Read Getting Things Done by the prolific ??David Allen?? and, for all the productivity enhancements, you begin to think of your life as a series of queues. The pile of papers on your desk, the line of voicemails you’ve been receiving, the number of emails in your Inbox. Like the email from your dear pastor with even more praise about the church website. Or the one from your old friend Caryn, whose friendship you want so much to maintain, but just can’t seem to make the time. Or the neverending get rich quick schemes, which your spam filter astonishingly still thinks are legitimate. Each of these, says Allen, must be periodically reviewed, purged, and reshuffled into another series of queues: the garbage can, a filing cabinet, or a calendar.
This reminds me of “BullFighter”:http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp, a product designed by the folks at Deloitte & Touche to combat the rising tide of BS words in business documentation. They had a “screensaver”:http://web.archive.org/web/20040109230106/www.deloitte.com/dtt/section_node/0,2332,sid=27378,00.html, which acted as a running commentary on the latest consulting clichés. One of my favorite commentaries was on the word “bandwidth,” which is still often used to describe one’s limited amount of time in a given day, as in “I’d love to do that task for you, but I haven’t had the bandwidth lately, given my other projects.” The commentary was something to the effect of, “Is this what our lives have come to? We have become nothing more than a passive conduit for the transmission of data.”
Yes, sometimes, it is very much like that.
This isn’t a shot at you Ken, anymore than it is a shot at myself since I read all this stuff type of stuff as well.
But have you ever thought that the time spent trying to figure out how to best orginize information, life queues, relieve stress, etc, might be better spent just getting one of the queues to go away?
This occured to me the other day, while i was reading yet article on managing workload. I have no less than 5 major projects and 15 minor ones right now. Yet, instead of making some of the minor ones go away (each is prolly a day or 2 of work) or making a dent in a major one I spent almost a solid day regorginizing my desk, to-do lists, and reviewing some software packages in the hopes of squeezing a little more productivity out of my day.
If i had spent the day doing actual work I would have less of a workload now.
What I have works: It is orginized (to me), and I can get work done using it; I suspect that most people have a ‘system’ that actually works pretty darn well without someone else trying to improve upon it.
Stress is an artificial word, IMO, that can be dismissed. People have ‘stress’ because they allow themselves to have stress.
So, my goal from now on is to avoid articles that deal with managing my work/information/life and just get the work done so that I can have more of a life. If i find myself reading, or thinking about reading, such an article that is 5 to 10 minutes that I could be cleaning up some code, playing a video game, reading a book, eating a cookie. Stress? I’m going to do my best to just not worry about it anymore.