Getting things posted

As I mentioned in a comment earlier, it’s proven too difficult for me to keep up the essay-style posts I started out with. It was a fun experiment, and I’ll definitely write a few more that way, but actually it looks pompous, and it just slows me down. That is, I now have six or eight draft posts that I’ll never get to post if I wait until I find time to expand them to that format.

On a side note, yesterday ProBlogger put up a guest post I wrote on “OpenID for bloggers”. Of course, I don’t have pro-blogging aspirations, but I want to thank Darren Rowse for an opportunity to try out my writing on a larger audience.

Here’s one draft that would have never made it into a post if I stuck to pompous writing:

Nick Cernis (whose site design is awesome by the way) wrote an interesting piece on the productivity craze. While I think he has a point, I’m not sure I agree with the analysis given. I’m afraid I should admit to possessing the “self-help” book Getting Things Done (Nick calls its author the “archbishop” of the productivity religion), too, which all of this goes back to. So I took it off the book shelf to see if I could find a basis for Nick’s criticism there. Nick writes

Productivity tips and habits are a manual — they’re an attempt to answer the question, “how should I lead my life?” That ‘answer’ is now spiralling out of control into a complex algorithm of habits, software, tips, tricks and a long list of reading material.

I couldn’t find a complex algorithm. The whole organisation scheme fits in a single-page diagram with only three or perhaps four branches. As David Allen writes, all you ever need are lists and folders. That is, the original text is simple. I do believe however that Nick’s criticism applies to all the Getting Things Done spin-offs, that just go around in circles repeating what used to be a simple message, until all clarity was beaten out of it.

Another point to note: the way I read it, Getting Things Done is not about being more productive (as in taking up even more responsibilities) - it doesn’t mention anything like that anywhere on the cover. Instead, it is about stress-free productivity. The one take-home message is that you should relieve yourself of the anxious feeling that you may have forgotten about some to-do: write it down somewhere where you’ll find it again.

Whether you’re going to call that a todoodlist or anything else, in the end it’s the same simple idea.