elfs | Jan. 23rd, 2004

At the moment, what is your favorite...

...song?: It's either Yoko Kanno's Inner Universe or Her Space Holiday's The Young Machines
...food?: Grapefruit and Bagels!
...tv show?: Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto
...scent?: Freshly laundered sheets.
...quote?: "If you're so smart, why aren't you naked?"

Well, today has been productive. In work barely two hours already and several major bugs have died ignominious deaths under my capable hands. That whole bit recently about how sleep is a necessity for creativity and problem solving is completely true; I put in 11 hours at the office yesterday and I could not for the life of me figure out why a list of files kept growing, repeating, every time a command was passed through the control module. I woke up this morning with the answer fresh in my head: I was forgetting to clear the filename accumulator. Set, did I feel dumb.

And I would like to thank

ambar and

lucky_otter for pointing me at David Allen's website and corresponding book, Getting Things Done. I was impressed with two things. First, he dismisses the Covey method: "Focusing on values and roles will only add to the complexity of your task. They are important, but not for the everyday business of getting things done."

The second is that he was brutally honest and forthright: "Every week, I have 60 projects and 70 maybe-projects in my to do list." I've never seen that kind of confession before; most of the "productivity gurus" try to keep "life's bullet points" down to something that can fit on a powerpoint slide; Allen admits up front that reality doesn't work like that. I'm looking forward to the rest of his technique. I've been sputtering along with the Franklin/Covey method for years and never felt that it was quite working. Now I think I know why.

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