Lunamania

Who knew people are so hard core about this book and system? It's not just a "sub-culture" or cult, but a whole personal productivity industry build around implementing GTD. The Already Organized Monkey listened to me rave about this Way of Life that promised transcendental levels of productivity and an ever tranquil state of mind and responded, "So you're just keeping different lists?" (^_^).....

Me: No! Wait, yes! but they are context specific! And tied to projects! Oh and processing, collecting and filing! I need a label maker!

Monkey's ears perked up with "filing": Great! So all those piles in the study will be filed!

At which point I realized, I was talking to an individual who without resorting to a book and with zero dollars shelled to a multimillion dollar industry, has already created files and systems to track everything from car maintenance to new year cards from all friends and family dating 25 years back. I am lame.

Back to the Getting Things Done, I told someone that this book is like Office Max for the head--all those files, label makers, clean desks, paper shredders, and SYSTEMS. They hold out a dream of being organized, efficient and well...just getting things done. Yes! I, too, can be one of those people who wake up, work out while reading the paper, come home to cook a hot breakfast, save the whales, file briefs on behalf of "enemy combatants" wrongly detained at Guantanamo, plan what to make for dinner, feed the cats, walk the dog--all before 7AM!! ok, honestly, I think those kind of people are not right in the head and to be fair, the book promises nothing along the lines of this kind of ridiculous task oriented Hyper Type A "productivity." The "gimmick" here though is David Allen's tapping into the New Age/Zen-ster in each of us. His Jedi Mind tricks are drawn from his martial arts background (for real, he's a black belt in karate) and the appeal of a "mind like water" -- a calm state of being present in the moment and reacting just the appropriate amount to any stimulus. Now, wouldn't that be nice?

Several obsessive weeks later, I conclude this book is more like IKEA. I'm drawn by the hope of a mind evocative of clean and efficient Scandanavian designs, but dude, you have to build it yourself--from scratch, with only a label maker, and some file folders. It looked like this--literally and figuratively.

In an effort to most efficiently implement GTD, I've engaged in spectacularly "productive" hours @computer, home (any GTD geeks will get this) on "actions" that include:
--reading about hacking my Moleskine notebook
--find MS Word GTD templates
--searching forums for Agendus and GTD systems

and not enough time actually Getting Shit Done. Oddly though, having some system in place has made filing kind of fun. I also do have the contours of the various projects in my life outlined right now.

Tony has been a great coach in this process and I plan to pick his brain some more about this whole thing. Contrary to his inner gear geek, his advice was to focus less on the paper v. PDA, what sort of label maker etc and you know--just get it done. I see...

I'm not quite an acolyte at the Temple of David Allen yet, but maybe I'll join those geeky ranks soon. Gentle Reader Concerned for Mental Health of Lunamania asks, "Why would you want that?"
Well, GRCMHL, I think I've been overwhelmed for a while with those proverbial Trees and have no idea that a Forest even exists -- 10 points from Gryffindor for use of lazy allegories! -- but I remember those "oh right" moments when things come into focus. Those epiphanies come after I've really thrown myself into creating some system and putting together the details. They involve some collecting of all relevant knowledge and synthesizing that information by putting it on paper in whatever format makes sense to me.

I realize this is a geek comparison, but it's similar to outlining in the first year of law school. I loved outlining. And while I may not be able to share web templates for photo blogs or coach someone through the merits of ubuntu, in my own homage to geeks everywhere, I looked to share those outlines with anyone who wanted them. Reading and synthesizing through writing outlines was a helpful system/structure for processing all kinds of random factoids and it was only after that process that I came to see the big themes. Of course, this meant that until a week before the exams, I honestly had no idea what a tort, contract, or civil procedure really was. Now that I think about it, I still don't know.

Somehow this entry has morphed from Getting Things Done to law school reminiscing. Well, actually perhaps my long awaited epiphany is to learn that GTD is a process of outlining my life...oh, how sad.