Its a new year. I’ve made some changes to try to affect how I do things and to inject some simplicity into it. I have a job I enjoy at Celestix Networks which is imminently challenging, fun, and rewarding at a few levels. I guess overall I am thankful. The transition to simplifying the actual projects, ideas, tasks, goals has produced a few nice results. I’m able to check off things that I do which is rewarding. I also am able to simplify the things which means that they are more easily digested, managed, and done.
Moving to a new system has its challenges and I’ve met a few which in my journey. You have to stay committed to the system and not wander. I’ve looked a few times at what I need to capture those thoughts which pop in at unusual times. I have an idea about a work project when I’m driving and its a delicious, innovative, fun thing to try. But… I could lose the pieces of it. What to do to capture it? Now I pull over and pull out the smartphone and start typing into PhatNotes. Then when I get in, I deglue all the 1000 foot concepts into concrete things which are smaller, leaner, easier to manage and plan. They populate simple contexts and actions from the smartphone. Some may become major contributors to a daily important task to get done. Others become bigger things. Some are delegated. Most get done within a set number of minutes.
This is where the rub is and it takes constant practice to get this right. I tend to drift off into doing unfocused things instead of sticking to the plan. Perhaps this is my challenge.
Another challenge is that I still seem to want to validate my tools against others out there. There are so many web-based and personal productivity tools that the habilis in me strives to download, setup, use. What I’ve seen with a lot of these are that they are way too complex. I’ve found a basic and simple process to doing the “Zen to Done” for me:
The first thing is how I record things. I need a way to grab the idea, define it, place it no matter where I am. Paper does not work for me. The Motorola Q9 or any phone would work with a decent notetaker.
The second thing I need to do is to process those things. Here is where the wandering sometimes comes in. So I have exercised a bit of control and just do the work and do some mental disciplining around the effort.
The last thing I have noticed is when and where the most creative of ideas occurs. I’m sure you all have done this. When you are solving problems, locating solutions, you engage in this primordial creative state where ideas pop around like comets, things join up and then separate. You are doing more. There is a neural mindmapper working; joining ideas to other ideas. Wondering if a previous solution would work this time.
At this level of distracted awareness, I process ideas and formulate a plan that I have to write down. If I don’t; its gone.
Short and Long of it...
It all seems to work. Ideas process, I manage their collection. I use a simple solution to capture the flow. I have some challenges though. My normal and ordinal process is free ranging solutions architecting. Things bubble all around. I need a simpler solution than the classic business focused GTD. Perhaps I need to create a thing which blends the Zen to Done, the methods I have deifned, and offer it up.
