GTD asks us to “capture”, which means to write down stuff or use audio recordings or whatever.
Sometimes it feels like writing down “Email Alice and Bob about how such-and-such” would take longer time than just writing & sending that actual email, if you have a good comfy modern email app, especially if you’re capturing with some level of detail what the email is about.
In the modern era, that’s true for more things than email; there are plenty of other things we do that work similarly.
GTD has the two-minute rule to prevent this; when things would be quicker to just do, you just do them instead of forcing them through the system.
But when almost everything falls under that “two minute” umbrella, you lose out on one of the main benefits of GTD in the first place, which is to live a more directed and intentional life where the stuff we do is the stuff we want to do the most right now.
This is a problem for GTD in 2024.
One GTD idea that has fallen by the wayside was to have “agenda lists”, you’d keep an “Alice” list with stuff you wanted to talk to Alice about the next time you see her, and a “Bob” list and so on. These days, it’s hard to argue for having such “agenda lists” when you have your computer in your pocket so you can always send things to them right away instead of waiting for a chance to see them. Writing the thing down on the list takes almost as much time as just writing it down in a message to them.
But it’s not a worthless idea. Some people we still do have in our IRL lives (although because of the pandemic I went 15 months not seeing anyone IRL—yeah, I went a li’l crazy) and I’ve been experimenting with using agenda lists again. The idea is that sure, if it’s someone who lives on the other side of the planet, I should message them instead, but if it’s someone I wanna see IRL soon, I’m better off making a note so I can talk to them about it IRL than messaging them.
The drawback is that I can tend to become a li’l forgotten, a little bit out-of-sight-out-of-mind, but that’s why we have the “waiting for” list.
I’ve been trying to be more asynchronous lately and the setup I’m currently on does introduce more overhead and inefficiencies. I’ve still got more things I can sand down but it’ll probably fundamentally still be a li’l less efficient than to just do it directly. The reason I’m doing it is to get more intentional and more selective. That my takes will be cooler and more though-through and less urgent. But I have limited spoons and if this does end up too efficient, I’m not sure I can afford doing it this way.
There’s a li’l bit of hope though. Even as I’m introducing these inefficiencies, I’m making my overall routine more efficient in other ways that I hope can make up for it. There’s less context switching and more batching. I can plug in my keyboard and bang out a bunch of stuff in one sitting that’d otherwise trickle out across several days without getting anything else done. And I can do other things without the same amount of inner turmoil and distraction, if I can internalize that to everything there is a season. Time will tell if I can make up for it completely (or even more, so that I’ll net gain time) or if I can at least make up for it somewhat, enough that the directedness and intentionality makes it worth keeping up.
I’ve also found that things can be discussed more thoroughly and quickly in a conversiation than in a series of texts. The flipside is when you need to look back and reference what was said.
This “batching” is looking good so far! I’m still experimenting but I’ll return here to share what I’ve found! So far I’m spending way less time on social media. That doesn’t necessarily equate to getting more things done since there are books and I’ve been connecting with old friends. It’s an evolving journey! 🤷🏻♀️
I can’t believe it’s only been three months. I’ve seen a radical transformation already. No more doomscrolling; back to a more restful approach to media.
It is a fact that it takes longer to get a notepad and a pen and write down “look up how many teeth a giraffe has” and then later get out that that notepad and pen and decipher your handwriting and then get out your magical don’t-panic–marked panic-inducing pocket Guide and look it up via the information superhighway “cyber space” than it takes to just skip the writing-it-down part and go directly into the “cyber space” and look up your emergency giraffe-fact right away.
Or it would be a fact if there weren’t any rabbit holes online.
Because going online and then on your way to and from the
alt.fan.giraffes Usenet archive, that might make that method take
longer.
So one way to justify the joy of writing things down first (even though the real reason is that it’s fun to write things down) would be if we could leverage that written-down–list to get into enough fewer rabbit holes (perhaps because the giraffe BBS is just one stop on a more-or-less pre-planned itinerary) and/or use the sheer overwhelming length of the list to motivate us to perhaps cross out some things from that list entirely via the life-changing magic of WONTFIX and sifting and choosing which of our gazillion things on the list we really do want to check. That’d be one way to an efficient and fun life.
Another would be if we developed an iron will such that going online for the giraffe trivia really truly only took as little time as it does, completely rabbit-hole free. This one seems pretty difficult; it happens again and again (including yesterday) where I’m with someone and they’re like “okay I just wanna look up that one fact we just discussed” and then they end up checking nine or ten other things because they get sucked in because online is a hellvortex.
A third approach would be to trust in our own intuitive, curious, pleasure-seeking, info-seeking, instinct-powered heads and hearts and stopped seeing the rabbit holes as bad things and just lived more according to whim and stopped fighting it and reveled in the treasury of the connected world. That actually sounds pretty great but I’m gonna say no on that because that curious playful trust was co-opted, hijacked, exploited by bad-faith actors like Meta and X and Google and Bytedance who poured razorblades and toxic glue into the ballpit and now playful exploration means getting forcefed constant junk.
Ergo: lists FTW. Capture → process → do like saint Allen intended.
Also then you can do it with a proper keyboard and a proper screen and a propper cuppa. That might make going through that facts-to-lookup-list faster too, I dunno.