Organize IT

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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.

Continuing the theme from last month, I’ve done another guest post, this time for Twitip. It covers how I use Twitter so it doesn’t become a time and energy vacuum. If you’re a heavy social media user, you might find it a useful read. As for the rest of September, it was Organize IT’s third birthday! Be sure to check out my post celebrating the occasion, as well as my top ten tweets by David Allen – very interesting if you’re a GTD fan. Enjoy!

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.

Excuse the rambling nature of this post but I’ve had a few thoughts about creativity recently and I want to get it off my head (in the spirit of my last post). You see, creativity seems to be associated with hippy-like ideas about thinking big and opening your mind to new ideas and different experiences. Don’t focus on small things, think about the big picture! But I’m not so sure…