The Feeder Project

I sometimes need help getting things done. I don’t need a lot of help. Once I start, I’m fine. I just need help keeping my focus on whatever it is I’m doing until I finish it. Once I do that, then I need help with deciding what to do next. On and on and on.

I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and his system works, to a point. He says that you should call something a “project” if it contains more than two tasks. The individual tasks can then be added to a Next Actions list. At any given time, according to Allen, I could have 75-80 projects with God only knows how many Next Actions. These discrete actions, then, should be classified further and placed on lists according to context and labeled: @phone, @computer, @home, @waitinguntildaughtergetsoutofbathroom, etc.

I don’t know why, but I’ve never been able to get the context thing to work like how it’s billed.

I found myself counting the number of Next Actions completed to determine the success or failure of my day. A large number of Next Actions signaled a success, a low number failure. I was running at a breakneck pace for a long stretch of time. I was completing actions like there was no tomorrow. Average task completions per day–a key metric–were at an all-time high. But I was padding the list with relatively insignificant Next Actions. Meanwhile, important projects languished from inattention.

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Phyllis Tickle has written an excellent book called The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.

I’ll devote later posts to a more detailed discussion of the book, but for now I’ll highlight one idea gleaned from a cursory reading while still standing in line at the bookstore.

She teases an idea about To Do lists being respositories of our knowledge of what we need do next. Calculators become crutches used for running simple sums once run inside our own heads. Part of this, of course, is cultural. The speed at which life happens makes machines necessary for us to keep pace.

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In my workspace at the moment, I have:

• A pocket briefcase filled with 3 x 5 index cards

• a reporters notebook

• Three Moleskine Cahier’s notebooks filled with really bad poetry

• Legal Pads (White and Yellow, just in case)

• A standard Blueline journal

• A small sketchbook

• A large newsprint poster-sized sketchbook

• A digital voice recorder

• An inexpensive .mp3 player loaded with podcasts

• A portable CD player loaded with J. S. Bach’s 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Brandenburg concertos

• File folders with printouts of .pdf’s I’ve been meaning to read

• A desk lamp

• A table lamp

• A dictionary, thesaurus and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style

• Fowler’s Modern English Usage

• Strong’s Concordance

• Young’s Concordance

• Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words

• Five translations of the English Bible

• Thirty-seven different pens

• Twenty-three pencils

• A large coffee mug filled with….something

• Notes from a lecture series

• A two gigabyte flash drive

• A novel by Larry McMurtry

• The Book of Common Prayer

• Various CD ROMs with PowerPoint Presentations going back to 2001

• A cigarette lighter

• Two small binder clips

• A goose call

• An archery glove

• An old hospital wristband

• A Tony the Tiger Baseball signed by Tony the Tiger

• Five smooth stones

• A painted rock

• A replica of the Stanley Cup made out of tin foil and toilet paper rolls