Thursday
Sep302010
The uncluttered mind
Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 8:48AM
To live an uncluttered life, to have your mind free of "I must", is an age old recipe for happiness. It boils down to being open for new opportunities, but in practical life can mean the difference between life and death and is one of the keys to productivity in industry.
Photo by mikebaird Flickr CC
In the "unclutterer" Erin writes: "The 19th century designer William Morris is attributed as saying: 'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful' This quote is always great to keep in mind as you’re deciding which of your possessions you want to keep and which you want to purge."
To unclutter your home, free it from things not useful or beautiful, is one way of getting into a better mood. Less visual distractions, a calmer mind - a more zen-like living space, and it's easier to clean to.
But there are more layers to this onion, one of the basic principles behind "How to get things done" by Dave Allen and the GTD movement, is to clean out your thoughts by writing them down, filing them away and decide what you want to do today. As you might suspect, Mr Allen is a Karate black belt, the basic thinking goes way back to the principles of martial arts. Simply put, a swordsman with a mind full of doubts will meet a certain and swift death. When the attack comes, the Samurai had to be able to react, immediately, just as the sound of hands clapping follows immediately upon the physical action.
Another common application of the same principle is called 5S. It is a set of five steps for improving productivity, with its origins in the Total Quality Movement. The first step is to take a hard look at where you work, taking away everything not absolutely necessary to the task. This is a painful experience and I've seen grown people cry. If you need to write, do you really need more than one pen? The things you have on your hard-drive, are they really necessary to do the task you are handling right now? Everything that "might be good to have" is cleansed.
Typical results are that more than half of your things go out the door, most of your hard-drive is freed up, and all the things that you use only once in a while, goes off for store-keeping.
Next steps is to clean up what you are left with, making sure that its really in prime condition and fit for use. It makes sense that the things you really need are the best you can get your hands on. But the best tools are worthless if you can't find them. Thus, the next step is to organize your stuff. Surely you have seen the tool-kits carried about by professional repairmen, each tools has its outline painted and color-coded. Not only are the tools easy to find, but at a glance you see if something is missing.
We all know these things, and when it is really important, we have always uncluttered our minds and tools - be that a nurse preparing an operating theatre for surgery, or the warrior preparing for battle. The trick is to do it everyday.
Photo by mikebaird Flickr CCIn the "unclutterer" Erin writes: "The 19th century designer William Morris is attributed as saying: 'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful' This quote is always great to keep in mind as you’re deciding which of your possessions you want to keep and which you want to purge."
To unclutter your home, free it from things not useful or beautiful, is one way of getting into a better mood. Less visual distractions, a calmer mind - a more zen-like living space, and it's easier to clean to.
But there are more layers to this onion, one of the basic principles behind "How to get things done" by Dave Allen and the GTD movement, is to clean out your thoughts by writing them down, filing them away and decide what you want to do today. As you might suspect, Mr Allen is a Karate black belt, the basic thinking goes way back to the principles of martial arts. Simply put, a swordsman with a mind full of doubts will meet a certain and swift death. When the attack comes, the Samurai had to be able to react, immediately, just as the sound of hands clapping follows immediately upon the physical action.
Another common application of the same principle is called 5S. It is a set of five steps for improving productivity, with its origins in the Total Quality Movement. The first step is to take a hard look at where you work, taking away everything not absolutely necessary to the task. This is a painful experience and I've seen grown people cry. If you need to write, do you really need more than one pen? The things you have on your hard-drive, are they really necessary to do the task you are handling right now? Everything that "might be good to have" is cleansed.
Typical results are that more than half of your things go out the door, most of your hard-drive is freed up, and all the things that you use only once in a while, goes off for store-keeping.
Next steps is to clean up what you are left with, making sure that its really in prime condition and fit for use. It makes sense that the things you really need are the best you can get your hands on. But the best tools are worthless if you can't find them. Thus, the next step is to organize your stuff. Surely you have seen the tool-kits carried about by professional repairmen, each tools has its outline painted and color-coded. Not only are the tools easy to find, but at a glance you see if something is missing.
We all know these things, and when it is really important, we have always uncluttered our minds and tools - be that a nurse preparing an operating theatre for surgery, or the warrior preparing for battle. The trick is to do it everyday.
Reader Comments (6)
Nice article Johan!
I'm a pratictioner of David Allen's GTD. And one of the things that I particularly like about this method is that not only it's easy to start using it, but more importantly (and what to me makes it different from other systems) is that it is simple enough to restart using it if you stop for a while (which is something that tends to happen every so often).
Abraço,
José
José, thanks for stopping by and comment. Yes, I share your experience, it is easy to fall out of the GTD habit for a while. The classic is to forget about the weekly reviews, and at the same time they are making all the difference. My solution is to schedule weekly reviews first thing Monday mornings, before leaving for the office, do you have any other tips?
Abraço,
Johan
:-) I usually do it Fridays incorporated into a regular time I've scehduled in my calendar for several tasks - review current task list, go through the week's work and sum up important things for later, identify and plan new tasks derived from the work that was done as well as some clean "think" time. Here's another post I've written on the subject (http://thousandinsights.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/meeting-with-self/)
Thanks Jose, I really like the idea of some clean "think" time. Do I understand it correctly if you use the GTD list and the notes from the week as "agenda" for you meetings with yourself?
I have to admit that the process is much more organic, but I usually go through them before anything else. I spend some time reviewing my work of the week and complementing on notes. I keep a notebook / scrapbook where, throughout the week, I just do a "brain dump" of random notes and ideas, things I want to learn more about and interesting conversations and dialogs I have with other people. This is the "fun" part, giving some coherence to the list and my notes (some posts, memos and other articles come from these sources) and taking a few moments to further explore interesting topics (and finding new ones to explore). :-)
Great tip Jose, what I do to complement the process is to keep a victory list. Everyday I jot down the 3-5 things that went well, every 4-6 weeks I go through the list with my coach. It gives you a good feeling and a chance to reflect on your personal success factors.