Organize IT

Last week I took a book out of my local library on a whim that was called Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? and, so far at least, I’ve found it to contain some very intriguing ideas. In a nutshell, the book is a collection of writings from a diverse mix of people about climate change. What really got my attention though was about how this was tied into the whole idea of living a good life, dismissing common notions on what that actually means and, in particular, providing an often vicious indictment of how the pursuit of our current ad-driven consumer/hedonistic notion of what a good life is, is damaging not only to the planet but ourselves.

The end of another month approaches so it’s time to recap the best posts from the last several weeks. Whether you want to know what productivity means to me, how you can deal with a mistake in a proactive manner, what my favorite blogs of 2009 are or why you should always identify the root cause of any problems in life, hopefully there will be something here for you. Thanks as ever for the support!

I’ve always wondered how best to describe GTD to people. I’ve found that once you get through the hyping up and the fancy wording that David Allen increasingly uses when discussing his methodology, it’s a fairly straightforward system (though of course, understanding it and being able to use it on a regular basis are two entirely different things). However, that doesn’t really help me when somebody comes along and asks what the hell it’s all about.

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I’ve always frowned upon the whole idea of tracking your time in detail. As useful as it might be to know you spend 40% of your time at work, 5% of your time commuting and 10% of your life on Facebook, if you do genuinely need to know that information there are deeper issues to resolve. Such data might reveal to you where time is being wasted, and that by taking a different route to work and paying less attention to Facebook, you may resolve that problem. But it doesn’t resolve why you’ve got that problem in the first place (anyone want to suggest what the root cause may be?).

A couple of years ago I shared my top ten favorite productivity blogs. However a lot has changed since then. Sites have shifted topic or died away, and new ones have appeared on the scene. I avoid following hundreds of blogs and I don’t even use an RSS feeder, so to keep me focused I regularly identify a handful of sites that interest me. With that in mind here is my current top ten of productivity blogs.