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Advice on how to break things down
douggiefox | Aug 9 2007
Hi I'm sure some of the ramble I'm about to post some of you will recognise the symptoms :-) I picked up the gtd book a couple of years ago and hey guess what? I never found the time to read it! I'm a self employed programmer and I'm well aware that being organised in both my work and home life is key to being less stressed and more organised. I'm taking a little time out at the moment to try and catch up on some reading and some places where my skills just aren't good enough.... and there's the catch - improving my skills is why I'm motivated by gtd. I'm also a bit of an obsessive book buyer. If I buy the book, I get the knowledge right? Well no, because I never get the time to read em!! So here's my problem and the thing I just have a blockage over. I want to use gtd to help me through my huge pile of technical books. How does everyone else deal with this? Do I pick a topic and then just flit from book to book? Do I read the books sequentially? How can I organise next actions? Am I taking too much on? I'm finding gtd is making me frantic...as I'm more scared of getting the system wrong and getting nowhere. Sorry for the ramble - hopefully someone out there will recognise the symptoms and give me a helping hand. Best DF 5 Comments
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 In some ways, GTD is...Submitted by juniorbird on August 11, 2007 - 8:02pm.
In some ways, GTD is not a good match for what you want to do. GTD is very goal- and action-oriented, and you don't seem to be really goal-oriented in your reading. But, then again, maybe you're not reading because you don't have a goal. Is it possible that you put off your reading because there's a voice in the back of your head saying "what's the point of all this?" That would be a typical cause of procrastination. So, perhaps your best bet is to create a project that somehow matches with your self-improvement goals. I mean, nobody really learns programming by reading a book in abstract; you need to actually write a program! So, go and do it. Pick some goal like "I'm going to rewrite my foo program, but I'm going to write it without buffer overflows... and to do that I need to read these books!" or "I'm going to rewrite the baz Web site in Django... and to do that I need to start by reading these other books!" If it's a project, then you can have goals, and you can be sure you've learned in the end. Alternatively, I find a good way to ensure that I read books that are for my general education, but not immediately applicable, is to put them by the toilet. » POSTED IN:
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