When Reality Knocks

Welcome to another entry in the When Reality Knocks Lifestyle and Technology guide. Today’s entry is part 1 of 2 of my Guide to Being Organised. Today, I’m going to be detailing my system for personal organization, for GTD or Getting things done, which I suggest as a model, and tomorrow I’ll be talking about specific problems one can have with the system and ways to overcome them.

First of all, the key to dealing with any kind of information is not to have a plan, but to have a system. Plans change daily, sometimes hourly and trying to stick to a plan often doesn’t work, because the day is full of little problems which need to be dealt with, which lead to bigger problems and so on, such that you can wake up in the morning with every intention of proposing to your girlfriend and end up still trying to fix the file permissions on your hard drive at 2:30 a.m. So what you need is a system to deal with incoming data and the plans will largely take care of themselves, but certainly not quickly enough for some people’s biological clocks, thank you very much.

My Guide to Being Organised is really nothing more than a series of easy, simple lifestyle changes which can help you organize every aspect of your life. Your model when dealing with large amounts of data should be the biblical character of Noah, who you will recall built the ark and saved all the different animals. By utilizing a simple organizational system of collecting two of each animal, a male and a female, Noah was able to make sense of the chaos, convince others of both the seriousness of the situation and the efficacy of his solution and impartially sidestep many personality conflicts (“I’m sorry, we already have two elephants”) and ultimately end up on a leaky boat with thousands of defecating animals for many days. Noah’s system not only helped him organize his life, but also rejected any input which did not fit into his system, which is why you’re never gonna see no unicorns. In actual fact, as I look back on it, Noah makes a really terrible model for personal organization; it was a bone-headed idea in the first place and I apologize for it, since none of us is getting any younger over here, tick, tock, tick.. I offer in it’s place:

Steve’s 5 Easy Steps To Organize Your Life:
1) When someone tells you their name, do not repeat it back to them to help you remember. In fact, forget it immediately, as filling your brain up with names only slows down getting things done. Refer to everyone as `Hey man!’ or `Buddy’, even if it’s your mother.

2) Keep a pad by the phone for taking down messages, but no pen. Having a pen would allow people to take down messages, which means you would have to return calls, which just slows down your life. The pad is only for show, as other people thinks it makes you more organized. Almost everyone who phones you either wants to call your attention to Colonoscopy Appreciation Month or is wondering where their stinking check is. Not worth bothering about.

3) Many people have a ridiculously organized personal planner, which is fine, but you can go too far. I like to keep things fast and loose, to leave myself open to inspirational possibilities. Using this approach, you might well end up checking your bag 15 times before you leave the house to see if you have everything and then walk out the door without any pants. This is part of the reason I have so many adventures.

4) When you have to deal with a problem, avoid boredom by doing several things at the same time. Boredom and repetition sap energy and creativity, whereas multi-tasking helps keep you keen and alert. The effect is even more pronounced if you work at home. Dealing with a data-backup crisis while making blueberry cornbread allows you to accomplish so much more than you could otherwise, though I should warn you that you can experience total data overload and wind up downstairs looking for the admin password to the DNS server in the dryer. Information overload, the crisis of the times we live in.

5) If you have a thought just before going to bed about something to be done the next day, don’t leave yourself a note about it. There are few things as discouraging as waking up to a pile of annoying sticky notes and it’s hardly the right way to start the day off. Instead, repeat the message to yourself several times right before you go to bed and then when you wake up, it’ll be the first thing you think of. While I personally consider this to be a much more humane way of dealing with important data, I should note that an unfortunate side-effect of this process is that you may end up having dreams all night about sitting in a hot tub with Socrates, Napoleon Bonaparte, and 15 European fashion models, all of you talking about emailing Jim, re: company bowling league. No system is perfect, the struggle continues.

Well, those are the basics, though you can of course adapt and expand the system to better suite your personal needs. Be sure to check back tomorrow for part 2, Trouble Shooting Data Collapse

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2005 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Personal Growth, Lifestyle and Technology, How To Be Organized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.