September 13th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
So, despite magically disappearing for a while (beyond my mortal senses), I did manage to track Merlin for a few minutes to catch up with him. Observations?
- He is really nice: Merlin’s a genuinely nice guy. That’s the vibe that I got. He seemed to care about the people around him, and was quite giving — in terms of his time — to anyone who wanted to ask him questions. He also answered a lot of questions we had (he had an audience at the time) quite graciously.
- He is really intense: Merlin lives efficiency (although, as I understand it, he hates being called a guru on the topic), and its reflected in conversations he has with you. He tries to get you down to what’s important and for you to concentrate on what’s important for you. Sometimes this can be a bit off putting, but you can’t fault the man for living through his own mantra.
Personally, I wanted to ask him a question around managing time when you have friends, family, work, kids, and a life — and what the best way to manage your time effectively when you want to blog.
Sadly Merlin didn’t have a magic pill, or wand, or spell for me, to manage my time, or perhaps energy, as quite frankly I feel generally exhausted at the end of the day. But he did have some pearls regarding Getting Things Done and crushing procrastination (in small chunks), which was pretty cool.
The other pearl, of course, was making some hard decisions about where to spend your time, which was hard to hear for someone who has a lot of interests (some of them deep, some of them jivey).
Now, being as bone-headed as I am, I’ll probably continuing doing too many things at once. Trying, and failing, is something that I’m happy doing, and quite frankly, its something that’s brought me a great many things, including, for example, meeting Merlin Mann in the first place.
