05.07.08

On A Lack of Organization

Posted in Essay Week, Rants at 9:03 am

Essay Week Spring 2008 runs from May 5th to May 9th, 2008. Each day Iíll present a short essay on a topic of concern to me; I have the option of including a pre-essay post giving updates on ongoing life events if necessary. All the essays this week will be here; the LiveJournal is on hiatus while I concentrate here. Some of the elements in these essays may be controversial; I hope, however, that most will be well-regarded and at least read with an open mind. If you have anything to say about them, please feel free to leave a comment; I read them all, even if I may not respond due to time or other concerns. Today we’re taking a step back from the grave matters of the past couple days and talking about being a scatterbrained slob, and why it’s not as bad as one might suspect.

Longtime readers of this site will probably note that, around the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, I started going on a little bit of a productivity and organization kick. For a few months there, I was almost overzealously devoted to David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and for a while there I felt more productive. Then I kinda fell off the wagon and started chasing it, heedless of my own path. The metaphorical crash into the lamppost came when my good friend Mike said on the topic, “I read it, and then I realized– I already do all that stuff.”

GTD isn’t intrinsically good or bad. I did find a couple of things that I kept up with for a while, and I still feel pretty confident that it could confer a lot of benefit to a great many people. But, as Mike said, I already knew most of the stuff Mr. Allen relates. And because these were things I had already largely incorporated into my normal workflow, wedging myself into conforming with the way Mr. Allen describes it– with next-action lists, bins and folders, and the full complement of trappings– became unnatural to me. Then it became counterproductive. Then it stopped getting done altogether.

So I fell off the wagon. It happens. Like I said, for a while, I tried to recover– focusing myself on tasks, writing out detailed lists, keeping everything largely on paper. It got to the point where I was spending more time playing catchup with the organizational paperwork than I was actually doing productive stuff. I’d fallen into the old trap of overusing a good thing. Programmers have a saying: “XML is like violence. If it’s not working, you’re not using enough of it.” As amusing as the aphorism is, it doesn’t quite apply to GTD (or even XML, come to think of it).

Organizational books like The Five-Minute Manager and Getting Things Done are, I feel, placed in entirely the wrong sections of the bookstore. In reality, their purpose should serve to be something more like inspirational books. They shouldn’t be treated as manuals to squeeze out another fraction of a percentage of some vaguely-defined productivity or performance. Instead, they should serve as guides to help you determine where you might be flagging in your own personal work habits; their solutions aren’t hard-coded mandates, but advice or a starting point. What worked for David Allen– while it worked for thousands of other folks as set forth in the book– just plain didn’t work for me, and as a result I had to make changes to both it and myself.

Folks like Merlin Mann and Gina Trapani introduced GTD to a vast audience over the past two years, but what they said about it– what they touted as its greatest strength– wound up getting tossed by the wayside for a great number of people. The adaptable nature and customizability of GTD– its hackability, to use the computer term– was what Mr. Mann and Ms. Trapani both claimed as the real strength of the system. Mr. Allen even says that the book shouldn’t be considered the word of God. Of course, there will always be people who have varying successes and varying affections for dogmatic adherence to ritual. To each their own.

In my case, “my own” happens to be somewhere between rigid order and abject chaos. Every time I’m on a job, I find myself collecting file folders of material. Pages upon pages of handwritten notes, printed manual fragments, and screenshots fill these files, each file being devoted to one and exactly one project. Anytime that I find myself working on a new subsystem or aspect of the job, I get out a fresh file folder, write the project name at the top, and start filling it with data and notes. Inside these folders, however, the organization breaks down– they’re usually in chronological order, but as I need to retrieve items, they tend to float to the front of the file. Inside the drawer, the folders usually live in chronological order, and I’ve seldom had to go back to projects once I’ve moved on– but I know where all of the data on them is if I do need to.

That’s great for archiving the data from a project, but while I’m actually working on it, my desk tends to look like the day after a hurricane. Papers scatter everywhere, notebooks stack upon notebooks, and the mouse finds itself having to fight for every square inch it can get (or did, until I got a trackball, specifically to avoid that problem). In the end, I don’t give the appearance of being organized in my workplace. But, by the same token, it’s just a matter of valuing effectiveness over appearances– if I don’t have any other pressing concerns, I’ll usually prefer to have a neat and clear desk without clutter and will spend the time to get my desk into that state.

I’m actually the same way with more or less everything. My games and movie discs are organized pretty well into a somewhat fluid system that is in an almost constant state of flux as it scales relentlessly upwards. Of late I’ve had to move a shelf or so of discs from each category from the “primary” shelf (the one closer to the media center) to an “archive” shelf (an older one purchased last year that’s now closer to the computer). It took me a very long time to use the old shelf as an archive space, because I didn’t want to move anything to it until I could dedicate it to a single endeavor– either movies or games, and not a mixture of both. Naturally, I ran out of overall space on the primary shelf long before I had sufficient materials to warrant moving one category over– it actually pulls double-duty as the portable game storage and the archive, and the archive is woefully scattered.

This is to say nothing of the way that I manage portable games. I have a very nice bag for my DS, but it only holds nine games at a time. I’ve managed to roughly double this capacity through the use of small snap-case carriers that hold three each, but even with that– and declaring an additional snapcase as “active” and to be carried with the DS in its pocket sleeve– I still have about seven or eight games in their clamshell cases on the shelf, which don’t get carried around in the bag. It’s gotten to a point where I’m always reluctant to add a new DS game to my collection– the majority of the games in the bag are multiplayer titles, which lends them some weight in the decision to carry or shelve. The PSP has a slightly lesser problem, as I have fewer games for it and little desire to add more; also, the PSP bag has room for 22 discs and a snotload more space for disc carriers if it comes to that.

I think, really, that everyone has a very specific definition of what’s “too” organized, or more organized than is worth the effort. I spent a couple of hours on two different days setting up automation for the Reclamation and Backlog lists; and if there’s a big self-guided project I’m interested in getting taken care of before the end of time, I’ll set up a spreadsheet to track progress. I tend to not feel like I’m making progress unless I can see numbers that define an exact quantity of completion. In order to accomplish that, it requires a certain amount of organization, and so I try to keep those things in more or less a stable order from the very start. Of course, as time goes on, that order decays, and occasionally I find myself having to take a little bit of time to catch up– far less than the initial startup time.

Overall, it’s really about determining how much organization you need in your life and working to and from that goal.

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