Comment by golergka
5 years ago
I have a creeping feeling that systems like this (one of the most famous of them is GTD, but there are many, many others) are designed by people with a certain temperament: they are organized anyway, and their ability to continually keep things neat and orderly, following the same algorithm day after day, is what really helps them, and what particular system they choose to follow, doesn't really matter much.
But then they are unsuccessfully applied by people with a completely different, chaotic temperament, which are not able to maintain any such system for a significant amount of time anyway. We (as I'm certainly from the second kind) try one system after another, hoping that this will be the one that finally saves us from ourselves, but the real difference lies not in the system, but in something very fundamental in our psyche. It doesn't matter how beautiful the system is, or how fancy are the pens that we buy each september (school memories are the best example of this) - a couple of months later it will lie abandoned and forgotten.
May be I'm wrong? Has there been a single HN user that has been unorganized and chaotic most of his life, but then have actually turned things around because of such a system? Would love to hear about it.
You're probably right in your general conclusion. I definitely understand - I'm on the "unorganized and chaotic" end of the scale. That is, I desperately try to get myself organized. I have been, for almost two decades now. I've started with GTD, done it numerous times, and went through pretty much anything I could find on-line. What always happened is as you describe: it "doesn't matter how beautiful the system is, (...) - a couple of months later it will lie abandoned and forgotten".
But! Every now and then, something from one of these systems will stick for longer. Perhaps a technique, or vocabulary, or a piece of tooling. Over time, it coalesces into this chaotic, very idiosyncratic organizational system that kind of works for you. I'm definitely much more productive today than I was those two decades ago.
I think you’re right, and recognising that some people just aren’t organised people is a valuable emotional skill.
Those of us that are organised just need to help those people. Or be the person in our organisation that takes control of this stuff and does it. Hey, I’m making a decent living partially because of this system.