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elfsI am the chronic absent-minded middle-aged writer. To overcome this terrific affliction I've tried hard to adopt as much of the Seven Habits / GTD stuff as I possibly can, although the daily discipline of GTD often gets lost in the bad habits of a chronic infovore like myself. It's extremely difficult for me to just sit down at the start of the day and not want to suck up everything that happened in the last ten hours: the news, the views, the arguing and bickering and entertaining pwnage that is the world at large.
But I do try. And one of the things that's always bothered me about the Seven Habit method is the focus on so-called Roles & Goals. This is the part of the system where, on a weekly basis, you review your "roles" (as father, as employee, as citizen, and so forth) and then determine if your current projects and their goals are in sync.
I was looking through my day planner's major projects list and the associated roles and realized that I didn't believe it. I've never bought into the nonsense about roles. I think I've finally identified why: the people we admire don't have them. They have responsibilities. I bet you Patton never considered his role; he thought about his responsibilities. The same is true of Lincoln, or Ghandi. To take an amusing fictional example, Miles Vorkosigan's roles are determined by his responsibilities, and not the other way around.
Role implies an act and an actor, often one taken on with a sense of facade. "For the next three hours, Elf will take on the role of father," or "For the next hour, Elf will take on the role of writer." There are so many false notes in such an approach that I wonder how it ever became popular.
Instead, "responsibility" has a sense of authenticity (and not in the pomo sense of "authenticity"): my responsibility to my family is to keep the house in good shape, my responsibility to my kids is to make sure they reach adulthood healthy, hale, and with the tools necessary to take on the world and win, my responsibility to my employer is to deliver working and contemporarily styled user interfaces on deadline and with no defects, my responsibility to my readers is to deliver thoughtful and engaging stories, my responsibility to you is to stay interesting.
So I'm going to revise the "roles & goals" page into "responsibilities & projects," which seems to me a much more profound way of viewing yourself. Most importantly, to me, they imply a whole and integrated human being, not someone who puts on a different facade within different contexts. We do enough of that already: the vocabulary you use at work is very different from the one you use in the bedroom, I hope. Formalizing it into a collection of cheap suits and masks just makes the fragmentation of ourselves even worse. We do not wear "roles", and if we have goals then to be meaningful they must be subsumed into something greater, something which enables accomplishment. Those things are responsibilities, duties, projects, and deadlines.
But I do try. And one of the things that's always bothered me about the Seven Habit method is the focus on so-called Roles & Goals. This is the part of the system where, on a weekly basis, you review your "roles" (as father, as employee, as citizen, and so forth) and then determine if your current projects and their goals are in sync.
I was looking through my day planner's major projects list and the associated roles and realized that I didn't believe it. I've never bought into the nonsense about roles. I think I've finally identified why: the people we admire don't have them. They have responsibilities. I bet you Patton never considered his role; he thought about his responsibilities. The same is true of Lincoln, or Ghandi. To take an amusing fictional example, Miles Vorkosigan's roles are determined by his responsibilities, and not the other way around.
Role implies an act and an actor, often one taken on with a sense of facade. "For the next three hours, Elf will take on the role of father," or "For the next hour, Elf will take on the role of writer." There are so many false notes in such an approach that I wonder how it ever became popular.
Instead, "responsibility" has a sense of authenticity (and not in the pomo sense of "authenticity"): my responsibility to my family is to keep the house in good shape, my responsibility to my kids is to make sure they reach adulthood healthy, hale, and with the tools necessary to take on the world and win, my responsibility to my employer is to deliver working and contemporarily styled user interfaces on deadline and with no defects, my responsibility to my readers is to deliver thoughtful and engaging stories, my responsibility to you is to stay interesting.
So I'm going to revise the "roles & goals" page into "responsibilities & projects," which seems to me a much more profound way of viewing yourself. Most importantly, to me, they imply a whole and integrated human being, not someone who puts on a different facade within different contexts. We do enough of that already: the vocabulary you use at work is very different from the one you use in the bedroom, I hope. Formalizing it into a collection of cheap suits and masks just makes the fragmentation of ourselves even worse. We do not wear "roles", and if we have goals then to be meaningful they must be subsumed into something greater, something which enables accomplishment. Those things are responsibilities, duties, projects, and deadlines.
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Date: 2007-09-19 08:59 pm (UTC)