Getting things done

I'm an incredibly disorganised person. You can usually tell where I have been in residence as there is always stuff everywhere, generally accompanied by teetering piles of paper which in turn are occasionally balanced or weighed down with a collection of stuff that is separate from, but related to, the other stuff that is, as I have already mentioned, generally everywhere. This habitual habitation ritual can be witnessed at work, in my car, my desk at home, my coffee table at home, my dining room table at home, my side of the bedroom floor and in large piles of bank statements, paid bills and other receipts in the study, which are often weighed down by obsolete pieces of computer hardware that no longer fit on my desk.

I'm a big procrastinator, which goes a long way towards explaining the preceding paragraph. I am also very easily distracted and I am sure that this is strongly linked to my procrastination. It is amazing what mundane item of trivia will catch your attention and leave you engrossed for hours when you are supposed to be sorting through old telephone bills from 2002 which for some reason you have kept but you cannot for the life of you work out why.

Being like this actually offends my geek sensibilities and my almost obsessive desire to categorise and order just about everything in existence.

(this last point will confuse my wife no end who would probably argue quite convincingly that she has never seen me exercise a desire to organise and categorise in the 8 years she has known me. In my defence, I'm easily distracted and just because you don't act on the desire, doesn't mean it isn't strong, obsessive and tears you apart inside when you never quite get around to doing it)

The thing is, I should know better. Late last year and early this year, work paid for me and five other people to undergo a Personal Efficiency Program, or PEP. PEP is full of incredibly useful, but also painfully obvious ways of improving your own productivity and helping you keep on top of things. Possibly the biggest driving force behind the PEP philosophy is "Do it now" which translates to "If it can be done in under ten minutes, do it straight away and then it's out of your way. Don't let it sit there, nagging at you, festering, sneering at your ability to keep control of your own life and circumstances, mocking and deriding your organisational skills". Something like that anyway. PEP was useful, but it is all too easy to stray once more.

"Do it now" seems to have a lot in common with the "Getting things done" movement, based on the book by David Allen titled, strangely enough, "Getting Things Done". I haven't read the book myself, but I have found something that seems just as inspired (and indeed has been inspired by David Allen) - 43 folders.

43folders falls under the category of "lifehacks". Little things you can do to try and be a little bit more productive. There's more than the website - there's a 43folders wiki, a 43folders Google Group and it's a blog and community as well. So much stuff to look at. So little time to look at it all (largely because I'm not as productive as I could be).

This time, I'll try harder. With Web 2.0 on my side, how can I fail?


As something of a post script, Merlin Mann, founder of 43folders is an interesting guy. He's a regular on MacBreak Weekly (an Apple based weekly podcast on the TWiT Netcast Network) and will also be featuring in an upcoming Inside the Net podcast (also on TNN).