Productivity? Macon and I were chatting on the phone yesterday about, among other things, productivity. I was bemoaning the fact that at 4 PM every weekday afternoon I "run out of gas", attributing that to being two months away from 60 years old. He expressed some doubt about my explanation, and said he hit a wall about that time as well. We both, it turns out, start our work day at around 8AM.

I was thinking of other things we seem to do in common, and one of them is coffee. Maybe that's part of the problem. I start off with a jolt - a medium size "half-caf" from Starbucks, and then sip half-caf for the rest of the morning. I am not drinking it after the noon hour. (I hate to bring this up on the blog, because Carol thinks that caffeine is generally unhealthy, and would like me to quit. I've tried, but obviously not hard enough.) I think Macon hits the caffeine pretty hard too. I know he starts out at Starbucks in the AM.

"Productivity" has been a topic we've discussed on this blog before. It's a popular subject all over the blogoshere. I did a google search on "productivity blogs", and there are over 2000 of them. One of them connected me with a recent Washington Post article that names some of the productivity blogs that the writer of the article likes.

One of my problems is that my day fills up with appointments and specific tasks. There is little time for list making, drawer emptying, all the things that David Allen says one should be doing. (Its interesting that the first sentence of this paragraph blames the problem on "my day", i.e. it's "my day" that fills up and it's not I who fills the day up, either deliberately or permissively. Ah, human nature!)

Maybe this weekend I can try to turn this around again. No caffeine, time in the office making lists and emptying drawers, just a few other time commitments. There is always hope.