3 posts tagged “system”
So believe it or not, four years now and I'm still a heavy daily habituae of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" time-management system, originally a business idea that has grown into a quasi-religious movement among the Web 2.0 set, precisely because it works so incredibly well. And out of all the different ways one can work the system, I use the simplest and cheapest possible, nothing more than a paper notebook, a pen, and the calendar function on my Palm Treo; and as I was reminded tonight as I get set to finish yet another double-page spread of one of my action lists, buried inside my latest Moleskine, I'm also one of the messier GTDers out there, and that every time I post a photo of one of my action lists at Flickr I always get dozens of alarmist comments from fastidious workers of the system, who carry around a whole series of colored markers with them, and will spend an entire evening at the beginning of each notebook hand-inking rules and lines on each page, etc etc. The whole reason I love GTD so much, as I've said many times, the whole reason it's been so easy to stick with it daily for four years and counting, is precisely because there is no complicated methodology necessary (although can certainly be added if a person wants), no expensive equipment or software needed (although can certainly be added if a person wants), precisely because the whole point is to use the tools as little as possible, in order to spend as much of your day and evening possible actually getting things done. I had tried other time-management sytems before, and gave up on all of them pretty quickly, because they would either require learning a whole new way of doing things, or require a way that's counter-intuitive to how I normally do things, or require buying a bunch of new stuff before any of it would work, or require a bunch of prep work before any of it would work. I love GTD so much because it requires none of these things; literally, all you need is a one-dollar tablet at the neighborhood drugstore and a ballpoint pen to be on your way, everything else literally being supplemental, once you truly understand how the system works.
Anyway, since I'm about to close out this two-page spread soon, I thought I'd snap a photo and post it online, for all the more anal-retentive GTDers to cringe and groan at. Look at it! LOOK AT IT! Didi mau!
Anyway, I recently read this article by Lifehacker.com's Gina Trapani, where she invents a new simple three-folder system for handling all her email; it got me to thinking about the ways I use email myself, which led to me inventing a three-label system for my own use. As you can see in the above screenshot, they consist of "respond," "moreaction" and "holdtemp" -- basically, if an email is going to be in my inbox from now on, it needs to have at least one of these labels, or else there's no reason for it to be there. Each time a new email comes in, then, the moment I'm done reading it, I'll end up making one of the following decisions:
--I'm done; throw it away
--It requires a short response; do it right that second
--It requires a long response; give it the "respond" label
--It requires another action on my part away from my email, before it can be thrown away; give it the "moreaction" label
--It requires information from someone else before it can be thrown away; give it the "holdtemp" label
--It can be archived; give it one of the usual archiving labels in my system
I'm hoping, then, that this will help me not only speed through the 22 emails still left in my inbox these days (some going all the way back to April of last year, I shit you not), but also to quickly turn around all new email that arrives in the future, and keep me in a situation where I'm keeping on top of my email as much as anything else in my life. That would be a real relief, to tell you the truth; that's one of the biggest sources of stress in my life these days, in fact, is the constant pressure of getting back to old emails in my inbox. Anyway, wish me luck.
I was reading a year-in-review article this morning from futurist Matt Webb, and learned that #3 on his list is very similar to a theory I cooked up a couple of years ago myself, but which I realized I've never really explained at any of my blogs. So while I was thinking of it, I thought I'd stop and mention it...
Basically, the theory goes that when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early '90s, it also marked the collapse of the US as we knew it as well, something that as a country we've still never gotten around to acknowledging, which has led us directly to Bush and Iraq and torture and all the rest. Because basically, for a little over half a century now we have primarily defined ourselves as one half of the Cold War; one of the only two superpowers that matter, with a society that has to be run the way it is so as to stay even with the theoretical capabilities of our cold enemy, the Soviets, called a "cold" enemy because we know they'll never actually attack, but only because both sides are so evenly matched. And you can compare this to, say, the 75 years between the Civil War and World War II, where the US primarily defined itself as mostly an isolationist state, happy to do nothing but to grow and expand, to create a better and better infrastructure and educational system, and to let all those crazy kings in Europe fight their crazy wars that were always causing a million dead here and a million dead there. There's a reason, after all, that we rarely remember the names of US presidents from the late 1800s and early 1900s, all those Tafts and Rutherfords and the like; and that's because in peacetime, in "nation-building" times, the people in charge live mostly unremarkable lives.
This all changed with WWII; not only did Europe manage to almost drive itself extinct with that one, but most of its smartest citizens ended up moving to the US and never going back, plus with the US essentially walking away from that war with not a single bit of damage to its own physical borders. And this led to the shining period of American history from 1945 to 1965, when we had not only the smartest and prettiest and best-educated people on the planet, but the richest and most innovative as well, a veritable walking billboard for how freaking great the United States is. But the problem is that once you take on a superpower/empire role in world affairs (and just ask the Brits for confirmation of this), you can suddenly no longer concentrate on what made you so strong in the first place; instead of continuing to pump in the money necessary, for example, to fund the world's best educational system (something you could argue the US legitimately had back in those days), more and more money had to be diverted to the military, the military, the military, because as one half of the Cold War we were now expected to effectively become half the planet's police, with the Soviets being the police of the other half. And thus did things like the Korean War and Vietnam happen, essentially US/Soviet Cold War skirmishes that used these pawns' homelands as personal battleground sandboxes, much like how the European kings used to use Western Germany back in the 1700s and 1800s, before the 20th century when they almost annihilated each other for good.
So since the '90s, then, the US has been faced with this real dilemma; that we still have a military structure in place appropriate for the Cold War, appropriate for being half the world's police, but with an enemy that no longer exists. But this military structure has become so huge and pervasive at this point, after half a century of the US being a superpower, that it's not just a matter of saying, "Okay, let's just cut the entire military budget in half" -- it makes up so many billions of dollars now, affects so many tens of millions of lives, has its tentacles so well-entrenched in so many non-military aspects of our society, that the entire system would collapse if you were to just arbitrarily start hacking away at it. Not to mention, profoundly changing the very definition of a country is a traumatic thing, something like I said that we haven't done in the US for half a century now, and that last time took a good 30 years or so to completely redefine. Now that most people are so comfortable with the system that's in place, they don't want anything to come along and upset that system, much less an entire society-changing new paradigm that will ultimately cause the disruption and loss of hundreds of thousands of military/industrial-related jobs that are no longer needed in a post-Cold-War world.
So when September 11th, happened, the Bushists were able to very very smartly sell this in Cold War terms to the general public -- that this wasn't an issue we're talking about, like poverty is an issue or human rights is an issue, but an enemy we're talking about, like those dirty godless Soviets. You remember the dirty godless Soviets, right? And this suddenly made millions of Americans finally feel a bit more at ease with the reality of the world as they know it to work; that as long as we still have a global enemy, as long as we still have a war to fight with this enemy, we can go ahead and continue just the overwhelming percentage of our national budget that currently goes towards the military/industrial structure. And seriously, this is one of the biggest problems right now with the US, is simply that the majority of people here have no idea what a ridiculously high percentage of our national budget goes towards the military each year, versus the relative percentage numbers of almost every other country on the planet. We've lived with this military structure in place for so long now, it doesn't even seem strange to most citizens anymore, and like I said with so many of these citizens' jobs dependent in one way or another on this military/industrial system that most people don't even want to contemplate the alternative.
I didn't mean to make this so long, but I think I got my point across; that things are never going to change in the US, never going to get better, until we acknowledge all the things mentioned above, that the US as we knew it died the same moment the Soviet Union died, way back almost 20 years ago, and that a new definition for us needs to be created, one that starts with dismantling the overwhelming military/industrial system we currently have in place. And in the meanwhile, there have been just so many countries going through their own "nation-building" periods of their own, in these 50 years that we were running around being the world's police; just look at southeast Asia for an excellent example, who for half a century have been very quietly shipping millions of their kids off to America for educations (whereby they were mercilessly mocked for years for being fun-free nerds, as the Americans around them blew off all their classes for yet another beer-bong party), very quietly coming back home afterwards and increasing their own educational systems by leaps and bounds with each decade, very quietly starting to steal more and more jobs away from all those sad-sack American college loafers who are now all a bunch of inept American inefficient middle-managers. As we sit around snorting at "The Office" and laughing at our own idiocy, places like India have been slowly creating an internal infrastructure that is starting to far outshine the US in certain respects; it's only a matter of years now, not decades, before that part of the world will be the new center of finance and culture and entertainment, bypassing us as quickly as we bypassed Europe in the 1950s.
All this is coming, and it seems sometimes like I'm the only fucking American who actually sees it. It's nice to sometimes come across essays like Matt Webb's and to realize that other people get it too.
