Getting Things Done

Back in college, one of my roommates fancied himself a poet. He had a blue, spiral-bound notebook that contained his poems, and this (along with his electric guitar) was strictly off limits to me. I never broke that trust, though I doubt he believed me. I actually just didn’t have much interest. He also had a really fancy word processor. For the time, anyway; this was c1990, after all. He allowed me its use, though, being an engineering student, I think I only ever did one paper with it. He had written some poetry on that gizmo as well, and told me not to look at it there either. However, when I did that one paper, I cruised the file system, looking for how to save my file, and saw that he had left something there, very prominently. Too prominently. I knew immediately that he had left it for me to find, knowing that I would, someday, run across it. So I read it.

It was a poem about time. I think the last line went something like “always an enemy of those who waste it.” Good line. Good words. Good thought. See, I was his inspiration. I’ll readily admit that I was a horrible procrastinator. That doesn’t take any particularly-insightful introspection. What was funny was that I guess he thought that his deep psychoanalysis (after all, he was a psychology major!) would open my eyes to the truth of the ages, and that I would be “cured” by reading this poem. That I would sit up, take notice, and stop staying up till 4 am playing Nintendo in another friend’s room.

As I’m sure he has realized by now, such things don’t work in real life. I think we all harbor the illusion that a witty saying can change the course of someone’s life when we’re college-aged. Later, our friendship started to fall apart. During one heated argument, he said, “I can’t tell you how much I want to tell you that you procrastinate!… Well, there, I guess I said it.” Far from being the revelation he thought it would be, I said, “Yeah…” So what? I knew that better than anyone else. And I knew what it did to me. But I was willing to trade that time off for the quick pleasures I was getting for it.

Here’s the point. Does it bother me now? Actually, no. I regret a lot of things from my “previous life,” but blowing off schoolwork isn’t one of those things. (Someday, maybe I’ll make a list.) There’s no disputing that the decisions I was making day-by-day back then have made a few decisions — big ones at that — for me since. For instance, my poor grades in college kept me from getting sponsored by my company to get a Masters degree at MIT. I easily had the test scores to get in, but there was no way that ArvinMeritor could consciously promote me as one of their best and brightest with a C+ average. (I asked if it made a difference if three and half of my four years there were spent drunk, but the answer was, of course, a bemused no.)

I’ve matured somewhat since those days. I don’t procrastinate nearly as badly as I used to. I’d say that about half the time I think “I should do this,” I just go ahead and do it. The other half of the time, it gets shelved for other things. Yes, including recreation time, though much of the time, it’s other stuff that I could be doing. Easier stuff. Less important stuff. The inspiration of this writing is that I’ve just read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s been a real eye-opener.

Basically, it’s about time management. One of the big steps in working through the process is collecting everything you need, want, or have to do in a big pile. Everything. For me, my stack of ideas and todos and projects and whatnot was somewhere around 75 “things.” All of these will then generate actual tasks and lists and project plans. It can be quite an undertaking, on average, but I would say that I was more organized than the average person, and it wasn’t all that bad for me. In my favor, much of my “stuff” is long-term and project-based. Or purely ideal. Like hacking memo support into Evolution. (Just a second. I forgot that. Let me take that down… There!) In addition, very little of what I do is time-sensitive.

All the same, though, Mr. Allen’s promise is proving true. Just getting everything out of my head’s “RAM” has been quite encouraging and relieving. The thing — the pithy quote — that has really caught my imagination through all of this is that you can “feel good about the stuff you’re not doing,” because you know that you’re doing the most important “stuff” at the moment, relative to all the other “stuff” you have to do. Hrm. Maybe a pithy quote really can change someone’s direction, but only if it strikes them at just the time they’re ready to make the move.

I suppose that the second biggest thing that strikes me about Mr. Allen’s method of time management is that it’s such a departure from Steven Covey’s, as he says. I read (part of) Seven Habits and First Things First years ago, and tried to apply those methods of time management to my Franklin™ planner. (Arvin gladly bought them for engineers. There was no way I was buying one on my own…) I also tried to work the system, subsequently, into my original Palm Pilot Pro. (Unfortunately, “Uncle Arvin” didn’t have the same attitude about buying the latter, despite its clear advantages, and I had to prove it’s utility on my own dime.) However, I found that it never really worked. Great ideas, but I find that they just don’t work down where the rubber meets the road.

I like Allen’s work because it fits with things I’ve realized over the years. That todo lists are supposed to be about actions, not projects. Confusing the two makes keeping track of both items in the same place useless. And categorizing my “life” into “roles” is just as useless to me. It’s a completely arbitrary thing. I am who I am, and I certainly have roles to fulfill, but trying to plan and “get things done” by thinking along those lines has long been nothing but hindered by grouping my “stuff” by my being a “father” or a “computer programmer.” That’s not how our lives are prioritized. Another good point Allen makes that I’ve found to be true is that we know in our gut how to choose which tasks to work on at a given moment. We don’t have to sit and map out stuff on a quadrant grid every morning. Our brain can do all this stuff if we just let it.