“There is no money, inherently, in being productive.” - Stever Robbins
Perfectly put. If you don’t spend time on why you’re doing something before you dive into your favorite GTD app, you’re only moving more efficiently in the wrong direction.
Dave Caolo, writer/curator of nerdery, prompted me to elaborate on the advantages of journaling for writers, after my review of Day One.
I’ve been writing for some kind of publication for 24 years. I write 8 hours a day professionally and about 1 or 2 hours for pleasure. But I know that if I could squeeze in another hour, I’d be a little better. Journaling is a small part of that 1 or 2 hours of writing for pleasure.
I can’t say what it’ll do for you, but, for me, journaling:
Above all, the most important reason to journal can be summed up by Socrates:
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
I don’t think focus gets enough attention. It’s the single thing that separates the products and services I care about from those I yawn about.
A few years ago, Kevin Costner made two lower-budget, indie-style movies that were better than any of the big budget movies he’s ever touched. One of them was Open Range; arguably one of the best “guy” movies ever made. The other was Thirteen Days, the story of the Cuban missile crisis from inside the White House. Actually, it’s the story of total focus and attention on a singular problem (in this case, an end-of-the-world-type problem).
Forget the politics and nitpicking for a second. There’s so much about this movie for a productivity nerd to love; from the President’s GTD method, to the meetings of historical heavyweights locked in a room and duking it out over solutions to Armadgeddon-level issues. Plus, it takes place in a time and location where high quality materials and minimalism ruled over even the most common of daily tasks (imagine entire sets designed by the Field Notes crew).
But what really matters about the movie - why I put it in the DVD player before I take on a major project - is the focus. If anyone put as much energy and focus into their projects as these characters did, there’s no limit to what could be accomplished. There’s no limit to the money or impact that could be made. There’s no competition that could possibly touch what’s produced.
It should encourage you, that of all your possible competitors, few are executing, but much fewer (if any) are bringing an intense focus to what they execute. It’s an opportunity.
A few great posts have been written in response to my Back to Paper, Back to Work post. I admire both the writers, so it was treat to see them hack apart my thinking.
Aaron Mahnke wrote:
A great GTD computer application serves one single purpose in my day-to-day: removing friction. Tools like OmniFocus allow me to quickly push tasks and ideas out of the active portion of my brain and into a system that allows me to organize them by date, project and context. The friction disappears because I can enter the items fast and move on, knowing that later that day or week I’ll be able to sit down and organize it all. For me, paper can’t serve in that same frictionless manner. It’s in the pixels that I find speed and freedom.
This brings up a good point. Just because the brain works better with paper, doesn’t mean everything you do requires firing on all cylinders. This is part of what I’m trying out in my experiment. So far, for my workload, I don’t see enough of a reason to spend the time and money to bring the complexity of this software back in my life. Talk to me in a month.
Chris Bowler responded to Aaron with his own take:
My process is similar. I absolute need paper, but more for certain aspects of my day, rather than my entire system. OmniFocus is my Inbox, where various links and URLs are dumped, to be processed later. It’s also where I document all my big projects, each with it’s specific action items or Someday ideas.
I believe the inbox will always be a mix of analogue and digital, because we live in both worlds. But I also believe projects require deeper thought. Deeper thought requires two things (according to the monstrous amount of reading I’ve been doing):
Which brings me back to The Shallows, the book that started this. The author gave a sneak preview of the book in an article for Wired (June 2010):
In a Science article published in early 2009, prominent developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield reviewed more than 40 studies of the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies, she wrote, has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” But those gains go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”
This is one of the reasons I’m not likely to say, “to each his own” when this is over. There’s actual science here, not just productivity pr0n.
I’m also not going to give in to the theory of “Appropriatism,” because I don’t believe it holds true for artists (by which I mean all creatives who care to be unique). I believe in a certain amount of constraint to force creativity. I’ve seen too many musicians/painters/writers get boring when they finally have the money to buy what they feel are appropriate tools.
None of the things we’ve touched on yet even hints at the hardest part of the experiment to come. A “system” means more than actions and projects. The really hard part is reference materials - something even David Allen seems leery to approach.
If the research is true, we should be printing everything out. Nothing about that will appeal to us. Apple doesn’t even make a printer.
Information overload…that’s not the issue. If it was, you’d walk into a library and die. The first time you connect to the web, you’d blow up. As a matter of fact, the most relaxing environment in the world is the most information rich environment in the world. It’s all around us. It’s called nature. As a matter of fact, if you really want to stress out and goes nuts, sensory depravation is a fast way to do that.
A year ago there was nothing hotter than Evernote, the application touted as “your external brain.” I had high hopes. A long list of writers, podcasters and productivity buffs heralded it as the answer to information overload.
I played with it for a few months, then paid for the premium version. I shoved all my notes and documents in it. I listened to their podcast. I subscribed to their feeds.
After I had loaded it up with information, I started to actually use it for its intended purpose - retrieving information. What the hell had I done? Now, nothing was findable without twice the work and simple tasks felt like I was asking my processor to edit video. Turns out, I wasn’t alone.
John Gruber blasted it, Jason Fried questioned the numbers and Merlin Mann abandoned it (after being one of its biggest cheerleaders).
I’m coming to the same conclusion, at what may be the worst possible time. With the release of the iPad, applications like Evernote will become essential to house, in one place, what we used to store in a myriad of different files types in nested folders on our hard drives.
The problem is, it just doesn’t work like it should. The search returns every note, but the one you want (even if you’re searching for the exact title of the note you want). Text of no consquence in a picture gets treated the same as the lead words of your most important note.
Much like a black hole, information goes in and doesn’t come out unless it’s in a jet blast of random text and images. This is seen as a feature, not a bug, by the developers at Evernote. In fact, in the newest Evernote promo video (for the iPad app), a search is performed for “soup.” It yields 80 results. The demonstrator is excited by the amount of information returned. I think it’s the heart of their problem.
The Spotlight integration is..well..spotty (often non-existent for me). And then there’s the beach balls. What’s on my Mac is there because it’s fast, simple and works with minimal effort. Evernote is none of those things.
Evernote will probably improve in the future. And the iPad app looks like a vast improvement of the UI. But, for now, I’ve started moving my files back to the documents folder, where I’m finding what I need in a split second through Spotlight.
2.5 year update: I’ve since downloaded and re-evaluated Evernote and it seems even more cluttered than ever. They still haven’t addressed their biggest problems, as they see them as solutions. I’m now trying out Yojimbo, because it comes highly recommended by people I respect.
