So, Stephen Thorne, huh? Yeah, I bumped into his work a while back. Seemed like everyone was talking about his methods for a hot minute, or at least that’s how it felt in my little corner of the internet.
He had this whole grand system, you know? All about ‘optimizing your life’ and ‘achieving peak whatever’. It sounded pretty good on the surface, all neat and tidy. So, I figured, okay, I’ll give it a whirl. What’s the harm? I got the book, watched a few of his talks online. Seemed convincing enough.
I remember spending an entire weekend trying to get his ‘Thorne Productivity Blueprint’ up and running. Seriously, a whole weekend. I was color-coding my tasks, setting up these intricate daily schedules he preached, even downloaded a couple of new apps he swore by. My desk, let me tell you, looked less like a workspace and more like mission control for a very complicated, very serious operation.
And what happened after all that? After about a week, maybe ten days, I wasn’t more productive. I was just more stressed out. All that tracking and micro-managing every minute of my day… it was exhausting. It really got me thinking, you know? All these self-proclaimed gurus with their ‘foolproof’ systems. Do these things actually work for regular folks, people with actual, unpredictable lives and jobs that don’t fit into neat little boxes?
It kind of took me back to this job I had a few years ago. We got this new manager, straight out of some fancy school, full of big ideas and buzzwords. First week in, he announces we’re all going to implement this thing called the ‘Dynamic Synergy Framework’ or something equally over-the-top. He had charts and presentations, the whole nine yards.
This ‘framework’ meant we had these long, drawn-out ‘alignment meetings’ every single morning. An hour, sometimes more, just talking about what we were going to do. Then there were these ‘progress trackers’ we had to fill out three times a day. Filling them out took more time than actually doing the work itself! And don’t even get me started on the ‘innovation points’ we were supposed to earn. It was a complete circus.
Most of us just started making stuff up for the trackers to get him off our backs. The meetings? They just turned into gripe sessions. Actual productivity went down the drain. We were so busy trying to follow the system that the real work wasn’t getting done. I remember this one senior developer, a quiet guy, super smart. He pretty much just ignored all of it. Kept his head down, did his work, and somehow managed to deliver. Meanwhile, the rest of us were drowning in this ridiculous system.
That whole mess taught me a valuable lesson. These big, complicated systems, whether they come from a guy like Stephen Thorne or some manager trying to make a name for himself, they often forget about the people. We’re not machines. You can’t just plug us into a pre-defined program and expect it to work perfectly.
I didn’t last too long at that job after that. The bureaucracy was just too much. I ended up going freelance, and that’s when I really started to figure out what actually works – for me, anyway. It wasn’t some guru’s complicated method. It was more about trying things, seeing what stuck, making small adjustments. A lot of it was just plain old common sense, and learning to listen to my own pace and how I work best.
So, when it comes to Stephen Thorne and his stuff, I ended up just cherry-picking. I took one or two small ideas from his work that actually seemed practical, adapted them a bit, and pretty much ignored the rest of the complicated scaffolding. For example, he had a tip about batching small tasks together – okay, that one was genuinely useful. But the whole elaborate, rigid framework? Nah, not for me.
It’s like cooking, I guess. You can follow a recipe down to the last gram, or you can use it as a starting point and throw in your own stuff, adjust it to your own taste. Most of the time, the second way ends up tasting a whole lot better. At least, that’s been my experience.
