"that's like life!"

[alexr_rwx]

Still reading GTD, still thinking about better ways to GTD. Although reading it is fraught with peril; I ended up putting it down and furiously processing the random scraps of paper cluttering my desk/mind. Trash! Read now! File for later! OK, out of papers!

I spoke with my dad about managing time and attention earlier tonight -- he does real estate, and the more I think about it, the more I'm impressed with how many different things he handles at once. His system, as he describes it, is that every day he makes a list of the things he wants to accomplish, finds the one he's most worried about and wants to do least, and tries to get it out of the way first.

It may be that the really important lesson isn't any specific GTD doctrine, but that you should have a system that you trust not to drop things so you can focus on the immediate task, and be conscious of what you're trying to accomplish and why so you don't get stuck doing a dumb immediate task.

Just remind me to relax with the self-help/motivation/personal excellence books if I start trying to make metaphors about golf. Next up: Mind Hacks and The Miracle of Mindfulness.

Comments

Your dad's system, meme-ified!

[lindseykuper]

In one of the classrooms at my middle school, there was a sign on the wall: "Do your DUDs first." "DUD" stood for "Difficult, Uninteresting, and Distasteful".

In middle school, I thought, "Why would I want to do that?" These days, it's been making a lot more sense.

Re: Your dad's system, meme-ified!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

It makes sense that it wouldn't make sense for middle school kids to buy that -- they're treated more like a factory workers than like a researchers. There's a stream of worksheets and book reports and things to memorize, most of it not terribly important...

Middle school kids are given actual DUDs -- just random crap to do. People should do stuff because it's potentially useful.

(how can we fix middle school education? ...)

Re: Your dad's system, meme-ified!

[lindseykuper]

Aw, man. Here I was about to make a lighthearted joke about how someone has to keep coming up with new golf/personal-excellence metaphors, or how will Accenture be able to keep coming out with new Tiger Woods ads? And you had to go and bring up a serious topic.

You know, for the most part, I don't think I was given "random crap" to do in middle school. I think my teachers really cared, and really tried. They were busy and underpaid and had to do extra stuff like coach sports teams to make ends meet.

Re: Your dad's system, meme-ified!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

See, this is where you're a nicer person than me :) You're focusing on the good people, working hard. And maybe it's not individual teachers' faults, as such?

I think well-intentioned people can waste the time of lots of middle-school kids and still be well-intentioned people. And they can even be trying to teach something valuable. But there sure were a lot of disconnected fill-in-the-blank worksheets.

Even being given specific, arguably important knowledge, like lists of battles in the Revolutionary War, with no more detail about them, or the quadratic formula without any context for why you might want to solve equations in the first place -- I'd say the approaches for teaching these are broken.

Re: Your dad's system, meme-ified!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Also: ♥!

And -- I think I've been thinking about motivation in education today after I read the article about companies that contract out to write people's papers for them. Which I will link for you (http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i28/28a00102.htm)!

So much disingenuous going on! So many screwed-up incentives!

[kel-e-o.livejournal.com]

I really like your Dad's ideas about making a list of things that you want to accomplish every day.

I make lists, but they're pretty much lists of things that I *should* do and they're generally lists of things that I could only do in a day if I were superwoman.

But I'm not superwoman and the weight of all that I have to do seriously demotivates me and at the end of the day, I get depressed by the amount of things that I didn't do.

I think I should start making a list of things that I can "feasibly" do each day. That would be so much more encouraging and productive. I just need to have a better understanding of my own limitations and focus on what I *do* rather than what I can't do.