The hammer of order

You might’ve noticed the ‘GTD in box’ and the ‘tickler file’ in the rather odd photo I posted a little while back. You might’ve recognised them as being components of David Allen’s personal organisation system – Getting things done. You might’ve wondered why I, of all people, have an organisation system (my desk is practically a work station!). And a formal one at that!

Now, a personal (and professional) organisation system is something you’d likely find in the corporate world. And if you know me you’d know exactly how much I disdain the corporate world- It’s essentially a massive (and unnecessary) ego trip that everyone is somehow fooled into playing along with. But in any case the real question is: why does an affirmed Geek like me have one?

There are many answers to that question: I have terrible memory, I tend to loose things that I’d likely want later and I make a mess of things that should’ve been straightforward. In short, I suffer from the first stages of absent minded professor syndrome. I’m not quite there yet (hell, I’m still an undergrad!) but its progressing.

Absent minded professor syndrome, which we shall call APS because three letter mental disorders are so  loved in the medical world right now, is a state when your mind is constantly wandering. You think of one thing and that leads to another and that to another and so on. You love the thought stream, you live the thought stream and you exclaim in absolute delight at the wonderful ideas your sub-conscious coughs up. Unfortunately, that love leaves you with a predicament: either live the stream in your head and loose touch with whatever is around you or force yourself away from it and live with the knowledge that what you really want to be doing right now is a mere mental hop, skip and jump away.

Well, I don’t want to do either. I want to be able to enjoy my particular brand of madness to the fullest while loosing as little touch with the real world as I can. The answer, therefore, to the question of why I try to be organised lies in the true nature and purpose of an organisation system – to free yourself of unnecessary thought and worry.

The the essential first principle behind GTD (getting things done in buzzword form) is simple: Take all the thoughts that are clawing for your attention, whether they be as mundane as ‘do your laundry’* or as profound as ‘pen out the interesting approach to AI you thought up’* and put them down in a trusted and efficient, filing, organisation and reminder system. (The buzzword for this being ‘total capture’.) Once everything is in the system you needn’t worry about it anymore because you know you’ll be reminded of anything you need to do when the time and place are right and that any information you need is going to be right where it is supposed to.

That leaves your mind free to do whatever its doing right now! And what I’m doing right now is dreaming whatever I care to dream of, secure in the knowledge that I’ll do everything that needs to be done and sure that whatever I imagine and care for will never, ever be forgot**.

In short, I live in order that my mind may live in beautiful, beautiful chaos.

 

*Both of these are actual entries in my next action list!

**Please, please tell me you got the reference! A clue if you didn’t: the 5th of November.

Imagine worlds

Do you remember that day not all that many years ago when you stared out of the window just dreaming? It might have been a Sunday or maybe it was one of those convenient government holidays. You didn’t have any work and there weren’t any grownups bothering you with chores. Mom had just given you a bowl of something wonderful to eat. The sun was bright and cheerful but it wasn’t hot. There might have been a breeze that that day; that made the curtains swing and cast an odd drama of subtle shadows across the room. And you were lost in a world of your own. It wasn’t any tiny variation on this mundane world – which we imagine all the time, it’s human nature, project our desires of what was and what we wish were onto a virtual world. No, it was something else all together. The universe was dough for your mind to kneed, there were no rules, no things imposed on that true, pure freedom.

I imagined worlds full of wonderful things and staggeringly beautiful impossibilities. Of factions so strange intertwined in war and life. Of toy soldiers brought to life, following rules so bizarre and of beings my mind can barely think about now. I’m sure you did too. Maybe nothing similar in any concrete terms, except perhaps for their sheer differentness, but I’m sure you did. Our minds were unfettered then. We did not impose any rules upon ourselves.

Think about that. Our imagination can’t be fettered and shackled by anything outside. Not by anything that we have yet built at any rate. We do not imagine what we could because we will ourselves not to. We tell ourselves that it is childish, perhaps. We tell ourselves that it has not ‘purpose’, perhaps (As if all we do is only for some ‘purpose’ – hah!). We tell ourselves that many things that may or may not be either overtly or through some corrupted sub-conscious. But, the thing is, we just truly do not imagine any more.

Take my case: I write and I dream more that most I know. But my worlds are normal. They work and they think the same except in extremes of circumstance and in magnitude. They are just the normal world magnified and stylized in the parts I find interesting. But there is nothing truly new about them. I somehow try (perhaps not ‘try’ but in any case I do it to myself) to limit myself to more normal things.

It is our imagination which drove us to be what we are. The imagination which led some ancient Pharaoh to see pyramids where there are none or an architect to imagine ancient Rome where all he saw was a river bank. We do not forsake our imagination, we can’t – that would be as absurd as forsaking thought itself. No, we bind it and lock it in a cage of our making to serve the bidding we decide is ‘best’ for it. Imagine where we would be if we didn’t.