On not getting things done

As with all lazy people, everything I do during the day that isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing during the day, such as staring at the ceiling, checking in on the latest cable news freakout, scrolling through Twitter and Instagram, and updating my list of enemies, just adds to the drumbeat of anxiety I feel about getting things done.

Put down the phone, I say to myself. Close the browser, I nag. In five minutes, I respond, because I need to read what someone from the Federalist said to someone from the Bulwark and how someone from the American Conservative got into it.

This week, I spent most of my day keeping track of the lawsuit between Scarlett Johansson and Disney over what Johansson’s lawyers claim, with justification, in my view, was some shifty and shady three-card monte on the part of the studio when it came to paying its client for her performance in Black Widow.

It’s pretty interesting stuff, and because I’m a working member of the entertainment industry, it’s also relevant, in a way, to my career. (Not really, but it’s a plausible lie I can tell myself.) The only thing anyone in show business really pays attention to is how much someone else is getting paid.

For most of us, an enemy is just someone who does exactly what we do — but more successfully.

But here’s the problem: Spending your days staying up-to-date on someone else’s career instead of, say, sitting down and writing a script for money, means you’d rather read about people in show business than be a person in show business.

Getting Things Done does a great job helping people who have a normal work ethic, and it probably does an enormous service to people who are run-of-the-mill lazy, but it’s not written for the person who can sit down at 11 a.m. with a laptop and a ton of good intentions and then look up and see it’s suddenly 4 p.m. and all you’ve really done is google yourself in various permutations and compile more and more elliptical to-do lists:

To do:

Shirts
Lightbulbs re kitchen
FedEx for thing
Emails do and return
Novel begin
Script notes
Plan re career

It’s a jumble of things, with no real sense of what each entails — more like a cry for medication than a to-do list. It’s not a recipe for success.

A few years ago, I went to Costa Rica with a friend of mine, a lawyer who wanted to write a novel. (Is there any other kind?)

We met in San Jose, drove a few hours west, and parked ourselves at a small beach hotel for 10 days of writing. On the first day, he woke up and grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down at his computer and started writing.

I went swimming and ate Fig Newtons.

On the second day, he started early again and would have worked straight through the day if I hadn’t dragged him to town with me to sit in the shade and drink beer. On the third day, we sort of repeated the first day, except I added cashews to the Fig Newtons and my friend sat farther away from me.

On the fourth day, I turned on the computer.

On the fifth day, I met some Australian backpackers and bummed around with them. On the sixth day, I sent emails. On the seventh day, I organized my notes on my computer, ate cashews, and sat quietly staring at a lizard on the wall.

On the eighth, virtuoso day, I ate cashews and Fig Newtons and drank beer and talked to the Australians and drove into town and went swimming. On the ninth day, I packed. On the 10th day, as we waited for our plane, I read my friend’s completed novel. I explained to him that the only reason he could actually sit down and write a novel in 10 days was that he wasn’t a professional writer.

For me, as good as it is, Getting Things Done is sort of like a terrific war novel. It’s something I’d rather read about than do.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.