Robert Rodriguez on productivity

I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of Robert Rodriguez. He's really good about half the time, and he doesn't interest me at all the rest of the time. But in a short interview with SCI FI Wire where he was offering updates on the seemingly dozens of movies he has in development, he dropped a line that actually struck me as rather profound. He said that being so busy is, paradoxically, the thing that allows him to do so much without being over-stressed.

"It's actually a strange thing," he said. "The more you do, the easier it is. My mom used to say, 'If you want something done, give it to a busy man.' Because there's an efficiency to it. So I think if I just did one job, I think I would be more tired, and the decisions wouldn't be right, because you have too much to think about. You can go more based on instinct, which is always smarter than your conscious self, and you just have to make all of the decisions, so it just moves so much faster."

In my own life, there are certainly times when I take on too much and just can't get it all done. But I do understand what he's saying. The times when I don't have as much going on, it can be very hard to get anything done. Think about going back to school after summer vacation when you were a kid, and how completely stupid and unmotivated you felt trying to do your homework after months of not challenging your brain. Then compare that to times in your life when you had a lot of deadlines and personal responsibilities and your brain never got a chance to rest.

Too much stress is terrible for you, but maybe the ideal is to have just the right amount of the right kind of stress.

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