Blog Action Day: The Environmentally Friendly Lifestyle
Today is the third annual Blog Action Day, a great event where thousands of bloggers (just under 7000 at the time of typing this) all write about one particular topic of concern. This year it’s about climate change, a particularly apt subject given how world leaders will gather in two months time to hopefully finalize a global deal on the issue. I like to get involved in this event and have done so for the previous two years (be sure to read my posts for 2008 and 2007). This year is no exception. However this time it took me a while to figure out what exactly to write about. After all, climate change is a huge, complicated topic. Now that the politicians, companies and the media have jumped all over it, there is so much information, facts, tips and advice out there that it’s hard to know where to start. But starting is what we all have to do, and that’s what this post is about.
We’re All Time Wasters, But Whose Fault Is That?
As you can probably expect giving what I write about here at Organize IT, time is a big issue for me. I have hobbies and interests and goals I want to achieve and they all take up precious hours. This is actually a good thing because I’d much rather spend those hours in pursuits I enjoy rather than in mundane work. The challenge I have then is how to free up more time for the former and do less of the latter. It should be simple but it never is and I think I may have finally figured out why. At heart, we’re all just a bunch of time wasters.
Why “Just Do It” Is Still The Best Productivity Advice
Just do it. Stop procrastinating and get on with it. It really should be that simple and years ago it probably was. We should all have the doing habit – that drive inside to see our daily chores completed despite what’s on TV or our to-do list ticked off despite colleagues pestering us. But nowadays we have so many distractions, so many things fighting for our attention and so much stuff that’s so complicated, that the doing habit has been eroded away and replaced by inaction.
Does GTD Make Your Brain Lazy?
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.
GTD And The Work/Life Blur Dilemma
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.