Greetings from 11:07 p.m. on a sweaty, rainy Thursday in August. It is hot and my attention span is already cringing in anticipation of classes resuming next week. In other words, I would like some vacation time to recover from my vacation time, please and thank you.
I think I first heard (or read) the phrase "getting things done" well after the 2001 book of the same name first came out, probably via some productivity blog (remember those?) or even a nascent podcast sometime in 2005 plus or minus a year. It struck a chord with me because I was kind of obsessed with optimizing my time. I had so many ideas and so many ambitions that I just had to get everything done.
Only that just never seemed to happen. Nowadays they call it executive dysfunction or burnout or decision paralysis. All I knew back then was that I had so many things I wanted to do that I could do exactly zero of them. So I became obsessed with efficiency and organization. This did two things: it leaned hard into my fixation with stationery1 and it made me feel like I was getting something done.
These days I like to think I've left the productivity shuffle behind, mainly because I've been able to move into actually GTD'ing but also because all those systems I spent so long perfecting have, more or less, withstood the test of time. My productivity systems are pretty much the same now as they have been for the past fifteen years. Which is both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, gone is the need for me to spend hours (or weeks or months) learning a new piece of kit just to take notes slightly better. On the other hand, gone is the fun of learning a new piece of kit just to take notes slightly better.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that tech kind of stopped evolving. I mean, it hasn't, but it can feel like it has because, well, take a look at our smart phones. For a while, every new generation of phone felt like a game changer. These days, not so much2. The same is true for software. For a while every new app could do something new and cool, but eventually they all began to overlap and become more or less the same just in different colors.
Now, the thing is, we probably shouldn’t be doing so much of our GTD on our screens anyway. Multimodal learning3 takes the idea that we should be incorporating the "four skills," e.g. listening, reading, writing, and speaking, whenever we are engaged in learning. In other words, when you take notes, ideally, you'll be talking to yourself while writing things down in multiple colors with diagrams and ideographs, while taking a walk and reading your notes back to yourself out loud. It's a lot. But it's effective.
So, effectively, despite having all the best tech in the world, the most efficient way of remembering anything is to use pen and paper and just, you know, study.
All of which brings me back to GTD. Knowing all this, having incorporated all this and developed my systems accordingly, means that I get up and get things done. I take the dog for a walk, have some water and a coffee, hit the gym, and then hit the keyboard ready to write, create, interact, and otherwise, say it with me, get things done!
Only that almost never happens. Not never. Just almost never. Most mornings, I get up with just enough time to get showered and dressed before I have to be in the car to get to work. If I'm really on the ball, I'll manage to eat breakfast before I actually leave the house. As it is, breakfast is usually two bites of toast while I'm grabbing my car keys like some strung-out salaryman in your favorite anime. And let's not forget that I applied my patented GTD strategy to finding the shortest route to work so I can sleep in for an extra ten minutes.
This month, though, I've been on vacation. So you'd think I'd be able to skip all that mess and get up, dog, coffee, gym, etc. Yeah, not in this lifetime. Instead, I just keep putting things off until I end up writing my newsletter and publishing it just before my self-imposed deadline.
Why? Because for all my efficiency and stress-tested productivity systems, I still have more things I want to do than I have time or energy in which to do them. Cue the decision paralysis - where do I start? What do I work on? How do I work on putting something out into the world when I know no one is going to see it? Or, even worse, how do I put something out into the world when I'm scared everyone is going to see it?
The only answer I've found, trite though it may be, is to break everything down into the smallest parts possible and then just start with one single thing. That's all anyone can ever do anyway, right? Right.
Pro tip - if you happen to be a connoisseur of beautiful, intentional, well-designed note pads, pens, journals, diaries, calendars, and all their assorted accoutrement, do NOT move to Japan. Your wallet, and possibly will to live, will be eaten alive by the sheer variety and volume of incredible objects d'art masquerading as simple stationery. Consider yourself duly warned.
As an example, the Nintendo Switch 2 looks great but is essentially a super Switch. But if you've been playing Nintendo for, oh, say, 30 to 40 years, every new console did something amazingly new. The leap from the GameCube to the Wii was incredible and the leap from the Wii to Switch was equally amazing. In between, even the disappointing Wii U still felt like something brand new was being presented to us.
In this case, learning means taking in new information, analyzing it, understanding it, and being able to use it to create new learning by incorporating from disparate sources and synthesizing a reasonable hypothesis.
All due respect, Mr Neff, but I find that bills, without fail, also arrive bang on time.
This is the most honest and relatable take on productivity culture I’ve ever read. It captured my struggles too, and the conclusion I came up with is, just make sure it's not zero progress everyday.