Tools for Thought

One of the more recent practices to become popular in the art of task management is the mind sweep. Instead of simply writing down our most obvious goals our top priorities, the aim of the mind sweep is write down a complete inventory of everything that has our attention. When we capture all of our [...]

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Realizing the life we want to live requires action. Discerning that life requires perspective. Action usually requires at least some loss of perspective. It’s hard to drive while reading the map. In a society rich with information, entertainment and commodities, perspective demands that from time to time we enter the devil’s workshop of idleness. An [...]

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Consider the initial steps in the GTD in-basket processing: Pick up item from In Ask, “What is it?” Ask, “Is it actionable?” [If yes] Ask, “What’s the successful outcome?” Ask, “What’s the next action?” In my opinion, there’s a glaring ommission in the algorithm, one that leads to overpopulated project and action lists. After asking, [...]

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David Allen’s Getting Things Done was one of the first productivity books to openly discuss the use of PDAs and software, so it’s no surprise that many technology enthusiasts latched onto GTD with uncommon zeal. It suddenly became easy to dignify a gadget fetish by invoking work as the rationale. Newcomers to GTD often purchase [...]

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It always warms my heart to see people questioning dominant ideas. Since I’ve been dubbed a “productivity blogger” by Lifehacker, it seems only fitting that I should question my own perceived stock in trade. So here are some ruminations along those lines. The Alternative Productivity Manifesto. Challenges the sacred cow of productivity as self-development and [...]

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While I was in the middle of reordering, revising and adding sections to the Pattern Language for Productivity series for a downloadable version, one of my more saintly readers, D.L. Fuller, preempted me and sent in PDF and RTF versions, which I’m making available now. I still see errors and omissions in the series, so [...]

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The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

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In a reply to my Pattern Language entry on General Reference Files, David Goodger recently commented: I have never understood the rule to use hangerless file folders. I don’t see how using Pendaflex adds any overhead. The rule seems completely arbitrary, and Allen’s GTD book doesn’t back it up with any arguments or evidence. Do [...]

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One of the biggest stumbling blocks to idea generation and problem solving is familiarity with our own thought process. A problem, once recognized, evokes a chain of associations drawn from memory, and the strong tendency is to apply a stock solution that worked in the past for a similar situation. The existing ideas or solutions [...]

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For any task management system to be trustworthy, it has to be realistic. It needs to have as few placeholders as possible, but no fewer. It needs to hold as many projects and actions as we’re genuinely committed to, but no more. The discipline of rapidly capturing new inputs and processing them into a list [...]

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