Organize IT

A couple of months ago I posed a little question on Twitter, having spent quite a bit of time figuring out how best to categorize Organize IT. I was surprised by the number of people who responded with their opinions and preferences. Productivity, personal development, lifestyle design, or other? What’s the name for all of this? What are all us bloggers actually writing about? And does it really matter what it gets called? Of course not, but it would be interesting to see what the general consensus is…

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One of the key elements of GTD is capturing what’s on your radar – offloading what’s on your head so you’re no longer thinking of stuff, but about the stuff. It’s a great bit of advice and it’s something I encourage people to do regardless of what system, workflow or methodology takes your fancy. If there is something that wants my attention I’ll jot it down somewhere so I don’t have to carry the weight of the memory around. It sounds like a sensible, even smart way of keeping track of everything, making sure you don’t forget things, etc. But recently something occurred to me that puts mind sweeping into doubt.

This guest post was written by Rich of Half-A-Dozen Monkeys.

The main focus of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology is… well, to get things done. It aims to give you a tool to enable you to identify everything you need to do and then go and get those things done. This is fine. No, this is superb. But it does create one particular problem – it consciously blurs the boundaries between all aspects of your life. It seeks to provide you with a solution to all strands of what you do in one fair swoop, on the assumption that for a lot of people the boundaries are already a little fuzzy.

On Monday I talked about the misconception of creativity – that it’s about thinking big, opening your mind, etc. This got me thinking about what I believe to be another big misconception. Many people claim that GTD and creativity don’t work together, and to be frank it’s kind of frustrating. It’s such a matter-of-fact statement, I’ve yet to find anybody back that statement up and I feel it’s based on certain stereotypes of GTD and productivity in general. I’m by no means a GTD-zealot, but I am a fan, I have found it useful, and yes, I like to think I am fairly creative. I do believe the two mix and they can mix very well. Below are my reasons why I believe that.

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.