EclecticLip

I’ve been using the ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done at work for about a year now, and despite my undeniable novicedom, have found it invaluable: I feel like a Stone Age artisan newly introduced to bronze!

Like so many transformative tools, the basics are delightfully simple — but like eastern martial-arts disciplines with which it shares… well, virtually nothing, the arresting simplicity takes years to master. 

Actually, I jest — the end-goal of GTD, as it’s known to its acolytes, is to allow the practitioner to engage in their life and work attentively, undistracted by other action-items and to-do’s that might otherwise clutter the mind.  Which means it’s basically the Zen ideal of mushin, or “no-mind”, dressed up in 21st-century American secular idiom.  And mushin plays a central role in every eastern martial-arts discipline I’ve chanced to read up on.  So GTD does in fact share a common fundament with karate, judo, aikido, and their cousins.
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For me, the biggest GTD learnings have been:

• discovering the exhiliaration of the empty inbox!
• the idea of separating items on my to-do lists based on timeframe (my prior attempts to make to-do lists failed because my short- and long-term items were jumbled together)

Most gratifyingly, the “outsourcing” of my memory to Outlook has let me clear my mental cache of those things-to-remember that always floated around in the back of my mind, depleting my concentration.  So now, instead of multitasking, I can monotask.  That is, I can direct 100% of my focus to various tasks-at-hand, instead of only offering 90% (because the other 10% needed to be held back to avoid forgetting other action items).

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With my quantum leap in workplace productivity, it was a rashworthy irritation that I couldn’t apply similar methods at home with Gmail, given its more limited architecture.

So discovering GTDInbox a few days ago was a real psychological emollient.    A Firefox extension, it layers a GTD-friendly interface onto the Gmail interface.
Within a few hours, I’d decluttered my Gmail Inbox from about 170 to under 50 items — one screen.  And there’ll be a few whoops (as in plural-of-the-celebratory-whoop, not as in gentle-expletive-indicating-accident) of joy in the living room when I attain the mythical state of “Inbox Zero“. 

Just when I’d nearly set myself up in WordPress template “White as Milk 1.8″ a horrifyingly irksome formatting problem emerged.

Reminded me of the Zen koan:

“It is like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window.
Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through.
Why can’t its tail pass through as well?“

But whereas Wu-tsu was (presumably) referring to the lingering effects of karma — cumulative past action, in secular vocabulary — in my case it was arguably “ox”tensibly a more mundane matter of trying to tweak just a bit too much.

Harrumph.

There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

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