Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Archives for December 2013
Essential Thinking Man of 2013
Though I started blogging in 2009, I only became serious since last year, writing regularly. Some posts were good, some were sub-par. The posts I thought would make an impact were never even discussed and the posts I thought would cater only to a specific audience drew-in the maximum traffic. Now, at this time of the year, I felt it would be good to share links to my best posts of this year (and last year since I did not do one such post then) in one place. Note: these may not be the most popular posts on my blog, but, those which gave me an immense satisfaction in writing.
Time for New year resolutions?
Time rolls by and yet another year comes to an end. Years, months, days are but just yardsticks that measure its passage. Every year this time, almost all of us ask ourselves two questions:
- How did I live this year? If some look back with gratitude, some are just thankful its over.
- How do I want to live next year? We want to use this time as a ‘course correction’.
After taking stock of the situation of where we are and where we want to be, we promise ourselves to take steps to reach our goal. We promise ourselves a fresh beginning. ‘I’ll quit smoking’, ‘I’ll hit the gym’ we say to ourselves and, with all good cheer and intention we embark into a new year. Some reach their target but most don’t. When another December comes they promise themselves to do better yet again and move on to the next till the time it’s too late.
Falling back on Ourselves
Steven Covey identified three stages of existence in ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ – dependency, independence & interdependence with dependence being the lowest rung of the ladder and interdependence the highest. It was pretty shocking to me ’cause I always believed independence was the highest of all states. But, alas, no man is an island. And, obviously synergy is better than individual efforts. Two heads are better than one. But, are they really? How to distinguish between dependence & interdependence? Or, is being self reliant – independence better? Which one is good? What if interdependence does not work?
Choosing & Managing a GTD app
Moving from Things to Omnifocus made me question not just the app’s capability but also my workflow. Here, I have a collection of few points I noted when moving to Omnifocus:
On choosing the application:
- Identify your workflow: how does work come to you? Digital? Paper? Do you need a digital inbox to collect your stuff or physical? Where do you get more work? At home? Work? What kind of system helps in capturing, organizing that stuff? What are the other tools/apps you work with? How can you integrate them into your GTD system?
- How flexible is the system you chose to accomodate your working style? Do you have to change your thought process to fit it’s? or is it flexible enought to fit yours? If our brain senses even the slightest friction in the way we think and the way the system works, it may not trust it and hold off to unprocessed stuff in its psychic RAM defeating the purpose of having a task management application in the first place.
- How does the system scale? If tomorrow you change the way you work, can the system easily scale back and up without hiccups? (I created Things perspectives in Omnifocus, but, tomorrow if I don’t want to view my data in this way, I can simply delete these perspectives and create new ones.)
- No system is ever perfect. Every system has its own limitations: