Eckhart,
> I'm sort of in the middle between paper and the Newton, and I found
> the most important aspects of getting GTD right is to have a very low
> barrier to creating projects (I'm thinking that even the term
> "project" is sometimes wrong), and hard links between projects and
> actions.
This is the variable personal divider in making sense of your life.
For me, transient, big things are for paper and detailed, permanent
things are for computers.
As soon as something cannot be encapsulated by a headline, I drop
into OmniOutliner, Graffle and myriad other tools and get to grips
with it. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
and over the last 14 years I tried to use the Newt for everything but
there is just too much resistance in this task even for that sublime UI.
Some of the perceived problems with paper have turned out to be
benefits: Having to periodically rewrite a page to roll it over
actually makes you think about all the tasks anew. On a screen they
just sit there mocking you while growing stale. Shuffling them around
and giving them priorities or recategorising them is just
displacement activity. I keep the trail of previous pages and I'm
beginning to see value in the history.
Being very visual, the patterns of notes on a page add a lot to the
speed of my perception whereas a computer homogenises everything into
repetitive patterns of excessive neatness, when what you want is
organic complexity.
"Smart paper" apps. like the excellent Curio are too much work at
this early stage of planning but I can see something like InkBook and
a touch screen might start to make sense.
The huge, unsolved problem is how to meaningfully connect all this
knowledge without it being so much work that it never gets done.
Joel.
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Received on Sun Mar 15 19:22:21 2009
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