Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
really capturing everything, including the unconventional
Helen | Oct 22 2007
I had an 'aha' moment while listening to the podcasts about 'leaks in the system' today. I'd thought, until now, of GTD in terms of organizing my online work - the emails and jobs I need to do for my website - and then realized that I could incorporate my writing work and personal administration things - home finance and suchlike. After looking at a mom's organizer with a 'what's for dinner' section on it, I realized that I could include menu planning - it's part of my job, after all! Some people might find it stupid (too 'granular?) to plan something as mundane as dinner, but when you hate cooking and it's your job to feed the family.... Anyway, when Merlin and David Allen were talking about the 'higher levels' I realized that this system really can encompass EVERYTHING. Mad ideas for inventions I'll never do, crazy theories about 'stuff'...all those little notes and ideas about art theory, story ideas..... the dozen notebooks I have lying about with half-finished things - THEY have to be part of the capture system too. I hadn't realized how much mental noise all those notes and papers were creating. As a student, the Visual Diary was effectively a capture system - everything went in there. There are some pros to that: you have a sequential record of the generation of ideas, and they are all in one place. But then you can't take things out and put them together with related larger pieces... they are locked in place... this is something I'll have to think about, how the visual ideas fit into the capture system. I wonder if many other 43folders readers fit 'unconventional' things into their GTD system? Helen 3 Comments
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 Do Everything. Do Nothing.Submitted by dr.marty on October 22, 2007 - 8:12am.
Everything is an awful lot, and I mean awful in this literal sense here, but when inspired by David Allen, we all want to do everything, and we all have to learn how awful that lot can be. My experience with my clients, is that there is more and more time and energy sunk into wrestling with everything, and there is less and less time and energy sunk into doing some thing, whatever that might be. Some burn out so bad, they go back to being a disorganized mess, and if rendered to depression, do nothing. Which perhaps is worse, but there is salve in that form of grief too, something to be learned. To get up and start from such a bad place, it's usually about doing one thing, and then perhaps a second, maybe after some essential rest. Finally, action flows more regularly. I will argue that GTD forces people to confront their own capacity for self-regulation, for choosing what matters and what doesn't, what is a true commitment of energy and what is just a hypothetical, a fleeting want. GTD in this regard is much more about what we don't do than what we do do, and we can be pretty simple, and should be simple about what we don't do. » POSTED IN:
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