April 8, 2008
productive mess, tools
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Ever notice that the first ten hits on google are almost identical, no matter the search term? The first link is wikipedia and the remaining nine are commercial sites. Getting tired of that yet? I know I am.
The book The Perfect Mess suggests a different kind of search engine: Banana Slug. Banana Slug bills itself as the ‘long tail’ search engine. When you type in your search query, Banana Slug adds one random word before scanning its index. Type in ‘Wellington Grey’ and Banana Slug will actually search for ‘Wellington Grey +Foxtrot’. It’s amazing how well adding this bit of noise cuts through the usual search result cruft.
While I still use google for most things, Banana Slug has become an excellent backup and a great assistance when I just can’t quite find something on google.
[Click here to try Banana Slug]
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Header photograph by David Sifry
March 13, 2008
productive mess, ubiquitous capture
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Everyone loves Moleskine notebooks. The rounded pages that don’t fray, the faux-leather cover and strap that let you feel secretly pretentious. A new moleskine smells like a fresh library. For office supply lovers, they are perfection.
Don’t use them.
If you keep a Moleskine to jot down notes and ideas, your pen will never touch paper. The pages, (especially the first page) are just too clean and perfect. Using such a fine, quality notebook makes you feel that only fine, quality ideas can fill it — not what you really need, like ‘buy milk’.
The lesson: Don’t use nice notebooks for ubiquitous capture.
Your pocket notebook should be a little, 50-cent junker that you can easily rip pages out of. Don’t keep it neat. To make ubiquitous capture work, you need as little resistance to writing down your thoughts as possible. Otherwise you will not capture them all. By keeping the notebook messy, but accessible, you take advantage of productive mess. Keeping it neat will make you hesitate scribbling a thought across an entire page as you walk to work.
The messiness makes it easy to record that half-baked thought or reminder. Just don’t forget to process your junk note book to zero during your weekly review.
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Header photograph by Paul Worthington
January 10, 2008
productive mess, Getting Things Done
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When starting with Getting Things Done, the weekly review is the most hassle and seems the least important. Why, if you are following such a perfect system, do you even need a weekly review?
The dark secret of the weekly review is that what you actually need is an imperfect system. Life isn’t perfect, life is messy. Many short-term projects work better with mess, e.g. in a perfect world, computer desktops would always look like this:
During the week, however, documents started or files downloaded get dumped onto the desktop, so that by the end of the week it’s covered with icons. It’s a mess. And that’s the way it should be.
The time spent organizing those files isn’t worth it — they have a small window of usefulness. Creating a folder somewhere for such ephemera is a waste of effort.
By dropping transient items in a prominent area like the desktop, they serve as reminders of the stuff you’re currently working on. The mess is a visible representation of temporary little projects and shows you when you have too much going on by growing too large.
However, if you don’t keep little messes in check, they will grow out of control. This is where the weekly review comes in. When it’s time for the weekly review, everything gets processed off the desktop. Everything. Each file is filed, deleted or sent. The desktop mess is kept on a tight leash — it exists only on the desktop and for no longer than seven days. This way the overall system is organized but can still take advantage of some of the benefits of mess.
This idea of limited mess applies to the overall GTD system. Don’t always be pristine with next actions and projects: keep odd scraps of papers and notes, leave files in a mess box. But, don’t let the messes grow and overwhelm you: reign them in during the weekly review.
While David Allen fundamentalists say this is heresy, even he says in The Book that there are times when the cost of running a perfectly smooth system is too great.
Allow some mess into your life, just keep it on a leash by reviewing it weekly.
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Header photograph by Ella’s Dad