On Productivity(The Productivy Corridor): Disparities Between Brent and Vincent.

On the local level, there is a certain mindset.  Brent is our case study for sake of making a point.

Brent works part-time.  And having that part-time job is worth a kind of social credit, despite the lack of funds in the bank account.  The little job earns Brent a kind of respect among the mainstream of the locals.  Social cache.

Yet Brent is below the poverty line.  Nevermind the term "time millionaire", Brent living his best life engaging in various cultural activities and socializing with friends at his leisure.

Vincent is basically the polar opposite of Brent.

Good old Vincent, a Yank, born into a family that owned a convenience store, Vincent began to work for his father during his teenage years.  Imagine that Vincent learned to manage his time during that period, as he made room for work, schooling and all the other.  

But there was a niggle that began to grow, a sort of obsession with getting on the clock, working when he could, so that he might earn.  He might forsake some of that regular teen stuff in order to make some money.

Vincent learned small business during that time, and he fed that obsession with being productive, with earning.

I personally came up with a sort of scattershot approach, putting my eggs in several baskets.  Despite that the totals of each basket grow slowly, they do grow, and in the end, where one person, like Brent, will have a half-full basket, and yet others might eventually have one full bucket, I would find that I had slowly filled not one bucket, but several.

So I organize an hour with the pomodoro, and do time-blocking for the daily, which is segmenting various subjects into various blocks of time, usually each block an hour or two, important meetings with Chris Hale and Seth Adams, and so forth.

But the week?  The scale of so many days?

It gets a variation of the Eisenhower Matrix, a four part grouping of squares of varying distinction, does the week.  I take artistic license here like so many productivity pundits who each claim to have invented the Eisenhower Matrix.

What I've done is segmented the week into large pieces of time that I divide into pieces in an Eisenhower Matrix, four parts, of varying importance, just the way Ike would.

Those pieces might be 400 dollars a day for some weird analytics, or 2 dollars an hour in the spare time, stuffing envelopes at half-attention while on Zoom with Chris Hale.

You could call it quick hands, or perhaps busy hands, just the way Vincent would, but with the pomodoro's enforced leisure periods mixed in.  That even making a grocery list for Seth Adams demands its own leisure time added into the substance of the time, like Bentonville's "2 hours on" earning "15 minutes downtime".

We're talking seat-time and the economy variously of attention and other demands, such as mental energy.

Imagine a neat little row of bean sprouts.

Each bean, less than cent in cost, acquired almost as worthless waste material, and then placed lovingly into cups.

What did we do?  Did we get a business loan?  Did we buy Facebook ads?  Did we design influencer content?

No.

We did the core business of putting small dashes of nourishing water into each cup.

And what happens, eventually?

A penny spent in December.  A few minutes spent in care.  A squirt here and there.

It spawns a few meals in the later seasons of the year.

Vincent the obsessed Yankee hustler takes something like this to a further extreme, saying that he doesn't spend his first million on a "f*cking Bugatti", but instead uses the money to hire a team of employees to grow his own business interest, cementing his income stream, multiplying, compounding, feeding his obsession for the concept of business.

In the same sense, that modern entrepreneur mind is pitched the 5 percent interest bearing checking account, earning some low amount, but feeding that dream of someday having the passive income, some subsistence amount earned trouble-free on all that sweat and negativity from the daily hustle.

I think the new American dream is somewhere between the Meta content planner calendar and the interest-bearing online checking account.....