Personal productivity

He who sometimes gets obeyed sent a link to a Merlin Mann informal talk on productivity. Jet-lag got me before I made it to the end, but it got me thinking about just how many parts there are to my life, and how they individually get under control.

Sometimes, organising my life is like one of those whack-a-mole games at a fairground. I pin down one part (say work) so it's running smoothly, and immediately another one (say health or friends) pop up and start to unravel. And I'm measurably sane (having been checked for all the possible candidates, I can safely say that I'm sane; just a bit eccentric and occasionally depressed) but I seem to spend much of my life worrying about things I should have already done or ought to be doing without really being able to quantify what exactly they are, and I am so jealous of people who seem to have enough time to not do that. So I got to wondering: how many things do I actually try to organise at once? And the list is...

• Work: team projects, team admin, own projects, own admin, outside projects & influences etc.
  
• Relationships: partner, family, friends, neighbours etc
  
• Infrastructure: house maintenance (including finishing turning a 1970s shell into home), housework, car maintenance, home equipment (pc maintenance etc), finances, paperwork
  
• Self: mental + physical health, outside image (clothes, not muttering wildly in the streets because I have too much to do etc)
  

Now I cheated a bit there because a while back (as part of the "stay sane" project), I made a big list of things to do. And ordered it by House, Self, Work and Other people. What was interesting was that I lost the list for a couple of weeks, and when I found it again, I'd done almost all the 'other people' and 'work' tasks, some of the 'house' tasks and almost none of the 'self' tasks. Which got me to thinking 'who is this life for anyway?'.