by Asim Jalis
One of the things that gets in my way of getting things done is
that if the task is not interesting, I find it hard to get
motivated to do it. I know people who don't view things this way.
Normally, this ability to discriminate between boring and
interesting things is a weakness. The guy who can put his head
down and crank out whatever code the customer wants wins every
time.
But if applied correctly this could also be a strength. For
example, whenever I summarize meetings at work people tell me
that they got more out of the summary than out of the talk.
This might be because I leave out the boring parts. A person who
can dedicate his bandwidth equally to boring and interesting
stuff would be unable to discriminate in this way.
Another great example of this is Roger Hodge's weekly summary of
the news. He sends it out on a mailing-list from Harper's. In a
small paragraph he summarizes all the interesting things that
happened in the world the previous week.
DrudgeReport is the same way. Drudge and Hodge are much more
engaging than news.google.com because they have this ability to
tell what is interesting and what isn't. Even if you disagree
with their judgement, there is a kind of human quality about it.
Their personality comes through.
