Comment by mlac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlac | Hacker News Reader

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They don’t. If they do, they shouldn’t and need to relax some constraints.

I’ll offer four books.

-> “Getting things done” -> Dry as hell, but useful for basic organization and “adulting”.

-> “Essentialism” and “Make Time” -> prioritization

-> “Four Thousand Weeks” -> perspective

Life is trade-offs. The thing you are doing at this very moment (reading this comment) has been prioritized over everything else in your life. Analyzing everything this way can be exhausting and can lead you to beat yourself up, but it’s good to keep in mind at a high level.

When I say “they don’t” do it all, I mean anyone you see doing anything is, by definition, not doing everything. They are doing that one thing. A few people can do a lot of different things in a day and keep a lot of plates spinning, but there is a natural breadth vs. depth trade off.

I would encourage you to not try to do it all, but explicitly make trade offs for your time (e.g. hiring a house cleaner, ordering in from restaurants, getting a nanny if you and your spouse both want to work). Whatever your comfort is for that sort of thing, there’s nothing to be ashamed of for bringing in help to keep life moving. The best people have teams helping them get things done. Whatever your pain point is, throw resources at it. These will change over time.

Time != Energy. There are baseline skills (diet, exercise, sleep) that are force multipliers and have a positive ROI on Energy. There are things that have a highly negative ROI. Finding both for you is useful.

You will never “get there”, even if everything is perfect. Change is constant, and living is staying current and adapting with the change.

As Willie Nelson said, “All we have is right now”. That took me a long time to get.

As Bill Gates said, “We underestimate what we can accomplish in a year and overestimate what we can accomplish in a day.”

““You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” - Wayne Gretzky” - Michael Scott

And Warren Buffet says to write down your top 25 priorities, and absolutely do everything you can to avoid the bottom 20, focusing only on the top 5.

>And Warren Buffet says to write down your top 25 priorities, and absolutely do everything you can to avoid the bottom 20, focusing only on the top 5.

And make sure you revisit that list every couple of years. It's going to change a lot over a lifetime.

Do you use GTD on a daily basis and does it help you? I found the system terrible and convoluted. David Allen is a member of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, which I've read is a cult. The history of the system seems a bit shady when you look at it from this perspective. Essentially GTD is actually just a cult like any other. Scientology is meant to use science to actualize people to their full potential, as another example. I'd love to hear your perspective.

Yeah I hadn’t heard it was a cult, and I wouldn’t read too far into it. Anything taken to the extreme gets weird, and he has made his life from it so he’s as extreme as it gets. I think for him it’s definitely something he came to while taking psychedelics, so it’s probably spiritual and “the right way to live”.

In my mind to have a cult you need other people, and I’ve never met with anyone for a GTD meetup. To me the point of GTD is for it to be as low drag and out of the way as possible, so that you spend as little time on it as necessary.

It’s a tool in the tool belt like anything else. The key ideas I (try) to use:

- Weekly review (just carve out time to get organized each week in a structured way)

- Inbox / place to capture things

- 2 minute rule - if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it (sometimes 5 depending on the context)

- Contexts to let me think about work and personal items separately (though I keep them physically separate and work stays on work machine).

- Agendas (@person) which is a bucket used for anything and everything I need to talk to the person / team / group about. I’ve got tons of agenda lists.

- Snoozed items - need to change oil in 6 months? Put it in the inbox to call the shop to set up an appointment, and snooze it for 5 months.

- Delegate / Defer / Do workflow for email and (somewhat) zero inbox.

- Horizons of focus, and making sure I’m not too heavily focused in one area or missing one completely.

- Natural planning method is also good.

Viewing GTD as a cult to me is like viewing agile as a cult (which… now that I think about it…). In all seriousness, GTD is a way to think about to do lists and all the incoming information, and presents a way to handle it to get it out of your mind. There are a lot of ways one could do that besides GTD, but the book + tools (I use omnifocus) are well established and mature, so it’s a good and time tested approach.

Its about having the right information at the right time so that you can take the desired (pre-planned) action to achieve some outcome. If you want it to, omnifocus will tell you when you are nearby a physical store (context @bestbuy) and show you the to dos or things to purchase only when you are there (project get kids’ Christmas gift & task buy printer ink). Or if you shop online you could make your context @computer, so when you open the computer you can look at the list and work out of it. I don’t go that far, but some do.

I'm not reading too far into things, I'm looking at things objectively. At the beginning of the book, Allen thanks his "spiritual coach J-R." He is referring to John-Roger, the founder of the MSIA cult. GTD started as seminars given to members of corporations. It is no coincidence that the MSIA cult started as a series of spiritual seminars. John-Roger went on to author a self-help book called Life 101 [1]. Paul Allen went on to author a self-help book called Getting Things Done. You can find online allegations of the seminars being used to recruit people into the cult. There are allegations of the cult telling women to abstain from marriage and perform sexual acts on their leader who is god incarnate.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Life-101-Peter-McWilliams/dp/093158078...

Slight correction for those reading -> David Allen (not Paul of MSFT) went on to author the self-help book called GTD.

But that’s fascinating. Reading the acknowledgements is further than I had read into it - I honestly never looked at the acknowledgements in the years of having the book, let alone researched J-R or heard of MSIA until this comment.

For me personally, I am not quite sure what to do with that information. It looks like J-R is dead, and if anyone took my original book recommendation as saying “join MSIA” and go to spiritual seminars, that’s not what I meant. GTD frees up your time and attention to do whatever you want with it. That’s why I also recommended of Essentialism, Make Time, and Four Thousand Weeks. I guess someone could dig into it and wind up at spiritual seminars. Essentialism is written by a Mormon, and I wouldn’t think that people who read that book suddenly go and join the Mormon church (or to even know that about the author).

I guess it is sort of like separating songs from their creators? I can like the music, but not be a huge fan or follower of the musician?

Yes, nothing at all to do with Paul Allen, the wires just crossed in my brain. No I don't think it's anything like separating songs from their creators. L. Ron Hubbard conducted seminars on Dianetics and later authored the self-help book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. As you probably know, he later went on to found the church of scientology. I am a programmer not a journalist so this is as far as I'll go. I think the moral of the story is don't take these books as gospel and don't treat them as your bible.

IMO the key takeaway from GTD is that you need to write things down in some sort of anything-goes inbox, so that they don't bounce around in your head. What kind of sorting/tracking mechanism you use after that is less important.

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