)

The next voice you hear will belong to Twyla Tharp, and it will come out of a video that I posted recently on another site (which had turned into my secret hidey-hole for stuff I thought was too “trivial” to put here). Tharp is a woman whose book so utterly inspired me this summer – well, I guess I’m embarrassed to admit how transparently I’ll be lifting and rephrasing her ideas here. Not sure anybody needs this site when such a wonderful book already has all the best stuff.

So, happy birthday to me. And, just for the hell of it, let’s give this another spin. And, God bless the “artistic temperament” in all of us. Without it, I might still be idling behind an unseemly line of buffalo.

”Driving Around the Buffalo” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 26, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work

Merlin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:14:34 -0400

[“what is this?”]

Here’s something I wrote last week for this site’s new “About” page:

43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s website about ﬁnding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Call it a motto, or a charter, or – if you have to – a “mission statement.” But, for both of us, it’s a stake in the ground that keeps me focused on what I feel best suited to do for you with this site right now.

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you ﬁgure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t ﬁnd so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to ﬁnishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but ﬂawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

From now on, I’m going to talk about how people make stuff. Books, art, code, buildings, ballets, companies, furniture, whimsical hats, songs, or what have you. But understand: this isn’t just for fancy people and ﬁne arts majors.

You’re already “creative”

If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then ﬁguring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.

But, then – and this is really important – if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we’ll have a lot to talk about.

But, if you want a “site about GTD,” “a blog about index cards,” or a wide-mouthed sluice of recycled links to lists of geegaws that will keep you momentarily distracted from how sad you are, then you’re wasting both of our time here. So, go. You’re stinking up the joint.

This is now a site for people who want to ﬁnish things that they care about – but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

So. What, then?

Does this mean that Inbox Zero, Time and Attention Management, or advice on reducing noise will be going away from 43 Folders? No. Freaking. Way.

If I may say, that’s all great stuff, and you’re still going to need it if the mind is willing but the attention is occasionally weak (or under attack). No, if anything, you’ll be seeing more articles targeted at how to do this stuff well so you can get back into the studio faster.

You’re also going to see more material about the habits and patterns that have been demonstrated to work for makers who have had long-lived careers in the creative world. In itself, this is the direction I’m most fascinated with right now, and it’s likely one I’ll be returning to often in the coming months:

How do you ﬁre your muse and learn to rely solely on working your ass off every day?

As I’m learning, it deﬁnitely can be done, but there’s no secret or silver bullet; it’s just work, work, work, combined with a personal commitment to editing and improvement that produces the best results of which you’re capable as often as possible. It’s the kind of productivity that’s about applying your time to frequent, high-quality “releases” – not laying in a hammock while people in Bangalore update your website.

But, what about all the cool notebooks, links to lists of “GTD resources,” and ponderously detailed tutorials on how to label a ﬁle folder? Yeah. From now on, maybe don’t expect a lot of that here. Unless I feel it has a direct link to helping you do things.

Here’s the thing

A notebook is basically the creative equivalent of the NFL jersey you picked up at Macy’s; unless you ﬁll it with a lot of hard work and sacriﬁces, you’re just a dilettante with poor spending patterns. An aspiring something. A fan of the game. An existential cosplayer. And, that’s not what I want to help you to be. Even if you really love Moleskines or the Raiders, God love ‘em.

So, we’re going to talk about what goes in the notebook; not the fact that it’s pretty and has a little bookmark. Then I want you to leave here.

That’s the basic idea. We’ll see what evolves.

And, there’s these other things

I’m also working on some other stuff for the site that I hope will please more people than it annoys. In any case, they’re each important to me. Here’s the shape of the map.

1. Less noise in general

Less chrome, less noise, less blah-blah, and less unnecessary anything. On a given day in the future, you may notice this as fewer ads, lower (but higher-quality) post volume, and an ongoing attempt to make the site fast and easy to use. I’m working on this. With money and people and new relationships and so on. More as it develops and becomes worth highlighting.

2. Walking a truer productivity walk

It’s important to me that we both try to stay focused on the real goal: which is being done with a project that you care about. It’s not about hanging out, smoking cloves, and chatting about “Différance” late into the Paris nights. I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.

So, if you occasionally notice me smiling, and putting a ﬁrm but gentle hand between your shoulder blades as we begin a walk toward the door, it’s because that’s closer to where your work is. It’s not here, it’s not in your inbox, and, with all due respect, it’s probably not in a list of 5,000 links.

Like I said recently, if you’ve crossed the river, you should quit carrying the boat. And while I very much hope and desire that you make 43 Folders your ﬁrst stop when you need to feel inspired and conﬁdent about making decisions that support your best work, I truly do not want you to waste time here. That would make me sad.

So, yes, please read this page: How to Use 43 Folders. It’s a new page that provides basic guidance on ﬁnding fast answers, and ultimately, on helping you ﬁgure out why you’re here.

I imagine the how-to will evolve as the site evolves, so I would be honored if you would trust me enough to bookmark that page, then consider making it the place where you begin your visits here. With any luck, it can also frequently be the page where your visits quickly end here. And, although I have to imagine it will vex the nice people who are kind enough to sell ads for my site: that’s okay by me.

3. Mostly ﬁrewalled self-promotion

While it’s my site and will always be used to promote my ideas and my business in the way that I think is most appropriate, I also don’t want it to turn into a gloriﬁed billboard for me – especially to the exclusion of the writing and ideas that make it theoretically useful. And, especially in the articles and content well. That space is getting more sacrosanct.

With much sadness, I’ve recently watched some of my most beloved and respected friends’ blogs degrade into a depressing slurry of pimping, random afﬁliate linking, paid (or pseudo-paid) placement, idiotic trafﬁc boosters, and wholesale ego boosting about every bakesale, state fair, or mall opening that its authors plan to chopper into.

Here, except for The Monthly Pimp, I want the content well to stay clean, focused, and worthy of your trust and my credibility. Ads go in the ad zones, and anybody can buy one to sell pretty much anything. But it doesn’t buy placement in a 43 Folders post, and it shouldn’t buy my association or endorsement elsewhere. Maybe for a truly paid, public endorsement deal; but not for a banner ad buy. That’s just weird. Plus I don’t own a chicken suit.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t link to my own work and my other sites and projects whenever I think it’s appropriate. It also doesn’t mean I’ll stop linking to Amazon for products or A2 for web hosting when it’s germane to what I have to say. But, I do already have a site that’s purely self-promotional. And that’s where I’d like most of that that stuff to live now.

OT: If you’re a blogger I know and love, maybe at least consider joining me in your own overdue Superfund cleanup to the extent that you’re comfortable and able. Too much money can easily buy you a very dumb audience and an astoundingly inﬂuential cohort of ex-readers.

4. No more fake “conversations”

I’ve loved so many of the comments and forum posts on 43 Folders. But, for an endless number of reasons that you’ve probably seen for yourself across the web, the quality and care of visitor contributions everywhere has hit what I truly hope is rock bottom.

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

“Conversation,” like “friend,” is a word that has a meaning to human beings with faces and brains. I will not abuse it as code for the surplus page views produced by someone with an afternoon to kill.

5. This is my site. There are many like it, but this one is mine

43 Folders is now, once again, about what I have to say about things, and I want that to be the sole reason that the idea of a visit here either attracts or repels you.

Yes, there will still be occasional guest posts, open threads, and of course, I’ll be linking to and quoting widely from the work of others. But I’m taking a cue from John, Andy, Jason, and anybody else who wants to own every pixel of their site. I’m buying back my own stock, even if it incurs a short-term writedown.

If you have comments about what I say here, post about it on your own blog. That’s what it’s there for, and it’s a place where owning your words will have gravity and, in most cases, will be associated with the name of a real person who doesn’t pinch loaves on his own couch.

And, then, there’s everything else

Over the next year, I’m going to do lots more speaking, more of my own independent video and podcast projects, and, yes, in all likelihood, I’ll ﬁnish one book and make progress toward a second.

N.B. In the case of that last thing, it’s likely to be the sole public remark I’ll have to share until I have a release date, an Amazon page, and a sample chapter for you to download. But, that’s getting ahead of myself. We’ll see what happens. Do wish me luck.

So, “hi.” Again.

I want you to know that I’m back. I’m here. And I’m thinking very much about how 43 Folders can become a focused resource for people who do work that they love and make things that matter to them – but who just want to do it better and with less bullshit and existential overhead on every conceivable front. And, if it’s not clear, I really want that same lack of bullshit and surplus of polish to be evident in my own work as well. It’s the goal, anyhow.

We’ll see how I do. As ever, it’s going to be mostly letters to myself. But, the material is out there, and as much as my schedule for other work and the time I set aside for my family and friends will allow, I want this site to be really consistently good. And, where it’s able, I’d love for 43 Folders to help you make your stuff even better.

So, that’s it for the throat-clearing and metatalk for now. Thanks for hearing me out, and I hope you’ll stop by sometimes if you think 43 Folders can help you make something cool today.

Now: back to work.

”43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 10, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Four Years

Merlin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:39 -0400

[“what is this?”]

Four years ago last Monday, I started 43 Folders with a TypePad account and no idea what I was doing.

The obsessions that brought me here struck me as fascinating and under-reported — if almost entirely unrelated, one to the other. And, talking about the stuff I was really bad at often made me feel less awful about it. Sometimes it even helped me to rehabilitate the triggering, sucky behavior. On a number of levels, this felt really good.

Even though I never really knew where I was heading, I tried to remain candid that the primary reason the site existed at all was because it helped me — a strident preacher, clutching the pulpit in one hand and a book about Next Actions in the other. But, by even a week in, I realized I was writing to a growing audience and found myself daring to hope for a little dough to come my way as a result. Someday.

But, to this day, almost everything I’m proud to have written on 43 Folders started as a letter to myself. No shit.

I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more. I wanted to ﬁgure out why this stuff did and didn’t work by living inside of it, and by ﬁling real-time reports about what I learned — effectively operating on myself in public with a keyboard, a handful of index cards, and an inﬁnite IV of French Roast coffee.

Some days, it helped me. I’d feel a real sense of purpose and focus that made my new job about writing about my new job seem less weird, fractal, and self-involved. But, on just as many days, it felt like I was allowing myself to be tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device of my own design. On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish. Some days, I thought I might be losing my mind. One blog post at a time.

Only on the web could a zero-budget, one-person project about such random shit hit the kind of hockey stick curve 43f rode in late 2004.

People I idolized were suddenly saying they enjoyed what I had to say. People like Andy Baio, Danny O’Brien, Dan Gillmor, and Ben Hammersley each said things about 43f that made me feel really good about what I was doing, making a case that I swear by to this day: producing something that’s enjoyed by the people you admire and respect is the greatest reward a writer can imagine.

But, in no small measure, it was Cory Doctorow’s surpassingly generous linking and encouragement that shot my crummy little site to its cruising altitude, where (for now at least) it remains. Some days, I’ll admit, Cory drives me crazy — and I’m far from the Boing Boing fanatic that I was at the beginning of this decade. But, until the day someone in a smock sets my corpse aﬂame and pours the remains into a big, red Folgers can, Cory will have my deepest gratitude for using his considerable whufﬁe to almost singlehandedly put 43 Folders on the map. Thanks, man.

Through 2005 — even as poor Danny and I struggled to ﬁnish an unﬁnishable book by employing a Kafka-esque process that redeﬁned my notion of “irony” — 43 Folders continued to grow in trafﬁc and in whatever passes for stature on the internet. People seemed excited that blogs were ﬁnding a sweet spot in which niche topics, passionate writers, and devoted readers could form a long-distance relationship that was satisfying to everyone in a way that print media increasingly was not.

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, “very.” But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and conﬁdence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Over the years, “productivity blogs” of unbelievably varying quality shot up like hothouse kudzu — many baldly hoping to capitalize on the low-cost, high-return business of theoretically useful self-help publishing — mostly without affecting even the vaguest patina of wanting to help another human being solve a real-world problem. Some of these folks continue to make a living (and draw a considerable crowd) by producing material that I personally ﬁnd transparently dumb and useless.

Thus, in time, phrases like “life hacks” and “GTD” became associated with everything from printing your own graph paper, to taking a nap, to making a living by pinching off lists of links to lists of links to Firefox extensions that help you use Facebook to more efﬁciently pretend to like people whom you’ve never met.

Important Intermission

At this juncture, I wish to apologize and formally atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing “hack” as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their “productivity system” all day. 43 Folders regrets the error.

Plus, as the “Top n” style of shoveling context-free horseshit to an undemanding audience became the new way of “blogging,” I started to wonder where the hell all of this stuff was heading. And, more importantly, I wondered whom any of this stuff might actually be helping. Besides the bloggers, of course. Bloggers love that trafﬁc. Even when it contravenes the basic goddamned tenet of every post their addict-readers are mainlining. But, then, nobody ever said gold mining was going to be good for the environment.

As I continued writing regularly for 43 Folders — and it was very hard to keep up with the pace I’d set in the ﬁrst months of the site — I often had a gut sense of when I was doing well. I knew when the material was working, because I felt good about the results, less crummy about myself, plus I was still occasionally hearing thoughtful, non-ass-kissing feedback from people whom I respect and admire. Somedays, I fundamentally got it. Other days, I just typed and hit “Post.” Just like the gold miners I despised.

Along the way, I got dubbed “a productivity guru” and was repeatedly reminded by almost everybody that 43 Folders was “a site about Getting Things Done” — period. Which certainly came as a surprise to me. Still does.

By improbably (and I’ve often thought, mistakenly) landing a brief berth in the Technorati Top 100, 43 Folders was also “discovered” by an unspeakable black mildew of PR people who, on their clients’ behalf, “reach out” to bloggers with the gruesome goal of getting them to trade their credibility for access to free crap and “embargoed” press releases. Mm, pinch me. And, somewhere in there, I heard somebody say, “Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I dreamed of having that phrase printed on a giant hammer.

As I experimented over the years with sundry ways to make money with my site, I tried (and mostly abandoned) a dozen different small trickles of income, before eventually settling on a relationship with a dependable ad company whom I still work with today. They’ve been good to me.

Of course, I occasionally still ﬁnd myself on the receiving end of an astonishing array of paid promotional offers — a few of which have been the web equivalent of being asked to stand on a street corner, wearing a chicken suit, while spinning a giant red sign that promotes computers I’ve never used. I’m proud to have said “no” to all but a couple of these — I refuse all of them today — although I do regret not having purchased my own chicken suit. Because, that’s steady work that you can do anywhere, you know?

By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would ﬁnd me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically inﬁnite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.

On those days, I rarely even bothered to type. I sulked and wondered what the hell “productivity” meant to anyone who wasn’t peddling some ﬂavor of online addiction or, basically marketing a personality-based cargo cult.

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efﬁciently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

Finally, when I had the opportunity to really go off the grid last fall to be with my wife and our new daughter, I watched over the hill as my best-known site faded into an XML-enabled cacophony of voices that weren’t my own. Guest bloggers (albeit great friends and good writers); random forum posts; inane, self-linking comments; a wiki that greeted me with freshly replenished v14gRa spam each morning; my own sporadic non-content posts, containing more self-promotion and advertising than I liked; plus a handful of weird, legacy attempts to make an extra hundred bucks a month that, in retrospect, were frankly embarrassing.

My blog about making your life a little better suddenly had more chrome than a Chevy and more bullshit than a limo full of lifestreamers.

The brutal Catch-22? At about the point when I realized my site was no longer about what I really thought or really cared about, I also worried whether I had anything new and substantial to say. And, what I did have to say, I usually self-edited or watered-down, for fear of either adding to the noise, infuriating the dopamine-deprived “TL;DR” crowd, or provoking an exhausting internet feud with one of the web’s countless retardate man-children.

The ad money was still consistent, so I didn’t need to sweat niggling details like why the site still existed. But, by as recently as this past winter, I just wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

The site that had used to make me feel so good about my place on the web felt dry and brittle, and I started avoiding it like an oncologist’s waiting room. This feeling fundamentally sucked, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Then things got better. A lot better.

Tune in later this week for the next thrilling chapter in Merlin’s weird-ass bildungsroman, which series is explained in concept here.

Now available: 43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work

”Four Years” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"