Staying with my last post’s theme (from a week ago) of procrastination, I figure I should write about how personal productivity (or lifehacking for the true geeks) has ruined my life.
It all started with one of my roommates telling me I should make a budget. Being a nerd, I couldn’t just sit down with notepad and calculator and work it out. No, I had to make a spreadsheet to do it for me.
As I stared at my screen altering how much I spent on food to see how that affected all my other expenses, I realized my trusty computer could probably fix my life in other ways.
I am no good at all with to-do lists on paper. Odds are, it’ll end up falling out of the notebook and be lost forever before I cross off a single task. Clearly, I needed software for this task and began the search.
What a mistake.
I discovered that there’s an entire internet sub-culture (the lifehackers) dedicated to organization, productivity and Getting Things Done.
What’s this? A blog with new ways to organize my e-mails, I gotta try that!
Or maybe I could organize them this way? Firefox extensions to make the internet work even harder for me? I gotta try all of those too.
Oh…and there’s a obscene amount of to-do list apps, both web-based and desktop based. How to find the one that works for me? Easy! Try them all!
Before I know it, I’ve read through David Allen’s Getting Things Done (the bible for the previously mentioned sub-culture) created a card file system, figured out plenty of ways to make my cellphone harass me about tasks and played with Google Mail, Google Calender, Google Reader and Google Easy-Bake Oven long enough that they’re second nature.
Problem is….I’ve gotten NOTHING done!
All I can say is, productivity systems are clearly not for people of my obsessive nature.