Getting a model together
The New York Times recently published an article by Penelope Green entitled ‘Saying Yes to Mess’. Its main point was that being organised is not necessarily a good thing, and that we should learn to embrace the clutter of our daily lives.
Green quoted a number of people in the article. Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist from New Hampshire, said this:
Total organization [sic] is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life.
Last year, Ajilon Professional Staffing (in New Jersey) published a study which, to quote Green’s article,
... linked messy desks to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000, [and answered] Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”
The article goes on to talk about a handful of people who live with mess — one has a self-described ‘violently messy basement’ — and makes it sound as if people can only exist in one of two states: rigidly organised, and chaotically disorganised.
Irwin Kula, a rabbi from Manhattan, who is also a proponent of clutter, gets it right, I think, and provides a nice starting-off point for this whole website. He said:
Real life is very messy, but we need to have models about how that messiness works.
We need to have models
No-one who thinks seriously about personal productivity is advocating a rigidly-constructed, inflexible approach to getting organised. (Well, no-one that I’d take seriously, anyhow.)
Instead, what we’re after is a way to take care of things that have to be done, to leave more time for enjoying the random things that life brings along with it.
For me, the single most convincing element of David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ system is the way he focuses on offloading the effort of keeping track of things from the brain and into a reliable system. Instead of keeping track of a thousand little things in your mind, ‘capture’ them (his phrase) into a system that you trust, and free up your brain to deal with other, more enjoyable things.
There’ll be plenty of time to talk about Getting Things Done (GTD) on this site in the future, but this is an important concept to grasp. When we talk about ‘getting organised’, we’re not talking about ‘removing all the joy and spontaneity from life’, although it’s easy for people to stereotype in that way.
Instead, we’re talking about ways to make the rest of our lives more fun by dealing with the necessities as efficiently as possible.
What the site’s all about
I’m planning to write here about anything to do with organisation — personal, organisational, for work, or for not-work. As I’m also a big sucker for stationery and gadgetry, expect to see some reviews here, too.
In the meantime, welcome.
Come and say hello...
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Older: The system - getting set for 2007
Newer: Revisiting contexts
Hi,
Just wanted to say congrats to what seems to be an excellent addition to the GTD blogs community! Looking forward to read what is to come.
— Daniel · Jan 2, 04:01 · #