There are two answers to that question:
- You can’t follow all the advice of productivity blogs.
- Nor should you.
Did you know that more than 100,000 new blogs are added to the Web every day? Staggering isn’t it?
I’m not sure what the breakdown is on these, but would guess that several thousand of these new blogs have a productivity slant. So, there are lots of places to find tips. In fact, there are too many places.
I enjoy subscribing to some of these new blogs, to see what they have to offer. Sometimes I am rewarded with an insightful article written by someone with experience and credibility. More often than not, though, I see people recommending things that you wonder if they even do themselves, and you see the ever-famous list post, where some new blogger is trying to get popular on Digg by listing a 100 ways to do something.
When I see lists like that, I unsubscribe immediately. I saw one recently that listed “120 ways to boost your brain power,” and immediately unsubscribed from the blog that posted it. Give me a break. Who in their right mind is actually going to make effective use of such a list? Adults learn by doing, and it is best to give us one or two pieces of advice at a time and let us apply those so that we can really learn them.
Sometimes I actually chuckle to myself when I think about this. I definitely chuckled in reading the Zen Habits post a few days ago, entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Productivity Bloggers. I think Leo published it as part humor and part truth. He succeeded, because it is both.
But, it is also true that there are some really good productivity information sources, like Leo and Gina Trapani and Adam Pash of Lifehacker, and there are others. The writing of those folks is worthy of attention and subscription.
So what do I recommend?
- Subscribe to a few, really good productivity blogs like Zen Habits and Lifehacker.
- Once you have a productivity system that works for you, tweak it to ensure it is as simple to use as possible. Then, stop tweaking it.
Gina Trapani sums it up better than I ever could in her interview with Harvard Business. I agree with everything she says in that post. If you are doing what she says, you really don’t need any more productivity tips.
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