Dave Seah has had an epiphany:
The big insight is that I’ve not taken responsibility for my adult existence, and instead have been rather more indulgent of my childhood impulses that I’ve realized. And while I’m not a parent, I can perhaps repurpose the mentality to create my own “sense of mission” toward myself: create stability, security, and sanctuary. It’s also good practice for being a parent someday.
This fits with a lot of things I’ve been thinking about, lately. I think Dave may be discovering an unexpected result of his time tracking and task management. And it’s an effect that his Printable CEO series of self-reporting tools seem to augment. And, as is often the case, I have a note to myself on an index card about it.
(Scan and more blather after the cut.)
That is, when you start tracking your actions, you inevitably become more conscious of how you are living your finite and irreplaceable life.
It’s usually not comfortable information.
Like Dave says, when you’re living alone and working from home, you can stay up late and act irresponsibly, because your adult self isn’t watching. It’s all good, as long as you meet deadline, right? Who’s going to tell your inner adult supervision what’s going on, it’s too busy worrying about the work stuff to take control of the life stuff.
Good productivity tools can give your adult self regular report cards, and if you care about how your (mortal, fleeting) time is spent, reading those report cards can come as a real shock. It surely did to me.
It’s like simultaneously being the reprobate child and the outraged parent when, all of a sudden, a pile of bad grades, truancy notices, and tardy slips are found in the shoebox under the bed. You have to face up to what you’ve been up to, and you have to take responsibility for it.
That’s when you start to notice things.
There is a cost to slacking off for the afternoon and whacking the spacebar on MetaFilter like a demented pigeon in a Skinner box, instead of cleaning the bedroom or kitchen, or processing your inbox.
There is a cost to leaving the dishes in the sink. (Sometimes, a literal cost; ever order pizza because the pans to cook dinner were buried under a pile of dishes? Am I giving away something I shouldn’t, here?)
Many Getting Things Done folks find themselves feeling like they’re “growing up,” once they’ve been tracking their to-do lists and performing the weekly review for a while. You can’t help but see what it is you’ve been checking off, and what you haven’t been.
GTD gives you both a “front end” view of what you think is important (a whole project list full of the things in your life you have decided must be dealt with), and the back end (what have I actually accomplished this week)?
And tools like the Emergent Task Timer enhance that effect, on the back end. It gives a good focus on where your time has gone, where GTD gives you a focus on what you’ve accomplished. These are complementary benefits.
(Sometimes, it’s more like being punched in the gut, depending on how much I’ve actually gotten done.)
As an experiment, I’ve taken to dropping my completed Printable CEO sheets into a tickler file, for a week ahead, so that I can see how I did last week. Every Tuesday morning, I see the last couple of tuesdays, and I get to see how I spent my work time.
Man, does that bit of self-knowledge intrude on whether or not I decide to check my RSS feeds. (He wrote, guiltily glancing at the clock.) And that’s a good thing.
