Contextual Relations

So what does all this mean for my GTD implementation? Well, I’ve obviously read the book, and I was implementing it. Or at least I thought I was implementing it.

That’s the point I’m trying to make here, as I come to re-read the book, all of a sudden things make more sense to me. I recall another comment by David (as part of the Productive Talk series) where he said it takes two years to actually “get” GTD. Now that can sound quite scary but David went on to say that the key is you get a little better in stages, you keep going, get a little better, keep going, get a little better still. It’s a slow but worthwhile process.

Slowly but surely you’ll make your way along until, roughly two years later, you’ll look back and realise you’re where you needed to be. I can certainly see where he’s coming from now, because I thought I was doing GTD, but really I wasn’t, and I’m still not even sure that what I’m going to be doing now is probably Getting Things Done. It’s just another step closer down the road. I’m sure I’ll look back in six months time and scoff.

What I would like to speak about, and this is where I think my particular implementation, if you can call it that, fell down, is contexts. Based on my research online, this has been a real trouble area for a lot of people. The problem, I think, is truly understanding how context really works. It took a second reading of the book, having taken some breathing space away from that initial enthusiasm, and now looking back reflectively, to actually get a better understanding of what a context really is, and how this fits how I work.

Context is not an artificial construct, but rather something that’s inherent in our lives anyway. Far from imposing a contextual setup onto my life, what I should have been doing is looking for the contextual setup that already exists in it. To get this right, I’ve decided to dump all my Next Actions into one list, go through it and look at the physical action verb association with each. This should, by itself, imply the context necessary, and if it doesn’t, I need to redefine the task. For example “call so-and-so” implies an @phone or Calls (David chooses the latter, I prefer the former) context.

By forcing myself to define my next actions in a way that fixes the context, whether it’s a location (like @home) or a tool I need (like @computer) I think I’ll get a better idea of how to set up my context lists to fit the way I work, rather than trying to force the way I work into contexts. Some people say they don’t work by context and have found great value in working off a next-action list sorted by project. Those people, to me, are actually simply using the projects as the form of context that suits them best.

Context should be a way of leveraging your energies to achieve the best result.

Wonder-Brain

On Tuesday I was discussing falling off the wagon and re-reading Getting Things Done, and how I was made to realise that although I thought I “got” GTD, I really had no clue. This took me back to David’s phrase of how people have “different ears to hear”, and this part is the bit that may be of interest to those of you that couldn’t care less about GTD (that’ll be all of you, I presume?).

You see, what you may not know about The David is he’s not just your typical productivity guru, the man is incredibly philosophical too. There’s a lot of talk about the deeper more meaningful issues in our lives in the book, and I very much would urge you, if you’re at all interested, to check out Productive Talk (link in Tuesday’s post). In it he talks a fair bit about the deeper, more amazing things we all have to grapple with.

So what does “different ears to hear” really mean? Well, it means you could tell someone something once, and six months later you could tell them the exact same thing, but they’ll hear something different. Not literally, obviously, but rather that they’ll take something different away from it. My take on that is that people see and hear things through “filters”, we all have them, and we’re all “programmed” to begin to interpret inputs almost instantaneously. Ever read a book and find it triggers your own thoughts?

Our brains are amazing things. Have you ever heard something and noticed your brain just jumps into action? Immediately those synapses fire off ideas, often in the most unorganised way possible. This part of your mind doesn’t seem to know about things like dependencies, it just spews ideas, it’s up to you to make sense of them all. You’ll often find you’ve missed a step or two, and when you go back and look at the thing that inspired the ideas, all of a sudden you get all the ideas your mind “jumped over”.

This, I think, is why David encourages brainstorming, allowing yourself to just have ideas in complete free-form, not analysing what’s a good idea or a bad one, but just spewing it all out as your brain gives it to you. If you’re mind-mapping, for example, when you eventually run out of “stream of consciousness”creative energy, you’ll probably stop writing down ideas. If you walk away and come back to the mind-map with fresh energy, one look at it and immediately you’ll see something that wasn’t obvious before.

You suddenly find you have different eyes to see, to borrow from David’s phrase.

Whilst the inspiration for this stems from David’s comments I’d like to make it clear that this is my own interpretation and by no means should be construed to be his. That’s the point I’m making, we all automatically interpret everything we see, or hear or read. To go back to what David’s saying, then, I think that these “filters” evolve over time, as our experiences shape us as human beings. Take, for example, a betrayal of trust.

Over time this sort of experience could make you automatically interpret things in a way that is naturally mistrustful. You may attribute hidden motives to people’s words, you may become cynical, or you may simply refuse to believe anything you’re told or that you read. If you then have an uplifting experience this may all change to the complete opposite, you may then automatically put a positive spin on everything, interpreting everything in the most optimistic way. Such is the wonder that is the human brain.

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about what this means for my GTD implementation.

Wiki-Wednesday – Michael Sims

Michael Sims (February 17, 1958 –) is a noted American nonfiction writer, author most recently of Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination (Viking, 2007). He is the author of two other books, as well as editor of two collections of literary classics. Sims’s books have received critical acclaim in almost every English-speaking country, including a lead review in the New York Times Book Review, as well as in response to translations of his work.

Nonfiction author Michael Sims

Early life

Born in rural eastern Tennessee, near the small town of Crossville, Sims has described in interviews how he grew up in a household without a telephone, an automobile, or, at times, indoor plumbing. He spent his teenage years in a wheelchair because of rheumatic arthritis following an attack of rheumatic fever. [1] Although Robert Macfarlane in the Sunday Times (London) said that Sims “is clearly the beneficiary of a wide-ranging American liberal-arts education,” actually Sims did not attend university. But he developed in childhood a preoccupation with literature, art, and nature, themes that dominate his adult work.

Career

Sims published his first book, Darwin’s Orchestra, in 1997, about which Martin Gardner wrote, “Sims’s range is awesome.” But it was Sims’s second book, Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, in 2003, that established his reputation as an original and witty observer of the natural world. Published simultaneously in the U.S. and England, it was chosen as a Library Journal Best Science Book and a New York Times Notable Book. In 2007 Viking published Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination.

Sims’s writing has been published in many periodicals, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Statesman, Chronicle of Higher Education, Health, and American Archaeology.

He has appeared on many radio and television programs, including a multi-part documentary about women’s bodies on BBC Radio 4’s popular program Woman’s Hour.

Books by Michael Sims

1997 – Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts (Henry Holt)

2003 – Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form (Viking; published in England by Allen Lane/Penguin, with the subtitles “A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Body” and “The Weird and Wonderful Story of the Human Body”)

2007 – Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination (Viking)

Collections Edited

2006 – The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis, Edited with Notes and Introduction by Michael Sims (Penguin Classics)

2007 – Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, by Maurice Leblanc, Edited with Notes and Introduction by Michael Sims (Penguin Classics)

The Good Book

Since the turn of the year, as some of you may have noticed, I’ve been somewhat enthralled with David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system. Obviously I took a good hard look at how things were getting done, or rather, not getting done, and how I was constantly complaining about never having enough time to do everything I needed to do. Sound familiar?

One of the things I believe to be key to David’s thinking, although I don’t pretend to know the inner workings of the mind of The David, is the notion that most people don’t suffer from a lack of time to get things done. True, some people genuinely don’t have enough time, and those people then need to look at the commitments they’ve made and reassess them. For most of us, though, it’s not a lack of time that’s the problem.

Quite the contrary, the time is there, it’s the management of it, and of the tasks we need to do in it, that isn’t appropriate. A lot of time is wasted on reorganising all the things you need to do as interruptions occur. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, as the old saying goes. Plans change, they are, by their nature, fickle things. One of the keys, then, to a good organisational system is that it remains as flexible as possible to deal with road bumps, whilst still providing some sort of framework.

There’s no avoiding it any longer, I’m going to have to admit it; I fell off the wagon.

Apparently this sort of thing happens all the time. It starts of small, before you know it you’re snowed under and back where you started, only with the added anxiety of now knowing how things should be. Once you’ve experienced the “mind like water” and find yourself back at “mind like treacle” it’s depressing. To see Nirvana and fall from grace…

Never fear, though, for though the GTD wagon is easy to fall off, it is even easier to get back on, so I hear. Where to start? A mind sweep? Good choice, empty the head, that megalomaniacal receptical that refuses to relinquish control. Yet, no, based on what has helped me that is not what I would recommend (not that I think it’s a bad idea, just not my suggested starting point). My suggestion is start at the beginning. The Book.

Yes, The Book, capital T, capital B. No, not the bible, you dolt. The GTD bible, the one that got all us crazy kids hooked on the idea to start with. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, remember that bit? Good. Well, re-read it. I did and it’s almost as if I had an epiphany. After fannying about with what I thought was GTD for the past two months I now realise I didn’t “get” it at all. I thought I did but boy was I wrong. Dead wrong.

Reading a passage in the book my mind immediately jumped to a phrase David used when he was speaking to Merlin, over at 43 Folders, as part of the Productive Talk series of podcast interviews. When they were discussing GTD 2.0, David suggested that were he to write “the third book”, the underlying theme would be that “different people have different ears to hear” (or something along those lines, I forget the exact words).

What does that mean? I’ll tell you. On Thursday. The suspense is killing you, isn’t it?

Monday Meme – The What Type of Communicator Are You? Test

As someone who defines himself by his communication skills and style, this test immediately grabbed my attention and was incredibly enjoyable. The results were somewhat surprising, I have to say. I’m sure those of you who read this blog regularly would have expected, as I did, that I would score highest in aggressive. Having said that, assertiveness isn’t a total shock, is it?

Although I’ve always naturally been very reflective and somewhat introspective, I think therapy only heightened this. Where before I would be aware of my flaws but do nothing to really change them, therapy taught me that that’s really only half the battle.

People who say they can’t change are wrong; no matter your age, if there’s something about your personality that you dislike, you can change it, if you want it enough. My aggression was a trait I felt was out of control, so I’ve worked hard to control the beast.

Textual Relations provides a great outlet for me to unleash my more opinionated nature but has, believe it or not, ironically made me less opinionated! The reason for this is probably the intelligent discourse I’ve had with some of you which has taught me the value of remaining open minded, using the ideas of others to add nuance to your own.

9 passive, 12 passive-aggressive, 23 aggressive, 24 assertive

The communication type on which you scored the highest is your dominant style. Of course, we all use each of the four styles at varying points in time, depending upon the circumstances in which we’re involved. Still, the assertive style is the most desirable in any communicator; descriptions of each are as follows:

PASSIVE – The passive person is indirect, anxious, and inhibited. You often do not address problems, and very rarely do you stand up for yourself. Your boundaries are poor, and therefore other people often respond by taking advantage of you or completely ignoring you. Beware, though, because you’re prone to the “pressure cooker effect,” whereby you explode over something seemingly irrelevant.

PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE – The passive-aggressive person is also indirect, and may even sound passive…at first. However, you are quite hostile in nature, and tend to want to “get even” with those who have wronged you. You do this very sneakily though, drawing as little attention to yourself as possible. You favor manipulation and deception, and would rather tell everyone *else* what is bothering you than the person with whom you actually have a beef. Sarcasm and hostile gestures are also your most common tools of communication.

AGGRESSIVE – The aggressive person is threatening toward others. You’re all about getting your way and being heard — no matter what. You’re frequently loud, demanding, bossy, blaming, and sarcastic. You may get your own way in the end, but it’s usually at the cost of the respect of those around you. You don’t talk to people; you intimidate them into meeting your needs, and have no respect for their boundaries.

ASSERTIVE – The assertive person is confident, clear, and in control. You speak with an even tone, and respect the boundaries of those around you. You try to address problems by offering solutions and working toward compromise whenever possible. You’re able to state your needs without any expectation of their being fulfilled, as you know that ultimately you do not control other people. You are perceived as a threat by the passive-aggressive person, as you are direct, open, and honest. You may be perceived as intimidating to the passive person but more so because he/she wants to be more like you.

Link: The What Type of Communicator Are You? Test written by inspireme27 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(inspireme27)