Oh no I’m free what do I do
One of the side effects of post-consumer praxis is that your autonomy goes up. You tend to cull activities that you have to do. Most post-consumers opt out of the standard 9-5 job/career game sooner or later, for example, and I’m no exception.
This presents a unique challenge: after so many years of having your life sliced and diced into chunks of various obligations to this or that institution, how do you decide what to do when you’re the institution? When there’s no boss, no deadline, no teacher, no professor? When you yourself call all the shots?
This challenge cuts across many areas of life but in this post I’m taking a look at my relationship with my GTD system.
I’ve run a Getting Things Done (GTD) system for at least twelve years. I used Evernote with The Secret Weapon method for many of those years, and switched to Standard Notes two years ago. I’ve dabbled with paper systems but haven’t gone full analog yet.
During my career as a mechanical engineer of the built environment, GTD was indispensable. It helped me organize all of the things I had to do and keep minutia out of my head so I could focus on my task at hand. Fewer things fell in between the cracks.
Now, though, I’ve identified an interesting problem that I can’t find information about: the volume of projects and tasks I have to do is very small compared to the projects and tasks I’d like to do. My commitments, obligations, and necessary actions are few.
I’ve got to finish freeze-protecting our well head piping before any hard freezes. That’s a weather-driven obligation.
I’ve got to do taxes once a year. (Actually I don’t legally have to do taxes, technically, but I choose to anyway.)
I’ve got to finish preparing for our family vacation before we go.
I’ve got to get groceries, carry water, chop firewood, and keep cooking fuel topped off.
Sometime in the next ten years I’ve got to generate a little more income… probably.
Those are my obligations. The list of things I’d like to do but don’t strictly speaking have to do is enormous. It’s hundreds of items long.
I don’t have any experience with this as an adult. I realized that my GTD system was set up for when I had an enormous list of obligations, mostly work related, and a small list of things I’d like to do because that’s all I had room for.
I didn’t have to spend much effort figuring out what to do because the external structures of my life told me what was most important: whatever fire was burning most hotly at w*rk.
I don’t have w*rk now and nothing in my life is on fire. The way I had my GTD system tuned no longer fits the reality of my life.
I’ve been working diligently for a couple years now to tune my life for intrinsic motivation. Mostly this looks like removing sources of external motivation (salary, status, fear, etc). But my GTD system plays in to this. My legacy system was tuned for externally motivated and directed tasks. What actually drives my actions now is primarily stoke.
These are my thoughts on how to tweak my system to reflect the reality I’ve actually got. If you aren’t a GTD practitioner, this might not make much sense.
Stoke-Directed GTD
Roughly speaking, I should create a category for / the ability to isolate projects/tasks that are objectively urgent due to obligations, commitments, the weather, or biological imperatives (e.g. freeze protect the well before winter).
A separate category for everything else.
Use contexts more, but also deemphasize project-centric thinking on the day to day. Modify my system so that a long list of *projects* is not the first thing I see.
Elevate Project thinking to Weekly Reviews and quarterly reports, try to keep day to day thought processes on desirable habituated behavior and stoke-fueled task focus.
I think this looks like dialing back on going to the System to decide what to do next,
(which hasn't worked as well as I'd like in the past because when I go to my System I see Projects because of how I structured it and you can't do Projects,)
and instead to have habits that lead me again and again to a time and place of not having anything to do,
which allows my mind to wander,
which inevitably leads me to wonder what I could do,
and what my mind tends to alight upon is something I'd like to do (because where else would my mind go in crafted moments like this?),
so then I just go and do that thing and I tend to drop in and I tend to lose track of time and I tend to concentrate, enjoy myself, and do well.
I think the way to handle Projects is to document them as I normally do when my crafted moment leads me to stoke-fueled project design, and then to organize that documentation in a trusted place that I can find easily when I want to but isn't always hanging around.
What I'm talking about here isn't much of a modification to the structure of my digital system as it is a modification of how I approach task acquisition.
I used to go to my System. I think I should go to my crafted moment instead. This is a fundamentally different thing.
The purpose of the System is to let my conscious mind let go of mundane details
so that my subconscious mind can float up what's truly important.
I trust my subconscious mind with this role more than I trust my conscious mind, but it requires the devotion of a gardener to create a space within my mind friendly to this relationship.
My experience with GTD is that every time I have an epiphany about how to tune it to be more fluid, more aligned with intrinsic motivation, more supportive of my internal rich growth as a human and spiritual being, I’ll go read the book again and realize that was David Allen’s intent all along. I’m not inventing anything new here, I’m just getting closer to the streamlined mind-like-water ideal that he set out from the beginning. There was no problem with GTD that I’ve discovered and fixed, there was just a misunderstanding on my part due to the level of personal growth and understanding I was at.