Node Glue

Recently, I’ve been reminded of something David Allen says in Getting Things Done. He is addressing the following question: “so now that I’ve got all my stuff in a trusted system, how do I decide what to do at any given moment?” Allen’s answer: “trust your intuition.”

Sounds so simple, right? But I think I spend too much of my time not trusting my intuition. As a result, I sometimes find myself trying to compensate for that lack of trust by refining the system to make it more trustworthy. The system sets up some rules for me, which helps. These guardrails often keep me out of the ditches. But the rules can also bind me and leave me feeling guilty if I don’t follow them. That guilt itself hinders productivity.

I’ve marveled before at those non-GTD people who just do what seems best at any given moment. Frankly, I’m suspicious that such a method is too susceptible to the tyranny of the urgent, and I think it truly is. But on the other hand, they enjoy a certain kind of freedom in “going with the gut.” So, again, there is the possibility of freedom (going with the gut), and the possibility of bondage (enslaved to the tyranny of the urgent).

So here’s my musing for the day. Perhaps an appropriate tension between these two is: use the trusted system to educate the intuition, making the intuition more trustworthy. Then work from intuition.

(more…)

Well, the kids’ gigantic playground structure arrived a couple of days ago from Costco. Here’s a picture of the “project scope”.

This thing arrived in seven heavy boxes of boards and bolts. And I’m guessing it will take about forty hours to assemble.

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you’ll know that the real challenge in front of me here isn’t the structure. It’s calling it good at each progessive stage of incompleteness until it’s done.

So, here’s the status report, in a picture.

Looks like a substantial piece, eh? Actually, my part was simply attaching the four wooden steps for the ladder on the left, the rest was preassembled About ninety minutes of work, with my five and three year old boys “helping” with the power drill.

So where’s the good here?

I got started on the project. Good.

We’re four steps closer to a playground. Good.

I did it with my boys. Good.

As I’ve wrestled with Perfectionism, and reflected upon how best practices like GTD have the potential of either cursing or blessing me, I’ve contemplated the words “Good Enough.” Can I just do something Good Enough without demanding Perfection?

And then it occurred to me that there’s something inherently wrong with mitigating Perfection with Good Enough. The trouble is that the two ideas are cut from the same cloth. So it does me little good to cover one with the other.

Good Enough is a euphemism for “it could be better,” or “it isn’t all that bad,” or “it could be worse,” or “it’s the best that could be done under the circumstances.” In all cases, the focus is not on the Good but on what’s Enough. And it leaves Good lacking, and asking, “what is Enough?”

I’ve realized lately that I have a hard time calling something good. “Good” to me means “three out of five stars,” with a particularly painful awareness of the two empty ones. (What is Enough?)
And then I remembered this:

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God divided the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:3-4).

When God creates, he calls things good that are not even yet complete. He was already using that word to describe His work after the first day of Creation, even before it was ready to host mankind. I rarely feel free to use that word, even after pouring myself out obsessively in pursuit of perfection.

God rested after six days of doing good. I never rest no matter what I do.

At best, I may say, “that’s good…BUT!” (But what?)
When God says, “it’s good,” He means “this is beneficial–this is delightful to me.” There’s no, “delightful…BUT”. It’s just good.

I tend to fixate on the two empty stars, and not only call the emptiness bad, but shameful. As if incompleteness were shameful. And that therefore something that is incomplete cannot, by definition, be good. Add to that the observation that nothing is ever complete, and you’ve completed a vicious cycle of mental bondage that shames, and robs me of the simple satisfaction of a Good Thing.

Nick Duffill weighs in on my GTD In the Grip post with some insightful comments that resonate very deeply with me. In particular, I relate to the ambivalence articulated by the statement statement below about how we create comfortable frameworks that we love to hate and cannot tear ourselves away from. ouch. Thanks, Nick.

For most people, habits that constrain performance are a comfortable framework that we love to hate and cannot tear ourselves away from. By adopting habits that have a predictable outcome, we have exercised a choice, and we prefer predictability over uncertainty. Even if we continually say we want to change and will change, only one or two members of the committee in our heads is actually convinced, and the silent majority still exercise their veto. This is perhaps the reason that changes in habit and approach arise from life-changing traumas and events - it takes something of that magnitude to actually enforce a change.

Since adopting GTD, I have learned to live with a to-do list that could keep me occupied for the next two to five years. I luxuriate in thinking that this is a bad thing and that I am failing to make significant progress each week, but in reality it’s not like that. By taking action, I am taking decisions - deciding to do one task in a hundred and leave the other 99 unattended. Instead of beating myself up for failing to also complete the other 99 actions, I can tell myself that I chose not to do them. If they were truly important, I would have done them. Actions speak louder than words.

I’m about to commit GTD heresy. But I have to be honest–I’m feeling a little more like “Mind Under Water” than “Mind Like Water” lately.

I’ve been using GTD for probably three years now, and I think the first big “Aha!” for me was the idea of Collection–getting all my stuff into one pile. Never leaving “open loops” to bounce around in my mind, but getting them all written down where I could see them and organize them. And I still believe in the merit of that–in theory.

But my current reality is that I have so much stuff that I collect all the time, that it is overwhelming to wade through it all and make “front end decisions” about what to do about it. Just looking at the massive piles of stuff makes me dizzy.

Meanwhile, I watch non-GTD-ers apparently going wherever the wind blows them. They work from a mental to-do list. Whatever is on their minds is what they do. Once they do it, it’s off their mind. (Or so I imagine). Basically, they are using their intuition to guide what they spend their time on–to define their work, in a sense, just in time to do it. So there’s a filtering process. If they aren’t thinking about it, it isn’t getting done. And that, I claim, is a mixed blessing.

(more…)

I made this confession at the Seattle GTD Meetup this week: GTD doesn’t make me happy.

From time to time GTD has definitely given me the gift of “mind like water”, at least in the sense of relieving “task anxiety”. But I can’t recall a time that it’s ever made me happy, that is, Happy (capital H).

(more…)

Right now, I am procrastinating by blogging about an article that I just read about procrastination. Paul Graham read my mail on this one. Thanks to David Allen for the link.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.

That’s the “absent-minded professor,” who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he’s going while he’s thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it’s hard at work in another.

Errands kill me, and I often feel guilt for not doing them (ironically, I did 6 errands this morning on my day off–extremely rare behavior).

Inspiration can’t be scheduled. If I have to “sneak away” from my normal work to do something inspired, I’ll do it! I admit it! I prefer being driven by inspiration than by duty. There. I said it.

Read the article.