In case anyone of you didn’t know already, I am an unrepentant slacker. Not the cool hipster who whistfully sits in Starbucks and whiles his time away listening to a mixture of Michael Stipe and Dizzy Gillespe; no, I’m the other type. I’m the type of person who will commit to 43 things, and feel crappy about doing none of them. I’m the guy who will write a list of things that I want to have done, and then go do something else altogether. I’m the guy who will do exactly the thing that I shouldn’t be doing in spite of all of the other cool things I should be doing. There’s some form of psychology working here that I haven’t quite figured out; some rebellious little child inside of me that picks the one thing that isn’t good for him in a sea of goodness. But, that’s a story for another time.
I’m a student, and sometime practitioner of Getting Things Done, which is a great system for getting things off of your mind, and has helped keep me engaged with things that would have otherwise kept me in my rebellious phase. Unfortunately I’ve been a little easy on my lists lately, and have kept things that have obviously lost their meaning over time, and things that I probably will never do, despite every good intention to the contrary. So, when I did a recent review of my lists, I came across an item for my Poor Man’s Cam program. It’s lay fallow for a while, despite having a patch submitted from a guy for over a year. I continued to sit on his patch, until I got so fed up with looking at the items on my list, that I moved it to my “Someday/Maybe” list. (For those of you who aren’t GTD-savvy, the “Someday/Maybe” list is just a place to store ideas that may have potential value, but you have no defined next-action on them, like “Climb Mount Everest someday” or “learn the banjo”). There, the project was moved, and I was satisfied again.
But I really wasn’t. There was a small piece of me that thought that wasn’t the right place to park this. Part of me knew this was probably a half-hour job that could be finished and completed with no effort at all. The next day, I took that patch, and within about 15 minutes had releasable code. What was funny/odd to me was prior to moving it to my “Someday/Maybe” list, it wasn’t even a blip on my radar – I didn’t even see the action in the sea of other actions. But, when I moved it, suddenly my mind took over and decided it was time to make it happen.
Looks like I have a bit more work to do to make my next-actions lists work better for me in the future.
It’s not a new problem.
Romans 7:15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (English Standard Version)
Now, St. Paul was talking about sin, but the phenomenon is not confined that way.
If you’re coming down hard on yourself, consider this: St. Paul was a saint.
Y’know, that is a bit comforting. I guess everything old IS new again.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
It applies to Apple, Microsoft and even Linux, too.
Well the MMS came a bit later than usual this year (I blame our illnesses over the holidays) but thar she blows. Looking forward to it’s proud arrival sometime in late May or early June.
Nah, it’s not full-blown MMS yet.
I’m actually pretty focused this time around. I’ll let everyone know when full-bown MMS occurs. (MMS = the male version of PMS).