Back in the fall I was turned onto David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I found it by listening to Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders Podcast series Productive Talk. Besides being a great resource for other books like The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and Purple Cow by Seth Godin the Podcast is a great primer for Allen’s strategies.
I have to admit where I listened to Pressfield’s audio book and sped through Godin’s short hardcover I haven’t yet completed GTD. That is where Mann’s Productive Talk series is such a great resource. Besides being routed to other books I picked up some handy tips. The best tip I uncovered is – your brain is for creating ideas, not for storing everything you imagine. It is best to record everything that pops into your head in some form or fashion.
I rely on technology a ton. I could not live without my Palm Zire 71. Its a few years old but it works like a charm and my life is immersed in its existence. Once the battery drained from the on/off switch being depressed by another object in my purse and I just about lost my mind. I thought it was dead. Luckily it only needed a charge and a sync. For me recording everything on my mind with Graffiti in a note on my Palm didn’t seem like the right solution.
Merlin mentioned that he used index cards (aka Hipster PDA). I felt like this was a lightweight solution so I went to the store and grabbed a stack of cards and began to record everything I needed to do plus every creative and development idea that came to mind. Recording everything is the first step to GTD. Where people get hung up, including me, is the review process.
Allen states that it takes 2 years to finally master GTD so I have about a year and a half to practice. The most important step I have taken is the first one and that is to get everything out of my head. The fact that I have chosen to use traditional tools like pen and paper, to me, is important especially when you consider that Jeff Veen recently advocated for the quick use of notebooks versus using a laptop on Mann’s video podcast.
This all made me think about the very basic studying technique of writing things down as you read. My database instructor reminded me of this in class one night. I use this technique when I read tech books in my free time but for some reason the idea didn’t come to me when I would struggle through chapters of database design and SQL. I might highlight but I think highlighting text as you read is worthless because it not taxing and I probably won’t revisit the text.
Actually writing as you read pushes the cognitive load a little. You have to chose carefully what you want to write down or you will record too much or possibly too little. Add to that the actual exercise of writing with your hand, which I find dreadful, forces you to pay attention. To study I would only need to recopy my notes.
I did this as a freshmen in college when I took a Sports Medicine class. I would write furiously during class. As soon as I got back to the dorm I would neatly recopy my notes. I excelled in the course and found studying and retaining information easy. Too bad I didn’t do that for all of my other courses freshman or sophomore year.
The last point I will make about writing, and for this point its the mere exercise of writing not the form that matters, is how writing makes us understand our experiences. On Morning Edition on NPR Monday morning they played a this i believe segment – The Deeper Well of Memory. At the end the announcer stated that the author, Christine Cleary, didn’t truly understand her experiences until she wrote them down. As I write for my blog, record my ideas on index cards and study my textbooks I know that writing is my key to understanding.