Getting Things Labeled
by
Ross M. Miller
Miller Risk Advisors
www.millerrisk.com
September 10, 2007
My first encounter with the cult of organization was
during my waning days at General Electric. One of my putative bosses
discovered Franklin planners and required that everyone of consequence
below him attend a full-day seminar to join the Franklin cult.
To keep travel expenses to a minimum, our Franklin
instructor came to us. He was a nice enough guy who showed obvious signs
of wanting to move up in the ranks of motivational speakers, in other
words, he was a bit smarmy. We got workbooks that encouraged us to go
beyond our comfort zones and were issued Franklin planners with a month's
worth of pages for them and order forms for more. We were then told how we
were to put everything in the planners and that we had to take them with
us everywhere. I imagined that the speaker had a waterproof pouch surgical
implanted onto his hip so that he could take his trusty Franklin planner
into the shower. The toadies of our crowd at GE carried their planners
with them for several months until the whole thing was forgotten when the
next management fad arrived, while the rest of us immediately chucked
them. Another Dilbert moment at GE.
The Franklin people never faded away entirely. They had
a messy marriage with the Covey folk and I still see them from time to
time on my more upscale adventures in retailing, it's just that they are
not worth writing about. I am not about to link to them—you
can guess their URL—and the handy store locator on
their sites indicates that there are no Franklin Covey stores in the
entire state of New York, which probably tells you something. The day that
I purchase an inspirational poster about teamwork is the day before the
day that the men in white coats come for me.
Now let's fast forward to the present. One of the first
podcasts that I subscribed to back when podcasts were new was Merlin
Mann's "43 Folders,"
a major podcast in the world of "lifehacking." It is there that
I discovered GTD, which is short for
"Getting Things Done," which also happens to be the title of
David Allen's book about his trademarked organizational system.
Before we go any further, you must understand that I am
for organization in a big way. I was an early adopter of Ready!, GrandView,
PackRat, Ecco, Outlook, and OneNote. My hard drive is organized, my books
are organized, my files are organized, and my fish named Alpha is
organized. The only thing is that I do not belong to any organizational
cult. I just pick and choose good organizational ideas cafeteria style,
which is what lifehacking is all about.
I read the GTD book in an attempt to pick up the trendy
organizational tips to and see what all the excitement was about. It was
one of those hot and lazy July weekends where my other project was to go
through all my electronic junk and various gadgets, throw most of it out,
and organize what was left of it in see-through plastic bins from Bed,
Bath, and Beyond. (Consumer advice: Do not buy those cheap Sterilite bins,
ever.) The psychic impact of this exercise was the disgust I felt for
having spent so much money for lots of stuff that was now utterly useless.
The GTD book has some good ideas in it, and one idea
resonated with my inner gadget freak. Mr. Allen suggested that to help one
organize one's stuff that one should purchase a label maker and stick
labels on things. I paid Amazon and Newegg (the subjects of next month's
commentary) a visit and discovered that one could purchase loads of
label-making capability for $50 or less. (Label makers are very much like
razors—the real money is in the blades, which in
this case are the label refill cartridges.) Aside from the fact that I had
just tossed a bunch of old gadgets, there was a major issue—what
to put labels on. Long ago, I would run special Avery file folder labels
through my laser printer, but then I discovered that the hassle of setting
this up meant that things would go unfiled for months, defeating the whole
idea of filing. Being unencumbered with OCD, I now simply write on file
folders with a Uni-ball Vision Elite pen to label them. Ultimately, if a
bought a label maker, I would make only a single label that would read
"Label Maker" and several years from now I would feel badly
about having purchased it when I would ultimately throw it out.
GTD nonetheless presents a perfectly rational and
reasonable method for reducing the chaos in one's life that is a tweaking
of the song the Franklin planner guy was singing to us at GE. There is,
however, a major problem with both systems. The philosophy behind GTD
makes sense: in order to have a sense of flow in your life you should get
all of the trivia in life out of the way (via organization) so that you
can concentrate on the "important stuff." This requires both
eternal vigilance and just possibly the aforementioned surgically
implanted pouch. That is because when you have moved your organizational
capacity out of your mind and onto paper, a PDA, a computer, or all three
together, you had better get everything right, especially if you kept
things obsessively neat by throwing out all original documents. If one
instead goes through life with a "mental picture" of what is
going on, it is far more difficult to mess up appointments and deadlines
than if one commits everything to external planning devices and does not
subject them to appropriate reality checks. In tech terminology, the GTD
system is brittle by design. One little mistake and you are in Cleveland
on Christmas for that big meeting that is scheduled for January 25. (In
Outlook, all months look alike. You have been warned.)
Ultimately, organization is a personal thing. Good
short-term and long-term memory make organization a lot easier. Also,
there is a certain kind of uncharted "intelligence" that helps
with organization and people lacking in this intelligence are perhaps
doomed to disorganization regardless of how many self-help book they read,
even if these books are clearly targeted at disorganized people with
limited memory and intelligence. (Especially since people with limited
memories are prone to buying the same book multiple times.)
The most disappointing thing about GTD, especially when
one considers its popularity in the blogosphere, is its limited embrace of
technology. Sure, the more expense labelers come with USB ports, but real
technology, like Microsoft OneNote 2007, is changing people's lives and
GTD has little to say about it. (OneNote is still very rough around the
edges, but can be a great organizational tool once one figures out what to
with it.)
A high-quality, sheet-feed scanner costs as much as
several dozen labelers, but it can also make a world of difference. As
long as one has plentiful monitor real estate, PDFs with OCR'ed text are a
lot easier to work with than the original documents in most applications.
(Paper still has an edge for quick scanning and for staying out of trouble
in airport restrooms.)
In closing, it is worth noting that there is a very good
reason that personal planning has all the earmarks of a cult. For the
persistent few who actually get organized, one thing soon dawns on them—the
organized pay the price for the other people in their lives being
disorganized, especially other people in positions of authority, like
bosses (or, heaven forbid, professors). Perhaps the GTD book is best read
as a utopian novel rather than as the latest and greatest self-help book.
Copyright 2007 by Miller Risk Advisors. Permission granted to
forward by electronic means and to excerpt or broadcast 250 words or less
provided a citation is made to www.millerrisk.com.