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I Dumped All My Productivity Apps
And I’m now in productivity withdrawal
I am powerless over productivity apps. The mere mention of a new application that will organize my thoughts, keep my notes, sort my sources, or make me more productive than I was yesterday freezes me like a deer in headlights. I will postpone any project, ignore my phone, and cancel crucial appointments on the off chance that the latest offering is the one that will make me whole. This is not new. I have had the productivity monkey on my back for twenty-five years, but over the last few weeks, I have been doing what it takes to break free.
I am old. My first productivity high occurred decades ago while creating a legal document on the tiny black and green screen of an Osborne computer. I still remember the rush. My work, written in Wordstar and saved on a floppy disk that actually flopped, could be edited and saved again before being printed on a dot-matrix printer. That prior pinnacle of productivity, the IBM Selectric typewriter with a whiteout ribbon, was toast. I was computerized, and I have been chasing the high ever since.
I worked in or ran law offices for most of my working life. I was present for the birth of the all-in-one office suites. There was Corel WordPerfect, then Microsoft Word, and eventually the open source OpenOffice. These behemoths promised to do it all, to fill the…
