Hi, I’m not dead.
It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written anything here (just over a year in fact). Still, a minute ago I felt compelled to write, so here it is.
Shifting Focus
In the past I wrote a lot about productivity. I was an avid reader of lifehacker, zen habits & other leading “life hack” blogs and was keen to pass on some of my knowledge to anyone who’d listen. About 18 months ago I shifted my focus to learning and started reading Cal Newport, Scott Young and other writes on the subject. My desire to pass on what I learned faded. Lately, I’ve had yet another shift of focus - from learning to philosophy, and hopefully for you I’ll want to tell you about it.
In the three of four years that I’ve been learning about productivity I’ve made massive improvements in my organization & workfow: I’ve found software products to help me work efficiently, developed a version of GTD to organize myself more efficiently, learned skills to help me learn more efficienty and made changes to my routine & home so I can live more efficiently. All of this has been great but there’s one problem.
Efficiency is crap
The trouble is, efficiency is only a good thing when applied to the stuff that you don’t really want to do. Some might argue that this is bollocks, that it’s good to be efficient in say, your workouts at the gym. Perhaps technically they’re right.
You see, for me, efficiency means “To minimize the amount of time taken to achieve the goal” and while I attend the gym with the goal of getting fit, I also want to enjoy it.
If I’m constantly trying to be more and more efficient in my workouts, I’ll loose that enjoyment. This is particularly true when thinking about relationships with others - is it really a good thing to be efficient with your partner? Probably not.
With this in mind, I think that I’ve reached a fairly good level of “productivity” - there’s only so much that I can “hack my life”, before I need to look at the bigger picture: Why am I here and how do I make the most of it?
And so to philosophy.
Although I’ve dipped into some philosophy books in the past, and pondered the different philosophies of the people I meet, I’ve not really made an effort to think about things and after all, philosophy is thinking.
I’ve not got much more to say on the subject at the moment but I’ve found that the notes (MP3 and PDF) at philosophersnotes.com are great for setting the gears in my brain whirring.
Time to think
The first step in thinking is finding the time to do so - everyone yearns for some quiet retreat in which to ponder and recently I’ve found that my own head is the best one (thanks Marcus). The thing is, before I can crawl into my head I need to have less stuff in it. No one likes pondering in a junk shop.
In an effort to remove some of the mundane “gumpf” in my head I have, in true Danny style, written two lists:
- Important Ongoing Commitments
- Important Finishable Projects
The first list contains all of the commitments that I’ve made to myself and to others over the past few months. I’v also added some of the people I’m committed to supporting and removed some of the things that I’m not whole-heartedly committed to. The important this is that none of these items are finishable.
All of the finishable commitments I’ve made, like “Remove Vista from my girlfriends laptop so it actually works”, make up my second list. Every item in this list has an obvious and intuitive end condition, some test as to whether I’m done or not.
These lists reside on the whiteboard next to my desk and above them is the promise that I’ve made:
Everything that I do will either further a commitment in list one, lead directly to the completion of a project from list two, or else be fun!
I will not take on any more projects until all of those in list two are complete.
Perhaps I’ll let you know how this goes.
A note on the future of this website
I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of redeveloping TheScribe and indeed it’s still on my list of things to do. I’ve got a few interesting ideas and It’s looking likely that the blog will eventually be running on a specially designed engine. Don’t hold your breath though - this isn’t on my projects list and isn’t likely to be for some time.
If you want to keep up with me I do occasionally post interesting things over at dannyat.tumblr.com.
So, after sorting through my home filling and organizing my projects, I moved on to my filling at cadets. I’ll not bother explaining the process as it was much the same as the process I went through before. 
