How to stay balanced and productive during uncertainty and crisis

I shy away from writing the "sound bites" style of posts that are common in the productivity/lifehack realm, such as "21 tips to beat procrastination" and "5 ways to listen better." While the format is attractive and accessible (and relatively easy to write!) I've focused more on longer and hopefully deeper ideas and analysis. That said, today I want to provide some targeted help for dealing with a time of upheaval, in this case via a laundry list [1] of ideas for staying balanced and productive.

The news these days in the US and increasingly the world is grim. The possible collapse of our economy, a presidential election that's literally indistinguishable from satire [2], and unparalleled crises in energy and climate. With this kind of uncertainty, I find it extremely difficult to stay focused and productive. Then it hit me that 1) These really are big issues, 2) a drop in personal productivity is natural, and 3) there are things we can do to ameliorate some of the impact on our ability to work.

I'd like to offer up some ideas that I hope will help. I'd love to hear yours too.

In no particular order:

• Acknowledge this is a big deal: We are in the midst of major changes, ones the severity of which this country hasn't experienced for generations. So cut yourself some slack! It is natural for these to have an impact; you're not alone on this. Also realize that this will absolutely have a significant impact now and in the future, at least for a while. So starting adaptation now is a good investment in yourself.
  
  
• Get perspective: Read your history: We're a resilient species (there's a reason we were able to take over the planet) and we can handle this. Try to step back and analyze the situation from a distance. Give yourself some time to grapple with things before you make big decisions. This regrouping will help you rise above the panic. You may want to review your higher-level goals, perhaps doing a yearly review. What has changed in light of what's going on?
  
  
• Cultivate an attitude of curiosity: I've found it extremely helpful to look at the current situation as an experiment [3]. This changes my fight-or-flight response to one of inquiry, instilling what I call "a sense of healthy detachment." Additionally, having an "I wonder what will happen" attitude acknowledges you don't know the outcome, but gives you the possibility of guaranteed success: You'll find out! I guarantee, no matter what happens in the coming months, you will learn a lot about yourself and your world. Can we look at this as a good thing?
  
  
• Stay present: It's easy to get wrapped up in the unknown of the future, but recall the wisdom behind some meditation disciplines: The past is over and the future hasn't happened yet, so living can only happen in the moment. This also helps us appreciate what we have right now. Yes, things could change dramatically, but can you continue to enjoy all that you have today? It's probably a lot! Related: Living In The Moment, Preventing Regret, And Appreciating Life.
  
  
• Downgrade expectations: Because you've realized you're in a time of change, you should reduce what you think you can accomplish at work and home. Cutting back on responsibilities, back-burnering projects (put them in what David Allen calls a "Someday/Maybe" category), and clearing out your calendar and actions lists can create some needed space for coping. Is this hard? You bet! My clients are smart and ambitious, and have set the bar high. But this may not be the time for maximum performance, so let go of the guilt.
  
  
• Work the emergency: If you're reading my blog you probably have a good system for self-management. This gives you an important advantage over those who don't have one: You're in good shape to maintain control and take action in response to the crisis. Managing the crisis is a new higher-level goal, so track it. Create projects to adapt as you see fit, e.g., moving funds, planning for outages, changing jobs, etc. As my wife put it, if your own house is in order and not chaotic then you feel like things are in hand. This will also help channel some of your nervous energy into something productive.
  
  
• Maintain your health: This can be tricky. On the one hand you need to stay strong and focused, which means continuing to exercise and eat well. OTOH you need to give yourself room to temporarily simplify, including doing less prep for meals (pizza anyone?) You'll also probably enjoy eating comfort foods, but try to limit quantities. Finally, try to schedule some renewal time as soon as you can to take care of yourself.
  
  
• Keep some of your routine: While there's a temptation to let a lot go due to a motivation drop, try keeping at least one activity from your regular schedule to maintain some sense of stability. Read to your kids, take a walk with your mate, or sit down together for dinner.
  
  
• Reconnect with others: One of the healthiest and most supportive things to consider during rapid change is to tap into your social network. And there is evidence that people with wider social networks live longer [4] Let's use the potential of hard times to bring us closer together.
  
  
• Seek out inspiration and wisdom: We humans have gone through massive changes before, and learned from it. Check out some inspiring books that appeal to you - treasured thinkers, religious works, and favorite authors can help us feel better. Earlier in the year when I was dreading having my wisdom teeth removed I found Victor Frankl's timeless Man's Search for Meaning to change my perspective.
  
  
• Comfort yourself: This is a natural time to be comforted. Kids like hugs and singing from their parents, and we should do the equivalent for ourselves. For me, enjoying drinking chocolate does that. Other activities include listening to music, gardening, meditation, being with others, and exercise. A warning about food, though: Going overboard is counter productive. I've found doing things with others adds practical limits, more so than binging alone on a pint of ice cream, say.
  
  
• Tap into humor: It's waaaaaay easy to get serious about this ... serious stuff, so try to balance things by injecting some humor into your life. Take in books, movies, TV [5], or audio that makes you laugh. For me David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) and Jack Handey (see Deep Thoughts On Personal Productivity By Jack Handey) are good stand-bys. Finally, try resetting your Reticular activating system to tune in to funny situations in life (more on that application here). I've played with keeping a humor log and using Twitter for humor training (even though I've sworn it off - see A Late Adopter's Productivity Experiment With Twitter, Plus Some 140 Word Humor). And guess what - it seems that happy people live longer.
  
  
• Practice selective ignorance: During these times there's a role for faith. Trusting things will work out (even if you're a natural "black hat," as Edward de Bono puts it in Six Thinking Hats) is comforting. I think of this as conscious suspension of the perceived facts, or selective ignorance. Try starting a daily gratitude practice such as keeping a journal of things that went well each day.
  
  
• Go on a radical news diet: In our family it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day changes in the crisis, esp. with the primarily fear-based media in our world. This tends to feed on itself and create more anxiety. So try this: Stop listening to the news for an entire week. Often either nothing significant changes, or if anything big happens, your friends will tell you. Talk about useful delegation! Here's more from the Subtract section in Productivity Lessons From Basic Math:

  Try going on a media diet by cutting out TV and news. TV is mostly crap (sorry!) and news is rarely important or durable. Try this: Remove all news from your life for a week - radio, TV, papers, and web sites. I'd wager that very little of what you missed is still important now. And relax: You'll find out about big things from your people.

  
  
  
• Help someone: Nothing gets you out of your head quicker than helping someone else. It feels good, gives you a sense of accomplishment, and can be relatively easy to do. I like this thought of Frankl's:

  The truth is that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

  Kindness is essential during chaos or a crisis.
  
  
• Look for opportunities: Cliches about silver linings aside, in times of great change opportunities open up. Mark McCormack in What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School suggests that during a crisis we: 1) Don't react, 2) give yourself time to think about it, then 3) analyze for potential opportunity.
  
  
• Realize you are the hero: There's a new story being written, whether we like it or not, and we're the protagonists. And crisis is one of the the classic story types. Cliff Atkinson identifies ten of them in Beyond Bullet Points: historical narrative, crisis, disappointment, opportunity, crossroads, challenge, blowing the whistle, adventure, response to an order, revolution, evolution, and the great dream. Great list! Even if we can't "Envision it a quest, not a crisis" (from Listening to Midlife), maybe we can still give ourselves a little credit for having the courage to take this on.
  
  

References

• [1] In "The secrets of consulting," Gerald Weinberg compares laundry lists and checklists. Laundry lists remind you of different items that you might have forgotten, but would be useful. Checklists are similar, but contain items that must be present. Clearly I haven't teased this apart well enough yet... Thoughts?
  
• [2] The Republican choice for vice president has been good fodder in particular. Consider this Countdown analysis (full spoof here).
  
• [3] In fact, treating life as a series of large and small experiments is a major shift in my thinking, and is the topic of a my new book project - applying the scientific method to living. Stay tuned!
  
• [4] For example: Friends 'help people live longer', Make friends, live longer
  
• [5] For me, Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show have been a godsend to help me stay sane. Thanks, folks!
  

A late adopter's productivity experiment with Twitter, plus some 140 word humor

OK, I admit that after programming for 20 years and devouring every new idea, tool, library, and methodology out there, I've now become a rather late adopter. Email, for example. What is it? Is it useful? I'll have a special report in a future post. My practice is to try the latest and greatest just long enough to get a sense of it, then drop or keep as needed, with drop being the operative word. (It's an example of "minus" - see Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide: Productivity Lessons From Basic Math.)

In this case I've been playing with Twitter and found it a very mixed bag. If you've not heard of it, it's a simple web-based program that lets you post short text messages ("Tweets" that are limited to 140 characters) that others can subscribe to ("follow"). Your posts, along with those of everyone you follow, are shown chronologically on your main page. More at Wikipedia entry and the Twitter FAQ. Additionally, there are many tools to make entering faster, get updates on your cell phone, share photos, analyze your use, find others, etc.

So how do you use it effectively? There are over a million hits when you Google twitter productivity, with good starting points being Lifehack's Twitter: Use it Productively and the many Lifehacker Twitter articles. You might also enjoy the CNET pro/con articles: The case against Twitter and In defense of Twitter.

Rather than rehashing all this, I'd like to give you the IdeaMatt perspective on how this tool can be used productively, and hopefully get a chuckle out of you too. But the bottom line? My unprincipled exploration determined it to be a massive waste of time, at least for me in the way I used it. It was addictive, fascinating, agitating, and fun. Like any tool, you must be clear about why you're using it, and control its use in accordance with your work. That is, like email, use it to further your goals, and keep control over it. This thing has real potential to suck you in.

Following is what I tried, what I learned, my tips, plus my stab at using it for humor practice. Enjoy!

What I tried

To get to know it I played with Twitter in the following ways (with these results):

• Accountability tool: Use it to tweet a public commitment, e.g., losing weight, clearing your inbox, or writing. Related: A Daily Planning Experiment: Two Weeks Of Accountable Rigorous Action and Update on the "Twitter Diet" for an example. My assessment: Potentially very helpful.
  
• Interpretation: Express your world view and find like-minded people. Great current examples: The election and the economic meltdown. Assessment: You might feel better, you might feel worse, and you might turn off followers. (I've had that happen here, and I've learned some hard lessons as a result.)
  
• Micro-blogging: Share helpful tips, ideas, quotes, and links in a very short space. (Staying within the 140 limit is a real challenge, but good writing practice.) More on this use here. Assessment: Potentially valuable if you are reaching the right audience, with the benefits much like a regular blog: help people, establish repute, clarify what you're thinking, and getting practice writing. My current thinking is that using Twitter this way, while possible, might be better done via a more dedicated tool like Tumblr. Tumblr is more structured and allows more characters. I tried it a while back at ideamatt.tumblr.com. It's probably moot at this point - Twitter's popularity makes it a defacto standard. Thoughts?
  
• Humor practice: Practice being playful and getting people to laugh. Assessment: Hands down I had the most fun using it this way. That said, I find being genuinely funny (not just sarcastic, say) to be good hard work. And writing funny, esp. in 140 words, is really hard. A good little "Tweet" that makes you laugh is an act of genius. Some of the ones I loved were "real" ones like jdickerson and communicatrix, plus a host of clever fake ones like FakeSarahPalin, fakemerlinmann, and of course fakedavidallen. I've shared some of mine below. So who are your favorites?
  
• Being helpful: Share tips, in my case micro-productivity ones (I've listed some below). Assessment: Possibly helpful. Again, like the micro-blogging application, value depends on what your followers hope to get.
  
• Inspiration: Share inspiring words and thoughts. In my case I pulled out a few from my idea pickle jar. Assessment: See above. Note: When your words help someone, it really feels good.
  
• Connecting: Read the people you want to get to know, examine what their lives are like and how they think. A corellary: Sharing events from my life too. There's a risk here - what do people really care about? There are many absurd examples, e.g., "At the airport." "In the toilet." "Picking up a knife." and "Buttering the bread." Assessment: Possibly very high value, perhaps the most important use?
  
• Discovery: Find interesting things that like-minded followees found valuable. In this sense they're acting as collaborative filters. (I talked about them in Why Blogruptcy Is A Great Idea But Doesn't Work, And Why SPAM Is Easy To Fix And Information Overload Isn't.) Some personal favorites: Jon Stewart: John McCain's Big Acceptance Speech and Tina Fey: Couric/Palin Open. Spore and The Official iPhone and iPod Touch Application are cool too.
  

Note: Much of this revolves around helping others, and so benefits from my guideline for How To Help People - Be curious about others, keep lots of high-quality inputs coming in, and share potentially valuable ones with others.

Conclusion, tips, and The Ultimate Twitter Productivity Tip

Some final points:

• Like any activity with followers, there's an ego trap involved in getting sucked in to watching how your follower count grows (or not). You can tell who does this by when they Tweet about it!
  
• I suggest setting up multiple accounts, each matching the image you want to promote and your goals for each. For example, a business one, a personal one, at least one "secret" account (e.g., a "fake" one - see above - or a "guilt" one such as iluvamericanidol :-)
  
• Twitter is a significant information source, and needs managing accordingly. Be purposeful in using it, especially when adding someone or exploring/following up on something. And like any media diet, purge and re-evaluate regularly. Maybe this is a good guide: Drop *everyone* except a) people you want a relationship with (friends, prospective clients), b) people make you laugh or think or learn, and c) people who are *useful* filters, not distractors.
  

For now I'll drop Twitter until I define exactly how I'll use it, with the focus being establishing business relationships that lead to consulting work. (Note: I would absolutely love to hear your consulting success stories in using it this way, i.e., to get business.)

And the ultimate tip? Like my answer to What is the ultimate productivity tip?, I have a meta-answer: For me it's probably twitter.com/account/delete. The catch? "Temporarily disabled." :-)

What do you think? Any Twitter thinking and stories you'd like to share?

Getting people to laugh. In 140 characters or less.

I don't like to boast, but my entry #227 was voted one of the 10,000 Funniest Tweets of the Millisecond on Aug 21st (millisecond #56,324,112). I humbly submit the following, in hopes that one or two will tickle you.

• [On cats] "Cat gack, like revenge, is a dish best served cold."
  
• [On my nice new office char] "to use: 1 align ass with seat. warning: misalignment could cause injury 2 slowly lower ass to chair 3 stop on contact. 4 work. 5 reverse"
  
• [On networking] "3 questions for any social situation: What do you do for a living?, What keeps you up at night?, and Are you done talking yet?"
  
• [On living] "'Motorcycles Are Everywhere.' Hey, look up! Psych :-)"
  
• [On crisis] "bad news: economy imploding, oil skyrocketing, global warming-era weather, cancer. good news: iPhone!"
  
• [On productivity] "never lick envelopes after eating Saltines"
  
• [On productivity] "I calculate: if were to re-define ellipsis from "..." to ".." global production would increase by $750 TRILLION dollars. saveaperiod.com :-)"
  
• [On productivity] "inbox no-nos: sorting, picking, and putting back. Applies to nose-picking as well."
  
• [On music] "Realized our microwave oven is a Major 7th :-) Train, Minor :-("
  
• [On inventions] "thought of this just now: What if paper had a sticky back that you could attach to things, but take off without ripping! Crap. Bloody 3M"
  
• [On safety] "sawing wood for raised bed. DARN this electricity thing is handy. Also: wondering: what if circular saw blade came loose. early Halloween!"
  
• [On chocolate] "Me: 'Hey - Let's try these raw Cacao beans!' One minute later: Rapid uncontrolled salivation."
  
• [On health] "Mobility. Sperm: good. Teeth: bad."
  
• [On decision-making] "any tips for getting a good verizon deal? it's so confusing and risky. just like teen sex!"
  

Being helpful to others

• So you're taking a few blows. That's the price of being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful - Pressfield
  
• It is easier to adjust ourselves to the hardships of a poor living than it is to adjust ourselves to the hardships of making a better one
  
• wow: We're not comfortable with an unfamiliar way to work, >>even if it's better/more organized<<
  
• #1 absolute productivity tip of all time: seat time!
  
• idea: YouTube mashup: adds a TruthOMeter to uploaded videos (Fox comes to mind). voters must provide evidence links supporting their rating
  
• media diet 101: kill your TV, remove all news (NPR!) from your life. TV=crap, news=unimportant/not durable. test: try 1 wk, notice no impact
  
• blogging, and apparently using laptop battery life as a Parkinson's Law enforcer. 11% (20 minutes) from the end!!!
  
• How good are you at being new to something? "You can't blame yourself for not knowing what you didn't know."
  
• Mac productivity tip: F11: Your single-key "get focused" tool. Now what was I doing?
  
• fantastic quotes from "Physics of the impossible" e.g., If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
  
• I like incremental file purge, not yearly: file 1, pull 2. BUT: resist urge to pull many. Like I just did. Where'd that 1/2 hour go?
  
• to yourself: "I should have known": either sucks (I didn't know.) or is useful (I should have listened!)
  
• darn I forgot how cool this is. can't wait to show my 8yo daughter: Powers of 10 http://is.gd/jNB
  
• sanity tip: if you have a problem in play, take great notes. date, who you talked to, what they promised. not just CYA, but relieves mind
  
• you *are* using Firefox smart keywords, right? ex: "is " -> http://is.gd/ . refs: http://is.gd/10SC http://is.gd/C1Z . sweet!
  
• try this micro experiment: use hash marks to count how many times you're tempted to "check" email. don't follow through, just count. yours?
  
• "Nothing stifles creativity more than fear"
  
• 8YO daughter sick today. reducing work expectations & exempting no-tv-during-week rule to practice Cockney accents :-)
  
• avid readers: remember the 50 page test: point at which you cut bait. for a movie: 20 minutes. yes, actually walk out! http://is.gd/346a
  
• Decision Making: a buddy suggests that if you're really vacillating between two choices, it probably doesn't matter which you choose. agree?
  
• Why "I'll do it later" can either kill you or save you save: defer. kill: clutter, procrastinate
  
• Ah, the Action Support folder. A temporary place for materials actions need to get done. For when you don't need to make a dedicated folder.
  
• tip: try making your meetings 50 minutes, and using the 10 left to process your notes/actions/delegated items from it
  
• OK fellow bloggers, contact rules: 1. have a contact page. 2. put your full name on it. 3. list an email, not a contact form. 4. stir & pour
  

My men@pause interview is up, plus an invitation to a four-square-o-rama!

I had the pleasure of speaking with my new friend Matthew Scott, who puts on the men@pause seminars (I love the name :-) My episode is up, and you can listen to it at Productivity Expert for Entrepreneurs. While you're there, you might want to browse through some of the other interviews, including ones with Jason Fried of 37signals, and Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art. Thanks, Matthew!

On a completely different topic, I've been having fun collecting ideas for those two-by-two "four square" matrices. You know, two binary dimensions with names for each cell. Of course in the productivity realm, the classic is Covey's Urgent vs. Important (see this diagram, for example).

I've written about a half-dozen or so before, and I find coming up with them is entertaining, and can actually provide some insight. So just for kicks I'm hosting a little challenge: Send me one of your favorites and I'll post a collection of them. Any topic about living is fair game, e.g., Happy vs. Correct, or Dangerous vs. Exciting - in patented ASCII-Vision(TM):

               Dangerous         Safe
            +-------------+----------------+
   Exciting | Sky Diving  | Roller Coaster |
            +-------------+----------------+
     Boring | Cell + Car  |   Dilbert      |
            +-------------+----------------+

Email them to me at 2x2@matthewcornell.org. Cheers!

---

Matthew Cornell is a former NASA engineer and one of the few consultants in New England specializing in modern personal productivity techniques. His blog (subscribe via RSS or email) is a popular resource for original ideas on productivity and personal development. Matthew is available for desk-side consultations, workshops, and presentations. Contact him at matthewcornell.org/contact.html

Add, subtract, multiply, divide: Productivity lessons from basic math

In the recent Harvard Business Review article "The Science of Thinking Smarter" [1], molecular biologist John Medina discussed stress implications of neuroscience research, especially the impact on learning. When I read that stressed people do poorly at math, the NASA engineer in me asked what productivity insights we could learn from the those four familiar operations. For a bit of variety, I'm keeping this short (!), so please contribute your insights. Happy calculating!

Addition

"Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." -- Arthur Conan Doyle

We want it all - information, opportunities, and results. Unfortunately, we are deluged with requests for our attention, and each time we say yes we're adding work to our already overloaded future selves. And because deep down we know how much work we have, each one increases stress. So should think very carefully before pressing the "+" key. Try this: For each request, ask whether it leads directly to completing an important project or furthering a major goal. If not, bite the bullet and say no. This has implications for information overload. Thinking of subscribing to a blog or podcast? Great! What are you going to give up for it? Or for filing: Is it really worth keeping this? It's likely you can find it again, that is, if you end up needing it all (usually unlikely).

Summary: Be careful when you add information or commitments to your life, and if you do, try to remove something else in exchange.

Subtraction

"Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets." -- Nido Qubein

"+"'s twin is a powerful productivity tool. Shedding things from your life not only frees energy for other work, but opens up space for unexpected opportunities. Following are a few recycling bin candidates. First, boost energy and productivity by going on a media diet by cutting out TV and news. TV is mostly crap (sorry!) and news is rarely important or durable. Try this: Remove all news from your life for a week - radio, TV, papers, and web sites. I'd wager that very little of what you missed is still important now. And relax: You'll find out about big things from your people. Second, look for things on your To-Do list you could let go of with little impact. Ideal candidates are those stale ones you've been avoiding. Finally, remove distractions from work. When you sit down, clear your desk's "180" (the space in your field of vision), quit all the programs you can (email, IM, browser), put up your "Do Not Disturb" sign and dig in, one project at a time.

Summary: Look at the information and commitments you can remove from your life, and let them go. You might find that once you start throwing out "empty calories" from your life you'll get some welcome relief and makes physical or mental space for that which is more important, valuable, and richer.

Multiplication

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." -- Sun Tzu

Multiplying is all about bang for the buck. Read Koch's "The 80-20 principle" to learn that most results come from a vital few activities, not the trivial many as expected. To multiply your work, automate (that is, multiply yourself) and eliminate (see above) so you can focus on the highest payoff work. Note that you'll have to analyze previous results to identify contributions. Other implications: For email, every message you send multiplies by attracting responses so send fewer. For clutter, anything you leave out will multiply like rabbits, so have a system to manage workflow. For your computer, every keystroke takes time, so use macros and shortcuts.

Summary: Focus on the few inputs that generate the most output, and cut down on things that generate negative work.

Division

"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs." -- Henry Ford

To get productive with division, think slices and boundaries. To beat procrastination, break big jobs into small tasks - five minute ones if you're really stuck. To manage focus, carve your day into uninterrupted blocks of time (approximately one hour chunks), and concentrate on one project during them without multitasking. To leverage staff, outsource or delegate important tasks that you're not good at or don't enjoy. Finally, a major productivity opportunity is to divide your overall workflow into stages - Gather incoming into inboxes, Empty them to extract action, Plan your day and week, and Act on the plan.

Summary: Divide work and time into chunks, delegate as much as possible, and adopt a method to control your workflow.

References

• [1] The Science of Thinking Smarter: A Conversation with Brain Expert John J. Medina. Find his executive summary here.

The real reasons for the modern productivity movement

(Sidebar: I know I'm a late adopter, but I've been playing with Twitter. If you want to join in my experiment, I'm matthewcornell.)

The last five years has seen a surge in interest in personal productivity, with the publishing of David Allen's 2001 book Getting Things Done being a watershed. Want more proof? Trying searching blogs for productivity (13,713,538 hits) or time management (833,569) and you'll find discussion of every aspect of getting our work together. Amazon's Health, Mind & Body > Self-Help > Success category lists over 79,000 books (bestsellers here).

Some have argued that it's a cult for the information age, but I disagree. Look at mega sites like Lifehacker, Lifehack, 43 Folders and you'll see a tremendous following by a wide range of people. (You, dear readers, are a good example - executives, in-house family workers, pastors, actors, comedians, programmers, trainers, professors, musicians, historians, and a ton of fellow bloggers. Neat!) Clearly some large subset of us is fascinated (obsessed?) with being "more productive" [1]. Why is this?

After a bit of thought I decided it's a perfect storm of 1) a really good best-selling book (Allen's), 2) an urgent need for meaning in our lives, and 3) the explosion of blogs. Mix in the scientific method and the human capacity for self-experimentation, and you've got something remarkable. Let me try to tease these apart.

Purpose

Productivity is neither a cult nor a fad. It's a search for meaning. -- (me :-)

Since the advent of the scientific method we've had to face regular breakthrough discoveries about how the world works, and about how our bodies and minds interact with and interpret it. This is like a punch to the gut to our rather irrational belief engines [2]. From the article Why We Believe What We Believe:

The greatest invention of the human mind is not fire, or agriculture, or iron, or the steam engine, or even the splitting of the atom. From the perspective of understanding the physical world, the greatest invention of the human mind is the scientific method--the systematic, skeptical approach to claims about the way the world works.

I believe this new perspective has caused many of us to redefine what our purpose on the planet is. Add a large dose of cognitive dissonance resulting from our species' unsustainable behaviors (e.g., global warming and peak oil) and the stress of our Olympic-paced worklives, and you have a crisis of purpose.

In that sense, could modern productivity techniques be the technical age's equivalent of tools for spiritual quests? Are they a way to get personal control of ourselves, much like science has given us unprecedented control of our world? Could it be we crave a replacement of the human rituals that were formerly integral to our daily lives, such as meditation or chanting? I ask because these methods seem to offer a way to obtain equanimity - what my meditation teachers might have called "getting centered" [3].

Blogs and self-experimentation

The phenomenal growth of blogs during this same period [4] means a large subset of us (the same one as above?) has a voice that can potentially reach thousands of readers using relatively simple tools. That means it's easy for us share what we think and experience. Now combine this with:

• our uniquely human ability to consciously evolve our behavior (and know it),
  
• our love of feeling important,
  
• our need to make acknowledged contributions, and
  
• our urge to help others.
  

I think these factors, along with the rigorous observational tools of science applied to the personal level (you do have capture tools, right?), are what's caused the explosion of blogs on self-improvement. The final piece is that the challenges to modern living seem to be large and universal (who doesn't experience procrastination?), but there's no uniform training of how to manage ourselves. This means each of us has had to experiment on ourselves to rediscover things that work, and therefore we each have something unique to say.

In an important post, Jose asked why there's a raft of anecdotal writing around productivity, but little empirical study. I can't answer the latter (young scientists - get busy!) but I think the above considerations go to explaining why we're driven to share our personal discoveries, and that they might help. After all, you have probably discovered something I don't know but could use. (Actually, in answer to the first part, is it possible we haven't gathered enough data to formulate the laws of work? I found doing so difficult when I took a stab at it.) That also explains the complaint about there being a lot of trivial or useless content on productivity: One woman's trash is another's treasure. (Or, It's all relative.)

Thinking our way to happiness

A final piece of this (admittedly poorly-defined) puzzle is our ability to change our thinking so that we're happier. That's a mind blower. A common idea in self-help circles is that it's just as biochemically easy to have a negative thought or interpretation as a positive one. How to do that is of course the hard part. I don't think this has been solved yet, but there's hope. Check out the wonderful current crop of books on the topic, including The How of Happiness, Learned Optimism, and Stumbling on Happiness.

Laws of living and wrap-up

I suspect that because there's not yet a "scientific method of happiness" (don't worry, I'm writing the book on it) we're left in the meantime with exploring it on our own. Thankfully, we have an extensive resource in the productivity blogging realm for helping each other. Yes the sheer number of sources makes 80-20 difficult (e.g., finding the small number of thinkers who give us the biggest return - see my post on Blogruptcy and Information Overload) but I think the search is worth it. That's also why I hold my readers in such high regard.

Lest you think I don't respect the efforts of religion through the years, let me finish with this discovery from my pickle jar: "Hey - Methodists were named for their spiritual routine - METHOD-ists!" I offer the Wikipedia entry as food for thought:

The movement focused on Bible study and a methodical approach to scriptures and Christian living. The term "Methodism" was a pejorative term given to a small society of students at Oxford who met together between 1729 and 1735 for the purpose of mutual improvement. They were accustomed to receiving communion every week, fasting regularly, and abstaining from most forms of amusement and luxury. They also frequently visited the sick and the poor, as well as prisoners.

Happy happiness hunting!

References

• [1] What's the definition of "productive?" It's one of the first questions I ask top productivity thinkers in my continuing interview series. I've had a range of answers, including insights from Marilyn Paul (making work meaningful and valuable - doing what we care about), Laura Stack (output per hour per worker - the value that's created with all of your work), and Sally McGhee (performance without sacrificing work/life balance). Another perspective was passed along by reader Dan Markovitz, who recalled Merlin Mann's definition of being able to focus on "the creative work that only you can do." My current take: Productivity is exerting the least amount of effort doing the most important work and leading the life you want. I'd love to year your definition.
  
• [2] See Why We Believe What We Believe, Belief Engine (Skeptical Inquirer May 1995), and Science vs. the Belief Engine. Great stuff!
  
• [3] Side note: I've studied yoga and meditation, and by far the biggest mental relief I've experienced came from the methods I practice and teach. It's partly why I took the risk of changing careers.
  
• [4] See The State of the Live Web, April 2007.