Metapost

One of the prefixes I've been overusing recently is "Meta." Frankly, I've started to have it up to here *uses hand to signal height to which it has been had* with meta-ness. It all started innocently enough. A list displaying "9 ways to get a good night sleep," I'm there. You put together a site showing your favorite 9 webapps? I'll del.icio.us it. But when I see lists like "The 102 best productivity blog posts," I'm done. A good number of those 102 are bound to be lists of 10 things I can do to boost my productivity. I know there are a lot of productive people in the world. I'm sure many of them have good advice about how to replicate their work efficiency. However, I could scour all 102 blog posts and I wouldn't find a single person listing "Read 1,020 tips for a more productive life" as a way to improve your overall productivity. If your idea of being productive is spending hours on end reading about how to be productive from people who spend hours on end writing about how to be productive, your life is way too meta.