I read a little bit of Making It All Work last night. The first few pages are way too self-important and religious-sounding, which makes GTD look even more like a cult than it did before. Reading it, I could hear Anthony Baxter shouting "It's just a todo list" in my ears.
One thing that stood out: drag. The opposite of flow. The thing that saps fun and life from creative endeavours. It's the garbage bin with the stuck lid, the test suite that takes thirty minutes to run, the blunt knife, the scratch on the DVD, the squeal of feedback during your talk.
Drag disrupts concentration and distracts you from the thing that you are aiming for. Like its physical namesake, it turns useful energy into wasteful heat.
Get rid of it.
(Ok, so it's pretty hard to write about this stuff and not sound cultish. Kool-aid anyone?)
3 comments:
So presumably while you are waiting for the test suite to run, you are trying to throw out the blunt knife and the $30 DVD into a trash can that won't open? While squealing? What a drag...
Is "sounding cultish" really a problem?
Great programmers live in a world where there is Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Beautiful and Ugly.
The ability to see Ugliness in code or Drag in the David Allen sense for what it is requires common sense. You can explain why it's bad, but you cannot convey exactly how bleeding bad it is.
So it is not surprising that Allen ends up sounding cultish, in the same way that great programmers sometimes do when talking about mysterious things such as "cleaning up the code base". It's the same difference, really.
Alex, :)
ddaa, it's mostly a problem of communication. When I have something good I want to share with others (like GTD or coffee or whatever), if I sound cultish, they immediately become defensive. This means that fewer good things are shared, which makes me sad.
Now you've got me thinking about the difference between the irrational (or is it pre-rational or extra-rational) "this code is ugly", and the irrational "David Koresh is Lord". Hmm.
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