I’m not an advocate or follower of any particular productivity framework, or even that you should have one, but I’ve recently rediscovered a fragment of one that has been very significant. The short version is that writing down ideas makes room for more, the long version follows.
As hinted at in my previous post, I’ve been experiencing a bit of overwhelming intellectual stimulation lately. I credit this to my new freelancing ways. I can spend an hour, or a day following a thought, where before, I had to run it alongside my work responsibilities. Not to say I have no responsibilities to my clients, but I think I’ve set expectations to the point where I can balance things better.
Last week I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with tasks, and went back to a GTD technique which is to essentially write down everything you need to do. There is a cathartic aspect to this, as well as the feeling of “oh, well that’s no so bad” once you see the list. In the past, my list was 20, 30 maybe as many as 50 items. This time, I railed off over 200 in a row, and many more in the following couple of days. This did NOT instill a feeling of “oh, well that’s no so bad”.
Once my brain was sufficiently debriefed, I looked at the list. I noticed that most of the things were my own projects. Research this, test that, learn that, add feature X to library Y, and so on. It turns out that many of my todos were more idea-related than work-related. And almost everytime I looked at one, others would pop up. I guess this makes it more like mitosis than rabbits, but you get the idea, and rabbits are cuter anyways. Regardless, it was, and is, out of control, and it’s great.
This is not a new invention, it’s basically brainstorming, and there are other people doing it too. I think the part of it that’s new for me is that I’m not drawing any distinction between ideas and tasks, and I’m not seeing any value to doing so. I’m not getting overwhelmed by tasks I haven’t started because in fact, I have started them, by logging ideas related to them. For software at least, expressing ideas is not far removed from doing the actual work, so I’m almost tricking myself into being productive.
There are two problems, however. The first is that my list is scaling poorly, and there are no tools that work for me. I’ve tried mind-mapping in the past, and might try it here, but am not especially hopeful. The second problem is that I simply don’t have enough time to do it all, and I’m afraid no program will ever help there.