7/13/07: Movie Review: Politics, Suburbia, and Sicko

I've been doing something lately highly out of character. I've been watching movies and documentaries almost nightly, some on the TV screen and some projected onto a wall in our living room, where I feel like I'm in a theater with all the comforts of home. I fell into Michael Moore's new masterpiece (and I mean that by way of the Internet. I don't know if its illegal, but someone sent it to me, and voila, I had it. I heard that he heard it has been released over the Internet and he said that was fine by him. I figure the artist has to be the real owner. But if I'm going to get into legal trouble for this confession, I hope someone will warn me.

A disturbing moment that went on all evening
Watching Sicko turns out to be one of those riveting but deeply disturbing moments in modern life. I know we're bombing countries where we shouldn't even be, I know we're engaged in torture tactics which apparently (according to a group of psychologists who have studied the matter) were developed by psychologists working with the military. I our poor are getting poorer and our rich richer, I know highly educated people are out of work and facing destitution. I know people are wanting to believe the message of the movie and book "The Secret" --that what you think determines what happens to you, and if you can start thinking about good things, you will to attract good things, coming from the universe to you. What I didn't know was the main message of Sicko, namely that having health insurance is no protection from poor medical care when disaster strikes. You may carry fine insurance and then get cancer, to discover that your carrier considers the treatment being recommended is still in "research phase" and therefore you are ineligible to receive, unless you want to pay out of pocket. Moore brings it home, in enough cases and enough ways to make me very nervous. But that wasn't the only point of the movie. He went on to show health care in other countries and the comparison was almost more compelling than the rather gruesome case stories. He then points out that this is part of an overall situation of fear induction. If we are afraid of losing our health insurance (which may or may not protect us from disaster in a health crisis), that makes us more afraid of losing our jobs, which in turns makes us more afraid of being decisive and strong on our jobs as is. Ripped of our potential for a happy state of confidence, fear takes over and permeates everything. Moore really does it, he takes us on a path that describes the state of fear that perhaps most of us are living in.

The comparisons left us looking selfish and cruel: Is this how we are as a nation?
His comparisons bring home clearly how our system has become selfish and cruel, and a fear-ridden population is far too weakened to change things. In other countries he describes --Canada, England, France and Cuba-- the citizens expect to pay for nationalized health through their taxes. Now why don't we, that's obvious. We're spending all our collected taxes on something most of us don't approve of, a widespread military offensive in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't exactly spend what we spend on warfare (in the name of democracy and national defence) and have anything left over for health care for everyone. Moore doesn't make this specific connection, but we all know he knows better than anyone where our money is going. Its going to the oil empire living in Texas either in direct dollars or in insuring that the oil or what's left of it, is well protected and in the hands of the same ..umm. families.

That brings me to "The End of Suburbia"
I'm writing this before I've seen the whole documentary because my husband and son got so anxious watching this spectacle that they wouldn't let me finish it. These are two men who can spend endless hours watching men chasing men with every kind of horrific weapon, and blood, guts, and gore exuding from the screen for hours. But they could not handle Suburbia. They said it was monotonous and boring, which I interpret to mean anxious. In Suburbia finally someone is saying what has been clear and obvious for years, but is never or rarely spoken. We live an entirely unsupportable life, dependent on taking and more taking from the environment, without giving anything back. The suburban life style is dependent on the oil economy and oil production is peaking (or has peaked) and will now be dwindling from now to forever. We have had it with oil. We can't expand and we can't even expect to continue as is, at our current standard of living. There is not enough energy to be had to keep us going, even as is, let alone while expanding. The way we developed suburbs for living and then suburbs for working was only possible because of the excess of cheap oil. We could drive long distances to work and home again every evening, because of cheap oil, meaning cheap and available gas for our cars. This is about to come to a stark and frightening halt as availability of oil rapidly diminishes. The message of Suburbia is clear, we have to change our whole lifestyle and economic set up by necessity not by choice.

The two documenatries belong together
The Moore movie ends up depicting us as a very selfish and cruel nation, jibing well with the message of Suburbia where people have been thriving by ripping off the planet of all of its natural energy resources. We are going to be punished, or if we can get the hit of Sicko, we are being punished right now as our requests for medical care are "denied" and denied and denied. Our way of life in untenable. We need a self-sustaining lifestyle where we plant our food in our backyards and in our community gardens, we work and live in the same location, we make our own clothes locally, no longer depending on the delivery of goods to Walmart from China. Same goes for our dishes, and everything else that becomes junk (or to use the GTD slogan/word, our stuff) in our houses. We cut back and change absolutely everything about how we live and how we function on a day to day basis, simply because we have to. With the end of oil, we have to stop our military offenses because they are so dependent on the oil economy. We can't fly planes without oil. So maybe the change in our life style will free up some taxes to go to free national health care.

No wonder the guys got so anxious. Meanwhile I'd like to see the end of the documentary I guess I have to do it the guys aren't with me.

July 13 2007: GTD and the Weekly Review

Having finally settled into a rhythm and pattern of organized productivity, I am finally ready to include the famous GTD "weekly review" on today's "to-do" list. By good luck Gina Trapani at Life Hacker has just written a piece about the weekly review http://lifehacker.com/software/getting-things-done/getting-into-the-weekly-review-habit-278118.php
"One of the most important aspects of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system is the Weekly Review - a regular ritual of checking in and updating your task and project lists. When people discuss GTD, they usually focus on the "capture" part of the system, which is the first step: getting everything out of your head and into some holding pen that you trust (whether that's Microsoft Outlook, a paper notebook or a text file.) But having all your stuff out of your head isn't enough: you've got to review it regularly to make sure you're focusing on the right things in your work."

I confess I was relieved to read that Gina only recently implemented this piece of the GTD method, as I just began my own scheduling of the weekly review. The first scheduled review happens today, and I began a half hour ago, by going through my email and dealing with any that have gathered for a while, finally getting my inbox to. I have been hovering at 1 or 15 daily, and that's out of the 150 or so I receive daily. Of course it helped that I moved many of my listservs over to Gmail, where there are something like over 5500 unattended emails sitting there, waiting should I have any interest it attending to them. One Friday perhaps I'll over over and archive all of them, beginning again. Or perhaps they'll all be deleted. Meanwhile, before I return to my focus on the weekly review (and I will certainly report on this) I want to report that I am now into preparing the third research report for publication. Please understand that these are papers that have been waiting to happen for four years now, my productivity had gone so underground and come to a halt as I was weighed down by the mountain of "stuff" that had accumulated in my office/home. Freed of the burden of stuff, having thrown out what seemed like half of my house, I really was liberated to return to work. My grades for the trimester were all turned in early, other academic tasks were completed, and I am now onto a summer of research/writing/consultation/teaching --with the teaching being relatively light, as I work with a few dissertation students. My teaching load for the next year is also light, giving me plenty of time to write everything I've been saying I was going to write, for years to be honest.

On to the weekly review. It includes emptying my inbox, emptying a back up inbox that contains things that were put aside to file or toss, going through my notes from the past week, kept in a circa junior notebook and a moleskin carried with me, processing what ever I find, and finally, reviewing everything on my Vitalist "Next Actions" list including the "Someday/Maybe" list, and the list of projects (www.vitalist.com) I'm most afraid of what I'll find on the Someday/Maybe and Project lists. Maybe it won't be as overwhelming as I'm fearing. So far GTD method, since I made it through the collection phase which anyone following this knows took two whole months, has been a breeze and has made my life much much easier.

GTD made simple

Minimalist GTD
I'm just finishing up the grading periods, meaning I have finished the trimester of teaching and am wrapping up the administration of a course. I had put put blogging on the back seat, while my job took precedent. I've also been busy finishing up 2 articles for publication --one about antecedents to psychopathology in chimpanzees. (Don't ask how I got quite so far ranging, suffice it to say I examined data from a personality study of 145 chimpanzees living in well-run zoos). The second is about a measure I've developed with colleagues, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)." If anyone wants to check out this measure they can go to my lab at www.eparg.org and find the study under current studies, the one called "emotion and personality." If you want to participate you can, its completely anonymous.

My GTD efforts have continued, and I attribute this recent productivity to my GTD lifestyle. I'm working on a blog on my "killer GTD set up" responding to a blog calling on all of us out here, to add our piece. I'm going to publish it here as soon as its finished. Meanwhile I just ran into a great blog about a minimalist approach to GTD, it's worth reading. It's a guest appearance by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, http://zenhabits.net/, and a great summary of what you really need to know to get going on GTD.
http://lifedev.net/2007/07/time-management-simplified-how-to-be-productive-with-no-worries/

If you want to know something, teach it
I find in my teacher/psychotherapist role, people are asking how I got so organized, they want some of that too, so despite my still being in an implementation phase (that might go on for years I suspect), I am now forced to pass it on. Just as well, the only way to really know something is to teach it.

Remember that, its a hard and fast rule. If you want to know an area, any area, find a way to teach it. Before you turn around you'll have mastered the basics. If you want to get organized, start teaching people how to get organized.

6/06/07: When Psychotherapy becomes Executive Coaching

I have not been writing much which is unusual for me. It might be that I am through the major first phase of GTD implementation, I'm down to the wire about what programs I am using for all of my lists. I've tried all of them that I read about as they come out. So far I'm sold on Vitalist, with only one downside. They don't yet have both an online and offline version. Remember the Milk (RTM) just announced that with Google, they now have it both ways, that is you can write your lists online or offline, and this is attractive to me, although Vitalist works better for me, I can print out all my lists on a few pages sequentially, and its overall a great program. Sometime I will write about all the programs I've tried out, but not now. The question for me this evening is: Why am I not writing?" I'm sneaking around all day reading productivity blogs, following leads from NetVibes, and generally spending many hours doing nothing I call "produective." I wrote one very long note to my academic community about some rewrite of the dissertation handbook for students, but that is not what I want to be writing now.

Empirically Supported Treatments: Psychotherapy turning into executive coaching

The topic I've been mulling over for weeks now is the simple and typical scenario in my practice, that makes the "empirically supported psychotherapies (EST)" coming up short. When I start to see someone they often have a diganosable mental disorder. At this point I try different techniques and see what the patient responds best too. Patients may arrive drug-addicted, depressed, anxious. I do two things in the beginning of a psychotherapy: 1) work on building a therapeutic alliance, without which regardless of what techniques I use, patients don't fare so well if they don't like me and/or I don't like them. The second thing I do is try out some specific types of therapeutic techniques, and integrate them if the patient seems to like them. This can mean doing some cognitive interventions, behavioral interventions, supportive therapy type interventions.

When my patients (clients) get better
Ordinarily (but not always) my patients Axis II (bonafide mental disorders) dissolve with treatment. Then I become an executive coach. Patients don't want to leave "therapy" even when I tell them there is nothing wrong with them. They like the coach arrangement, the career building or relationship support that I provide for them. This is where the EST is blown to the winds, because I am no longer treating mental disorders. At its best, I' become a cheering squad, an ally against guilt, and a psychologist who keeps her nose into the literature, so that I can bring any advances to my patients as we work as collaborators are their career blockages, or self-sabotage in relationships. These are not mental disorders. People want to hang out with me, and that is what I do. Coaching is fun, and not quite as nerve wrecking as regular psychotherapy.

What works when patients are cured of their mental disorders
From the beginning of a therapy, I try to let people know who I am and what I do; this relieves a great deal of anxiety in the patient and they feel less fearful. By the time they are "better" and ready for what I'm calling
"executive coaching" they know me very well, and trust that I will use many techniques, in accord with what works. I ask myself: What right do I have to see people who no longer have anything wrong with them?" Plenty is my response to myself. If someone wants to pay out of pocket for the coaching they receive from me, I would feel wrong to dismiss them. Instead, we discuss the situation with clear heads. There is no "EST" designed for this phase of "psychotherapy" that I engage in, or at least not one I know about. I don't feel in competition with all the zillions of coaches around. As I said before, I'm their own psychologist, bringing articles or ideas in that might help with any remaining "problems in living." As a psychologist and a coach, I can do anything that helps. I still hang on to many of the "rules" of psychotherapy, at least to some of them. I don't invite patients out to lunch, although I have eaten with them at graduations and weddings. But the ESTs are designed for people with mental disorders, not for the well who come to a psychotherapist to help solve job problems and to otherwise help regulate their limbic system. I often think that currently, the therapist is taking on the role of the small town misister, or the wise old person in a community, a tribe. Maybe the therapist is taking on a role and function that the hair dresser used to fill. In my mother's generation, people went to the hair dresser every week for a shampoo. In their time in the chair, they talk about their families and all of their problems. Thus the hair dresser was taking on the helper function, now served by the therapist.

We Have to Change Psychology in the Culture

Its Memorial Day and I just finished reading Scott Lilienfeld's chilling article, Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm, in the March issue of Psychological Science. He writes about psychotherapies that have the potential to harm people, if not everyone treated, enough people to warrant our calling them "dangerous." Beginning with "Do no harm" Lilienfeld takes us through the dangerous waters of psychotherapies out there today. I am sorry to say that many contemporary therapies hover on the edge of those pointed out as dangerous. We have a day to respect our soldiers, many of whom have died in what they hoped or believed was for the sake of their country, their families and loved ones. We need a day to honor the patients and clients who have been victimized by the professionals from whom they sought help for psychological and physiological disturbances. It is bad enough to suffer from a disorder that causes adverse changes in our thinking, and to suffer from the stigma that comes upon anyone with a mental disorder.

I have seen students riddled with anxiety, after falling into the hands of psychotherapists..
We may have lost more than we realize. I have seen it. I have seen students fall into the hands of therapists who convinced them that their families were "toxic" when their parents were ordinary parents, with good and bad attributes, but nothing extraordinary. I have seen students lapse into unbearable anxiety, as they lost their ties to their major supporters, friends and parents. I hear students speak with enthusiasm of treatments they're learning at the feet of their professors, that come close to making it onto Lilienfeld's lists of potentially harmful therapies (PHT) and I am powerless to do anything about it.

The "Trauma Trap" and "Remembering Trauma
Some hours earlier, late last evening, I reread an older (2004) article by Frederick Crews, "The Trauma Trap" published in the New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a magnificent book by Richard McNally, "Remembering Trauma." McNally brought out all the science, and it all makes it clear that people don't forget traumatic experiences, in fact they remember it better than ordinary life events. Crews wrote a brilliant review of McNally's book, and made clear the pathetically weak position taken by our "professional" organizations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. These two article together were chilling, and more so because I hear the echos of bad psychology in my students and I don't know what to do about it. It is impossible to tell students that most of what they are learning is simply wrong. Sometimes I actually say that, and I can see them almost rolling their eyes, thinking that I am a "fringe thinker" because I don't endorse the idea of repression, I don't endorse the theory of childhood trauma, I am sacrilegious. I want to fight for my discipline and at the moment I'm not sure how to do that. People don't repress trauma, they can't forget trauma. People don't get horrific mental disorders because of childhood trauma, but because of genetics and physical environmental insults, viral and bacterial infections, combinations of neurotoxins, and other environmental assaults as yet unknown to us.

It is not the fault of the students..its not the fault of the teachers
We are all the products of our teachers. We are wired to comply with our authorities, all the more so if they are kind to us. Babies imitate at 43 minutes out of the womb, and we all continue imitating. If our teachers tell us that the cure for psychological distress is "catharsis" or breaking through "repression" and remembering trauma, we try to believe it. There was a time earlier in my career, when I, in compliance with my mentor, wrote about repression. I think I didn't believe it even then. But I said and wrote the words. Lilienfeld names some treatments that have been shown in repeated empirical studies to cause harm to some people. He speaks of "recovered memory techniques." But isn't all psychodynamic psychotherapy one form or another of recovered memory treatment? Where is the psychodynamic psychotherapist who doesn't work to help patients "uncover" their long forgotten traumas? No matter that the memories uncovered are false. This remains the goal of psychodynamic therapy. Practitioners in our field believe in repression, and no mounting evidence makes a dent in their belief. Even Cognitive Behavior therapists have caved in to the myth of childhood trauma, and given it the name "core schema's" derived from experiences in childhood. Where is the therapist today who will stand up and say "I don't believe in repression and I don't believe psychopathology is connected to childhood trauma?"

It takes enormous courage
After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for many years of treatment, it takes great courage to stand up and say "I don't believe in the theory of childhood trauma, I don't believe in repression." It takes even more courage for the therapist who has been treating people for "ghosts in the nursery" to stand up and say "I misled all my patients, I led them into a dead end street and kept them there walking in circles." Lilienfeld and Crews have courage, but what about their colleagues. How many of them are ready to confess to years of misleading people who came to them for their expertise? This is not just a problem for therapists and patients in treatment, its a problem for all of us. This is a massive social problem that affects us behind our backs. The pop culture endorses repression and the myth of childhood trauma. Patients with serious mental illness have to endure the results of their illness, the ramifications of social stigma, and the attitudes of their treatment providers. People in therapy are told they are sick, when many of them are, as Adler said so long ago, simply discouraged. People are told they are in the grip of a maladaptive and antisocial unconscious, they can't trust their own perceptions and their own emotions. Therapists believe they know more about their patients' minds, than do the patients themselves.

We have to change psychology
This is a cruel system of treatment, and this is a cruel culture of pop psychology.

Do no harm seems like an oxymoron in our current psychotherapy culture. We have to change psychology in the culture and in the treatment room.

GTD Implementation: The third dumpster: The Etiology of Mental Disorders

The third (?) or is it the fourth dumpster?
We are now filling up the third/fourth dumpster. I have gone through numerous piles of papers stuck on bookshelves, and for the next three days I'll be careening through file cabinets, trying to weed out all the "out of date" or "duplicates" files. Its a boring job and not one I'm likely to take seriously enough. I still have too much extra room, not yet filled in other words, in the newer cabinets. But the end point is in sight, I think June 1 might mark the end of our first serious "GTD Implementation" which began in earnest on March 1, 2007. I like having such an exact date from which to track everything that followed. I love doing work in the broad field known as "evaluation" and this marker has allowed me to keep a running evaluation component going on my own GTD process. I did a "review" yesterday, the first time I actually made it to the Sunday Review on time. I can't claim it was a complete review, but it was closer. Practice and more practice is how this is going for me, its all still in a phase I have to consider "practice." Three months and three dumpsters full of "stuff" from our house, while keeping up my regular work load, the heaviest of trimesters as this is the trimester with my large class, the period in which I will have had three presentations at conferences, the presentation to the self-help court (it went very well by the way) and still we are moving ahead with GTD implementation.

Dinner with my TAs led me back to "The etiology of mental disorders"
I know I have touched upon this before in prior blog entries, but it is such a serious topic and so misunderstood, that here I go again. Almost everyone connected to clinical psychology, particularly practitioners, holds on for dear life to the belief that mental illness is the result of childhood trauma. This is one of those beloved fantasies, rather like the old belief that the earth is flat, an error maintained for thousands of year. It is simply wrong, incorrect, a false belief that has clinicians and patients alike chasing after dragons from their past, in hot pursuit of an explanation for mental illness that makes little sense. Mental illnesses are not caused by childhood trauma. What is childhood trauma anyway? The myth of childhood has gained the status of king of the mountain in today's pop psych culture as well as in the hearts of clinicians. But getting realistic, we have to face the obvious. For centuries the going belief was "spare the rod and spoil the child." Children were routinely swatted, hit, the victims of what today we regard as child abuse and trauma. But those unspoiled children didn't grow up to suffer from major mental disorders. We have in our hearts a myth of the perfect childhood, and anything deviating from this ideal is considered detrimental to a child's developmental pathway.

The myth of the "good-enough childhood"
Lets get real. No one has a perfect childhood, never has and never will. We are barely out of an era in which it was considered not only appropriate to beat your children, but to beat your wife as well. Have to keep those women in line, while you are busy not spoiling your children. Our grandparents --or many of them anyway-- saw their moms beat up by their fathers, and got hit quite a bit themselves. And yet they did not arrive at adulthood suffering from serious mental illnesses. Our view of childhood is a fantasy. Our view of what causes mental illness is simply wrong. We don't have the answer, we don't know exactly what throws someone over the edge and into the terrifying world of mental illness. And we can't stand admitting we don't know. The unknown is simply unacceptable.

Bottom line, mental illnesses are genetic
Many severe mental illnesses are genetic, bottom line. Heritability rates are high, from 60 to 90%. But something more is needed, because not everyone with the genetic make up for a mental illness actually shows up with the illness. Or is that also just a fable? Is it not possible that its a matter of quantity, and not quality at all. Suppose there are polygenetic "causes" for bipolar disorder. Meaning, there are many genes contributing to the development of biopolar illnesses. Lets imagine there are 10 genes that, should you be unfortunate enough to have the "wrong" allele on any of the ten, you have an increased chance of coming out in the end, bipolar. Suppose you inherit an allele on each of these genes, from each parent. Suppose there are instructions about turning these genes on and off in the "junk DNA." Supposing each gene has a different "on and off" switch in the junk DNA. We're beginning to see lots of possible variations now. Bob can inherit maybe 5 of the 10 alleles that put him on the bipolar path. Then perhaps four of the ten junk DNA areas are instructing the DNA to go to "On" and six are pointing to "Off." Perhaps the precise conditions in uteri --not exactly the same even for identical twins-- lead to the "on and off" situation of the relevant junk DNA areas. We see even more variation possible. So Bob has 5 alleles that might contribute to frank bipolar disorder, and four areas that instruct these 5 alleles to the "On" position. So Bob appears in the world with a dark mood on most days, on and off suicidality, an occasional hypomanic period, never anything remotely like a true manic episode, and in the end Bob is a very unhappy adult with what is now known as Bipolar II. Just think of all the possible outcomes might have occurred from this myriad of possibilities. But none of them were due to childhood experiences, childhood trauma or the world's most perfect childhood.

Physical environmental contributions
Is it all up to chance? Yes and No . We know that children may appear with OCD post strep infection. The strep bacteria produce something that amounts to a brain toxin, that results in inflammation in some part of the brain that ends up screaming "OCD OCD" in the child. There may be many bacteria and viruses that effect the likelihood of Bob (our character above) demonstrating or not demonstrating his propensity to bipolar disorder. There may be neurotoxins in our ordinary contemporary drinking water. There may be other factors in the physical environment that instruct the DNA to go "ON" or "OFF." But how much does the "emotional" environment contribute? We get it confused. We see an erratic parent and we think "that behavior is pathogenic for the children." But what is really pathogenic is that the erratic parent has an untreated (because it is relatively mild and therefore not diagnosed) bipolar II condition, meaning the parent inherited perhaps four of the possible 10 bipolar alleles (two from each parent, such a small number that there were no visible signs in the parent) and perhaps three junk DNA areas yelling "ON," just enough to get some of that erratic, irritable parenting. Here we are, claiming that childhood trauma, present because of that irritable erratic parent, is responsible for the later development of bipolar II in the offspring. All wrong, the parental behavior doesn't cause the illness in the child or young adult. The parental genes and areas of instructions, in combination with the genes and areas of instruction from the other parent, are responsible for the development of the illness.

Its very simple, very simple math and very simple conceptually
Its simple really, very simple math, very simple concept. Major mental disorders are inherited and sometimes brought to life from some environmental (physical) factors. We always want to run away from physical causes because we (psychologists) think we have to think that way, we have to make other people think that way, in order to make a living. Wrong. Having a serious mental disorder causes numerous psychological problems, for which people need psychological treatment. We may know that addiction is an inherited illness, but the treatment is abstinence and psychosocial treatment modalities. Addiction leaves a mess in its wake. A person who has suffered from active addiction may get into recovery and wake up and find themselves in some of the nastiest messes possible, they've done horrible things, they've stolen from their families and friends, they've burned all their bridges. They need massive amounts of psychosocial help to regain their sense of personhood, and good personhood at that. There's plenty of work for psychologists who understand that major mental disorders are physical in nature and physical in origin. Psychologists who have their patients endlessly searching for childhood trauma miss the boat. People know their parents tried, tried and failed. It does not help to have them demonize their parents. It helps a lot to have an explanation for their parents adversive behaviors, to have sympathy for their parents as well as for themselves.

Mental disorders are physiological illnesses from beginning to end. People act like this simple statement is violating the most basic beliefs about life. Its time we all said the obvious. Mental illnesses are the same as any physical illnesses. The urge to rest on the psychology of childhood is an escape into devils inhabiting people. Lets stand up and say it like it is, so we can get some decent help and respect for people with mental illnesses, and for their families.

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.