Yeah, yeah, I’ve read that brains aren’t literally organized the way people thought for a while:
That the left side has all the nerd stuff: Dewey decimal system, numbers, letters, putting words for things, putting things in order, symbolic language, Lisp, discrete math. The hobgoblin of consistency lives here.
The right has the capacity to work wordlessly. Painting, drawing, cooking, feeling; things that are graduated and nuanced and not necessarily as consistent, more capable of working with contradiction and double speak and poststructural feels-over-reals.
It’s apparently not literally the case that one of them physically resides in the left side and the other physically in the right side. It’s just different kinds of processes and they’re a li’l bit spread out. Not that the brain doesn’t have regions, like Broca’s or whatever, it does, but the brain might a li’l less strictly separated than the left-brained eggheads originally had us believe. Or that’s what they’re saying now, I dunno.
Even though it’s not literally set up in two lateral halves, I’m a strong believer in how different those two minds can be, and how awareness of them can make us more capable and help us make wise decisions. I like to say “if you’re only listening to your thoughts and not your emotions, you’re only using half your brain”.
I’ve found myself more able to stay out of bad habits if I’m aware of how the two sides of me might both have a point.
For example, working vs slacking, or procrastination. If I have one side that wants to be goody—two-shoes and another side that wants to rest, if I listen to both sides I might make a healthy decision but if I try to suppress the “subconscious” side, I’m more likely to end up doing stuff that’s neither, like doomscrolling or whatever. People in the 90s endlessly whittling away at Solitaire on Windows 3.11 instead of either doing their actual work or getting actual rest or using their time to like learn a language or make friends. Not that solitaire isn’t a fun game, it is, but I’m talking about how we sometimes spend our time in ways we later regret.
But if I’m fully listening to the side that’s overwhelmed and don’t wanna do the thing, and the side that wants to do the thing for whatever reason, and try to let those sides “talk” to each other or “listen” to each other; one of the sides will be wordless and bubbling under and hard to access and the other will be a thread of running commentary in my li’l noggin (and what’s weird is that sometimes the “work work work” side is the conscious one and sometimes it’s the other way around, that the “work work work” side is an unspoken nagging feeling; the sides can switch their “interfaces” with each other apparently) but if I let myself access both, hash things out, I can procrastinate less and either get work done or get well-needed rest without guilt.
Speaking of “subconscious”, that’s another word that’s apparently out of vogue and now only considered to be New Age woo. The “well, actually” left-brainers have been all like “well actually if we’re not conscious of it, then it’s obviously unconcious”. But I’m not gonna hop on that train. I’m a big believer in how unaware many left-brainers are of why & how & when we’re actually doing things.
Uh, TL;DR: if you see me use the word “left-brained” or “right-brained” it’s not out of ignorance, or I guess it is in the sense that science as a whole is not sure about this kind of stuff, but it’s just shorthand for a more nuanced & mystic topic.
When you’re in a little room and you’re working on something good, you might find something else that you also want to do.
Now, there are two ways to go about that.
One, which I’ll call “fifo”, is to note the new thing and then finish the original thing to the best of your ability.
The second, “lifo” is a good pet name for it, is to just immediately go up and start working on the new thing.
This is something I’ve found myself really struggling with. David Allen (the main GTD guy) has, in interviews and in his books, conveyed some warning words against “lifo”, against always being driven by the latest&loudest at the expense of what you really wanted to do.
I have a relative who’s really good at always working the “fifo” way. She reads one book at a time, she does one thing at a time, her house is sparkling clean.
I’m a mess in that regard, a complete sprawl-brain, SOFA-prone and nerd-snipable. I wouldn’t even get half-way shaving that yak until I’d have to go stand in line in the razor store.
That’s exacerbated by how in the world of programming, because automation is a thing that’s usually worth it, working lifo can sometimes get massively rewarded. Today as I was working on a thing I had dreaded because putting the files that way is such a schlep, I was like “OK, so why don’t I automate it?” and two lines of shell and three lines of elisp later, I can now do the schleppy part of that with one keypress. It literally took less time making the automation than to actually do it by hand one time.
Conclusion: I’ve got to case-by-case it. I want to get away from the lifo-vs-fifo, “Sandra you’re a bad girl for working so much lifo” mindset, and not even have to think of things in terms of lifo-vs-fifo anymore, but, I want that freedom–from–lifo-vs-fifo to be earned, to learn to carefully consider what I’m doing and why; to be more deliberate and less whim-driven.
To choose to do something, and whether I choose to go to a new task or to continue a started task shouldn’t be an automatic no-brainer choice; “lifo vs fifo” and hangups around that shouldn’t be the biggest factor.
I am a fan of notifications actually (and I miss having a good reliable notifications system now that I’m on iPad where the notifications system is a flaky mess; a good notification system was part of what my relationship to my old Debian desktop system so healthy).
Without notifications, I can easily find myself in neurotic, addicted “checking-checking-checking” loops.
Here are some properties of a good message notifications system:
For me, this usually means that someone I know (friends & fam, or coworkers) is trying to talk to me personally, or there is a local emergency like the water lines are gonna get shut off or something.
Newspaper type stuff, newsletters and such, do not belong here. I can read RSS as part of a daily or weekly routine. Books don’t fly off the shelf into my face normally and neither should this sort of stuff.
Anything that can be batched away like that should. I only wanna be notified when it’s about real human connection.
One button should toggle it and it should also mute at night and turn itself on the next morning. For example, if it normally automutes at 10 PM but I shut it of a few hours earlier to turn it in early, I don’t want to need to remember to turn it back on the next day.
It’s also great when I can do things like “OK, mute for one hour” and it turns back on for me so I don’t have to remember to do it myself.
Ideally it should also be able to automute when I run specific apps; I don’t wanna get email pings when I’m talking to someone on Jitsi.
Manual toggling like this is great for when I wanna do some deep work. I wanna be “available for notifications” some of the time, not all of the time.
If I silence the notifications or even leave the computer entirely, I don’t wanna miss messages. I can sort them through and read them later. This needs to be super reliable, and if it is, it’s what helps me have peace of mind when I toggle and mute the notifications.
In other words, they can’t be ephemeral. If it’s important enough to be a notification, I wanna see it.
I get the point of some things in some situations being suited for ephemeral notifications (like network status things or stock trading stuff or whatever) but those things don’t apply to my current life.
The sound shouldn’t pierce my ears and I always turn all kinds of vibration completely off. The best system I ever had was back on my Debian desktop where the only notification was a number showing up in the top right corner. Not a glaring red badge, just a calm black number on white background, no sound, and completely persisent until I had cleared out the queue. No number if it’s zero, otherwise it’s the amount of un–dealt-with messages. And a keyboard shortcut toggled visibility of the entire area that the number was in.
Ideally, I don’t wanna have to look for email notifications in one place, usenet in another, RSS in a third, IRC in a fourth, text messages and voicemail in a fifth, Fedi in a sixth, forum DMs in a seventh etc.
That’s just an ideal, it’s not something I’ve completely attained.
Here is where iPad completely sucks (and from what I understand, Android has the same problem) since notifications are often delayed or missing entirely, which sends me back to neurotic checking-checking-checking land.
It should work solidly and reliably.
I’ve always had a hard time doing boring things like washing the dishes or walking or just existing but recently I got two pieces of advice that, although they kind of contradict each other, taken together they have really helped.
A few weeks ago I read Francine Joy’s Lightly. For the most part it’s just minimalism basics and nothing new to people who know what that’s about (for those who are unfamiliar with minimalism, though, it is a very good intro that I definitively recommend. She’s well-read and intentional and explains wide-ranging topics clearly and simply). I also was frustrated with the metaphoric image of minimalism as “lightly”; I want to live my life fully, not breeze over it.
Then I got to the “savor” chapter. Now this is more to my liking! She uses the metaphor of savoring, really carefully tasting, to explain awareness practice and mindfully doing whatever you’re doing fully. Taking a walk is boring but might as well enjoy it, examine things along the route, being curious about the aches that keep plaguing my old hips, being aware of what I’m doing. Same goes for washing the dishes; enjoying the brushstrokes, the sound of water, the plate getting gradually cleaner, figuring out a good order to place the dishes in.
Not that that approach is new to me; it’s core to the kind of meditation practice I’ve been into for the past decade and a half.
It’s just that the “savor it” mental model cleanly encapsulated the idea, making it easy to remember, and making it intrinsically appealing as opposed to something to do out of some sense of duty to a practice.
Once I learned to value the “when sitting, just sit” approach, the one-thing-at-a-time awareness practice, probably better known as the focused totality of my telepathic abilities, boring things sometimes was really joyful.
And other times they were even more boring than ever before. Painful, even. I’d alternate between being this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed, vs losing all control and giving up completely and totally numbing myself with records and TV and IRC and Fedi and video games.
And the “better” and “more offline” I’d be one day the more lost and outta control I’d be the next day. One day being good, having my GTD lists or reading or resting, the other day completely giving in to being nerd-sniped or watching YouTube or cartoons.
Doing boring things felt like moving a mountain.
Enter Stolen Focus:
It’s an ambitious book that covers a lot of topics and in many cases it comes to some pretty wack conclusions so I hope I get an opportunity to return to it in another essay, but I’m gonna start with the “wandering mind” idea. Daydreaming. Being OK with your thoughts not being with the task at hand but with anything and everything at all. Having your own internal noise machine, what some Qin era buddhists called the “monkey mind”.
Hari, the author of Stolen Focus, argues that this is not an entirely bad thing. Giving yourself room to think freely is one of the things missing from today’s society. “Don’t you have time to think?” as Feynman famously phrased it.
I don’t know if that’s obvious to you or not, but to me it was mindblowing. It felt like getting permission to absolutely drop the ball while simultaneously doing things more focusedly than ever.
I’ve been trying it out. Not all the time but as an “at least it’s better than headphones and sitcoms” kind of thing, just like doing something “little-and-often” is better than not doing it at all. I don’t want to lose out on my awareness practice, but doing something with a wandering mind sounds heck of a lot better than not even being able to do it without a ton of digital anaesthesia, and doubly so if Hari is right that it’s this sorta daydreaming is actively beneficial.
Now, I’ve already found myself missing a way to write down and capture some of the wild ideas I come up with when my mind wanders like this. When I first got into GTD, I was really good at what it calls “the capture habit”, but the more I applied GTD successfully, the simpler my life became and things stopped rattling around in my head unsortedly or falling through the cracks so I stopped having a pen in my hand at all times. I do enough “mind sweep” sessions as it is (that means deliberately going into mind-wander mode while scrawling down and mindmapping things that come to mind, to later sort them onto the GTD list). But maybe that’s something I could bring back a little bit.
The wandering mind was a mistake for me. I am committed to my meditation practice. I need it and it needs me.
Over in the Mark Forster corner of the online “productivity” world (a favourite well for procrastinators to return to again and again) there’s often focus on the idea of working on something “little and often”. You have a stack of letters to send or doshes to distim? Don’t do them all at once, just go and do some of them, take a break, and then you can return at a later time.
The drawbacks of this little-and-often approach are many.
Whenever we switch contexts we add overhead, it takes energy, it’s tiring, it’s unfocused, it’s a waste of time. Going to the kitchen and washing twelve plates all at once can be more efficent than going to the kitchen, washing one plate, going to the living room, going back to the kitchen, washing one more plate, going to the garden, going back to the kitchen etc. “Touch it once”, I’ve heard this opposite approach called.
But the one single advantage of the little-and-often approach is nothing to scoff at:
It’s way better than never doing it at all.
So for me, that settles it. I’ve been trying to cultivate some awareness of things that I just wouldn’t be doing at all if it weren’t for little-and-often, and using the little-and-often approach for those things.
Given the disadvantages, I try to use the technique sparingly and as seldomly as possible. I am definitively not in the Forster corner of promoting little-and-often or always looking for opportunities to apply it. If anything, I think I already do it way too much and would really benefit from batching much more than I already do. One way I’m trying to get there is by getting a little bit higher tolerance for boredom, since doing a whole batch of the same thing can be super boring.
I only want to apply little-and-often “as seldomly as possible” and no seldomlier. The pitfall of not even doing something at all just for the sake of trying-and-failing to attain some efficiency ideal is one I don’t wanna fall into.
If “little-and-often” is the only way I’m gonna get a big and boring rock done, I’ll gladly and gratefully apply it.
When we deliberately choose what is most important to do right now, other things are going to get postponed or even fall by the wayside.
That’s why postponing things is a necessary component of doing focused work.
GTD, or whatever reminder setup you choose, is a bookmark for all of those thing so that you can have them out of sight and out of mind and instead be 100% with what you’re doing. I’m grateful for that.
It’s also true that a stitch in time saves nine. Something our elected officals seems to have been neglecting for far too long since climate stuff is gonna get a heck of a lot more expensive to fix later than sooner.
GTD is good at turning your goals (probably better known as your projects) to concrete actions.
It then sorts those actions by context, like “these are things I can do at the grocery store”, “these are things I can do by the phone”, “these are things I can do in the kitchen”, and so on. (And it deliberately tries to limit stuff you have to do at a specific time to actual appointments. It’s not normally a “daily lists” type system.)
There are two good things that come out of this sorting system.
One is that it helps you be efficient. Imagine having to take a separate trip to the grocery store for every item. That’s what the context lists helps you avoid.
The other is even more amazing. The act of sorting things into contexts helps us actually clarify exactly what it is we wanna do. It turns a lofty and vague goal to something concrete and specific. “OK, the first step of this is a phone call and I need to call Mrs Brady at 555-0199. I’ll put that on my call lists.” (Or do it right away if it’s under two minutes.)
But there’s a drawback to this sorting, too.
It can get in the way of choosing the right things to do, the most proactive, stitch-saving things, the most important things, the things most key to saving the planet or to our art or our hearts or putting food on our tables.
We see a list of calls or emails to send or widgets to crank and that list is, by design, supposed to be detatched from the underlying projects, which makes it hard to see which of those things are the actual most important ones.
GTD’s response to this is that the idea is that you are supposed to be really deliberate about what projects you have on your lists that week, and that every week you go through and weed out some projects, move them over to a larger horizon where you then can bring ‘em back on another week (or someday, maybe… or never).
That’s a fine response, it doesn’t solve everything but it’s OK. Being aware about this limitation of GTD also helps. I try to keep the relative importance and stitch-savingness of projects in mind when I dot and do things.
Time for some GTD heresy in this 🐝 since you’re not supposed to do any prioritization at all according to the canon.
Here’s something I’ve been using since almost day one for me back in 2006.
When I was using a paper system, I drew a box in front of every task.
I put a dot in the box. Then a checkmark means I’ve done it, an X means I’ve decided to not do it, and slash through the box means that I’ve moved it to another page or another list. What’s neat is that these same marks work whether or not there is a dot under them, they hide the dot, so I can use the exact same notation for undotted boxes. I got this system from some jerks online, the rest of their system sucks but this is still a good notation that I’m used to, whenever I’m on paper.
Currently I’m on digital but most of these apps have some way of flagging or starring or marking your fave tasks.
I dot the things I most wanna do so they stand out.
When I’m in a context I then can do the dotted things first, and then I might do some more, undotted things, before I leave that context. I’m already at the grocery store, might as well get paper clips and garlic since they are both on my list even though the urgent thing is envelopes. Or whatever.
This helps me from getting overwhelmed when I’ve got a lot on my lists. Since GTD tasks (probably better known as “actions”) sometimes can get a little bit too separated from projects, dotting based on the most important projects can be really awesome making sure I don’t miss the most clutch things.
Here is something that I don’t do all the time but I go through periods of doing it since it can really help when I have low focus and a hard time making decisions or doing things. It’s based on something Mark Forster came up with; he called it the “Final Version”.
I put my GTD system in a mode where I can see all actions from all contexts in one big list, still sorted by context.
I look at the top action. Let’s say it’s distimming the doshes. I ask myself “What do I want to do the most right now, rest or distim the doshes?” If the answer is the latter, I dot the action.
Then I look at the next action. Let’s say it’s laminating the stasis. I ask myself “What do I want to do right now, distim the doshes or laminate the stasis?” If the answer is the former, I do not dot the action.
I only compare things to the most recently dotted thing and go through the whole list. That way each thing is more something I wanna do than the previous one.
I get a lot of mileage out varying the criteria. “What do I want to do first”, “What do I feel the most resistance towards”, “What is the biggest rock?”, “What would be the most restful of X and Y because I’m tired” and so on. That sounds dumb but it really helped motivate me. Or sometimes skipping the comparison and instead dotting a specific kind of thing like “what are some tiny low-hanging–fruit tasks”.
Then you have a list of tasks in a good order, a “chain” if you will, and you’re supposed to do them starting with the lowest first and that can work pretty great!
I don’t always use the dot&do and when I do, I don’t always do “the chain” variant of it.
I primarily use GTD. It’s just a way for me to cut through overwhelm. GTD is good at making me decide one thing to do and then I know that that’s the best thing to do. I sometimes find it a little bit exhausting to dive all the way into the system between every task, and a relief from that can be to dot a handful of tasks, so I know that I have a couple of things that I know for sure I wanna do before diving back down again.
If there’s something you can do right away in under two minutes, and it’s something you know you want to do, do it right away instead of having to schlep out your entire system.
Don’t miss out on this super good speed hack.
It saves a lot of overhead.
When you’re sorting or clarifying and you come across an inbox item that’s under two minutes? Do it instead of sorting it in.
When you’re out and about and doing stuff and you come across something to do that’s under two minutes? Do it instead of capturing it.
Having to fiddle with apps or phones or notebooks or folders for every little thing is not reasonable. “Oh, mom forgot to put away the salt earlier. I’d better make a nine step project for that.” No thanks.
That’s what I mean by “overhead”, by the way. Fiddling with systems and calendars and lists is actually work too, it doesn’t take zero seconds to do all that. I refer to that part of the system—everything outside of the actually “doing” part of it—as “overhead”.
Don’t get me wrong, I love GTD, it has saved my life on more than one occasion, but hacks like the two-minute rule can make it run a lot more smoothly.
Only do things you know you want to (or need to) do. GTD is supposed to help you make deliberate decisions on what you do.
“But how can I make that kind of deliberate decisions without schlepping out my whole system to get an overview?” some of y’all might ask. Truth it, you’re gonna have to do a li’l guessing & winging in this regard, which is why it only applies to two-minute tasks and we:
Why not always do everything right away no matter how long it takes? That’s no good, at least it isn’t for me, since I’m so prone to getting sucked into new projects and new ideas and start new things. I’ll miss important things, I’ll miss stitches in time that might save nine.
Schlepping out the whole system does have some value and that value is that it helps me make sure that not only am I doing things, I’m doing the right things.
I’ve seen some people buy timers and stuff for this but to me that sounds like that just add more overhead. I’ve always take the “two minutes” to be pretty figurative. If I had written GTD I probably would a called it the “three second” rule since that’s my standard phrase whenever I mean a really short duration.
If it’s something that you can do right away, it applies. If it’s a bigger thing, it doesn’t.
If you really truly have a bad sense of “can do it right away” means, and if you have a wrist watch on, or a clock in your workspace, you can look at it before and after you do the thing. And if at first you accidentally do some fifteen minutes, ten minutes things early on as you calibrate & find your sense of this, that’s fine.
This rule is supposed to help you, to be a speed hack for you, not to be an additional constraint on your work. It’s meant to make GTD better for you, not fiddlier or stricter. Whenever the two-minute rule, or two-minute hack as it probably would’ve been called these days, doesn’t help you, just ignore it.
I’ve sometimes seen people misunderstand the two-minute rule as if it ignored the time and cost of getting into the right context. Like “Sure, it takes me less than two minutes to put an apple in the basket at the grocery store but you are forgetting about the three-hour drive there!”
Ah, no, the two minute rule means including all that context switchery. Let’s say it’s about making a two-minute call and you’re already next by your phone even though you have your GTD stuff out. Then that’s fine.
But if you’re in a meeting and in no way able to make a call then it’s absolutely not appropriate to make any calls no matter how short they are.
That’s how these “two minute” things arrived in the inbox in the first place, too, by the way. Perhaps placed there in the middle of the night when there’s no polite time to make calls.
If you really wanna cut down on overhead, here is a hack of the hack. Don’t blame upstream GTD for this one, this “two-hour rule” is something I made up.
The idea is that if you have a core focus in your life right now, like homework for a student, you can change the two-minute rule to a two-hour rule but only for things that fall squarely into that category. You already know you want to do it. If it’s more than two hours it can be worth breaking it down (or even if it’s already atomic “deep work”, it can be worth schlepping out the system to see what other stuff you’d be postponing.
I’m Swedish and I struggle to find English words to explain what an utter Sisyphean soul-crushing burden every single thing in my life is.
Now I’m only gonna speak about my own need for help, and you do you:
There is an idea of self-reliance that’s so pervasive throughout our western culture. Everyone needs to pull their weight, tit-for-tat, measure-for-measure. But we’ve all been babies when we were little, we’ve all needed help at that stage of our lives. No baby is an island. Ergo needing help can’t be inherently&universally immoral or shameful.
Yes, being underestimated does suck; imposed helpnessless beyond our own helplessness causes suffering. Sometimes “I’ll carry that for you” lands like getting tied to a chair. The help is what made me helpless. Other times it’s like getting lifted from quicksand, it’s a bridge over troubled water, it’s a relief in time of need.
I’m always getting seen as either this superhero who can do everything quickly and perfectly and what a let down I would be if I were to fail and ruin it for everybody, or as this complete grade-A no-count that better just sit there quietly we’ll fix it and I better never attempt anything for anybody. It’s rare that someone gets the balance right: that I already can do some things, I have some questions before I do some other things, and I’d better not even attempt some other things.
I have the same problem when considering other people—it’s so hard for me to get that they can do some things. I either expect them to be perfect or I dismiss them as no-counts. Truth probably is that on the one hand, distributing tasks & responsibilites & resources is a pretty difficult problem where flexibility is important. (I know kanban is a tool of the oppressors but it’s an efficient way of working.) And on the other hand, clear instruction can go a very long way. People learn things in different order and if we can get a li’l better at getting into learn&teach–mode as opposed to compete&defeat–mode, we’d all benefit.
“Efficiency” is a word balancing on a razor’s edge between two sets of connotations.
For some, it can conjure up a grinding gear factory where your boss is standing over you with a whip yelling “Crank! Crank! Crank!”. Maximum output beyond what’s reasonable or healthy. An unsustainable drive for growth. Where investing means taking resources from the future to the present. Making new inroads into plundering the Earth for some more fuel.
But it can also means using what resources you have wisely and sustainably. To not waste things. Making and using tools. “Ecology” means the story of householding. Where investing means giving resources from the present to the future. Noping out. Marking WONTFIX. Making choices. Being deliberate about work and rest, and self-aware of changing energy levels.
In the world of low-spoons, efficiency is vital. This li’l light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine carefully and sustainably.
Probably the number one misconception about GTD is that it’s a productivity cult where you’re asked to do, do, do until you’re all burnt out and dead. I myself thought that when I first got into it. It touts “stress-free” productivity and I was like “when the heck is the ‘stress-free’ part gonna come?”. And then I tried resting. Thing is, GTD is a bookmark of my life. It lets me let go of something, knowing I can get back to it. It lets me select the one thing that’s most important in the world right now—which might be writing, making food, helping a friend, working, or resting—and when I’m doing what I’ve selected, I can do that fully, knowing that I won’t forget the other things when next it’s time to choose what to do.
It lets me use my spoons with ruthless efficiency.
The serenity prayer is the core of efficiency.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
Or in GTD terms: you’ve got to ask yourself a couple of questions:
Inbox Zero was the philosophy that there should be super clear edges between “email you’ve never even seen before”, “email you still need to reply to but you don’t need to do anything else first”, “email that’s waiting for you or someone else to do something external”, and “email you’re done with but might wanna look up things in later”, and using folders to do that.
I’m not sure if people are still using folders and stuff to organize email, but yeah, in general, fishing out “I need to do something” things from your notes or emails or RSS or socials or phone calls or meetings, and then making yourself aware of what are the practical and concrete actions I need to take and what context I need to be in, practicing that is pretty clutch.
If your email app has a tangle of stuff you’ve already replied to mixed in with something you’re holding off on until you’ve slept on it mixed in with things where you need to go buy flour and chickpeas mixed in with things you have everything ready and you could be replying to it mixed with things that just popped in and you haven’t even seen it, and you’re constantly manually reading and re-reading your list of emails, that’s the sort of pain the Inbox Zero philosophy set out to liberate you from.
Whether you’re using “read/unread” markers, folders, labels, stars, flags, archive etc, you need three steps:
Of course, most of the time you can go from first-look to done immediately, by either replying right away or just ignoring/blocking the email, and that’s great, that’s healthy, but that only makes it more tricky when you do need that intermediate step for some emails.
Most people who are in trouble have figured out how to let their email app have two steps, but are missing a way to have three steps.
Perhaps they’ve figured out that unread email looks bold but then they re-boldify things that they’re not ready to reply to right away, blending the first two categories together. That’s a common cause of stress and repeated work. Having to re-encounter and re-decide about the emails over and over again is pretty exhausting.
My own preference is to use an external todo list app (or on paper) to keep track of emails I still need to do something about, but that only suits me because out of all the things I have to do, only a small portion of them come via email.
Another way to do it is to have a folder, label, flag or star that means “todo”.
A Zettelkasten is a physical slipbox of note cards.
Zettelkästen enabled these researchers to do a couple of new things with text, but we don’t need them today.
I.e. going back and entering text before other text.
This is something any digital notepad app or wordpressor can do, from
the MT/ST in the sixties through notepad.exe
in the nineties down
to almost any textfield, including the numpad based T9 text entry on a
dumbphone.
Weirdly enough, I think this was the biggest mindblow and productivity enhancer for these researchers. It’s non-linear editing, baby! You can go back to before an earlier paragraph and just add another paragraph in there! Holy smokes! This is one of the key parts why Zettelkästen made these researchers so productive. That wasn’t possible before without cramped margin notes or tedious rewriting.
And, compared to some specific Zettelkasten systems, like Luhmann’s 1a1 indexing, the humble notepad apps of today can do something even more mindblowing: actually reorder paragraphs, not just insert new stuff before old paragraphs! Now, historically, there were systems that could do that, that did allow more loosey goosey reshuffling of cards. Processes often used by movie screenwriters, for example, who’ll use forty cards on a corkboard to layout their films. But Luhmann’s specific card id system gave each new card a strict position in the linear sort.
Just imagine the power! … that we’ve all had every day since the spread of the microcomputer a couple of generations ago.
I find that this, editing, is great. Careful editing and reordering
(and deleting selective exporting) can beat any
organization method of just slamming immutable snippets in there in
productivity for 90% of what you wanna do. And outline editors
are even better.
The second part of their wonder juice was:
Linking seems to me like it was a distant second compared to the life-changing magic of arrow keys but it’s the part of these systems that people are most interested in today, for good reason, because we aren’t always familiar with tools to help us do them, backlinks especially.
They didn’t have good tools back then, either, even with a Zettelkasten. They would have to go find the other card (and if it has an ID other than a plain name, they had to dereference it), and if they wanted to add a backlink, they had to physically grab that old other card and add it to it.
If that level of effort is acceptable you don’t even need a Zettelkasten to add some links. Bullet Journal, for example, is pretty strict about always having a table of contents in front of your paper notebooks and maintaining that.
I used a table of contents for my short-lived Starforged attempt (well, maybe I’ll give Starforged another go one of these days) and it made a world of difference in how accessible (to myself) my paper notes became. Having a table of contents and numbered pages so I could find and reference other pages easily. Jolly good.
But there’s a third thing that we have that they could only dream about:
I love the saying “A short pencil beats a long memory”, but there’s
something that beats even a pencil since it can help you if you forget
where you wrote it down. That’s right! Good old Ctrl-F
! Their crusty
old paper boxes can’t grep this.♥︎
First of all, searching can help us do editing and linking more effictively. That’s the key benefit. Searching can also help us find connections that we didn’t even know about. A great index or linking system can make us find specific cards that we have deliberately referenced. Searching can make us find things that we had forgotten about entirely.
I’ve tried this system twice, although only one of those two attempts were really serious, and I couldn’t get it to work.
Now, I like that it leverages having a working GTD system, which I have, and it does set out to solve a problem I perceive myself having (doing slightly fewer long-term and slightly more short-term projects than I tell myself I’d like), and maybe the solution is to try it again and maybe it’ll stick the third time.
I ran into three problems.
And, since I managed to stick to it for such a short time, I wasn’t seeing benefits yet so that intrinsic motivator was lacking.
I was also already using a “Final Version” inspired dot-then-do method of task selection so I already had a solution to half the problem this set out to solve. That leaves the other half: balancing more long-term projects. I do some, like the rewrite of [match-generics] took many days, as a recent example, but I do find it difficult to stick to long-term projects. I’m more of an idea machine and less good at the elbow grease part.
Also the solution of working an equal amount of time, i.e. releasing a ton of small project for every big one… I already do that, sorta? Not 100% equal time but that’s not really the goal, right? The problem is: not enough big projects get done. Getting speed bumped on big projects and asked to do small projects doesn’t sound super fun. Sounds a li’l like the Pomodoro (which I can’t stand; probably better known as getting bleeped at whenever I’m about to go into a flow state and getting ticktickticked at when I can’t).
The idea of releasing small project also is based on it being a way to generate feedback but I don’t get a ton of feedback and probably wouldn’t handle it well if I did. I’m not “super online”, I don’t follow a lot of accounts, I’m not on a lot of social networks. Soju and notmuch is fielding a lot of the irc and mail for me.
Maybe people know that I’m thin-skinned & toxic and get defensive and entrenched and don’t handle feedback well just aren’t that into the weird stuff I do.
I’m also not really part of an artistic community of peers any more, except for the last few years with D&D and programming (which has helped me become better at D&D and programming and motivated me to release more stuff—love it, super grateful, haven’t found the same for the other art forms). Also I get great feedback on the essays themselves and the opinions in them.♥︎ Even disagreement is good, either I can elaborate on something I missed addressing, or I can change my mind.
IDK. Maybe it’s all good as it is. It’s a struggle but that’s what the war of art is.
Recovery was swift and worth the wait,
a brisk and rapid couple million years,
as algae grasp at life beneath the waves,
and fiery rain has fried me through the core.
This wooden spoon is coal, a painter’s wish.
The open canvas roiling like the sea.
No destination waits beyond that sea,
so hesitation whispers to me: “wait!”
No goal, no dream, no guiding beacon wish,
just staying on that hot tin roof for years.
No need to bury, digging to the core:
lost at shore before those endless waves.
Left standing, sinking, hearing mighty waves,
in sand, in liminal. The beach, not sea.
A bridesmaid caught a rotten applecore.
I’ll set my sail tomorrow! Just you wait!
(Or, failing that, in six or seven years.)
Procrastinating tangled up my wish.
That falling star, I snatched it for my wish:
a guide to find a path across the waves
of foam, of sea, of tachyons, of years.
The journey’s only purpose is the sea.
The present doesn’t need for me to wait
since now is now. We’re always at the core.
The bottleneck within the hourglass core:
a promise knot, a hopeless tangled wish,
a comfy wait that traps you in the wait.
Prerequisites come crashing down like waves.
These rocks and pebbles washed up from the sea:
debris that binds my schedule up for years.
I taste a second. Barely hear the years.
Ten bulls transcended, lost inside the core.
A stolen conch horn dreaming of the sea,
forever whispering its inner wish,
reflecting audibly, for us, those waves.
Just does. Without a need for it to wait.
The years get stolen waiting for that wish.
The core lies not beyond, nor on, the waves.
The now is all I have. The sea can wait.
First, and most importantly, before looking at your old lists, write down what’s most on your mind right now. If it’s among what you’re worrying most about right now, it needs to be front and center in your new system.
Second, from your old system, move everything to “someday/maybe”, or to a sublist in “someday/maybe”. If it’s on digital, just drag it over there without looking at what’s in there yet. If it’s a paper list, relabel it without reading it yet.
Third, sort the new stuff in from step one onto your now empty lists. Here’s also where you can make changes to your system, what lists you have, how it’s set up etc. It’s even a chance for you to switch system. It should be a rule in GTD to never, ever change systems, but here’s your chance. But if you can get back to your old system, that’s even better. It’s more likely that the reason you fell off it was that your life changed in a disruptive way rather than an issue with your implementation itself.
Fourth, and this is the painful part; finally open your someday/maybe with those old lists and selectively pick the most important old stuff and bring it back into your new lists.
When it comes to “future paperwork” like “I’m gonna need these bus tickets next Wednesday”, and I’m talking actual paper here, for most people who only have like three or four such paper pieces in a given month (usually), it’s enough to have a li’l basket or bag or folder or envelope or stack or tray for them and make a note of them in your normal calendar or reminder app, which is where you need to be checking anyway.
The Getting Things Done book recommends a system where you have an actual physical folder dedicated to every day, that you then also need to get in the habit of checking every day. This is great, but only worth it if you actually have a lot of physical paperwork incoming, which most people and professions in this digital era don’t. (I wanna say 99% don’t but I’d be pulling that number out of my hat since I don’t have actual stats. Not everyone has a digital profession, like if you, I don’t know, make pottery or something, but professions that deal with sorting a lot of incoming information usually are digital.)
That paper folder system was pretty clever, actually. You didn’t need 365 folders, you only needed 43. One for each month, and then thirty one for the days in a month, numbered 1 through 31. For stuff that’s less than a month from now, you put it in the numbered folders. For stuff that’s further away, you put it in that month’s folder, and then as that month arrives, you sort its contents out into the numbered folders along with what you’ve already filed there.
So say it’s the 29th of November right now. Your folders would look like, front to back:
29 30 D 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 31 J F M A M J J A S O N (You’d write out the full month names.)
You pour everything from the 29 folder, which represents November 29th, into your “in” tray, and stick the 29 folder in among your December folders and it now represents December 29th.
For digital, do not do this folder juggling. Having 365 folders is unreasonable & unnecessary on paper, folders are cheap on digital so it’s better to have one for each YYYY-MM-DD date. (And even then, that’s only if you’re somehow writing your own app for this instead of using one of the many, many readily available apps.)
Here’s one way to divide up the information world.
For the purps of this discussion, I mean everything that’ll let you know on its own, it’ll blong or ring or hum or blink or sigh.
Many apps overnotify you about everything, making you hate ‘em, constantly interrupting you all the time.
A much-behated category so it’s important to not put too much stuff here, and also to be able to toggle notifications on and off quickly (maybe in two tiers).
If you can manage both of those, this is actually a wonderful category.
“I don’t wanna be interrupted”; yeah, you’ve got to be able to temporarily mute this category.
It’s wonderful to be able to do something like draw or read or watch a movie knowing that if something important happens, I’ll know.
It’s fantastic because it lets you avoid the dread terrors of…
This is the category for when you want to read everything, but there’s no notification so there’s constantly checking-checking-checking.
Pull sucks!
Now, there are two kinds of people in the world.
Those who can check their pull stuff (for example, they have email set up as a pull-based system) in the morning, then go to work, focused on work and never spending even a single thought on their pull stuff. Then, once work is done and the desk is clean, they can check their pull stuff again and calmly deal with anything in there.
Then, there are those that have ants in the brain. They try to work or read or think but they find themselves constantly checking-checking-checking, or thinking about checking, which is just as bad.
I’m one of these people. I realized this and got pretty good at eliminating all “pull”, but then it has sneaked back in after device changes or platform updates or broken workflows or new communities.
Pull is addictive like a slot machine or a scratch ticket. You refresh and “ooh, you got a like”.
So many sites are set up to favor pull (because it’s an addictive anti-pattern and because ads are not palatable to push).
I need to develop a less completionist mindset for when I just wanna browse and discover and learn curious things.
Browse is the category for where you don’t need to read everything, but you can find fun stuff drifting by.
As bad as it feels to be browsing mindlessly on dumb sites and forums, the refresh-refresh-refresh checking-checking-checking of pull sites and apps are way worse for me.
After being really deep in pull hell, browsing can actually start to feel really great by comparison. I have an RSS/Atom app with tons of groups and feeds, more than I could ever keep up with. It’s perfect for this type of browsing experience, reminds me of browsing Usenet groups except that the stuff in there is actually interesting because I subscribed to it at one time or another. It has microblogs and essays and magazine articles and even videos.
Pull and browse are enemies of focused, deliberate reading, which is difficult when the lure of refresh-check-pull is so strong. I briefly had a pretty nifty setup with Calibre’s wonderful RSS->ebook setup. It’d do a pretty good job of fetching and converting the pages so you could make, for example, a cozy li’l weekly hacking journal out of Lobste.rs. I was happy: I had eliminated pull, I had my most important stuff on push, and I’d catch up on Sundays reading nerd stuff on e-ink.
That setup slipped away as some of the push workflows broke down and left me back in pull-land and maybe it’s for the best: is “reading every single article on Lobste.rs” really a better use of my hours than a good book? Lobste.rs works better for the browse mindset: haphazard, discoverly, non-committal.
I’m keeping the solution in my mental toolbox since that tech didn’t stop working (it was push stuff and notifications that did, as I switched from notmuch to Delta Chat and from Android to iOS). Maybe I’ll figure out a set of feeds that I do wanna read every week and it’s non-interactive enough to be suitable for e-ink.
One experiment from a few years back, with mediocre results so far, is “the slow push”. It’s like push but it only gets to blong you once per four hours or once per hour or once per day.
The problem is that there’s a risk that you’ll start pull check-check-checking in between those hours.
How to actually get to those three ideals, I don’t know. Now I have a signpost; time to make a roadmap.
First of all, the grass isn’t necessarily that green on this side of the fence since I often write these essays when I’m procrastinating on other things. It’s a way for me to chill out and relax and be social, so I’m OK with it, or I’d have to make some big changes to my GTD routine. These last few months, I’ve already found myself overly SOFA-prone, nerd-snipeable, and driven by the latest and loudest instead of doing deep, deliberate work. I pretty much spend my days reading and blogging instead of hanging out with other people and doing real things.
Other things that help is that I never worry if an article is too long or too short, and I edit both before and after I post. I write a sloppy first draft and I fix it before the initial publication, which ergo is usually once the second draft is done, but I’m also super willing to keep polishing old posts. Simon has a “don’t look back! onto the next!” policy for his blog while I have more of a wiki mindset. Although our policies are opposite, both have the same purpose: to help us get over the hesitancy to hit “publish”. And both seem to work well.
I don’t “preview the rendering”. When I was writing a lot of essays for print I’d constantly be re-running TeX neurotically. These days I don’t even preview before uploading. I check after uploading and if something looks weird then I fix it.
I also work on these in parallel. You might see me post, and then a second post two hours later and be like “whoa!”, but that second post might be months in the making. Sometimes. And sometimes not. I only rarely have actual written drafts in progress (right now I have about five), but stuff is churning in the back of my mind and then it’s easy to bang it out. I’m lucky to be a fast typist (Dvorak FTW!) and it’s also the case that the more I’ve written, the easier it has gotten.
I have good tools to help me with formatting, publishing, spamming an excerpt to Fedi, pushing the post to Antenna etc, all of that is automatic. I also have one for turning README files into blog posts so those are practically freebies. I don’t wanna have to fiddle with that stuff, I want it all sanded down. I see people proudly saying they write their HTML by hand and their Atom by hand and I’m like “you do you, son! I have Markdown.”
Most of the time when I’m writing, I’m writing to someone. I start explaining something on a forum or in an email, and sometimes I realize after a few paragraphs that this would make a better blog post, and shift gears. Other times I don’t realize until I’ve written it and then I’ll just paste it in here, sometimes combining a few posts there into one here. (I’m sure you can tell that the quality suffers. 🤷🏻♀️) I used to have a deliberate policy that stuff I wrote on S-G, BGG, WRNU, Reddit, blog comments would stay there and not be duplicated on here. I would think to myself “heh heh heh, if someone would accidentally stumble over everything I write all over the net they’d think I was prolific AF”. But since a few years back, I’ve done a 180˚ on that and as you can see I’ve gone from a few posts per years in here to a few posts per day.
All this duplication is bad for SEO but I never care about that. I never use analytics or log analysis, I just try to make the page as I would want it.
One of the biggest changes from when I was writing much is that I also was reading much, back then. A conversation is easier to sustain than a monologue; learning and teaching go hand in hand. Ideas come from other people.
The Noguchi Filing System is for keeping track of physical paper. I keep paper in envelopes on a shelf and new envelopes go on the right (or on the left if you live in Japan) and if I use an envelope, it goes on the right as if it were new. Linux nerds can think of this as sorting the envelopes by atime. Envelopes always must have a date along the spine and a word or sentence describing what’s in ‘em. Optionally they can have a color, using markers or stickers. Noguchi even cut them off one inch so that the a4 documents in there stick up a bit.
I use the Noguchi filing system and have for decades and tonight I needed to find a contract from 11 years ago and I managed to find it pretty quickly, next to break-up–letters and roller derby team rosters and tickets and old gadget manuals. 🤷🏻♀️
I’ve got to say, I did flinch when putting it at the top of the stack instead of putting it back with the other December 2011 era papers. But I trust the system, it’s been good so far, so…
♥︎
I personally do use one envelope per document rather than the buckets variant (in that variant, which Forster briefly promoted, each envelope represents an entire topic, like a folder). This is much better for me, since I don’t have to dig up something old just to file something new. Some documents are many pages, it’s not one envelope per page, but separate (although related) documents go in separate envelopes. For example, back in the day before publishers allowed digital submissions, one draft of a novel would be like hundreds of sheets, all crammed into one envelope. Separate drafts of the same novel went into separate envelopes even though they’re the same “topic”.
I’ve got to add, please don’t let me convince you to use the Noguchi filing system if you have doubts. I’ve loved it for years and it’s worked exactly as intended and it’s a perfect fit for me and for how my brain works. I’m more likely to remember temporal context than a name, I would’ve been like “is it C for contracts, H for housing, A for apartment, B for broker, S for the seller’s signature, F for the floor, X for the spot I live in” etc.
Similarly, I keep folders in the computer sorted by mtime, not by name.
I just have a huge and clear preference for that way of working but if you’re on the fence, I don’t wanna be responsible for if five years down the line you’re looking for a file and cursing because you feel I talked you into a filing system that wasn’t your bag.
One problem with the NFS is that it’s difficult to apply it to an existing collection of paper. For the first year getting organized, I used an a–z filing system and when I wanted to switch to Noguchi’s method, I had one year’s worth of paper that I didn’t know how to sort. I was like: I wish I had used Noguchi’s system from the start and if I then would’ve wanted to move that into alpha, I could. But now it’s been fifteen years of NFS and I don’t have a lot of the junk from that one first year🤷🏻♀️
But in your case you might have several months of paper, are they all gonna get the same date?
Small might be why it works for me. Mine is only one foot wide (that currently is enough for a decade and a half). When it gets full, I grab the rarely-used end which by then is crystal clear to sort between junk and long-term-storage. A decision which isn’t as easy to make on the front end.
I also never put actionable, “TODO” type stuff in there. Only “this might come in handy” stuff.
I also have another hack that helps keep papers few.
Outside of my NFS I have two “junk” trays. Stuff only goes in them if I’m OK with throwing it directly into the trash. Paid bills are a good example.
Once the top tray is full (which usually takes about a year), I take the bottom tray and destroy everything in it, then I rotate the trays so the bottom is full and the top is empty. This way, I always have access to around a year’s worth of paper trash. In case a bill is disputed or something. I spend no time on “filing” things there, it’s just literally a flat trash basket.
It makes me less prone to over-filing and hoarding. I can just put something in “the flat trash bin” if I’m in doubt about needing it again. And, the NFS itself also helps there because if I’m in doubt but leaning towards keep, that’s also fine because it’s gonna “drift towards the left” the more useless it is. Everything on the left is either a perfect untouchable treasure, or completely obsoleted junk, and it’s gonna be so clear which is which so I can archive the treasures and get rid of the trash.
Over the years, I’ve seen many people compare the Noguchi filing system to a stack, a pile on a messy desk or even papers in a huge barrel.
I first saw this comparison in the book A Perfect Mess by Abrahamson and Freedman, where they write:
If something seems vaguely familiar about the [NFS] arrangement, perhaps it’s this: Turn the row of envelopes so that the envelopes are stacked vertically instead of horizontally, place the stack on your desktop, and get rid of the envelopes. Now you’ve got an ordinary pile of papers of the sort that you’d find on any messy desk, where the most recent and most used items tend to end up at the top. So the next time someone tells you your pile-covered desk is messy, you can point out that it’s just hyper-organized.
This made me chuckle, as it reminded me of a professor at my old university. He was a clever chap, naturally, but I never approved of his sense of organization. He had a huge stack of papers on his desk. It led me to joke that he didn’t file things alphabetically, but by centimeters from the bottom.
OK, so, in all seriousness, I believe there is some merit to this jokey comparison.
Stacks might work for some people, the same way the NFS has worked for me since 2007.
And if people are using stacks and piles, that’s a good thing. It’s not that I’d benefit from people rushing out and getting envelopes and folders if they don’t wanna. Save the Earth!
But so often when we hear these stories about a messy, absent-minded genius who has stacks and piles and barrels and clothespins and racks and cans, but still manages to be brilliant and get work done, it’s from the outside. Scoffingly and admiringly at the same time. It’s rare we get to hear how their “system” actually works.
So in that spirit, here are three ways to make your stack better (i.e. turn it into an NFS). Best (most impact) advice first, but you can mix and match.
Part of what makes this work is that I know that it’s in there. When I had to find that contract, I was sighing and groaning because I didn’t wanna go delving in there, but I wasn’t scared. I knew it was in there (and I did manage to find it pretty quickly). It’s optimized for putting things in there without thinking (you’re talking to Miss Decision Fatigue over here) so do it. A stack where you know there are treasures is a precious thing.
Also, I never put actionable stuff in there, only reference.
Even with a vertical stack, you can do the NFS sifting thing of putting stuff on top, and then when you replace something from further down below, put it on the top instead of where it was. This has the con of breaking your temporal association, but these pros:
(Also you’re gonna feel better because you Have A Consistent System and not just a mess. This pro is kind of illusory but it’s a nice bonus.)
The envelopes, which have a date and a name and sometimes a color dot aren’t just for show (although they do look a li’l neater). It’s metadata and sometimes it’s easier to find something by seeing the date and/or name than to leaf through a huge pile of paper. I remembered the year of the contract which made it easier to find, and, I only had to read through one sentence per envelope, not stare at page after page of small print text trying to figure out what each one was. It’s like looking at filenames as opposed to lessing through a whole cat
of files. This is also sometimes bad, though, because sometimes you do give it a dumb name and you don’t remember when it’s from.
Also, sometimes documents come in all kinds of shapes and colors, or are multipage folders or printouts or leaflets. That can make ordering difficult.
The envelopes are great to leaf through compared to a bunch of cut-inducing paper.
This li’l section has defended stacks, but I’m actually happy that my NFS is in a horizontal shelf and not in a stack in a barrel or box or drawer. I can flip through it from the side as opposed to lifting every item one by one. A kinda minor benefit but nice none-the-less.
I always say that the Noguchi Filing System has a tradeoff of making files slightly harder to retrieve but a lot easier to file, and for someone who hardly ever retrieves files but keep resisting filing because of the friction and boredom, it’s worth it, and it becomes a thousand times more worth it since it’s easier to cull old dead useless files which is very difficult and cumbersome to do in an A-Z system but trivial in a Noguchi system.
I might wanna revise that “tradeoff” philosophy because today I needed to find a file that in an A-Z I would have no idea where to even begin to look because I had no idea what I would’ve named it. It was just so odd and weird. I would’ve have to look through every folder. But with the Noguchi filing system I found it instantly because I knew when it had to be from.
I guess I’m more of a temporal thinker than a verbal one (as y’all can see how I struggle with the English language).
Also on Unix when I have no idea what a file is named or what its greppable contents are, I can be “but I worked on this other, known file at around the same time” and sort by time stamps (ls -rt |less
) and search for the known file and look near there and that way find the weirdly-named file. Works great. On Unix I sort by mtime rather than by atime but in my physical NFS I like the atime version better.
Organization i.e. knowing exactly what to do, is much more important than willpower. Make more concrete goals and more concrete steps.
Lack of willpower is our brain’s way of protecting us from overwork. Don’t force your way through stress.
But one way to do things when you don’t wanna is to let the resistance and “this is so boooring” feelings just wash over you and feel them fully. Both sides of you—the side that wants to do it and the side that don’t—need to feel fully heard & consulted, lest they subconsciously revolt (through guilt or procrastination, respectively).
Both sides of your brain need to be in on the decision and which ever side doesn’t gets its way (i.e. the don’t-er, if you decide to do it, or the doer if you decide to don’t it) need to have gotten the opportunity to feel like “OK, I might not like it but I feel like my points were heard and I see the points of the winning side.”
In addition, there is biological variation in the prefrontal cortex that makes executing on things significantly harder for some people. Which is why organization and concreteness makes a huge difference.