The Borg of GTD
21.Jan.08
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I honestly try to refrain from posts that are largely a quote. However, this one just grabbed me and I wanted to share.
From 7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done (at Zen Habits):
1. Have all our projects and tasks stored in an external system (out of our heads), such as a to-do list or lists.
2. Pick the tasks and projects that are most important to work on.
3. Overcome the resistance to actually doing those important tasks.
And I would submit it’s the last step that’s the most important (although I wouldn’t ignore the other two). Unfortunately, because we’re not very good at overcoming resistance, we procrastinate on this third step by fiddling with the external system — the tools we use to organize our tasks, coming up with new and better systems, tweaking them until they’re near perfect, and so on.
That’s Resistance.
Bam! It is like he must know me.
Booted! When Good Bloggers Go Bad
25.Sep.06
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I was in the Vanguard SOH beta earlier this year. Wrote about it a few times too. And what’s funny is I started an article with this phrase:
No big spoilers, screen shots or surprises. I haven’t actually read the T&C of the beta yet… so not going to push my luck.
And then quickly lost sight of that as I blathered on about details and performance thoughts. I uninstalled the beta around June of this year and wrote another article grousing about performance. To be fair, more from the angle that my machine is old. But still…
Not that bright, am I? (that’s foreshadowing.)
On a whim, I thought I’d reinstall last weekend and see how things were coming along. Whim or nudge from Rich — one of those. Anyways, I thought maybe my meager machine would do better 3-4 months later with newer code. Found my original beta invite mail and re-downloaded the old setup package. Installed it and quickly guessed thatI probably had the wrong version. Couldn’t log in, couldn’t patch. I naively surmised that maybe the move from Microsoft to SOE had changed things. (cue timpani roll; start quiet, gradually build up tempo and volume)
Ok, no problem, I sent them an email and explained I was trying to come back and asked how to get rolling again.
(Cymbal crash! Stop timpani)
Whoops! Turns out somewhere along the line I was removed from the beta program for violating the NDA terms. (cue toilet flush) Through a bit of investigation (non-admissible in court but excellent deductive work) they determined who I was and let me know that I’d been removed from the beta program when responding to my email. Politely though — even said they look forward to seeing me in the release.
Turns out they didn’t figure me out until after I posted about uninstalling. And since I had uninstalled, they didn’t contact me. (We’ve traded some emails since I found out I was booted). I’ve never been kicked out of something by more pleasant people, for what that’s worth. *sigh*
Lesson learned: Read the terms before writing about anything covered by NDA.
Darn it.
18.Jul.06
Oops… forgot to post here a few days back when I left — I’m on vacation! Doing family stuff and doing a lot of driving. Remembering what “humidity” is too. Back next week at some point with some new posts. 
Continuing Simplification
21.Jun.06
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[This is a bit of a followup from "The Troubles of Keeping Up" from early May]
I’ve slowly been making minor changes to how I do things and the things I do in search of a bit more simple life. While this is truly a joyous time to be a technical aficianado (or geek), it can also be a bit too much at times. I believe I had reached one of those times this year. What are my big earth-shattering changes thus far?
» Read the rest
The Troubles With Keeping Up
02.May.06
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I’ve been pondering this topic the last couple days as I found my brief vacation from being online rather refreshing. Yet I also felt so out of touch with the online world while offline. And realizing that I had that feeling introduced new feelings of… sadness? Apathy? Not sure how to word it, but not necessarily a good thing.
Yesterday, 43 Folders had post about “keeping up“. And as usual, I think he nailed it.
I’m intrigued by this whole idea of “keeping up” — especially in how we experience and exert an invisible pressure to know more (and sooner) than our peers and the world in general.
[...] at a point you really need to ask yourself precisely what it is you’re keeping up with.
Interesting yet short article. He writes well and hits the high points though. Enough to be thought-provoking.
Remember a week or so ago when I said I had switched back to Bloglines as my feed reader? One of the first things I just had to do, after the switch, was uninstall the Firefox plugin that alerted me when new articles were there to be read. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. It was sitting there tormenting me all day long. First I tried telling it to only check every hour. But soon I’d find myself stealing sidelong glances at it. Just hoping that maybe it would suddenly alert me to the fact that a “productivity break” needed to happen. Argh!!! The Firefox gmail plugin was next to fall. Again, the damned things start to exert a weird sort of pressure and interrupt my work. Not good.
Now I’m reviewing my podcast and rss feed subscriptions. Surely some of those can go. Right? I won’t become a technical dinosaur overnight. Right? The other geeks won’t mock me — right?
