A little intermission.

It’s slowly dawning on me how much I’ve been surrounding myself with the culture of productivity. All the TODO lists, GTD techniques, lifehacks and tricks mean nothing. Just nothing. These are all solutions to a wrong problem.

Thing is: if you keep focusing on something and keep failing, it’s not the issue of you trying in a wrong way. It’s the issue of you not focusing on what’s important for you. Once you determine what you want to do with your life, you don’t need any time management techniques to do it. Jeff Atwood summed it up perfectly in his blog post:

For the things in my life that actually mattered, I’ve never needed any to-do list to tell me to do them.

He gives a more practical implication of the above, too:

If you can’t wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that.

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I’m really tired of the chase, of the rat race of today’s life. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram, that’s why I’ve blocked Hacker News on all my computers – simply because I don’t want to be surrounded by proof that everyone else is having fun constantly. Life is a mix of good and bad – and I want it to stay that way.

There’s a little story to be told here. A friend dropped in for a breakfast a few days ago; and she took the opportunity to snap a quick Instagram to show how much fun we were having. Sure, it was a really beautiful morning, but the photo obviously didn’t mention the important things that we discussed. That colorful photo didn’t mention that she got barely any sleep the previous night or that she was disappointed some of her new friends hitting on her. All it said was “we’re having fun”.

I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again: this is not real life. This is some kind of fucking phony glittery fake. This is also the very reason I’m still using a film camera: because it means no one dictates what I should photograph. I don’t care how much likes or reblogs I get – I don’t think I even remember how to check that. I’d rather get one person to say my writing is inspiring that to get 100 likes under the blog posts.

If you have a spare $100 and want to invest it in the most profitable way possible, go and buy a bike right now.

What’s the Return of Investment on this purchase? It’s hard to measure directly. It’s easy, however, to list the areas of life influenced:

• Physical fitness & exercise.
• Tons of money saved on public transportation and/or fuel.
• Simple happiness. It’s rare to see a sad, grumpy person on a bike – yet buses and cars are full of those types.
• Time saved. Depending on where you live, it can be substantial.
• Drinking less. This means both saving money and improving your health.
• Freedom. You’re no longer constrained by streets, lines, tracks & timetables. You’re free to explore – just like when you were a child. How cool is that?

Considering how much there is to gain, not riding a bike is not just silly – it’s plain unwise. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the real lifehack. So much for just $100.

PS. Don’t toss your excuses at me. I don’t care. After all, it’s about your happiness, not mine.