The Ricochet Podcast - Rob Long's Martini Shot: Hello? (Cough, cough)

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Hello, Ricochet Podcast listeners This is a special preview of Rob Long’s weekly commentary podcast Martini Shot. To subscribe to the show, search for “Rob Long Martini Shot” on your favorite podcast platform or go to MartiniShotPodcast.com and click on the subscribe links. In this episode, Rob is re-reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done,” but it’s not working out so well. Source

Hi there, this is Rob Long, and as longtime listeners know, I have created a small industry in interrupting James Lilacs as he attempts to segue gracefully to a commercial message. I don't know why exactly I do that. Commercial messages are what keep the whole Ricochet enterprise afloat, actually. Maybe I just like interrupting things. I don't know. This is a question for a psychiatrist, clearly. But here I am interrupting the orderly appearance of flagship podcasts into your inbox to tell you about my short, four-minute weekly commentary called

Martini Shot. When you're filming a movie or a TV show, when it's the last shot of the day, the first assistant director will call out, this is the martini shot, meaning after this shot is done, we're calling it a day, and after this shot, you get your martini. So I call these stories martini shots because they're exactly the kinds of stories we tell and lessons we learn after we've wrapped for the day, stories about Hollywood and the media, about living and working in the entertainment business, about living and working in general. And like a good martini, they're short enough to enjoy more than one. I did them on public radio for 16 years, and now I'm doing them on my own. 16 years on public radio, I know you'll agree, is long enough.

So in a way, this is a commercial message I'm trying to get you to listen to and subscribe to my short four-minute podcast. So I have to admit, if life were fair, James Lilacs would have been here to interrupt my doing just that. But thanks for listening, and thanks especially for listening to the Ricochet Network of Podcasts, and I hope you enjoy Martini Shot. Martini Shot is brought to you by Cushy Dreams, the smokable CBD. Stay tuned for a special offer. This is Rob Long with Martini Shot. For the past week, I've been rereading an excellent book called

Getting Things Done by a very interesting guy named David Allen. The book's title sort of gives it all away. It's a book about, well, it's about getting things done. And it's pretty thorough. And it's a compelling system for organizing your life and work for maximum productivity. Now, there's a fair amount of work on my plate for the next three weeks. So the fact that I spent the past week rereading Getting Things Done, a book that I first picked up nearly 12 years ago, rather than say, getting anything done has a certain cheap irony to it. I mean, like all really, really lazy people, everything I do during the day, that isn't what I'm supposed to be doing during the day, like staring at the ceiling or checking in with Twitter or clicking around TikTok, updating my list of enemies. All of those things pack a specific

sting. Why are you doing this? I will ask myself. Put down the crossword puzzle, I will say to myself. You know, for a long time, I tried the Buddhist approach to getting things done, which, yeah, I mean, I get it. Buddhism isn't the best productivity hack, but I try to be what they call present to the process. Ah, yes, I'd say to myself, I'm noticing that I'm avoiding getting writing done. How interesting. No judgment, just noticing. I wouldn't get anything done, of course, but I'd be relaxed about it, which is not a sustainable solution, I know. So I once went to a psychiatrist to get some advice for dealing with my chronic procrastination, and he asked me, do you have a hard time starting things? Yes, I said, and doing them once I've started and continuing to do them and finishing them, I added cheerfully,

as if what I was trying to do was impress him with my inability to get anything going, as if he was going to hand out awards later for, I don't know, best putting things off until it's almost a contractual violation. Instead, he looked at me sadly and said, well, maybe you're just not meant to be someone with deadlines, which for a writer is sort of an existential issue, and which I later learned was probably some kind of breach of professional ethics on his part. But it did the trick in that I never went back, and I've spent the ensuing years picking up this book or that about time management or workflow or self-help and, of course, getting things done. Now, a month or so ago, I had

a script due. It was, in many ways, the perfect test case for a truly dysfunctional procrastinator. The project had been long simmersimmering. There was plenty of time for outlines and revisions. The deadline agreed to was ample and months away. In other words, a normal person working slowly and deliberately in a stress-free and measured way could easily meet each key deadline without any trouble at all. There was no reasonable way, in other words, to explain why I had dithered and frittered away so much time, except to admit that I am a dysfunctional person who cannot manage himself, and it is incredible that I have managed to come this far. And then the worst possible thing happened. I got an excuse.

COVID has, of course, it goes without saying, been a terrible tragedy for the world. People have lost loved ones, not to mention jobs and savings and businesses. So stipulated, COVID is an unspeakable global disaster. However, because it's disrupted the normal pattern of television production, along with the usual crush of development and casting a series, the one group that has materially benefited from the worldwide pandemic has been my tribe, the procrastinators. So in December, when I should have been finishing up the script for my deadline in January, I instead decided to put it off until after the new year, after which I knew I'd have plenty of time to fix and polish the draft and get it in right when it was wanted.

Now, this is a pattern I've repeated for decades. I look at the job ahead of me, I look at the calendar, and then in a series of complicated and delusional logic steps, I prove to myself that I still have a lot of time left. There's no need to panic. Take the week off. You'll power through it next week or next month or later when there's plenty of time. And this time, I did all of that, plus I got COVID. The mildest case, a week or so at best, some mild fever, a little fatigue, but I'm a lucky person and I'm grateful to God that it was just a touch. However, the thing is, when you get COVID, you're automatically relieved of any accountability for a while. Your past agreements and covenants are null and void.

You can be as late as you like with material. And here's what's amazing. No one can say anything about it because you have COVID. And COVID is serious, even if yours isn't. And no one wants to be the guy who calls you up and says, hey, come on, you're not that sick. Get back to work. Instead, they have to call you up and say Oh my lord, please take care of yourself Really, your health is the most important thing Take whatever time you need And when they call a few weeks later Just to check in, just making sure you're feeling okay

You can answer the phone like this Hello? Hello? And that buys you another two weeks. Of course, eventually you have to recover. The World Health Organization puts it at 10 to 12 days. But if you're smart, you can get two solid weeks of deep, rich procrastination in without penalty or sanction. But, you know, eventually you do have to actually get something done, which is why for the past week I've been rereading Getting Things Done without getting anything done. But tomorrow, day after the latest, I'm going to power through. Although

now that I look at the calendar, I see that there's plenty of time left. And that's it for this week. Next week, the deal gets extended. For Martini Shot, this is Rob Long. We thank Cushy Dreams for sponsoring Martini Shot. The world today is nuts, and just when it seems like things are getting better, we're hit with even more reasons to be anxious and uncomfortable, and that is where our friends at Cushy Dreams can help. Cushy Dreams specializes in high-quality, smokable CBD, and CBD has been shown to help with anxiety, depression, inflammation, even pain relief and more. And smoking CBD gets it into your system right away, so you don't have to wait long for the effects. Cushy Dreams' extraordinary

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