I went to the GTD Roadmap seminar yesterday in Denver.

At some point it struck me how GTD is the world's best technique of karma yoga for knowledge work.

A glossary for the unitiated:

• GTD = Getting Things Done, a book on personal productivity by David Allen.
• Karma Yoga = the spiritual practice of action in the world, elucidated in the Bhagavad Gita. In the world but not of it.
  
• Knowledge Work = work done with the mind, not necessarily the hands.

And David Allen lives it--he's 61 and bouncing off the walls, looking like he's just getting started in life! His mind is clear, he is present, and you can feel his firm boundaries with his time and energy.

My personality type is a type 5 on the Enneagram. 5's tend to withdraw from and avoid the world. We procrastinate, feel a baseline of buzzing anxiety, and over-prepare in the hopes that we will be knowledgable enough to act.

Recently I've been working GTD intensively and have been thinking of it as a spiritual practice. Most spiritual practices are introverted and involve withdrawl from the world and responsibilities: long meditation retreats, yoga, self-inquiry, personal development.

I realized tonight that I have reframed engagement as withdrawl which is why I'm now successfully engaging with the world and work more and more.

Engagement is the new withdrawl.

Doing is the new avoiding.

Getting up 5 minutes early is the new snooze bar.

Just went to set a reminder for my Google Calendar and I saw the feature I've wanted the whole time: the ability to choose for a specific item whether to be reminded by email, pop-up, or text message.

Yay Google! Now I don't need to look for another reminder application.

I'm reading a great book entitled Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst of Good Experience.

Here's a quote (pg. 23):

Having no emails forces the user to get on with real work--as managed by the todo list...--and doing real work is hard. It's easier to stay distracted by the messages in the inbox, so as to avoid more demanding activities.

Ouch!

You know it's time for a new information management strategy when you notice you have 691 items in your Amazon.com wishlist...more books than you'll probably read in the next 30-40 years. :)

Well, that was my experience today. I've been systematically going through the nooks and crannies of my life looking for piles of unsorted, unprocessed "stuff" like this, and finally got the nerve to deal with it today.

I printed out my entire list (about 76 pages) just to feel the weight of all this junk I've been keeping in my head. 691 books! And I actually have 6 other wish lists too on Amazon, which total 95 more items, for a grand total of 786 items.

I just now decided to end the insanity and deleted all the lists. I'm now going to try some new methods for managing my someday/maybe reading list.

Wish me luck!

Talking to people is expensive. So large companies use complex phone trees so they don't have to talk to you.

Leave it up to some tech geek to create a service that helps you cut through the crap, pitting technology against technology. From Bringo's website:

Here's how it works:

1. Find the company you'd like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care)
2. Enter your phone # (we will never disclose your phone number to anyone, not even your mother!).
3. Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree.
4. When we call you back, pick up your phone and you're done. No more phone trees.

What a great freakin' idea. Power to the (geeky) people!

Is this new addition to Gmail a bug or a feature?


I guess it depends on whether you're a geek or a Buddhist. :)

Yup, finally did it. I'm making the switch from PC to Mac.

My new productivity system is based on iGTD, a Mac-only program built for the Getting Things Done methodology. So far it looks good, although probably has too many features (like most GTD applications).

So far, switching has been harder than I thought! I never realized how many PC-based keyboard hacks I use. I'm guessing it will be worth it though once I get comfortable with the Mac hacks, as there are many, many user-friendly productivity programs for Mac like Quicksilver.