We’re going nuts today. And by we, I mean me. I’m going nuts. If you haven’t checked in regularly since, oh, 7 PM on Friday, I suggest you get busy on the old posts first. That’ll learn ya to not have our blog on an RSS feed.
I hate doing things. But I love getting things done (GTD, get it?). Things need to get done, but I don’t like doing them. I hate mowing the lawn, but I love that I mowed the lawn. I hate working my abs, but I love that my abs got worked. I hate building web applications, but I love that I built web applications.
It’s not just that I like looking back at my accomplishments, but I can project myself into the future and see that I will soon enjoy my accomplishment as I am currently accomplishing my accomplishment. I believe this is what scholars of the English language call, the Future Perfect Progressive. Implying that the future is not only perfect, but also progressive. That might be a fun sentence to diagram, right there.
At any rate, I like getting things done, and that has led me to some GTD applications. Basically, these are computer programs that help you organize your life. You can find a lot of information by subscribing to lifehacker. I’ve been reading the site for a few months, and I’m just now starting to delve into the crazy ideas and products that they purvey, so I can’t recommend anything directly.
However, I can advocate the GTD overall strategy. I recently explained it to a coworker like this: I need to have a lot of things going on at once, because otherwise, I just get pissed off with what I’m doing and just quit doing anything altogether. So I need to be able to quit something, but still feel like I’m being productive by working on something else. The key, therefore, is making sure that I can switch gears without any friction.
If it’s too hard to remember what I had going on with this other project, then I’ll just end up playing solitaire all day long. Therefore, I need an application that can keep me on task, through multiple tasks, as I retask my task list. And that’s why I’ve started using Thinking Rock. I’m told that it takes some time to get to know it, but once you’re ingrained, it’s really hard to do without. Kind of like Quicken. Though I didn’t really have any trouble quitting Quicken; I just got a bank that shows me all my transactions online.
I still like Quicken for taxes though.
Sometimes one does the least unattractive task. It’s possible that someone was lazy about making posts to their blog until some task came up which the person really, really preferred not to do, so suddenly the person catches up on things like blog posts.
Contrariwise, maybe the person simply checked off a bunch of very important tasks, and therefore had the time to post afterward. The person worked his way down his list and then came to the item, “Post to the blog.”
Thanks for the links to Lifehacker and Thinking Rock, and the plug for Vonnegut’s “Player Piano”. In my time, I often worked to try to make my own job unnecessary. But as you say, as soon as you make one task unnecessary, there are higher-order tasks to be done.
We should talk about unions someday. I come from a city where unions did a lot to keep employers honest. These truly are the folks who brought you the 40-hour workweek. In more recent observation, my employer would neglect things such as employee recognition events and years-of-service awards for years at a time (not to mention, pay increases!), but whenever some union started to try to organize a group of employees, suddenly the employer would catch up on that stuff. Sometimes it was really droll. Pay increases would also improve, as the employers tried to demonstrate that “You don’t need a union” without actually saying so out loud. Sometimes you don’t need a union — because sometimes the mere prospect of a union would make the employer pay attention to the employees.
It’s similar to the phenomenon in which the super-loyal gung-ho employee is deemed to not need a pay increase. Employers say that they want self-motivated employees; well, that’s true. They don’t have to pay self-motivated employees as much money.
You describe a couple of classic things:
1) The endorphin rush you get with the completion of a task. You literally get high by accomplishing things. It’s natural–otherwise, no one would ever be motivated to do anything, ever. I’m talking on an evolutionary scale, here. You are hard-wired to crave accomplishment. So once you’ve gotten some hits of that, it’s hard to stop that ball from a’rolling.
2) The Reverse Prioritization method. You yourself espoused this at some point (at least that’s what I tell people). As the codger says, you put off doing the thing you REALLY don’t want to do by doing other things. In this way, though you don’t accomplish the Big Thing, at least you get SOMETHING done. And tying this into the above point, the endorphin rush you get from accomplishing several small tasks often builds enough to springboard you headlong into the once-dreaded Big Thing. (This method is literally the only way I ever get anything done. Though it’s not like I accomplish a lot.)
3) The GTD method really just reminds me of something someone (perhaps the codger) once said: “Feeling listless? Make one.” From there you can get things done, because the list simultaneously tells you what needs doing and gives you a tangible way to measure accomplishment. I can sit around for days just watching Star Trek and checking my round of Web sites 14 times an hour despite having a bunch of small tasks I should accomplish. (This strategy is not recommended for anyone who has a REAL job.) But sooner or later I’ll actually make a list of things that need doing and sure enough, I’ll do them. In order of least to most important, of course.
Ending note: I think it’s ironic that it takes some work to get started on a program (Thinking Rock) that is supposed to help you get things done. If you’re lazy, aren’t you doomed to just never get into it?
I claim a Gnu-like copyright on the original statement that ran along the lines of, “Feeling listless? Make one.” (I should look up the original and cite it.) If you can’t get started on something, make a list, and there may be something on it that inspires you to action; or you may see that if you do one thing, it enables another.
Part of the “list” concept is that it is important to also make a list of what you have finished. You *must* give yourself credit for what you have done. If you banish an item from memory the moment you finish it, while continuously adding new tasks to the list, then the list become destructive; eventually it becomes a list of all the things you can’t bring yourself to do.
Also, it occurs to me now that if an item has been on the list for a certain amount of time, you should think very seriously about deleting it. Apparently (1) it is not urgent, (2) when you get right down to it, you haven’t been able to sell yourself on its being important enough to justify the effort. So wave it a fond farewell, or hire someone to do it.
Tolkien wrote, “Not all who wander are lost.” To that I like to add my own, “Fare well, wayfarer!”
Gee, it’s nice to be cited. At the same time, I remember what Woody Allen once said. Some interviewer asked him whether he hoped to achieve a kind of immortality through his body of work. Woody replied, “No, I hope to achieve immortality by not dying.”
[Fist-bump]