For the longest time, I thought productivity was something I could conquer. I sure tried to conquer it. I put my head down and ran straight at it full tilt. I repeatedly bashed my skull into it for years. I can look at so much folly in my life arising from this private war with that slippery productivity.

David Sparks – “On Productivity”

David Sparks nails why I’m done with self-help and productivity porn, at least for the most part. It’s not helping me. The only thing that will help me is to sit down and do the damn work. As long as I do that, ways of doing it better will arise naturally. It’s always great to know I’m not the only one stuck suffering under various delusions when it comes to self-improvement.

Recently, one of my favorite podcasts, Back to Work began a short series of episodes, devoted to Getting Things Done [1], the productivity system endorsed and praised by countless nerds, bloggers, and nerd bloggers. Since the start of the series, I’ve gone back and started re-reading the book, reacquainting myself with GTD and its tenets. If you’ve never read it, and you’re overwhelmed by the stuff on your plate, then by golly, go get a copy. Re-reading it has been rewarding, and lord knows that I’ve had some… issues… with getting things done [2] in my past. Merlin’s discussions and returning to the canonical text have been helping me get myself in order. What has not been helping are the panoply of other self-help books, blogs, and podcasts I’ve been reading and listening to.

I could provide a list of what I’ve been reading, or at least skimming, but why bother? The problem isn’t with the people who post this stuff. They’re only sharing what they’ve done to make their lives better, and who can blame them? It reminds me of a recent experience on the subway where a woman began reciting at us a clearly rehearsed and prepared litany on embracing the tenets of her religion. The key difference between her and the writers and podcasters I’m burning myself out on is that they’re not coming to me preaching The Way of David Allen—I’m coming to them. Nothing’s stopping me from unsubscribing from their feeds. Nothing’s stopping me from not buying their books.

Merlin Mann once wrote, “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.” I’ve quoted it before, but it bears repeating, especially in this context. I can read all about ways to use Evernote, how I can be productive with only the pre-installed applications on my iPhone, or how setting my desktop to a shade of blue has been found to increase productivity by x percentage, but these things are not making me productive. They’re interesting, but they’re not helping. Reading about whether I should add a new application to my workflow, whether I should use Things or OmniFocus, or whether I should just write down the three things that I actually need to get done today on an index card—these can help on a theoretical level, but they’re not helping. At least, they’re not helping me.

What is going to help me is to spend less time worrying about implementing a system. What is going to help me is to spend less time figuring out what application to jump ship to. What is going to help me is to spend less time setting up fiddly little AppleScripts, templates, and other hacks. What is going to help me is not spending money on another pop-psychology book about how I can be more creative, productive, content, brave, happy, and the Best Me That I Can Be, because not a single god-damned one of these things will actually change anything. The best self-help these things have inspired me to do is to declare my independence from self-help. I’ll have more hours in the day to make things if I’m spending less time reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, and keeping up with the latest book about how I can change my habits. It’s a question of mathematics. It’s also a question of priorities.

Let me step back a bit. One of the reasons I listen to Back to Work is that I sincerely enjoy it. Even when I don’t get a whole lot of practical use from an episode [3], I still enjoy hearing Dan and Merlin talk. I still read, and will continue to read some of Patrick Rhone’s stuff, and listen to Enough because Patrick provides enough value and edification that the time spent is worth it. It’s those other blogs and other podcasts that insist on large chunks of my attention that I’m unsubscribing from. I’m not getting enough back from my mental investment to justify it.

More importantly, I’m putting up roadblocks to adding more of this self-help stuff to my life. Maybe if someone I know and respect links to a blog post that touches on some of the things I’m avoiding, I’ll add it to the ol’ Instapaper queue. That seems fair to me. What I won’t do is add that blog to my RSS reader, follow the author on Twitter or App.net, or subscribe to their e-mail newsletter—even if their ideas are intriguing to me. Life is too short. My time is too short. I’ve had enough self-help.

I’ve also had enough of writing about self-help. I no longer feel like publicly fluffing myself about being a productive person any more. I’m getting less out of writing about it than I am reading it. Every day, countless people get their shit done. For some it’s easy, and for some its hard. Either way, the vast majority of them don’t go patting themselves on the back over what they’ve done, let alone doing it for an ostensible audience on the Internet. They just get on with the business of living their lives. Count me out of the circle-jerk. I’m ready to put my hands to use doing something more important.

I’ve always been bad about putting things away—especially laundry. During my bachelor days, it was common for me to haul my laundry back into my apartment, up three flights of stairs, hang up my shirts and pants, and leave a clean pile of unmatched socks, t-shirts, undershirts, and underpants at the foot of the bed. However, I avoided the bachelor problem of not knowing which clothes were clean and which were dirty. Dirty clothes always ended up in the vicinity of the hamper, which I kept in my bedroom closet. Rarely, if ever, did these two piles collide. Obviously, this wouldn’t cut it forever— especially now that I’m sharing my living space again. There’s an old axiom: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Rarely is that place “the floor,” unless we’re talking about area rugs.

My current living arrangement doesn’t afford me a lot of space for my stuff. I already reduced the amount of stuff I have a fair amount before I moved up here—or rather, the amount of stuff I took up here is a reduced amount of what I had. What I didn’t sell or donate is in storage back in Philadelphia. I have two plastic containers that I keep my clothes in, save for the stuff that gets to hang in the closet. Two plastic containers aren’t the most ideal place to store clothes. So, for a month or so, clean clothes ended up neatly folded and stacked on top of one of the containers.

These neat stacks lasted about a day. When I got dressed in the mornings, the stacks fell apart. Neatly folded clothes became crumpled balls, and so it was until I’d worn a week’s worth, and laundry day came back around. Sometimes my button-down shirts got hung on hangers off a shelf. Sometimes they got folded and stacked on the container. Wherever they were, it was all a cluttered mess. Once they were put away, I felt a sense of great relief. Something I hope to keep feeling.

The laundry is just one aspect of learning to find a place for things, and put them there. As I mentioned last week, I have trouble putting things into my system, in much the same way as I have trouble putting my clothes away. And books. And anything else. The point of having a system is to know not only that something is in it, but that you have a place to put things. Events go on a calendar, tasks and projects go into a task manager, my clothes go into the closet, or the plastic containers. It’s not hard, at least in theory.

I used to wake up many mornings, get ready for work, and be unable to find my keys. Why? Because I didn’t have a specific place for them. Sometimes, they ended up on my dining table. Sometimes, they ended up on the desk, or occasionally on the end table, or the dresser, or the kitchen counter. In the haze of the morning, it was impossible to remember where I put them, so unless the keys were in the first place I thought to look, I’d panic. Now, my keys go right next to me, on top of the short bookshelf in the bedroom. Recently, we put an organizer on top of the bookshelf, which holds all sorts of stuff. It holds my wallet, my pocket notebook, pen, pocket knife, and wristwatch. Now, there’s no need to fumble around in the morning trying to remember where any of these things are, if they’re buried under papers, got knocked off and into the trash can, or anything else.

For a chronically disorganized guy like me, this is a revelation. It’s one less thing to worry about. Every disorganized person can tell you they know where everything is in their mysterious piles of stuff. I could. Until I couldn’t. One minute you’re confident in your lack of a system, and the next moment, you’re desperately looking for your W–2 form, cursing, and messing up all your piles. If there were a letters column for people who experienced this phenomenon, they would all start out like something from Penthouse Forum: “Dear Disorganized Forum, I never thought this would happen to me…” For the skeptics, I suggest you try it, just as an experiment. For the true believers, keep it up, but spread the gospel gently. Us disorganized are slow to change and easily backslide. The harder you push, the more we will resist, until that moment of clarity occurs.

When I go to work and sit down, I know what I need to do, when it needs to be done, and how to do it. I don’t need a task management system, GTD or otherwise, to make my job go. It’s everything else I need a system for.

Without looking, here’s a brief list of the “projects” on my plate: I have a redesign of Sanspoint I’ve been working on, a site I’m creating for someone else, a podcast to record, edit, and post, a novel to write, two short stories to revise, an album review to write, posts for Sanspoint to write, music to listen to (for myself, and Crush On Radio), and more. Most—though I freely admit, not all—of this stuff has ended up in my task manager. When it’s in the system, it’s everywhere: my laptop, my iPhone, and my iPad.

And it stays there. If the stuff in my task manager were organic material, it would officially qualify as either a biohazard, or a compost heap.

This is untenable.

I’m not the only person with this problem, and in the last few months I’ve seen several articles on the web on how to fix it, or hack around it. Off the top of my head, there’s:

• “Todon’t” by Jeff Atwood
• “Getting Things Eight-Tenths Done” by Patrick Rhone
• “GTD for the Easily Distracted” by Michael Schecter

And, lord, I am not going to reiterate my struggles with finding the right GTD application. It makes no difference what app I use if the work doesn’t get done.

There’s two disconnection points: getting stuff into the system to be dealt with, and then dealing with that stuff. The first is easier to deal with. In fact, after I wrote the first few paragraphs of this essay, I loaded up the Trigger List and went through, and had a short brain-dump, gathering various open loops and putting them into Things.app. Here’s a sample, my own internal syntax included:

• Comms
  ** Reply to REDACTED review
  * REDACTED, RE: REDACTED Relaunch
  * Call Hover.com, re: DNS issues with wantabreathmint.com

• Writing
  * The Residents Project (ongoing)
  * Sanspoint (ongoing)
  * Non-Rez Pro Kittysneezes (ongoing)
  * Crush On Radio stuff (stalled)

Evaluating the writing side, I went back to a great essay by Antony Johnson called “Getting Things Written”. It shows off a lot of the shortcomings in GTD’s workflow and the bothersomely open-ended nature of writing tasks. Unfortunately, I don’t find Antony’s solution to be workable for me. Job sheets only work when there’s a physical thing. There’s very little physicality to the writing I do, which is almost exclusively for the Internet. [1] He makes a point though: “the definitive nature of NAs being ‘done’ or ‘not done’ simply doesn’t suit work where something might only be half-done, but can’t be finished by merely putting more hours in.”

By way of example, here’s what a typical writing project looks like for me in Things. [2]

First, a few words of explanation: the “@anywhere” context means that I can do this part of the task, more or less, anywhere I am. I’m on the subway? The album’s on my iPhone, so I can give it a listen. I’m laying on the sofa with my iPad? I can type up a first draft, or revise the one I have. It’s lunchtime at work? I can export the manuscript, copy and paste it into the shared Google Doc.

Going from this task list to actually a finished thing is the problem. These tasks exist in an odd state of being as defined as possible, and still nebulous and open-ended. I try to keep these articles around 500–600 words, but that’s neither a minimum or a maximum, and the time it takes me to write those words can vary. There are days when even the best of us struggle to put down one good line of text on paper.

Obviously, the two failure points in this system, the disconnects on stuff getting in and stuff getting out, are really only one failure point: me.

I talk a big game about GTD in this essay, but I’m actually quite terrible at GTD. For example: I don’t do reviews. For a while, I had a Morning Review project that popped up every morning, but it wasn’t exactly great: check my tickler file [3], check my e-mail and add stuff to Things, check the projects in Things, and add tasks to my Today list. I have no Weekly Review. I have no Nightly Review. As it stands right now, I don’t even have a physical inbox, but I also don’t have much physical content to address.

The point of GTD reviews is to shake out the last parts of what is rattling in my head and formulate a plan of action for the week ahead. When I know what I have to do, I can do it. Like at my job. Every morning, I come in, sit down, and know exactly what has to be done, and how to do it. I’m also finding ways to improve my workflow there. There’s also the context shift that comes with going to work. When I’m there, I’m there to work, and they’re paying me for it. [4]

Making that context shift at home is going to be the tricky part—I’m not about to impugn upon my employers goodwill and start writing the novel in my down time at the office. This is going to involve more hard landscape stuff, working with timers and scheduled work periods. Something not dissimilar from when I was looking for work, and firewalling off time to search for jobs, only getting to dick around on the Internet when my work time was up. I accomplished that with a Safari extension. Perhaps I should look back into that.

Knowing and doing are the foundation of actually getting things done. (Lowercase intentional.) They have to work together. One alone does not productivity make. I can know I have a review I need to write, and not do it. I can do a lot of writing, but if I don’t know what to write about, it’s not likely to go anywhere. I can also fix the metadata on my MP3 collection, but that’s still going to leave me in the same spot. I need both. Now I know.

To call Hurricane Sandy a disruption is much like saying there’s a bit of water in the subway tunnels—accurate, but selling the event far, far too short. When you consider the lives that have been not so much disrupted as destroyed by the storm, the people even now, a week later, homeless, powerless, and cold, the amount of disruption I took would not even register on any calibrated scale. Namely, I lost Internet for a few hours, had to work from home one day, and face crowded and delayed subway trains for a few more days. By every measure, I got lucky. [1]

Disruption happens, willfully, and otherwise. When I moved to New York, I willfully disrupted my own life. When I took my new job, I willfully disrupted the routines I’d set up for myself. Trying to put these things to rights has been a challenge, and it has been, all my life. Why, then, should this be any different?

The ability to recover from disruption gracefully, as well as having restraint, focus, and the need to succeed can be summarized, neatly, in one simple term: grit. Those who are grittier [2] are far better at keeping themselves on the narrow path that goes between themselves and where they want to be, than those who are not. I’m not going to give a complete overview of grit, and how to cultivate it, or the benefits of it, when others have done it much better. I’m simply making a point.

Even as I write this, after missing a week of posting on this site due to the dual disruptions of Sandy and my new job, I’m facing another external disruption to my daily life in the form of another severe storm, dumping a load of wet snow on top of an already battered metropolis. This isn’t anything I’m not prepared for, having lived in this climate, just a hundred or so miles to the southeast, all my life. I’ll make it to work, and back, without any problems.

However, as I write this, I’ve got another thing gnawing at the back of me, with regards to the nature of commitment and what I should be doing. The brilliant Patrick Rhone made a guest post on A Better Mess on doing less with your day, or to put it better, cutting down what you have to do during the day so you can maximize the time you spend actually living your life. This was followed by a related episode of the Enough podcast. There may be another essay in here, on my end, but with regards to disruption…

When you’re trying to recover, you step back and look at what you’re putting back together, and in the process, one simply can’t help noticing ways to put it together in a different way. The things that make up a day are like LEGO bricks—a set that’s not just boring rectangular prism blocks, but also those crazy pieces that let you put stuff at odd angles, weirdly shaped plates, and weird specialty pieces from the really awesome spaceship set you got for your birthday. Without the manual, how you put them together is up to you, though of course you have to work within the constraints of what’s available to you. [3] This leaves you with a mathematically ridiculous amount of options, though.

I’m recovering and rebuilding after this disruption in my life. It’s not physical rebuilding, like so many less fortunate people have to do now, and if I dared to call it just as taxing, I would be insulting those who got the worst of it. In doing so, however, there’s the silver lining in seeing how I can change things to improve, and maybe even mitigate the effects of the next big disruption in my life. Fingers crossed, and toes crossed there. The first step is to know what my priorities are. One is, of course, to get the words out of my head, and on to the page. Another is to take care of myself, physically and financially. The third is to live my life.

The rest is implementation. That’s the hard part.