The Bumper Book Of Stupid Metaphors

Hey yo. With all this productivity knowledge from reading blogs and having an awesome slick GTD system in place, why am I not as successful as Tim Ferris or Ryan North already?

Doing Too Much

This goes back to the limes thing. I’m attracted to too many things. Aside from wanting to run a food co-op, I’m also trying to start up a magazine, learn to play guitar, wanting to write stories and poetry, learning to draw, learning to rap, learning about feminism, economics, extreme sports and all sorts of other things…

Not only is it causing a lot of resistance when choosing what I’m doing moment-to-moment (if I do Important Project A today then I won’t have time for Important Project B!) but it means the mental effort I do put into anything I work on is spread too thinly, and the result is sloppy and completely unremarkable.

One Track Mind

I think the trick isn’t to just do one thing at a time, but it’s to do one new thing at a time. Something Leo Babauta’s always harping on about but I never internalised properly. Once you get into the habit of doing something and you don’t have to engage your creative mind every time you do it then you’ve got mental space for something new.

Immersing Yourself

So it can be hard to stay focused on just one thing, especially when you get stuck and there are all sorts of other shiny and far more interesting things floating around.

The way out of this is to externalise your motivation – make it like a current that’s hard to resist, one that drags you along. Find people who are doing similar things, make it into a talking point. Join forums, start meetups, anything you can do to create some feeling of wanting to be working on That Thing.

Communities can be so useful in situations like this. Some of the reasons why include:

• When the discussion is flowing between two or more people, things tend not to go as stale as when it’s just you and your mind.
• If you get into a tight spot, you’ve always got support and a fresh pair of eyes who can help you out.
• Other people can show you the holes in your knowledge that you didn’t even know were there.

Over To You

What projects are you working on at the moment, and what does the community surrounding it look like (if there is one)? Let me know in the comments.

So I have all these limes to hold, right? It’s tough because there are more limes than I can hold in my arms at once.

Seriously, what do you do when you have so many limes?

1. Juggle Them

You learn to juggle. Put the limes aside for a bit and pick up a book on how to juggle limes. I was/am reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is all about creating a system that you can use to juggle all your limes.

2. Throw Some Away

While I’m learning to juggle, maybe it’s best to stick a few of these limes in the compost (or in the fridge and I can get them out later).  Still, there are a couple of fairly big limes that I really want to hold that I just can’t bear to throw away.

3. Give Them To Someone Else

Hey, two people juggling 3 limes each has got to be easier than one person trying to juggle six limes, right?

4. Make Limeonade

If you cut the limes up so small that they actually become liquid you can easily down a glass of that stuff all in one go.

The thing about most of these solutions is that sometimes you just have to step back from your limes and think about it a little bit.

Last weekend I went to Southampton’s Ropewalk Community Garden to pick some medlars. The facebook event extolled their virtues as ingredients for wine, cakes and jam. When I heard of the opportunity one thing immediately sprang to mind:

What the hell’s a medlar?

My medlars in my drawers.

Well it’s a fruit, fairly common on trees in England but not so much in shops. And there’s a good reason for that – before you can eat it you have to let it rot.

Now that doesn’t sound too appealing, and if I was somebody else I probably would have passed up the opportunity. But this sounded like a little bit of an adventure, and besides free fruit is not something at which to turn up one’s nose!

To blet the fruit you have to keep them in a cool dry place, and not piled up on top of each other. I chose my bedside draws, but right now everywhere in my house is pretty much the same temperature. Leave them there for a few weeks, checking them every 2-3 days until they’re soft and brown-red-purple.

Then you can eat them, or cook with them, or throw them at people. I’ll be doing at least two of those things.

A ripe medlar such as this one is difficult to eat.