I forgot to forget to rememberI began composing this post nine months ago, which explains why the topic and links are more stale than usual. I unearthed it last night when I was going through my "Draft" entries--the ones I'd begun but never completed--and I thought, Eh, good enough. TEH IRONY!!!1!!!11! Anyhow, only the first two paragraphs are old. About The premise of GTD, if I recall correctly, is that you collect shit in your in-box and then divide it up according to how long it'll take you to take care of it. Then you Do, Delegate, or Defer. Then there are 20 more steps after that. I have a flowchart pinned to my bulletin board here. Its corners are yellowed. The major flaw of the GTD philosophy is that it can't really help you if you hate working. But I reckon if you're in that position, ain't shit that can. Does anyone like working? Very few friends of mine seem to enjoy working but we're a profoundly shiftless lot. I've been wondering this a lot lately. I wish I did enjoy working--because I'm certainly never going to be independently wealthy. Around the same time that I bought GTD, I succumbed to the whole hipster PDA phenomenon. It turns out not to be particularly useful for me, because rather than collecting cogent ideas and to-do lists I instead carry around a dog-eared stack of revolving index cards with scribblings that sorta resemble Ira Louvin's mashbook. Sometimes the card has phrases I'm trying to remember so that I can incorporate them into something I'm working on. Sometimes the card says only BEETS. Or FAFNIR. The only cool thing about the Hipster PDA is that it necessitates stealing its components from the work supply closet, something I can endorse. Plus, I like binder clips. I added 43 Folders to my Bloglines feed. As with 75% of the blogs on my RSS feed, I almost never read it. Talk about a lifehack! All nice and compartmentalized, this means I need to travel to only one webpage to feel completely overwhelmed by how behind I am in my "reading." This is what they're talking about, in part, here. To find the task of catching up on blogs insurmountable? To consider reading blogs "reading" in the first place? That is information overload. Clearly I am using the internet for the wrong reasons and resolve to play more online poker. To end this encapsulation of my sullen state of affairs on a positive note, however, I'd like to introduce you to my new favorite phrase: the broken beer bottle shit. This phrase is the sanies, if you will, of a conversation about a particularly nasty prank that involves taking a big shit and then breaking a beer bottle in the toilet when you're done. It makes a good metaphor. For example: Fuck this noise, I'm not doing any more work, and I'm taking a big broken beer bottle shit on this whole thing. *So I work my youth away in the place of a machine... Posted by Dana at 08:39 AM
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Shit from an Old NotebookThat's fucking hilarious, I was just about to order this book. Thanks for saving me 12 bucks.
Posted by: adam at March 2, 2006 10:49 AMreminds me of this program i did once called (i think) the artist's way. it was this book/program designed to get the creative juices going for writer types. and a bunch of people kept recommending it to me, despite its load of pseudospiritual b.s. the main exercise required me to wake up every morning and write one full notebook page about anything, first thing every day. and this was supposed to get me in the habit of working and writing daily, even if i didn't feel particularly inspired. worked really well, too. after six months, i had the rough draft for the least inspired detective novel ever written. maybe it was just me...
Posted by: reeves at March 2, 2006 11:59 AMadam, I found GTD. You can borrow it. It will change your life.
Reeves: It wasn't Creating a Life Worth Living, was it? I tried reading that, too, a long time ago.
It starts out by instructing you to devote 15 minutes of your day to doing something that a)isn't something you normally do or have any interest in and b)isn't a task of some nature, like paying bills or washing dishes.
Why the hell would I want to do that? I barely have the time to devote to brushing my teeth.
Posted by: dana at March 2, 2006 12:20 PMnope, D, definitely The Artist's Way.
and no, that does not sound like a life worth living, dammit.
Posted by: reeves at March 2, 2006 12:24 PMit was definitely "the artist's way" - and it was THREE pages of bullshit per day, not one! (at least in the edition we have.)
i could never understand why many people i knew loved it so much. another one of the exercises involved putting on an "artist costume" and going to a quasi-boho public place and "behaving like an artist" (eyeliner, beret, etc). *facepalm*
at the time i pretty much dressed like that anyway.
Posted by: miranda at March 3, 2006 03:45 AM