GTD: The next phase of implementation

I'm so glad I'm here but not here..
Yesterday I lay around until 3PM, reading on the Internet, spending time with Netvibes, resting, and starting my own wiki. I finally found an online source for my wiki, and laid out a plan for the day in greater detail than I allow myself to do here in this medium. I might bring it over here, but I might not, its too detailed. Having constructed the plan, I lepta into action. I spent hours throwing out books that weren't classics, weren't loved, and had no place being here. Old diet books, old exercise books, old sociology books. I kept most of the anthropology because it was mainly ethnographies from the 40's, 50's, and 60's when there were still hunter-gatherer groups of people around the planet who had not been touched by global industrialization and culture. These are real classics and going through them I thought about how much I wanted to take a year off and study my "topic," that is survivor guilt broadly defined, in multiple cultures around the world. I would love to read all these ethnographies again with my aging brain, I know so much now that I didn't know when I read them. I would read with a different perspective and a different world view. I threw out lots of the economics books, the lefty analysis of this and that, though I held on to Lenin and Mao, it might be interesting to reread them at some point. I am not finished even with books in our bed room which has bookcases up to the ceiling on three of four walls. I'm throwing out piles of papers as I run into them, stacked and disordered on the shelves.

"Times they are a-changing..."
After almost three hours of this, I settled into preparing for my second review by clearing out my inbox. Things were acted upon immediately, filed with real brother's created labels (or at least sections of the files cabinets are formally labeled), thrown out, or put in a "deal with this when I speak to my husband" place. Things I have to take to my academic institution were put in the "To Office" folder in my brief case. I have one more place to collect pieces of papers, and two notebooks from which to gather and integrate information, and then I am ready for the thinking part of my Sunday morning review, or should I saw the "review." One thing I did differently yesterday was to put things that I was not going to do immediately into an appropriate list on Vitalist, the online GTD-driven listmaking program I'm using at the moment. http://www.vitalist.com/ I am also dallying with Nozbe www.nozbe.com/ but for the moment, Vitalist feeds into Google Calendar easily and seems the most efficient. It also prints out everything by context sequentially, and not one context per page, so it is easier to carry around with me. The way this was so different for me. In pre-GTD days, I would throw things I wasn't going to immediately process (either by filing or do at some later time) into a pile, or just back into the inbox so to speak, and forget about it as the piles grew larger and larger. My piles began to show up everywhere, on every surface and then on the floor, taking over rooms I was working in.

Its a good thing, because I discovered a talk I'm going to be giving
This new procedure I'm learning means that the undone items are not in my inbox but in another "to be processed" place, and the activity itself is on the appropriate list, which I look at thoroughly at least once a day. Its a good thing too because yesterday I noticed that I was going to be speaking to a group of lawyers and judges who work in the self-help courts this coming week. The obvious conclusion: I have to spend much of this weekend preparing my talk, in accord with the kinds of questions the audience has, and the reason they have asked me to come and speak to them and with them.

The Self-Help Court: How to work with clients with mental disorders
I did this last year, went to speak at the conference for lawyers and judges working in the self-help courts around California. I have rarely had such a receptive audience; this group were not out to be critical, to be judgemental, they wanted help with the serious problems they face on a daily basis, working with people who suffer from serious mental disorders and who come to them for help, in being their own lawyers so to speak, in court situations. What is an attorney to do when a client comes in to the self-help legal clinic and wants to file a restraining order against someone who she says is coming through the walls of her apartment and raping her every night? Or what is an attorney to do when someone says her neighbors are systematically spying on her, and slipping poison into her food? Or what are they to do in the self-help clinics when some clients come in every day, even when they have no legal business to tend to, and won't leave until an attorney has spent an hour with them, treating the meetings like psychotherapy sessions. I have the power point talk I gave last year, but now I know the kinds of questions they are asking better, so I will revise the outline accordingly.

The beginning of a trusted system turning into action and practice
Seeing this in my Vitalist "Urgent" list section reminded me this is coming right up and I need to spend a lot of time thinking about it now, so I won't be worked up on Tuesday night, right before the conference. Moments like this, when I see all the clutter being dismantled, and I see I'm beginning to have a "trusted system" of everything I have to tend to or think about now, and what I can think about "later" (or "someday/maybe") lends credence to the idea of a "mind like water." I had no idea that the clutter and disorganized work style were creating enormous tension in my life. I think "how could I have missed that, its so obvious?" But then much of GTD is breaking things down into obvious units of organization, rather like I do when I 'm designing or working on a research project. Somehow I think I believed my life didn't deserve that kind of careful attention.

The way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice
Or I thought there were people who were born "organized" and people who weren't, and I was one who was by nature, disorganized. This makes little sense because I have always liked devising systems, and creating things dependent on systematizing and creating order out of chaos. Now I know from complexity science that the world is in fact always moving to order, that agents will work to collaborate, or coordinate, that is move to create a system in an orderly manner. So why I thought I wasn't organized may be simply that I was not trained to believe I could pay close attention to my life and organize it accordingly. A little thought goes a long way. People tend to laugh at those of us who have gone overboard with GTD, trying all the new programs and tools with which to carry out GTD principles. I am one of those people, I read the productivity blogs now with some passion, and try out ever new program, spending inordinate amounts of time on the tools. But in truth, every time I yet again make a list on a new program (and I plan to write my own review of the many tools I've tried one of these weeks), I give more detailed thought to exactly how I organize my life, what I have to do, what category all my "next actions" really belong in. So what looks like a "productivity addiction" is really just "practice" and the way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice.

So in accord with my plan for the day, I'm off to continue emptying the shelves in the bed room of papers and books that I don't need or want any longer, and after a few hours of that (I have a limit to how much time I can do this in a stretch), to tackling those very difficult questions as I prepare for the talk I'm giving on Wednesday.