I started making a list of the things I need to do this weekend and it was getting ugly and overwhelming, especially when I factored in how much time I committed to being in the recording studio Saturday and Sunday.

There was only one thing to do: start cheating and putting down items I could immediately cross off, thus feeling an immediate sense of accomplishment. Things like “shower,” “get dressed,” “mumble to self” and “drink coffee.”

Some call it pathetic. I call it optimizing my daily performance-intensity goals. I learned all about optimizing my daily performance-intensity goals at a training session once about 7 years ago. It hurt really, really bad. There was a lot of role-playing. In fact, now that I think about it, I am the only one left working here out of all the people who were sent off to that session of managerial-training masturbation.

At least the session was at a Top Secret Location in DuPont Circle so there was an excellent selection of bars for us to choose from once we were sprung from Hell. That may be why the only thing I remember from the entire session was “optimizing my daily
performance-intensity goals.” I think the perky trainer got paid gobs o’ cash to teach us that.

Want to know how you optimize your daily performance-intensity goals? Essentially, you take your Franklin Planner and make a detailed list of what you have to do today. You go into absolute ant-fucking detail about everything, even the softball stuff like
“drive to work” or “pee.” Then you cross off the stuff that you listed even though you already did it, and presto! You look like you’re a high performing machine.

The key is to never let anyone get close enough to the Planner to see that what looks like an important project is actually a notation reminding you to “inhale and exhale ryhthmically.”

Yes, my employer made me sit through an 8 hour session to learn to do that. Fortunately, I don’t have a Franklin Planner. That would be a waste of money, because if I did have a Franklin Planner, I would have set fire to it by now.