My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been boring anyone within earshot about the latest Book That’s Changed My Life. It’s hardly a book for the ages—no Moby Dick or Middlemarch—but it’s exactly the one I needed to read: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.
Jane bought it on a friend’s recommendation, and before she got past the first chapter I glommed onto it and read the whole thing. What’s worse, I’ve been implementing it, weeding through piles of paper and chucking half of it out, sorting out the filing cabinets and boxes and folders and shelves where all my paperwork has ended up, rejigging how I handle incoming and outgoing email, and even buying a label maker, yes, a label maker, because Dave recommended it and he’s the man.
Unlike many of the self-help books I’ve glanced at over the years (my brother reads those ones aimed at businessmen who want to be Attila, so every time I visit him I get to commune with my inner Hun), Getting Things Done is refreshingly platitude-free: it’s full of practical techniques for taking your existing organisational methods and giving them a few tweaks to make them more effective. By bringing to the surface the “next actions” buried in those piles of paper and festering at the back of your mind—where all they do is add to a general sense of unease—you can get a true picture of what you have to do and how to get there.
I knew I had to read the book because although I do manage to get a fair bit done it’s not always the right stuff, and important things go unaddressed because they seem too daunting: exactly the sort of situation that leads to chronic stress. And stress has been a pretty chronic feature of my life since, ohhh, about the time I started this site, actually, although the more significant factor was changing jobs at the time; and come to think of it, it goes way back. Probably crept in with the testosterone when I hit puberty.
The book has reminded me that I actually used to be pretty good at the filing side of things—it’s hard to write a thesis if you aren’t—but somewhere along the line lost the plot. For a while I used to blame the upheaval of 2000–2001, but that wasn’t the whole story. One key factor was that when I moved to the UK I didn’t bring my old habits with me. I figured I’d be doing everything on the machine, and let the paper pile up chaotically; pretty soon that chaos infected the machine as well. If it weren’t for effective search mechanisms I’d have been totally sunk, but searching isn’t enough. As any fan of the Dewey Decimal System (or son of a librarian) will tell you, the system of classification also imparts information and creates mental triggers... triggers that say do stuff.
So, I’ve been filing, at work, at home, on the computer, off the computer. Unfinished business has risen to the surface and is moving along faster; as for the rest, at least I’m more aware of it. I’m writing more lists and notes to myself, and am ticking off the items faster. Which is just in time, because there’s a hell of a lot to do in the next month, three months, six months, year, life.
If any of this sounds like you, I highly recommend Getting Things Done. After all, it’s the only reason I got around to writing this entry.