“You’ll be surprised how much you will do in a day if you sit and do it.”

There is a documentary that I love love love called Home Movie. It follows five super weird homes and the (super weird) people that live in them. They are all interesting, but I especially enjoyed Bill Tregle, this southern “alligator rancher” living on a houseboat in Louisiana.

Some scenes make him seem like a kinda modern folksy cajun philosopher with quotes like:

I’m figuring on living to be about 150. When I was a young kid I can remember seem like people only lived to be about 60 or 70. 80 was old. Today you got people living over 100. So by the time I get close to 100 people will be living to 150 I figure.

and

Houseboat no deck like pancakes no syrup.

Another of my favorites from the film is the title of this post, from Bill’s dad:

You’ll be surprised how much you will do in a day if you sit and do it.

It’s a little hard to find copies of this movie (or to stream it), so I’ve attempted to rip a little chunk of it myself. This is the bit that has that quote:

It stuck with me because of how commonly I find people ask about productivity advice. “How do they do it all?” people unceasingly want to know. The answer is never satisfying. Nobody actually has any magic tricks. Nobody slows down time. They do work and work gets done, whether it’s marinating alligator heads or building websites. You’ll be surprised how much you will do in a day if you sit and do it.