Saturday, December 8, 2007

Tim Ferriss - Meet Graham Greene

Tim Ferris makes a lot of sense, even if he is a bit of a huckster, runs some kind of a borderline 'nutraceutical' business, and pads the page views on his website by auto-refreshing every minute or so.

Graham Greene was famous for making his friends feel inadequate through his ruthlessly precise and efficient work habits:

"His friend Michael Meyer observed him at work during a trip to Tahiti in 1959, when he was writing “A Burnt-Out Case”:

He wrote in longhand with a fine pen in a very small, almost illegible script, for two hours each day; no more, no less. In those two hours he would write seven to nine hundred words, the equivalent of two to three printed pages. . . . At 9 a.m. he would stop. This was when I got up, and as I walked along the verandah to the shower room he would look up and say, somewhat complacently I felt: “Nine hundred words this morning,” or, even worse, “Finished my work for the day”—a depressing remark with which to be greeted when I hadn’t yet begun and the thermometer was climbing towards ninety."

-Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker, 2004.

I love work efficiency!

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