I like David Seah’s idea of using a pickle jar to tame distractions.
Category: gtd
LifeClever compiled 17 interviews with David Allen.
A nice roundup of 77 tips to amp your learning. Lots of good links there.
Wayne Gerdes can get 59 miles per gallon of gas out of a 2005 Honda Accord… and he’s recorded 181mpg in a Honda Insight.
Merlin Mann is starting a little video show. Widescreen, to boot. I hope they’re all that way—GTD is all about peripheral vision.
Fans of the Hipster PDA will hail the introduction of the Hipster Shuffle. I love the Apple Dancing. [via 43 Folders]
Rebecca Blood points to a massive New Year’s resolution-keeping experiment and a news article about the whole thing. The idea is that you sign up, tell them the resolution, then the psychologists/automated mailing system will pester you via e-mail to see how you’re coming along. All the data-gathering will help scholars figure out how humanity can follow through better in the future. I’d join, but I haven’t yet resolved anything.
I’m always looking for a new perspective on GTD. I thought David Seah’s review of Getting Things Done was quite good.
New York Times article on the trend of embracing entropy:
Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat Äî well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate).
Yes, I have to agree about Real Simple having no personality, along with most home-dec magazine in general. Anyway, I think the thing to keep in mind here is that being neat is just a means to an end; order is a preference. Let’s not be too dogmatic about either choice. And the neatness they’re talking about is really just appearance. Having things straightened up doesn’t necessarily mean I know where anything is. I think part of the trouble that people have in being organized is that it can be hard to be systematic about it. That is, it’s hard to develop a reliable, trusted system for all your crap and then stay diligent in sticking with it. If you don’t have a good infrastructure, then you will tend not to use it.
Take a Nap! Change Your Life (review: 3.5/5)
My grandfather can fall asleep in about 12 seconds. It’s amazing to watch, and he just might be on to something big. Take a Nap! purports to be “The scientific plan to make you smarter, healthier, more productive”.1 Sara Mednick starts off with some nap advocacy, the usual bit about how we run ourselves into the ground with self-destructive habits, etc. The best part falls in the next section dedicated to the science of sleep, which I think is pretty fascinating.
I first started getting interested in sleep as means-to-dubious-ends when I stumbled on Steve Pavlina’s journey into polyphasic sleep and further reading into the Uberman sleep schedule. I was hoping for a ringing endorsement of these fringe adventures, but sadly, Mednick is not a big fan.
Mednick walks us through the stages of sleep, starting from mild alpha waves, to that embarrassing twitching when you first go under, to transitional stage 1 sleep, the recurring soup of light stage 2 sleep, then to the deep slow wave sleep of stages 3 and 4, and onward to that REM where so much magic happens. The cool thing is that sleep research indicates that each of these stages has unique benefits to your health. And when you know that, you can learn to calibrate your sleep to get what you want. And we all love to get what we want.
If you take a look at the cover of the book, you’ll see a cool little nap planning wheel. It’s actually a plastic disc that you can spin around according to when you woke up that day, and that will let you customize your napping for the results you have in mind. There’s even a recipe for the “perfect nap”. Of course, self-improvement takes some work. Mednick has a program to walk you through some self-assessment you can do over a couple weeks, which of course I didn’t do. But I learned a lot from reading through it.
All in all, it was actually was a pretty good book. I nap on the couch2 at work every day, but never really put much systematic thought into it. At the least, this book has been a good lesson in self-awareness. I love the idea that we can learn about these physiological mysteries and apply our knowledge to everyday demands. Every now and then, science really comes through for us.
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1. Those with good taste in music will be reminded of Radiohead’s tune, “Fitter, Happier” (lyrics).
2. We used to have this incredible cot that would instantly put me to sleep. Alas, the cot was taken away in order to keep things from looking too tacky. We have to keep up appearances.
A catalog of Batman’s gadgets. I really need to get a utility belt.
And now the final chapter of the Productive Talks between Merlin Mann and David Allen. This one was focused on what was missing from the original publication of Getting Things Done, and where the system might head in the future.
I spent the morning listening to all the Productive Talks podcasts at 43 Folders, a series of dialogues between productivity gurus Merlin Mann and David Allen. They are excellent conversations on GTD philosophy and action, without much packaging fluff.
David has some hilarious ranting in the fifth episode about e-mail. Really, why are we still whining about e-mail? Another good moment came in a brief detour about kids being raised in a GTD household: “That’s great, Grandma, but what’s the next action here?” I love it. And then there’s this important philosophical bit to keep in mind: “Quite frankly, you shouldn’t be thinking about GTD.”
I’ve taken first steps to collect and process, and I can see how easy it is to get distracted by “perfecting your system,” when really it’s just another project to be evaluated and processed. Lastly, I love how fast they talk. It’s such a nice change from some other o-ver a-nun-ci-at-ed podcasts I’ve heard. Go listen, but you might want to read the book first.
Mark Larson 