The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
As I get older, and after having adopted
Getting Things Done to help keep my life sane, I find that I'm getting a little more conscious of how I spend my time, both at work (I've always been fairly focused there) and in life. Maybe it's the relentless ticking of the clock, but I'm getting more rigorous in addressing something my five year old daughter recently said: "Daddy, that's interesting, but not useful" (pronounced "in-stirring", and an amazing thought!)
To that end I've been re-evaluating the inputs I allow into my life, including my
Bloglines feeds, the conversations I have, the books I read, and, generally, how I choose spend my time. Are they interesting? By definition they all provide
something of value to me - information, stimulation, distraction, calming, etc. But are they all
useful?
To help solve this problem I've come up with what I call the "scribble test"
Does reading, listening, talking, etc. cause me to break out my Ubiquitous Capture Tool and scribble like mad?
If so, you've got a live one! This came to me while listening to
How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius. After a few minutes it was like automatic writing at a
séance!
Like any test of this kind, it has limitations, based on what your reading goals are, but in my study of personal productivity, it's one way to decide whether a book's worth my time. (This is important due to the sheer number of books on the topic - Amazon gives me 217,182 hits for "organized.")
Do you have any metrics for evaluating your inputs?
References/Notes
Return to Article