elfs | On why the GTD Wilderness is sometimes a place to go

You know you're in a cult when you start to learn the secret, inner vocabulary of the cult and use it in everyday life. In the Getting Things Done cult, there's a special place you go when you've forgotten your GTD tools: we call it The Wilderness.

The other day I had left my beautiful, expensive Miquelrius notebook at home, along with my lovely (inexpensive but hard to find) Jetstream pen, when I went to the office. At a bit of a loss for what to do, I went to the company's office supply cabinet and pulled out a cheap Bic and a 5x7 pad of yellow paper. I took out my meditation timer and set it for 15 minutes, and began brainstorming everything I wanted to do that day. I filled three sheets. The alarm went off and I went to work prioritizing.

I thought to myself: why do I never do this with my usual notebook? I think there were two answers: first, these were tear-away sheets. I was going to dispose of them by the end of the day, so even though I knew that the list was much longer than everything I could accomplish in a day I also knew that, ultimately, nobody else would see the list of things I didn't get done.

I also realized that I felt inhibited by the cost of the paper. These notebooks are pricey: eight to ten bucks each for a 100-sheet notebook. It's supposed to last me three months or so, and if I go filling up page after page with things that ultimately don't get finished, I'll just feel bad for wasting all that paper and having all those unfinished things to look back on. I'm not sure how to break this habit of being afraid of wasting good paper. That's why I bought it, to be my useful tool, and my repository for all things great or small.

So, I resolve (hey, the New Year's only two weeks old) to do with my overpriced but oh-so-sexy and lightweight tools what I would do with the cheap ones: use them.

One of the tricks of going from mere proficiency to mastery over a subject is to ask yourself, at the end of every task, "What can I do to make this better?" I've found that one of the things I can do to make my skills better is to recognize where my blocks are and tear them down. This is one of them.