Most schemes of personal improvement are very laughable things

Rhymes with Orange is on the short list of comics that would be here every day if I didn't handicap my choices. This one breaks through because I have an uncanny ability to watch brilliant creative ideas drift off into the ether and to see entire days on which I have time to be productive whittle themselves down to half-hours during which I would have time to be productive if there were anything productive that I could accomplish in a half hour. Which there isn't so to hell with it.

And I have figured out over several decades of trying to come up with strategies for being more productive that the best strategy for becoming more productive is to stop wasting time coming up with ideas that you think will make you more productive.

Which means that, of the two above, the most attractive strategy, as suggested-though-not-said, is the one on the right, because not only is it more efficient to lose everything at once, but this method also allows you to waste money and time on a trip to Staples.

It's the low-rent equivalent of spending $59.95 for a jogging suit and $2059.95 for a treadmill upon which to drape it as a permanent display.

And I happen to know that, as long as she stays away from table saws and lets someone else do the dishes, Hilary Price is in no danger of losing her notes.

I also happen to know that Hilary is holding her annual Open Studio November 12 and 13, along with the other artists with studios in an old toothbrush factory in Florence, Mass, which is suburban Northampton and a very cool place.

Her open studio is very similar to Flaubert's salon in Paris, except that Henry James and Ivan Turgenev rarely make the scene and, in lieu of absinthe and French pastries, there is Halloween candy. And yet it is very like Flaubert's salon in other ways, if less gaudy in decor.

Very like it indeed.

And well-timed for holiday shopping, particularly since the hostess is among the very best sketch-and-dedication writers in comicdom.

The above link is to the overall announcement of the open studio, but I should also offer a link to her latest blog entry, which contains a story I would steal if I could get past the slight obstacle of having been raised Catholic rather than Jewish.

(Headline note: Boswell remarked to Johnson, "You laugh at schemes of political improvement," to which Johnson responded, "Why, sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.")

Comments

[Tom Falco]

I usually lose my notes the 21st century way, I dictate them into my iphone and then can never find them again or just forget to listen to the notes until it's too late.

[Mark Jackson]

"The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques." (Shannon Wheeler, in a Too Much Coffee Man comic I sadly cannot find a copy of.)

[f]

I make notes of things I need to do at home by sending e-mail messages from my work account to my home account, where they get buried under the daily sale announcements from Lands End, Harry and David, and a few other places. I usually find them about a week later, when I delete all the chaff.

[Sherwood Harrington]

What is this "to do" of which you all speak?

[Mike Peterson]

You have not heard of the Great To Do?