Subtle messages

[elfs]

The new year is less that 36 hours away, and we've all been thinking about our New Year's resolutions (or denying that we have any), and while I was twiddling with mine I had an insight that has kinda struck me.

I've been a big fan of Life Hacks, which is the geek term for applying David Allen's Getting Things Done to programming and similar activities, for a while now, and have applied a lot of the tips and techniques to my own life. I regularly make TODO lists and keep them up-to-date, and I regularly carry around what we call a "capture device," a way of getting everything that flits through your head that might be valuable down so it doesn't get lost. It's just a notebook. I haven't quite gotten the hang of the "Waiting On..." list management yet, but I'm getting there.

One thing I'm terrible at, however, is defining a project. A project, according to Allen, has an outcome that is valuable, desireable, and well-articulated. And this is where, subtly, I start to resist Life Hacking. Because what this tells me, oddly enough, is that there are some projects for which one of those categories is never clear.

For example, my writing. The point of my writing has never been well-articulated, not even to me. I don't know why I like to write and do so with intensity, day in and day out, and if I'm actually too tired or off to do my minimum hundred daily words one day worry that I'm losing it.

For another example, one thing in my "TODO (someday)" projects list is,yeah, organize my porn collection. Yeah, I have one, kept under crypto lock and key, and organizing it would be "desireable" and the outcome "well-articulated" (I could finally find every Chloe Vivier and Ai Iijima picture I have), but would it be "valuable?" Even I know it's only something to fiddle with. I suppose in the same category, Finish Half-Life 2 is a "project," but unlike the former it doesn't have more than one obvious action required to make it happen. I suppose it's something that it's in the (someday) category, not something I'm taking seriously.

But still, there's this "value" thing that questions whether or not such "projects" should be on the page at all. I'll still play Half-Life 2, still write, and yeah still read smut now and then. I feel dishonest not putting down the "projects" that I do on my projects list because they don't have valuable, desireable, or well-articulated goals. I suppose I should put them down anyway, and still feel that twinge when I ask myself, "is it valuable, desireable, and well-articulated?"

Comments

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

Ohh, goody, just what I need, another fascinating organizational system to sink my time into. :-)

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

How do you even define a writing project? "Write a story about characters A and B"? I guess once you have an idea, you can define the project on that idea. "Finish story with ID 57B-92".

But I don't think you need to find a "point" to writing for the goal to be "well-articulated". The goal is to write a good story, about this idea or that. What more do you need?

And as to the value of organizing your porn collection, I think that the value in being able to find things when you want to is pretty clear.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

The point of [Elf's] writing is to provide a creative outlet, and in so doing, provide a means of maintaining mental health, stability and happiness.

Absolutely! And as I was just telling Elf as we were discussing this LJ post, there should be a project in everyone's list called "Pleasure" or "Enjoyment" or "Fun" that is valuable to each person because each person must have fun, pleasure, and enjoyment in their life to maintain stability, sanity, and even physical health; desireable because maintaining stability, sanity, and physical health is desireable; and well articulated...pleasure is the act of doing something for yourself that makes you happy. Writing makes Elf happy. Working on his porn collection makes him happy. Killing weird little things on computer screens makes him happy. ;)

I think that many of us, when we try to define our projects, continue to define them by what the outside world considers appropriate definitions. Appropriate valuations. When all we have to remember is that the value of our projects truly are what they mean to us.

[spiralsong.livejournal.com]

re: Value - This brings to mind a course I once took through an employer - something entitled "Conflict Transformation". Somewhat flaky-new-agey title aside, it was actually quite an informative course, that focused on taking conflict through it's natural conclusion. (Which is not, as most people believe, either 'resolution' or 'compromise'.)

The listening skill that was billed as the most important was actually hearing what the person was stating in the midst of discussing a conflict, and boiling it down to it's most fundamental basis, which was referred to as a 'need'. For instance - Conflict-ridden person states that they 'need a raise' and, through questioning, what it really boils down to is that the person needs to feel valued, as though they matter, and a raise is a way to show that person their value in a measurable way.

I'm getting to a point, really. ;) What this makes me think, in relation to your 'value' conundrum, is that the way you think of or define 'value' will have an impact on your life hacks. Other people might not find organizing their porn collection a valuable expenditure of their time, but if your porn collection is large enough and the files named ambiguously enough that you can't find a particular item, and you are prone to waking up at 3 am with a phrase stuck in your head that won't let you go back to sleep (an affliction with which I myself am, sadly, burdened) then organizing your porn collection may be of immense value to you.

Something that is valuable to you satisfies a need. Find the need, and, theoretically, you should be able to determine the value, or degree of value, in satisfying it. (Not as easy as it sounds, but quite, quite worth it in the long run.)

[merlinmann.livejournal.com]

I had a response to your comment (which I think is a good one), back on the 43F post (http://www.43folders.com/2004/12/a_year_of_getti_1.html#comments), so I’ll risk redundancy by also re-foisting a bit of it on you here. :)

Put a little more positively, I just think it’s important to identify why what you commit to doing is valuable to you. Or, why—faced with the hundreds of other options you see in a given day—is a project something you’ll allow to capture and hold your attention to the exclusion of other interesting things. There’s all kinds of good reasons to organize porn—not least because it helps make you happy (tip: metadata!).

Hope that helps a bit (or at least clarifies what I'd meant).

Indexing encrypted images

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'm in the midst of developing an image management system, one of the things I've been building in is the notion of images in different places (like on my web server), but I hadn't yet had the idea of sets of encrypted images.

What sort of organization were you thinking of? I guess it'd be important to encrypt the meta information.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it caught my eye and I'm wondering how this might work.