I keep meaning to write some kind of blog about this, but I call it "time opportunism" as opposed to "time management". That's the best name I could come up with for this thing I do that keeps me creative and flexible yet still getting things done.

In a nutshell, I quit trying to explicitly plan and organize my life (not that I was any good at that) and instead I have a giant bag of things I need to do. There's usually a bunch of projects, and each has a todo list. All I do is when I have the time to work on one AND the motivation, then I go bang out as much as I can until I can't. By having lots of different little projects I'm pretty sure I'll always have something to work on that motivates me at that time.

The only caveat on this is I then do one thing at a time. I see too many people who can't get their todo list down are usually trying to do 5 things at once. A good sign you're this kind of person is if you love patch queues. Just do one thing, and make sure before you do it that you can do it. Don't juggle 10 things at once.

Sounds like Structured Procrastination to me.

http://structuredprocrastination.com/

I for one would appreciate a blog post on this. I'm pretty sure the rest of the community are there right along side me.

Thank you for posting this comment. I don't know why but this completely makes me think of context switching in the kernel and everything then becomes clear. I am guilty of "multitasking" and at the end of it accomplishing almost nothing, only recently have I realised the error in my ways. Your recent work and comment are confirmation that focusing on one thing at a time is the way forward when working on substantial tasks.

I don't know why he's wasting time teaching python he could make millions (bwahahaha) giving "getting things done" seminars.

Of course they would probably consist of him saying "find something that pisses you off.Then fix it" over and over.

I don't know how you got downvoted, but I don't suppose it changes the intent of my reply either way:

That MIGHT just be the secret to Zed's success -- that so much in the world seems to piss him off means that there is so much stuff he feels he needs to fix that he's constantly drowning in the need to fix something.

Some of us are more complacent -- I'm happy to fix the things that irritate me, but my body of work may be less prolific because I'm generally happy with the products that I use.

Spite is an incredibly powerful motivator, only outclassed by survival.

For years, I worked for a boss who was always right. Not necessarily by being smarter, but by sheer force of will. She's a brilliant lady, and figured out the way to get some of the more competent technicians to perform was to subtly infer that she didn't think we could make deadline, knowing we'd bust our asses and put in 30 hour shifts to do it, just so she wouldn't be allowed to 'win'.

We called this process 'Hate Driven Development', and yes, in hindsight (and even in the moment) we all knew what she was doing, but she was clever enough to put it out there in ways where it worked even still.

If I remember correctly, he's also currently unemployed. This may be relevant :-)

He does more without a job than most people do with one.

I am, but to be honest, I got more done when I had a job. See all those sites? I did all of those, wrote for them, worked on LPTHW, wrote mulletdb.com, hacked on lamson, a few other projects, and still played guitar about 4 hours a day.

Now that I'm just working on Mongrel2 it feels like I do less. Weird.

Geez, man. Do you ever sleep? :-)

Oh, and just out of curiosity, what guitar music are you spending the most time on? Is it mostly your own stuff, or are you learning a lot of things written by others?

I work on Jazz mostly, but older Jazz. Which means I play a lot of scales. :-)

He's also planning to give python classes: http://codelesson.com/python (discussed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724354)

Wasn't he employed with dropbox?

He was.