How creative is David Allen?
Nov. 11th, 2005 10:11 amIt occurred to me that David Allen must not be a terribly creative person. Successful, clear-thinking, capable, and convincing yes. But not creative.
One of the principles that he advertises in his work is that if you follow the Getting Things Done process completely, your mind will be freed of the burden of coming up with "the next thing to do." You'll have it in your list, and you'll be getting it done.
The problem I have with this is twofold: (1) the creative process is sufficiently time-intensive that one can't just put it onto a list and call it "scheduled," and (2) the anxiety of the creative process is not always a bad thing. When I'm driving, or walking, or lying down for a nap, my mind circles around something I'm working on, a story or a program, and begins to take it apart and re-assemble it. Not because I'm negatively anxious that it won't work, but because I'm positively anxious to make it better, to have those ideas hot and ripe and ready when my hand picks up a pen or a pencil or a keyboard. Any task that I undertake requires a certain minimal level of reinforcement or it becomes stale; if I don't write for two weeks, it takes two days for me to find my voice again. If I don't study Japanese for three days, it's a real struggle to awaken all of the structures I had built up. If I don't draw every day at this stage, I'm going to regress.
My Hipster PDA consists of a Moleskin notebook and two cards from the Hipster template: the weekly schedule and the to-do list. That's it. I use my Palm strictly for daily and long-term alarms; for the weekly horizon, a 3x5 card is all I need. But having that list does very little for teasing out the good lines and great scenes of a story, or having the program I'm writing "click" into place. That takes more mental playroom than there is in GTD.
One of the principles that he advertises in his work is that if you follow the Getting Things Done process completely, your mind will be freed of the burden of coming up with "the next thing to do." You'll have it in your list, and you'll be getting it done.
The problem I have with this is twofold: (1) the creative process is sufficiently time-intensive that one can't just put it onto a list and call it "scheduled," and (2) the anxiety of the creative process is not always a bad thing. When I'm driving, or walking, or lying down for a nap, my mind circles around something I'm working on, a story or a program, and begins to take it apart and re-assemble it. Not because I'm negatively anxious that it won't work, but because I'm positively anxious to make it better, to have those ideas hot and ripe and ready when my hand picks up a pen or a pencil or a keyboard. Any task that I undertake requires a certain minimal level of reinforcement or it becomes stale; if I don't write for two weeks, it takes two days for me to find my voice again. If I don't study Japanese for three days, it's a real struggle to awaken all of the structures I had built up. If I don't draw every day at this stage, I'm going to regress.
My Hipster PDA consists of a Moleskin notebook and two cards from the Hipster template: the weekly schedule and the to-do list. That's it. I use my Palm strictly for daily and long-term alarms; for the weekly horizon, a 3x5 card is all I need. But having that list does very little for teasing out the good lines and great scenes of a story, or having the program I'm writing "click" into place. That takes more mental playroom than there is in GTD.
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