Organize IT

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I had the day off last Sunday with my fiancée and because the weather was so nice we decided to spend a few hours at Castle Howard, an historic house surrounded by a massive estate (great for picnics). I was in the museum reading about some of the former lords and ladies that had lived there, and one thing that became apparent was that they all did a lot of personal writing, typically in the form of letters to their family and friends. One individual in particular stood out because of how thoughtful, self-explorative and intelligent she came across. She happened to be the one who also put most of her ideas and feelings down on paper.

The traditional approach of prioritizing, where you assign a task a high, medium or low priority (or maybe even something more meaningless than that) is outdated and largely ineffectual in today’s workplace. In fact David Allen of Getting Things Done fame actively downplays the importance of prioritizing, claiming that each task is equally important otherwise you wouldn’t be doing them in the first place. However, this implies a “need to do-don’t need to do” attitude which, as I’ve discussed before, can be a surefire way to end up burnt out as you continuously feel compelled to do something. With the focus increasingly being on working smarter a different way of prioritizing is required that takes into account time mangement.

When I wrote seven reasons why you should ditch your PDA and switch to pen and paper it touched a nerve with a lot of you and I got a lot of very interesting remarks. A particular theme was how with the pen and paper approach you couldn’t search or backup your content. One suggestion was to use an index. As for backup…

Organize IT Recap for 16th May 2008.

• The long awaited follow-up to Getting Things Done has a name. It is called Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life. GTD Times says the book will apply GTD in a much broader way, covering work and life. This seems very fitting given how productivity has evolved in recent times. Clearly he’s been reading a lot of blogs!
• With productivity and what it means to people now that the traditional perspective of just being able to do more is waning, I’m currently seeking all your feelings on the subject. If you haven’t already, please leave a comment sharing your thoughts.
• Ok, a gaming related link for here, if you are not interested in computer games and playstations I apologize. Recently I bought Bioshock for the PC only to find it has very specific requirements to run it. I was pretty annoyed to say the least. To avoid this happening again in the future, I’ve come across a cool site that scans your system specs to see if it will run particular games. Very useful.
• Self help books are big business and when you catch the bug you can end up buying entire shelves of them. A lot of these self help writers cunningly propose you actually buy as many as you can to help with your personal growth. Cunning! However it’s not actually necessary as Shanel Yang gives five ways of trimming down the books you buy so you only get the ones you can actually use for your own personal needs.

There are enough bloggers (including yours truly) who write about personal productivity but what is it really all about? Last week I came across the alternative productivity manifesto at The Growing Life which introduced some very interesting ideas. One of those was how productivity is an industrial era economics term. How come then, are we applying it to ourselves? What can we really learn from our ratio of output per hour?