Douglas Johnson has a good post up, in which he discusses the virtues of simplicity in your organizational habits, as opposed to… well, just about everything many of us do.
[A friend]’s GTD-based system involved Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, a wiki, a web-based to-do application, a Palm synced with both Outlook and Palm Desktop, some Perl scripts to import and export CSV and tab-delimited data files to and from various applications, a DIY Planner Day-Timer and a rather thick set of Hipster PDA cards using most of my templates. I won‚Äôt get into the details: suffice it to say that the system was detailed in 17 steps, was about three pages long, required carrying a large bag filled with his tools, and done daily. I must say, as I read his email, I could certainly admire his technical abilities and ‚Äìin certain cases‚Äì his ingenuity. His Perl scripts used a number of CPAN libraries to retrieve and post information from his private wiki and prep it for his Palm, and his next stages were to involve Plucker in the mix using some Python scripts and then use pilot-link libraries to import to-do‚Äôs and memos into his Palm. Ringo is a part-time CGI programmer, and quite the smart cookie.
Too smart, I think. It seems like all the really smart people (and notably the ones with technical abilities) overcomplicate matters, and make the productivity process far too difficult and inefficient.
I’ve noticed some people are sharing their planning mantras. Here’s mine: simplify.
Well, it does seem that a characteristic trait of people who are creating systems for themselves to live in, is that we all have difficulty concentrating on simple things. A large part of what GTD does for me is to remind me that once the really complicated and interesting part of a job is done, it isn’t complete until I’ve done the rest of it.
The other, often unremarked part is to add a bit of complexity to something that I would otherwise have difficulty concentrating on.
It’s possible that many people create these huge, overcomplicated systems as a way of keeping our distractable, hyperactive brains mesmerized by enough shiny things that want to play with the big, messy, sprockety machine that we happily run our lives with. It’s like playing a game.
This strikes most people as somewhat eccentric, not to say pathological, but it works well… up to the point where you cross an invisible threshold, and begin to spend all your time playing with your system instead of accomplishing any work.
Any number of people have commented on this tendancy already, so I won’t belabor it, except to note that it can be terribly difficult to notice when this happens, because fiddling with your system feels very much like working. If you are anything like me, your system is entirely offline and involves standing up and moving envelopes, folders, and little bits of paper around, and that feels, to the body, a lot more like work than sitting at the computer and twiddling a mouse does.
So, I suppose that I agree with Douglas, with a caveat. And my mantra would be, “Simplify, but not too much.” Or else I’ll likely lose interest.
