Commentary

43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work

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

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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Four Years

Merlin Mann — 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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics

Merlin Mann — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:42:04 -0400

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

For each question, my preferred answer would be “No.” Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.

At the highest level, is this book’s topic based on the typical “zeitgeist” product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom finishes reading the 1,000-word “features” found in in-flight magazines?
Does the book have one of those irksome, “Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!” titles?
Is the author’s large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?
Does the cover art contain high heels, Mistral, or any reference to either Oprah Winfrey, Joel Osteen, or “Dr. Phil?”
Can you find the word “secret” anywhere on the cover of the book?
Is the book published by a company that you’ve never heard of — or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?
In the event that this is a book by a “famous” person: if the book were written by someone you’d never heard of, would your interest in the book or its topic wane significantly?
Are there a very large number of “intentionally blank” white pages at the beginning and end of the book? Are there an astonishingly large number of pages that have been provided for “Notes?”
Does the Table of Contents lack at least 10% stuff that sounds kind of familiar to you (and at least 30% stuff that does not)?
Does the first non-front-matter material in the book (often a “Preface” or “Introduction”) seem like a damp hotel room towel that’s matted with the author’s self-congratulation? Is it primarily a sales tool for persons who will never read any further? Does the author seem more arrogant than confident?
Does the book’s body or heading text suffer from careless or illegible typesetting? Does the book look like an unfinished government manual? Should the designer be horse-whipped for choosing a bold display face for body text?
Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and “inspiring quotations” that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?
Have you already found erors and misspelings?
Does the book’s index seem weak or does it not contain entries for the topic or person whom you most associate with the book’s theme or title?
Does page 69 bore, vex, or annoy you?
Can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn’t just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?
Now that you know about this book and have thought about all these horribly petty little things, can you imagine not reading it this week?

No on all counts? Good! You’ve found your book. Happy reading.

And, a propos of nothing, here’s my current non-fiction pile. If you wanted your book to earn a spot, you’d need to beat this competition (some of which do break at least one of these rules, but all trump on quality and great writing).

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- This is the second-best non-fiction book I’ve read this year, after the amazing On Writing
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert Mckee
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fari Amini
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Noted in passing: all the books on the list were purchased by me with actual money. One data point on how many freebies currently make my cut.

”Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button

Merlin Mann — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:40:31 -0400

Jason Kottke (via Rex, via TechCrunch) points to a new feature on FriendFeed that allows users to “fake follow” people:

That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity.

As duplicitous and sad as “fake following” sounds — and let’s be honest: the whole idea’s pathetic on a number of levels — for a certain kind of user, I can see why there’s a desire for this functionality. Especially on a site like FriendFeed, which has quickly become the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur — this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space. Yes, primate culture may be primitive, but it is not without its evolving needs.

Thing is, “fake following” is also not so far off from a more wholesome feature that I’ve been begging for on social networks for years now:

Any application that lets you “friend,” “follow,” or otherwise observe another user should include a prominent (and silent) “PAUSE” button.

I think users of apps like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Delicious, and, yes, FriendFeed, would benefit from an easy and undramatic way to take a little break from a “friend” — without inducing the grand mal meltdown that “unfriending” causes the web’s more delicately-composed publishers.

Here’s how it would work.

“Friends.” There are entities in the world that, for whatever reason, do or make things that theoretically interest you. Let’s call them “friends.”
“I need a break.” Occasionally, for any variety of reasons (new baby, SxSW, flight delays, adjustment to mood meds), your theoretical interest in the friend wanes, and you dread their next update. Perhaps you even find yourself wishing them some sort of non-permanent physical harm. Such as a hangnail or a bad haircut.
“Hit ‘Pause.’” You visit the temporarily-annoying friend’s profile or home page for the service, and hit their “Pause” button.
Break time. For the next n [hours|days|weeks] (would be great if this were configurable), you will not see items from this friend. Nothing new, nothing old, no comments, no nothing. It’s like they’re on the moon.
“Sssssshh!” No notification of the change is ever shown to the user whom you paused, and there’s no way for anyone to detect your pausing; you’re still “friends.” Yay. “Friendship.”
“On second thought…” If, at any time before the end of the pausing, you decide you’re interested again, you could choose to “UNPAUSE” (“PLAY?”) the friend. Or, of course, you might find you love the break too much, so you can fully “unfriend” them any time as usual.
“Hi, again.” After the pausing ends, any items you missed would be available to view in whatever location functions as an archive on that given service. But, you and your “friend” have a fresh start with minimal unnecessary drama. Now you can enjoy them again.

You can pause your newspaper delivery, and the newspaper never complains. Unfortunately most people online haven’t figured out that they’re just another publisher in a crowded space. Which is kind of a shame, because I think accepting that mantle of “publisher” might improve many peoples’ contributions as well as add a useful layer or two to their epidermis.

If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, either publishers or their readers just aren’t hitting on all cylinders, and a flight delay’s a terrible reason to lose a real, non-air-quoted friend.

Plus, everybody hates hangnails.

Addendum 2008-08-26 16:25:26 PDT

Just to clarify a point that I’d hope goes without saying: this all goes for me, too. My God, I feel like I say it often enough, but I’m thinking it needs to become a monthly PSA. I’ll say it again here for posterity:

You are busy. You have many demands on your time and attention. Never, under any conditions, hesitate to ignore anyone or anything that’s not making good use of your attention. Ever.

Why do I feel the need to press the point with specific regard to 43 Folders? This site is not a pyramid scheme nor a constantly-refilled bowl of Crunch ‘n Munch. I’m not here to addict you to self-help, “life hacks,” or any other topic you perceive this place to be about. That’s not why I type.

The Buddhist parable says to stop carrying the boat once you’ve crossed the river. If 43 Folders (or anything else I have to share) has no place in your life on a given day or year, I promise you’ll never hear a complaint from me. That’s…just life, right? Exactly, that’s life.

Like everything in your world, I serve your attention at your sole pleasure. You owe me nothing, reader-companion.

In fact, if you end up spending less time here because you’ve learned how to treat your attention as a free agent with incalculable value, then, in an unexpected way, you’ve paid both of us the highest compliment I can imagine; you’ve crossed the shit out of that river, and now you’re ready to just let other folks use the boat for a while.

”Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 26, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

What Makes for a Good Blog?

Merlin Mann — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:14:17 -0400

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four.

As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog.

Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

Coming soon: the blogs I read, enjoy, envy, and admire.

”What Makes for a Good Blog?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 19, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur

Merlin Mann — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:03:29 -0400

ideas are just a multiplier of execution - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog

Derek Sivers’ short blog post from 2005 has been making the rounds lately — it came to me via Chairman Gruber — and I have to say, I can’t stop thinking about it. I think this is really profound thinking around the fundamental misunderstanding many people have about the value of ideas.

In a nutshell, Derek says ideas are valuable only inasmuch as they can be multiplied by execution. So, if you remember your 3rd grade arithmetic, you can figure out the product of even the most fantastic idea when it’s multiplied by zero execution.

I, too, frequently encounter this attitude of “Sign the NDA! Sign the NDA!” any time someone wants to tell me about their squirrelly idea for making a bajillion dollars on the internet, and I almost always end up saying the same six things to The Idea Men:

Ideas are like assholes and blogs; everyone has at least one. And the cost of ownership for an idea is nil.
Who will this product delight? Why does it delight them more than any other thing in their world today?
What stops Google from replicating your idea — at full scale and with a huge installed base — over a long weekend?
Who is the auteur here? Who in your organization gets to tell everyone else to shut up and follow his or her quirky vision and ridiculous obsessions? These obsessions matter.
Who’s the proven sergeant-at-arms in your group? Does this person have a demonstrated track record for ensuring that everyone else in the group is executing flawlessly on the auteur’s vision?
What will everyone involved give up to become awesome? Alternately, how will you know when this project has failed and should be euthanized?

It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.

They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.

As I sit here today, I’m more convinced than ever that:

“auteur * (2x execution) = awesome”

An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.

The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.

”Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 11, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Blog Pimping, or: Who Do You Want to Delight?

Merlin Mann — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:10:58 -0400

Big Contrarian → Tacky.

My favorite bloggers are great at articulating something I feel in my gut — but they regularly present it better, more clearly, and (on days like today), more succinctly than I ever could. Such is the case with Jack Shedd’s post, “Tacky,” a razor-sharp polemic on the industry of cheese-food manufacturing that “pro blogging” has turned into.

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg. And for god’s sake don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.

Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.

For myself, I think there’s nothing wrong with having a blog and wanting to make money with it. Obviously. But I also hold an increasingly old-fashioned view that you ought to start with something you’re passionate about sharing with people — something besides how to make easy money with a blog — and try to build an audience of people you respect based on producing work you’re happy with or even proud of.

Consequently, I very much agree with Jack’s thoughts on audience-building.

Despite the utter-bullshit so much of the Anderson’s long tail has proven to be, the core idea that everything finds an audience should be held up and remembered. Clung to fastidiously; A life raft for the ignored, for the invisible.

If you’re worth reading, someone will read you. If you’re worth watching, someone will watch you. If you’re worth hearing, someone will listen.

Seconded.

If you do not agree with Jack’s or my opinion on building your audience — or if you think this is an unrealistically conservative tactic for simps and losers — consider this: I learned about Big Contrarian from reading a blogger I trust and respect: John Gruber. Today, the chances are good that at least a few of you might visit Jack’s site for the first time because you learned about it from someone you (theoretically) trust and respect: me. If you like Jack’s stuff as much as Chairman Gruber and I do, I’ll bet you’ll tell others about it through your own sites or through emails, IRL conversations, and what have you. And the music goes round. Organically.

Jack didn’t beg a link, he didn’t pretend to be 50,000 peoples’ “friend,” and he didn’t concoct a bunch of tricks, games, and page-padding bullshit in an attempt to increase views and time-on-site. Jack didn’t do anything except write a great blog. It’s up to his readers to do the rest. If what you’re doing is interesting and appeals to someone, that’s all you need. Seriously.

So, yes, if that wasn’t a clear enough recommendation: read Jack’s blog, Big Contrarian, and tell your friends about it. Jack gets this stuff, and his combination of links and commentary is, not coincidentally, reminiscent of blogging’s salad days. When people were more excited about what they had to say than with figuring out how to make it palatable to readers who’d prefer the entire web be re-formatted as a series of retardate lists.

If you watched The Wire, I’ll bet you walked away with the same piece of wisdom that I did — the thread that ran through every episode of every season, and that was articulated by the show’s creator, David Simon, in the DVD narration of the very first scene from The Wire:

It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how…whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

This is one of the most insightful things I’ve ever heard someone related to the TV business say, and I happen to believe it’s true of any industry, institution, or, for that matter, adult decision: you make decisions and you accept trade-offs. It’s true if you’re the Mayor, or a homicide cop, or a heroin addict, and damn it, it’s true if you’re a blogger in his or her underpants trying to make bank in a competitive marketplace. You make decisions and you accept trade-offs.

You decide whether or not to run ads. You decide whether or not to include Amazon affiliate links. You decide whether or not to edit posts after publication. You decide whether or not to accept free shit like trips and demo units. You decide how black of an SEO hat you’re willing to wear. You decide whether people will notice (or care) when your ten-paragraph link post is spread out over 11 pages (“It’s a Gallery!”). You make, erase, and re-draw lines until you’re comfortable with the mix. You evolve and you struggle to find your place in the system.

No one is perfect 100% of the time, and sometimes we all change our minds, realize we’re dead wrong, or we just try different things for the hell of it. At least that’s been the case for me on every point.

But, ultimately, our most important decision may be deciding who we want to please, and what we’re willing to do, allow, insert, or put up with that potentially will make those people love, hate, or even feel indifferent toward our sites and our work. Not only must we contend with the institution, we also have to figure out who we want to delight and how. That’s where the art is, and it’s arguably the turning point for whether a young blog will get noticed or won’t.

Want to build a great audience, composed of people you respect? Be picky about who you decide to overserve. Then do it with all the skill and enthusiasm you can muster.

While it might seem dim to say “the rest takes care of itself,” it is entirely true and fair to say “smart readers will always bring along their smart friends.” It’s why you’re here, and it’s why I am very grateful that you allow me to try and delight you as best I can. Even when the posts are this long.

UPDATE 2008-07-21 11:08:47: Fixed a dumb typo on Jack’s name.

”Blog Pimping, or: Who Do You Want to Delight?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 21, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create

Merlin Mann — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:24:46 -0400

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast - NYTimes.com

Is Information Overload a Billion Drag on the Economy? - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

If you’ve seen the video of my Inbox Zero talk at Google, you may recall the moment when a few attendees start mentioning the hundreds of internal email messages they receive (and send) in a given day. I still remember, because I almost fainted.

Whenever I hear these and similar stories, the same question always comes to mind: “What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?” Well, apparently, it’s a question a lot of people are starting to ask. Including Google.

A story in today’s New York Times covers Sili Valley’s new interest in curbing unnecessary interruptions and helping stem the flow of endless data.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

A few more stats for you:

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times…

I’d also draw your attention to this infographic illustrating data points from recent studies on “workers’ efficiency at information-intensive businesses.” 28% of a typical worker’s day is spent on:

Interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages — and the time it takes to get back on track.

Sidenote: According to that same graphic, 20% of an average day is spent on meetings. Wow. Expressed as a year, that means a meeting you start on New Year’s day would let out around the middle of March. Yikes.

Sounds like these folks have their work cut out for them.

I think it’s important to clarify something here: there’s nothing fundamentally wrong or irreparable about email as a tool. Given my position on how email gets (ab)used, you could be forgiven for thinking I want everyone to write each other letters once a year and ride cows to work. No. Not at all.

My point has always been that, as with any tool, email can be used for good or ill depending on the problems you’ve decided it can solve. One trouble is that our use and widespread adoption of email hasn’t brought with it an equally widely-adopted understanding about how to use it, what content it’s appropriate for, and what expectations we accept regarding when it’s allowed to take us away from everything in our life that’s not email. There are very few shared rules of the road right now. And that’s making life hard for a lot of people.

I’m thrilled to hear that these ideas are bubbling up and getting the attention they deserve; email pain is usually a quiet, lonely, and shameful one, where people’s work and home life suffer from the silent understanding that “too much is never enough” — that trying to tamp down this always-on hysteria is a sign of weakness or sloth. That’s ironic, given the biggest reason we reason use email so much: it’s easy.

There’s no cashier, editor, or therapist through which your message must pass. You set your own rules for what’s appropriate to send, ask, or demand. You decide what it means when someone reacts (or doesn’t react) in a given manner or time frame. Email is still the Wild West, and companies are paying billions of dollars a year to supply the six-shooters and Stetsons. Yeehaw.

I’ll keep following these stories, because, I must tell you, I think it’s going to be a rocky road for businesses to patch. Will whacky experiments like “No Email Fridays” have an affect on how we think about this medium? Only as much as “No Ice Cream Sundays” can help fix your eating disorder.

But, I’m glad they’re trying, and I’m really glad the conversation has started at a higher level.

As for the decision-makers who are struggling with this stuff: these stats are great for getting companies off the bubble, but before you start breaking crockery, I suggest talking to lots of real employees about how they work, how they communicate, and how they might be able to help you.

Every time I speak to a company, I hear half a dozen depressing stories of management disconnection and communication bedlam, alongside one or two completely inspiring tales about how employees and small teams are working to fix things at a squad or platoon level. It’s really amazing, and I wish it were something C-levels and managers were more cognizant of.

So, I suggest you be open to seeing email as just one tool among many, and be gracious about listening to those teams about how they’ve worked to fix or ameliorate these problems.

Bottom line (and I’ll never stop saying this): stop trying to eradicate human communication problems by introducing waves of new technology or made-up rules of social engineering. A company with email problems is also experiencing people problems. Until you understand why the wetware isn’t working like you’d expected, don’t go nuts with top-down technology solutions and over-clever edicts.

There’s a million tiny ways to improve how a business communicates with itself, and a lot of that intelligence is currently trapped, unmined, in the heads of people who’ve never been asked for an opinion. I like to think articles like this represent every knowledge worker’s opportunity to raise his or her hand and say, “Hey, I have an idea.”

[NYT links via Mrs. Mann]

”NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 14, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge

Merlin Mann — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:11:46 -0400

Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually “working” on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I’m getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we’re just getting started on GS — FAQs and more will be coming soon). I’m also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations — it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

But, y’know, as I read Tantek’s post, alongside his “Communication Protocols” notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I’ve been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I’ll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.

Right this minute, you can create an email of unlimited length covering topics of unlimited scope and then send it to unlimited numbers of people — whom you may or may not even know — all at absolutely no cost to you. There is also no prohibition or boundary of any kind on how you phrase that email. There’s no formal penalty or even feedback for when you’re using email inappropriately (e.g. the dirty look that you’d get if you said something this weird to someone’s face). Plus, of course, YOU get to decide (at least in your own head) exactly how quickly all those people should be getting back to you about whatever it is you emailed them about. And you can do this pretty much any time you want and as many times a day as it suits you. No Limits.

An optimist would say this indicates what a wonderfully flexible tool email is. But, a pessimist with 1500 unread emails will point out that this Wild West of Communication seems to bring out the nut in people.

As I say, there must be something about email’s unusual combination of intimacy and distance that can get people very emotionally engaged in hammering out demands in an email message. And not just flames — I’m talking about people whose de facto style is borne out of an uninhibited conduit between thoughts, emotions, or desires and the email medium that helps them convert that into some kind of request.

How and why this is related to Tantek’s post, I’m not entirely sure. But I think there’s some common ground here. Especially as this relates to that one-on-one idea and why it doesn’t scale.

Email culture and etiquette — if there is such a thing — occurs when people have a sense of how their behavior will be seen and evaluated by anyone who is not themselves. The reason most of us wear pants to the grocery store is the same reason that some people think very hard about every word that goes into their email messages and what it will mean when people read them. They understand that the message should be more about the recipient than themselves. And the Great Ones will take the time to get the tone right too — to phrase things so that misunderstandings and unintentional emotional provocations don’t occur.

But if — even without realizing it — you see email primarily as a one-on-one medium for venting some…thing that’s on your mind, you’re going to produce a lot of electronic madness. Especially if you think no one is watching.

I’m going to think on this some more, but I’ll close with a related thought on why this all goes straight back to Time & Attention 101.

Any system without scarcity or limitation will eventually suffer at the hands of people who aren’t overtly aware of boundaries — or who actively choose to break those boundaries because they can. Limitations in a communication medium not only make you think a little harder about what you have to say, they also encourage you to focus on what you and your recipient really need out of the exchange.

While I’m not suggesting anything as extreme as the five-sentence email, I wonder if this might be a fun exercise to try for a day:

The 0.001 Challenge

Imagine that the person receiving the email you’re composing receives 1,000 other message each day more or less identical to yours. What would you do to distinguish yours from the others? What change would make your email amazingly easy to deal with and not insane? Does the content of your email belong someplace else? Like an SMS, a face-to-face meeting — or maybe even in an angry, venting screed that you never send.

”Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

A Day Unplugged: Frenzied Blackberries vs. Kwai Chang Caine?

Merlin Mann — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:42:21 -0500

I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. - New York Times

In yesterday’s New York Times, Mark Bittman wrote an entertaining and thoughtful article about realizing that his need to stay wired, in-touch, and updated was really starting to eat into him. His headslap moment came on an international flight, as he realizes “the only other place I could escape was in my sleep.” He goes on to talk about the difficulty of maintaining even a single day of “Sabbath” from electronic communication and media:

I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.

But, eventually, he settles in and starts to enjoy things that would never appear on his radar screen on a wired day:

I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.

GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.

Eventually (natch), he returns to the wired world. So it goes.

I liked that this piece was written from a personal perspective, which, to my mind, is the best (and, often, only) place to start any kind of experiment around hacking time and attention. And, I do really like the idea of periodically accepting (enforcing?) days without media and wires. Truly, you’ll never realize how difficult this can be until you really make it happen. But, as Bittman notes, once you get over the initial crash, you can see a striking contrast in what your life could look like. Good stuff.

But, like a lot of pieces on wired overstimulation, this one comes close to conflating the axis of “work” with the axis of “electronic media.” Which, in my opinion, is an unwholesome confusion to abide, even just in appearance — especially since it could be seen as blaming inert matter for our problems, while allowing us addicts (and the culture we’ve permitted ourselves to grow accustomed to) to get off way too easy.

J’accuse!

Let’s be brutally honest, here — I can “work” at my computer for 10 hours and do nothing but dick around with Wikipedia and YouTube. Heck, even if I do “work stuff” like email and “research,” I can easily trail off in a hundred directions that have nothing to do with my initial task. Is that the fault of the computer and the internet? Maybe, kinda. But, no more so than I can reasonably blame this crappy hammer for that awkward birdhouse I built. Stupid hammer.

So, let’s start by admitting that one reason we spend so much time in front of a screen (or hooked up to an iPod or SMSing on the phone or updating Twitter) is simply because we can. Because it’s fun. And because it’s easy. It makes us feel…connected. Is it the fault solely of “my job” that I have to sit here all day? For me: I’m going to say a resounding no.

Okay, then, so what happens when I go off the grid?

From printer paper to rice paper

Well, first, does it strike anyone else as funny that — notwithstanding Bittman’s desire not to get too “new-agey” — the main alternative to stressful, wired work appears to be acting like a monk on Kung Fu? I mean, I wonder if it says anything about us that our first response to unhooking (after initial panic) is to pretend it’s the 19th century and all we can do is read scrolls, meditate, or walk amongst the trees.

For myself — once I’ve had my cup of green tea and carried a cauldron of hot coals with my forearms — I find there are lots of work-related things I can do without a computer, phone, or internet. Really good and valuable stuff that I tend to forget about or ignore when I’m powered up. Stuff like longhand writing, cleaning out old files, or just making my work area a more pleasant place to be.

I’m not disagreeing with this fine article in any substantial way — I mean, it’s not hard to sell me on the idea that we allow ourselves to be overstimulated, or that it’s hard to stop. But, I do think it’s very important to be frank about what parts of our problem come from the hammer versus which parts come from our own hands. I think Bittman clearly gets that, but I’d hate for this article to just land on the CEO’s desk in the pile titled “The Internet’s Killing ‘The Enterprise!’”

And, speaking of ‘The Enterprise’

So: vaguely (but mostly not) related. Whenever a company proudly announces “No Email Fridays!” I just want to groan, wad up my David Carradine poster, and throw it across the dojo. Because, while I’m sure this kind of rule (or policy or experiment) is well-intentioned, it’s about as employee-friendly as ankle weights and morning jumping-jacks.

Email is not the problem, America. The culture around email (and phones and meetings and SMS) is the real culprit. And we’re not going to change perverse electronic culture by nailing theses to a door or by social-engineering the crap out of our employees. Plus, I’ll just bet you, dimes to donuts, that “no-Friday-email” companies also breed a species of employee who spends most of Saturday making up for the lost time. (Instead of hanging with family or practicing having spears thrown at him by the other Shaolins)

I’d say that if we need anything “enforced” across a company it’s periodic, rolling breaks from being accessible to everybody; to create an environment where everyone in the group or company knows the time and day when they will simply be uninterruptible, without exception, consequence, or need for excuse. That’s their time to do with as they please.

Now, is this a distinction without a difference from just shutting off email? No way. For one, that email still piles up (even over the eight hours you’re commanded to ignore it). And what’s to prevent that Friday from being the day someone decides to just hand-deliver all their demands to my cube? What about meetings? And can we still call each other on the phone? Where’s the real break? Sane and firewalled time — yes, even to process email — is what people really need to have and depend upon.

I’d say the company that wants to solve the “too much connectedness” problem would do well not just to focus on the easy solutions that involve masking symptoms. To really get closer to the root cause, it’ll require a much more profound rethinking of a culture that’s still 20 years behind the technology it supports.

And that ain’t gonna happen with a memo and an “email-free” Friday.

It’s not you; it’s us

On a personal level, accepting these kinds of radical fasts can be a terrific way to detox or to just reconnect with a world that’s further than arm’s reach from your keyboard. And it reminds us that (apparently) there are alternative approaches to a morning that don’t involve a mouse or a keypad. This is all awesome — even indispensable. But let’s not be lulled into thinking that the medium is always the murderer.

So, yes: take time off from electronics and media, and take time off from work. But, be mindful about which is which — as well as which it is that you really need the break from. For most of us, the answer is an unequivocal “both!”

And, finally, is it conceivable that what you really need the break from is new demands on your time? What does solving that problem look like? And can it really be accomplished simply by unplugging a few things for a day or two? (My guess: no, it’s actually a lot more complicated than that.)

Me? I just want to inch toward a place where I get the problem enough that I can stop work for an hour to enjoy my iPod just as easily as I can take 10 minutes and a legal pad to draft a dull report under a tree. It’s ultimately how we’ll snatch the pebble, Grasshopper.

”A Day Unplugged: Frenzied Blackberries vs. Kwai Chang Caine?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 03, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"