In the last two years, I've done more personal development than I had since college. While I was not a failure by any means, I had stagnated in my personal and professional development. A combination of irresponsibility and vast disorganization was really holding me back from reaching any type of potential that I had. I definitely can pinpoint April 17, 2007 as a day that my life changed. I found out I was getting back a sizable amount from the IRS, and decided to finally purchase a Mac, and my youngest daughter was born
With the standard re-evaluation that happens with the birth of a child, I realized the old saying of "work smarter, not harder" was one I had forgotten. I was not happy where I was professionally, and my stress levels were much too high, and I knew it would get worse with an infant. I realized I hadn't really done proper self-analysis into how I worked, and how I stumbled through life. For a long time I had prided myself on my ability to multi-task, and to have low context switching costs. In addition to the fact that I probably overestimated these abilities, I also ignored the natural downside of this trait. My self-diagnosed ADD killed my productivity. When a "brilliant" idea would come my way, I'd drop what I was doing and further develop it, sometimes even acting on it. At the same time, I avoided mundane but necessary tasks figuring that I would remember to do them (despite all evidence to the contrary). The problem was that I was relying on my brain, which is good at tricking me into doing what it wanted to do. It's a useful tool, but it's unreliable, especially when you naturally flit to the latest shiny bauble. I had forgotten two of my basic principles, balance and , which is to have enough confidence to be empowered, while always striving for self-improvement. Oh, I thought I was improving. I was constantly reading anything I could get my hands on. But I was able to do almost nothing with that new information, other than occasionally find a cleaner more elegant computer algorithm or framework. Meanwhile, my internal systems for translating all the thoughts into actions was stagnating. And with another huge responsibility staring me in my face, I knew I had to change.
So, being a geek, I sought my salvation in technology. Once I unwrapped my shiny new toy, with some great suggestions from one of the most productive and insightful guys I personally know I quickly stumbled on to Merlin Mann at 43folders and started hearing about David Allen's Getting Things Done. As I dug more and more, I began to see how it fit me perfectly. Looking into how people were implementing GTD, I saw a lot of the adherents were mac fan-bois. Several simple GTD systems sufficed, and started making a noticable difference while I eagerly awaited the delivery of Omnifocus. Omnifocus was in so small part based on a brilliant collection of scripts Mann had written.
With Omnifocus as my GTD system for managing all of my commitments, and Yojimbo as my everything else database that is trivial to add to and search (though if I were starting from scratch now, I'd probably go with Evernote). I don't worry about creating a structure that I know that I'll abandon for notes and other artifacts, I just tag it all.I still have hundreds of "projects" (anything that takes more than two physical actions to complete in GTD nomenclature) from work to getting ready for our next child, to clearing up a debt. But my mind doesn't constantly wander to them, as I know and trust that eventually I'll get around to it when it is approriate, and my systems now do a much better job of telling me when it's approiate. And It's so trivial now when I read an interesting blog post or bit of documentation to make a quick note that I will revisit later during my reviews, that I don't worry about running after the latest shiny ball. I just make note that there is a shiny ball and store it away, knowing that when my contexts and priorites align. A context in GTD is a place that you are in, be it mental or physical. Sometimes I just have enough time to make a five minute call, I look at my call items and do it. Sometimes I feel like planning, and I see what all of my planning items are.
I think the other reason I've become such a ridiculous Mac shill is friction. Being someone who is prone to procrastinating, I would internally sense when something I wanted to do took any "wasted action". Why wait for 2 minutes for something to compile while I could be researching some other piece of technology or taking care of an email. The problem was, when I'd go off while waiting for something, I'd . While I only found the Productive Programmer recently, it does an excellent job of showing how to streamline all of one's processes. I don't think this is necessarily critical for everyone. People with discipline and focus probably don't have the issue that if a process takes 30 seconds longer than it should that the task should be avoided to do something else more "productive". They probably just deal with the 30 seconds, and actually finish the task, and end up being much more productive in the aggregate. For people like me though, the cost is not a mere 30 seconds, but much longer, as I avoid doing the things I should do since I think I have so many more items clamoring for my attention. Between the scripting, and wonderful integration, and all the great baked in developer tools, I spend little time thinking of how to make my computer do what I want in an efficient manner, and now just do.
I still have to fight my tendencies all the time to get back on track. But the need to constantly improve as a parent gives me the motivation to fight those tendencies and constantly improve the velocity at which I get things done. I've got a long way to catch up, but I'm gaining fast.
