Hello World

Like many of us, my life is in a constant “World War” scale battle with procrastination. It affects almost everything I do, every day of my life. Though I do consider myself a productive person, I struggle with not only the things I “need” to get done, but especially with the things I “want” to get done.

I am a web developer and graphic designer at a small tech company in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. My work consists of everything from .Net applications to web sites built with Joomla to graphic design projects. I truly enjoy being able to go from a half day of coding to working on a menu design for a local restaurant. Both of these roles are ingrained in me, and I absolutely love what I do.

I can’t exactly pinpoint where in my life procrastination became a problem, but if I had to take a guess I imagine it would be high school. Whenever I could, I would push off doing any large homework project, leaving it for the last possible minute. Often I was able to complete it on-time and do a half way decent job. Other times I fell flat on my face. It was the Hail Marys that I pulled off which kept the “Perpetual Procrastination Machine” rolling along in my brain…

About 10 years ago, I discovered the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Within a matter of days I was hooked! David laid out everything so clear and simple. To this day I am still a huge “GTD” guy. My weekly reviews keep me sane, and what better system for an avid procrastinator then to use one that can be endlessly tweaked and modified! I joke, but I would be an absolute mess without GTD.

Since moving to the Mac a few years ago, I discovered the world of Mac blogs and podcasts. I’ve looked up to powerhouse productive people like Brett Terpstra and David Sparks for years now. They seem to get so much accomplished and create so many cool things! Apps, books, podcasts, scripts, and screencasts; you name it, they have done it! These guys are who inspired me to create this web site. I want to become one of these ultra productive people.

Now, in my thirties, I love acquiring knowledge. I rarely want someone to just “do” something for me. I want to learn how to do it for myself. The struggle with productivity still haunts me. With someone who likes to learn, this means an endless number of books I’d like to read and a very large list of someday/maybe projects. I bet you can relate.

This web site honestly started out while procrastinating! It was built with Jekyll, a static site generator. What better way to avoid important things I should be doing then to learn about yet another system to create a web site! I first thought about hosting this site on GitHub. It would be super simple to setup and would be fairly fast. There unfortunately just wasn’t enough procrastination built into that setup! I decided I wanted to host it at home, using an old junk Dell computer that was destined for the recycling bin. I would have to get it running, get Linux installed, learn and setup Nginx and a deploy method. This was beginning to look better. My idea was that I would run the site off this old computer and cable Internet connection until the point it became so popular that I could no longer handle the traffic. There was something about that I really liked. I got it all setup and was ready to go.

After a couple more weeks though, I started having all kinds of really good thoughts and blog post ideas. I now began to have reservations that my site would start to gain some traffic and then go down or load slowly. From that point on, I just wanted a stable and super fast platform. I had heard about Amazon S3 and Cloudfront, and this would be the perfect time to learn about it. That brings us to the site in it’s current form, and proof that the procrastination battle wages on.

So I welcome you to Productivity Tomorrow, a blog about my battle between procrastination and productivity. Among these pages you soon find helpful articles, tips & tricks for the Mac, book and app reviews and even some screencasts I’ll “eventually” get to. Many posts will be about encouraging productivity, while others will be about the fun diversions that can keep us from it. If you can relate to my story I’d love to hear from you. We have such a wonderful Mac community that I honestly just want to be part of it. I simply want to create something cool that others find useful. Please feel free to contact me on Twitter @cyberbobcity. I know I’ll be itching to take a break to respond.

Thanks again for stopping by!!