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I used to love GTD.  Do, delegate, defer, drop.  Lists.  @someday/maybe.  43 Folders.

I still respect it. There is something to be said about being deliberate about your tasks.

But I quit it.  My life is vastly, vastly better.  Because I’m free.

The end product of GTD is itself a problem. Instead of spending time doing important stuff, you become a slave to your lists. It’s on the list, do it.  Even though there’s the “Drop” release valve, you don’t want to “drop” things because hey, you’re not a quitter, are you?

Systems make the man.  Except they don’t, not at all.

They make the man imprison himself with trivial tasks  Being able to focus on what matters isn’t going to be possible if you have a list that bosses you around.

While you’re putting things on a list, it’s likely enough that you’ll put more things on your list.  Inertia. You’ve got list-building momentum. So you put something that has no real relevance, and isn’t part of what you want to do. Because hey, you’re building a list.

Then you   have to deal with the mental overhead and guilt of having a barely relevant item on your to do list.  Do you drop it? Do you need to do it?  Why are there 18 things on this list?  I’ll never get done.

What you need to be doing is reading, writing and getting better.  But that doesn’t happen. Because the endless list of trivia beacons.

What GTD doesn’t acknowledge well is that the really important stuff gets done. Automatically.  You get your contracts and pitches out, because they matter.  You can wait on the TPS report.

We think that we’re cheating when we drop things, so we do stuff that doesn’t matter.  We make our own work. GTD has a severe activity bias. Activity and productivity are different things. Being productive is more than just a long list of things to do.

I remember this time last year.

I was haggling websites with Realtors and Mortgage people that I was basically contemptuous of. (Why I allowed contempt to enter my thinking is a whole other character defect, but I digress).  Everything was life and death.  At $600-1000 a pop, I was haggling all of them, trying to do them, and trying to make things happen a step at a time.

I had too many projects – by far- to do any of them well.  Try doing 20 websites at $789 as an average ticket.  That’s 20 server deployments, 20 themes, 40 designs, 100+ revisions, 140 emails, and probably 3-4 refunds (and I deserved more).

You’re always busy, you never have time to think. Every dime is blood money.

That’s the low end. Lots of volume. Opportunities for mistakes. Not enough money to do anything because it relies on selling LOADS of itself to be profitable.

You can enter a race to the low end, or you can ignore it.

I’ve been actively getting away from GTD lately.  I respect the ethos, but what it does is that it forces you into doing something that was important some time ago.  You may have more information now than you did 2 weeks ago when you set and scheduled projects.

I may be pursing goals that are obsolete, and the simple act of managing the goals that were once important makes for a tough time. I stopped pursuing this months ago, and I’m down to one list that I keep and glance at every so often.   (It’s in Evernote and I like the way that you can hit CMD-OPT-N and have a new note and then dismiss it with CMD-W.)  I process occasionally.

I like Brad Feld’s idea:

After the call, my dad asked “how do you keep track of all this stuff?” It was asked in a loving way with a glint of humor and amazement. I responded simply “I don’t – I just let it wash over me.”

That’s more or less right. I’ll get into how I do things soon.  Wash over me. Let it happen, knock it out, let it be, let it go.

.:.

The issue has been quality.  I won’t  put out schlock under the Simplifilm name.

I’ve been a bit paralyzed at what to do next, so stuff doesn’t get done as fast as it should.

Not long ago, I decided to redo our placeholder website. Jason and I ground it out in a few days.  What happened was that we iterated in public, and during a 3-4 day period, our site looked pretty ugly.

Didn’t matter a bit.  We put it on a new design theme that we liked, and had the changes made. Now that it’s going, it’s rocking, and we’re getting more leads – by far – than we ever have.

That lesson freed me to understand that I’m going to be improving things.  Getting them done is important.

Be in the cult of done.

.:.

What happened was this: we had 270 people see a site that was under construction.

But we got it done. We had 29,000 people see a site that we were both unhappy with.

90 days of traffic with an ugly site.  We were avoiding THAT.

.:.

So, I want to do routine follow up with people. It takes time  for people to part with the 5 figures that it takes to get a Simplifilm sold and created.

The messages have to be right.

But they have to be in place first. They have to exist. 

You can’t improve something that’s not deployed, not really.

So, get it out there.  Set a reminder to reevaluate.  Build a loop.

Then improve it.

.:.

Put something in place, make a loop.

Set a reminder.

Make something, then plan to make it better.

Deploy, improve, repeat.

I’m profoundly grateful for many things.

The idea that, to me, is pretty rough, is that there are a lot of debts that can never be repaid.

I can’t ever repay Marcus Aurelius for filling my soul with good things.

I can’t ever repay my children, Jack and Ruby for transforming my charachter.

I can’t ever repay the people I remember fondly, the teachers, the first co-workers.

The clients that supported me and let me get away with murder and indifference.

I can’t repay my parents for doing the best they could.

There are even people that are not in my life (and won’t be) that I owe something to for a kindness shown towards me.

I feel like I’ve got a much richer, better life than I deserve. I feel like I’ve been selfish and gotten away with something to have the life I do.

I don’t know how I got to the point that I’m at. I don’t know why I have a great life.

All i can do is try and be kind, quit delusions, and listen a lot more.

So, I’m not normal.

This much is clear.

I use a service called RescueTime to block things. To get better. (They are a Simplifilm Client).

And for me, I have had to block loads of sites. To stay sane. To not go into delusionville.  To get away from horrific people.

I had to pry my eyes away from the human train wreck that was Naomi Dunford, Dave Navarro and the Salty Droid.

Sports sites. I didn’t play sports in high school. Yet, I know that Kobe is dropping mad points on every team. I know – for some reason – that the Giants are back in 2007 form and Bill Belichick (the cheating smug, ugly bastard) looks to get his revenge. I know the storylines.

Then…Facebook.  That site antagonizes me like none other. It’s a news source for me, an echo chamber, and a look at the “what if” game.  I dated literally dozens of people. There they all are. The tramps, train-wrecks and worldbeaters all gathered for me to gawk at.

This is my whole life, being oozed out of me. For what? The chance at a pat on the head from some kid from high school? The opportunity to look edgy?

And heaven forbid I get drawn into a political fight. I can look testy and stupid faster than anyone I know.

It’s no good for me. Not when I’m meant to work, to create, to do whatever.  I don’t trust myself to run without a treadmill yet, and I don’t trust myself to do the right thing with my time.  So I put the blocks in place.

So I’ve trotted out the blocked list. It’s easy enough to do– Ehow has an article on it that works as of January 18, 2012.  For a pc, it’s here.

Anyway, FB got blocked.  I’ll still join it on my iPad and phone. But not on my computer.

For me, that is reserved for creating things and being productive.  That is a tool for work, and even though I may still need to be patted on the head by people I’m mildly contemptuous towards, I won’t do it while I’m supposed to be working.

We are already dead.

When our end comes – and it will come – we will either die in agony or by surprise.

It will probably involve a loss of dignity and bedpans. Even if science is somehow able to press the snooze button on life, it’s still finite.

What is there to fear? You know that you’re going to meet a grim and unfortunate ending.

Why stay in bed? Why worry about approbation?

We are already dead.  As we postpone death with life, let’s not do it in a fearful way.

The worst case scenario is a certainty. It’s a virtual guarantee. All we can do is live with passion and dignity.

Just a quick list of the tools I favor right now:

• Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Scripture.
• WordPress (blogging/writing)
• Google Reader: Following up and stalking everyone.
• Spotify – Music
• Google Docs
• Batchbook – CRM (highly efficient/lethal)
• Evernote – notes/writing/todos later.
• evernote – taking pictures of goal progress
• Boomerang – emailing later.
• Genesis – WP theme.  I’ll change to Headway 3.1 shortly.
• Macbook Air 13″ : writing.
• RescueTime – accountability
• Dropbox.
• Chrome – Gmail Notifier.
• Twitter/TweetDeck (narcissism relief)
• iPhone – communications/music/isolation
• iPad- Reading books.
• Text Expander
• Screen-flow - light movie editing

This is what I’m using now.  Besides Google Docs and WordPress more or less anything can and probably will change.