More to life than blogging

Greg Mankiw gives some very legitimate reasons why he won’t be blogging any more than he already does.

Sorry to disappoint, but more frequent blogging is not in my future. I have a full life: classes to teach, students to advise, articles to write, textbooks to revise, kids to raise, and a wife who still enjoys spending time with me (within limits).

I will continue use this site to pass along links for articles of interest, weigh in when I have something to get off my chest, and flog my favorite textbook. But I am too busy with other things to produce the voluminous output of some of my more energetic colleagues in the blogosphere.

Disappointing for those of us who very much enjoy access to his thoughts, but completely understandable.

Update: Chris Blattman gives some good reasons why he will continue his excellent blog - great news for the rest of us!!

The ultimate productivity blog

Check it out.

The Referendum

Totally out of scope, but I loved this article on the life choices we make and comparing ourselves to our peers. Funny, too:

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.]

Grit vs. grind in the professional world

I was pondering "Do Less. Do Better. Know Why." on my run this morning, and I kept coming back to another quote from Cal Newport's excellent post:

What separates the lauding of grit from the lauding of the grind lifestyle? This question is crucial to our mission here, as, of course, being happy and low-stressed is one of the key pillars of my philosophy.

After some thought, I arrived at an answer:

- The grind lifestyle involves filling most days with an unhealthily large amount of work. It treats the overwork itself as the goal, not its results. This chronic overwork, in turn, generates stress and deep procrastination.

- Grit, on the other hand, is about persistently accomplishing a reasonable amount of hard work. For example, consider my book writing. I spend 1 - 3 hours a day, most days, on this task. I’ve been doing this off and on for six years now. These are hard hours, requiring real hard focus. But they’re not many hours — so they’re not a source of overwork or stress in my life.

This makes a lot of sense, and it's easy to see how it applies to being a student, or personal hobbies at any stage of life. What I'm grappling with is how it can be applied to a more traditional professional career. Particularly as a manager, there are always fires to fight and lots of little things necessary to keeping the ship on course, and these are very difficult to keep "quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day" (whether that's 1 hour, or 3, or 6, or 8, or...).

So, is there some way Cal's attractive philosophy can by applied to the task of leading a large team or organization? Or is this the part where someone says this advice is for students, and/or traditional careers are for suckers and this is why you should be a student/writer/public intellectual/serial entrepreneur?

Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Ben Casnocha is so money - his taste in career and life advice is well-nigh impeccable. Here he passes on a compelling paragraph from Cal Newport:

Maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsesses over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals, like perfect majors, probably don’t exist. Keep this hard work quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day, and harness the rest of the time to recharge, relax, and, in general, enjoy life. Or, to put it in a more familiar wording: Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Running and reading are the keys to life

The consulting lifestyle often doesn't leave a lot of leisure time left over, particularly during the week, so how we use that precious time is often telling. Running and reading have historically been my personal activities of choice, so you can imagine I found it encouraging and gratifying to learn from Will Smith (via Ben Casnocha) that they are the keys to life.

I guess my new hobby of blogging didn't make the cut...