I have been purposely focused on avoiding distractions at work and in the my use of technology this week. You’d think that at age 56 I’d already have all this figured out and instead be pushing and shuffling paper and work all over the place like some seasoned pro, but I’m not wired that way. I love shiny, new things, especially when it comes to tech, and my mind often churns at trying to find a better way to get myself organized. The result is I often spend more time organizing my organizational methods rather than doing the things I had organized in the first place.
It’s all confounding.
For years I have subscribed to a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done”, or GTD, methodology for organizing my life. As iron clad as my memory is to the names and ages of the women that worked in my high school cafeteria back in 1983, I tend to forget tasks that I have to do at work unless I write them down. I have a spiral notebook where I jot things down all the time and then I add them to a digital to-do list. This is where things go sideways. Some folks in the tech space declare you should never use anything but plain text files to maintain this sort of thing. That works great for about 48 hours but then something falls out during a sync between systems, and then I have to remember what the todo list has forgotten, which negates the whole point of writing it down in the first place.
I could keep this all in handwritten notebooks but they can be cumbersome to carry around. My father kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket at all times and wrote things down there but while I’m clearly old enough, I’m not ready to wear shirts that require a shirt pocket at all times.
So then I switch from the plain text file approach to a solution designed for this sort of thing, which is a suite of applications called OmniFocus from The Omni Group. The application is outstanding and since the latest release has been even more fantastic. The thing is, it relatively locks me into the Apple ecosystem, aside from a web portal that has improved by leaps and bounds over the past year. As long as work allows me to get to that web portal from my Windows computer, I’m good.
But then my “be your own tech guru” instincts kick in, usually spurred by the clamoring of my open source contemporaries about “closed systems” and the cycle then repeats.
I have been focusing very hard not to be distracted by the differing voices of what’s right and wrong in today’s technology.
The truth is, I’m at the point in my life and my tech interests where “it just works” reigns supreme over everything else. I have to focus on technology that I trust, and while I don’t really trust any technology, my Apple setup is the closest I get to something I can trust: it should just work, they seem to be making good strides toward privacy, and most importantly, it allows me to achieve a minimalism that helps declutter my brain, my life, and my existence.
Side note, I still want a vintage Apple //e on the back desk in my office at some point in the near future. That’d be fun to futz around with.
The removal of “fiddling with the tech” distractions this week has allowed me to accomplish about 16% more this week at work and allowed me some brain cycles to think about upcoming videos as a creative endeavor. This has improved my mood and well-being.
Writing about this in this here bloggy thing, and making these declarations and discoveries public, has reinforced that this path has worked well for me this week.
I should probably read this blog entry whenever I start to feel distracted. I’ll have to save the permalink somewhere so I remember that I wrote this blog entry to begin with.
Maybe a sticky note on the monitor will work.
