I was deeply moved by Limitless, a film where Eddie, a deadbeat writer, gets hold of a cognitive enhancer drug called NZT-48. NZT gives Eddie near-unlimited focus and energy, allowing him to push an unhuman workload (and getting him into a lot of trouble).

One of the reasons Limitless touched me was that my workload has been increasing at the office, requiring me to go through tasks at a quicker pace. There's a constant pressure to quickly process and close items on my list. There's no longer time to fuck around with anything, because there's ten other things screaming for my attention at any given time.

Unlike Eddie, I don't have crystal pills of NZT to help me through day. Instead I'm practicing GTD and will myself to quickly push a task to the next higher state of entropy so I can move on. And in some ways, it's been working. My productivity has been increasing steadily, and it's quite a rush to see the amount of stuff that you can process in a day if you set your mind to it.

Unfortunately, this way of operating sucks for the people you're working with. While I was busy mowing through my todo list, my availability to my colleagues has been decreasing dramatically. An example for why this sucks: Last week I gave a junior developer bad advice for dealing with a particular programming problem. When I reviewed his commits a day later I saw pages of tortured code, bending over backwards to solve the problem using the leaky abstraction I had suggested. I'm sure my colleague had noticed that the problem resisted being solved that way. I'm also sure he had considered approaching me because of this. But I was busy talking on Skype all day, getting shit done.

There's a hard limit to how much good you can do in a project if you only have time to touch it twice a day. Even if those touches are brillant deeds of focus and craftmanship, you've basically become the hit-and-run manager who stops by your desk occasionally, kicks over what everyone's been working on and disappears until he does the same thing again tomorrow.

If you are working with a team in any sort of managing capacity, being available for a high-frequency feedback loop is one of the greatest contributions you can bring to a project. It's one of the greatest productivity boosts you can bring to your team. So think about optimizing that for a change, rather than finding better ways to spread yourself thin.

Also, buy the soundtrack of that movie. It's awesome.