This morning, I was talking with a smart angel investor about the difficulties of starting a company. In particular, the difficulty of prioritizing. It’s a bit like going to a restaurant: you can eat anything on the menu, but you can’t eat everything on the menu, at least without getting sick.

That’s led me to wonder about our collective obsession with efficiency, with productivity systems and organizational tips in general. Sure, they make us more effective, at least up to a point. But, eventually, no matter how smart our approach, we run into a hard limit – there’s just so much you can fit into a day.

Paring down to what fits is hard. It involves making choices, saying no. Which, perhaps, is why time management books climb the bestseller list. They seem like an escape from those tough decisions. If we could just be effective enough, we wouldn’t have to choose at all! We could somehow make it fit.

Of course, we can’t. We run up against those hard limits, time and again. Usually, we blame the time management approach, or we blame ourselves for not sticking to it rigidly enough. But, I suspect, the problem usually runs deeper. We have the whole menu on our daily to-do list, and we’re trying to eat through it all by marking individual bites as next actions, or sorting the plates into A’s, B’s and C’s.

08:00-14:00: Teaching classes at CrossFit NYC.

15:00-18:00: Presenting on a biohacking panel alongside the founder of Genspace.

20:00-0:00: Welcome party for Om at Matt’s place.

0:00-4:00 Late-night deal-structuring with Naval at the Experimental Cocktail Club.

Sunday

10:00-6:00 Up to Connecticut to scout Greenwich and Westport pop-up-shop locations for Dobbin.

7:30-10:00 Rehearsal with new jazz quintet.

I’ll rest when I’m dead, it seems.

For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my Beautiful Mind mode).

For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.

About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.

A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.

I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched Dobbin Clothing. (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.

Kermit was right.

The idea is simple: fashionable clothing that flatters real bodies.

They’re using high-end Italian fabric and manufacturing here in NYC, yet have kept prices low by cutting out the retail middleman, selling only online.

The clothing is also full of a slew of smart touches. A pair of their pants, say, is made from stretch canvas, has a hidden adjustable elastic waistband and is proportioned with a slightly higher rise and very carefully shaped hips and thighs, to make a classically tailored pair of trouser-cut pants that look great on a wide array of body types.

Check it out, tell a friend, and buy something! As they’re offering free shipping both ways, you’ve got nothing to lose.

I meant to blog about it then, saying that I was calling it early as the next big thing. But, it appears, I’m already too late; in under a week, the Pebble shot past its $100,000 fundraising goal, to a current $5,839,829. I guess I’m not the only person to have noticed.

Nonetheless, if you’re not one of the 40,000 people who hopped on to the project (essentially pre-ordering one), you should. By ingeniously using e-paper (the same stuff found in a Kindle screen) instead of an LCD, the Pebble has long enough battery life (over a week between charges) to make it practical as a watch. But, as it communicates with your iPhone or Android phone by Bluetooth, it can do things your current watch probably can’t. Like show the caller ID of incoming phone calls while the phone is still in your pocket, alert you when it’s about to rain, control your music, work as a golf rangefinder, etc.

Dick Tracy would be jealous. And so will a lot of other people. I’m apparently not quite as early on this one as I thought, but I still stand by my original sentiment: The Pebble, and devices like it, are about to be big.

The play itself is kind of a mess – little plot, pointless characters, ridiculous dialogue. But the music, like any Rogers and Hammerstein music, is excellent, in a wind comes sweeping down the plain kind of a way.

The highlight – to me, at least – was that the orchestra was staged up on risers behind the actors, in full view. Mainly, I enjoyed the show as a chance to listen to and watch a truly excellent group of musicians at work. And, in particular, I enjoyed listening to and watching Tony Kadleck, the lead trumpet in the orchestra, of whom I’ve been a long-standing fan. I mean, check out this discography! I gushed about his playing during intermission, and then again after the show, until Jess rolled her eyes and started ignoring me.

So, cut to now, a few weeks later, and I somehow get tapped to play trumpet myself in a fundraiser for music education in NYC schools. The organizer of the event sends along a packet of music that we’ll be playing, as well as a roster of the musicians they’ve roped in. I recognize a bunch of the names, as it seems all the other players are professionals. Still, clearly due to poor judgement on the organizers’ parts, I’m playing second trumpet, ahead of two Broadway players.

Playing first: Tony Kadleck.

Time to practice.

Consider “OccuPeep D.C.”:

Or “Just Peep’ed”:

Delicious.

Twenty-four hours before we were set to move to the aforementioned new apartment, we discovered that, despite our signed lease, the landlord had given the apartment to someone else.

So we’ve spent the last month living surrounded by boxes, madly scrambling to find a replacement apartment.

On top of that, I’ve been neck-deep in closing the last of Cyan (so that all the investors are made whole before we close down shop completely), getting Outlier up and running (and making its first portfolio company investment), helping Jess launch a company herself, and managing CrossFit NYC’s build out of and move to its new, much larger location.

Life is never dull.