Archive - Oct 2006

The productivity methodology I teach stresses the value capturing everything that's on your mind - commitments, concerns, ideas, etc. - and processing them frequently to harvest the corresponding actions. I wanted to share a few capture quickies I thought you'd appreciate.

Tap into your "smartest self"

One way to look at capture is that it leverages when you do think of something, not when you think you should be creating. Our brains have wonderful abilities to associate ideas in novel ways, put unlikely things together, and come up with surprising abstractions, but they don't do so on demand or on a fixed "creativity schedule."

I just finishing very quickly going over Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy, which has been in my candidates library for a while. It came to the front of my list as a result of some questions that came during discussion in a recent workshop.

A while back I wrote What's your maximum response time?, in which I questioned why some people don't respond in a timely manner to emails, even if it's to say "no" or "don't write me again" [1]. Due to my GTD practice I'm more sensitive to this in others and especially myself, and I've been pretty consistently sticking to a personal maximum response time of 24 hours. (24 hours is reasonable for most of my transactions; YMMV.)

Dan Gillmor is famous for his quote My readers know more than I do. I'd like to tap into my very smart bunch of subscribers and ask if you've any recommendations for digital voice recorders. For my birthday (44!) my family is buying me one for my use in capturing reading (see my post How to read a lot of books in a short time for the back story), so your thoughts would be very welcome! (I'm leaning towards the Olympus DS-2 or the Olympus WS-300M.)

Yesterday I put on part one of my two-part six hour workshop How Do I Deal with All this Stuff!?: A simple system for taking control of work and life. For me, preparing and presenting these workshops has a ton of value, not just (hopefully) for my participants, but to me as a student of personal productivity. (As I wrote earlier, if you want to learn, teach!) They're also a lot of fun!

I wanted to share a few observations from yesterday I thought you'd enjoy.

Brain dump topics

Here are a few of the fascinating topics that came up during the brain dump exercise:

• enzyme research project (experimental research)
• school volunteer calls (20 of them)
• bottling schedule (olive oil business)
• tag sale
• gift visit reports (development office)

I don't typically use this forum to address current events, but I just want to be clear: The United States government is not acting in my name, nor in the name of my family. We believe that torture is never acceptable, and we're ashamed of the recent pro-torture legislation (summarized in Senate Passes Dangerous Bush Military Commissions Bill).

As shown by a long series of events, including the war in Iraq, I feel this country is rapidly slipping down a slope in which our actions are in clear contradiction with our proclaimed values. The rest of the world knows it, but apparently my government and many of my fellow Americans don't see it.

I am ashamed of our actions, and feel powerless in our direction.

Related Links

• Torture is Simply NOT OK