This is similar to what I’ve always said about diets. The truth is that they all work, and they all work the same way — once you start paying attention to what you’re stuffing in your face, you’ll stop eating the crap and start losing weight. Everything else is just trivial implementation details.

Boofus, you just said exactly what I had wanted to say—using about 1/100th the number of words I did. :)

Well summarized.

In my experience, the most elegant statement of this insight is something I’ve heard floating around the Special Ops community, and nowhere else: “Control follows awareness.”

I think Boofus has summed it up precisely wrong (sorry!) and that it’s a poor analogy.

Some diets are better at making you pay attention than others and, some require less attention than others. (Not to mention some are extremely nutritionally unsound, but that’s unfairly stretching the metaphor).

Thus the implementation details are exactly the opposite of trivial - they are what make or break the system. If they are onerous, unrewarding, and don’t provide feedback, then the system is likely doomed.

GTD versus other systems: it’s easy, really easy, and it provides immediate positive feedback, in the form of the little buzz you get from ticking off each next action.

You are right on target. As I read your post, the software developer side of me kept thinking, XP is a self-improvement system for programmers! Your four immutable principles are central to the aso-called agile methods.

@Stephen: I think the implementation details are actually what keep people interested (the MacGuffin), but the act of self-awareness is the critical piece to making any patch stick.

Regardless of the diet or plan, you have to have an awareness that you want to be doing something differently from before. You can hack on that by throwing out “bad foods” and avoiding situations where you might “break your diet,” but ultimately it comes down to remembering what you want to change and correcting your behavior accordingly at the times you need to make choices. That’s true no matter what, I suspect.

Can you say more about “planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan” or provide a link to something that explains it?

Best post since I started coming here.

May I? “planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan”

it’s more important to think out a plan than it is to follow it to the exact letter… don’t stress out if circumstances make changes in the plan necessary midway through….. for instance, I’m a list-maker. Is it tantamount that the list be fulfilled by a certain time? No. It’s more important to me to get it all organized in my head (via paper and pen) and gives me a plan of action- leading right back to the other 3 excellent bullet points.

Yeah, Alison, I’m basically ripping off Dwight Eisenhower, who became a thought leader in the field of project management the moment he said: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything.”

The idea is that it’s valuable to layout all the risks and possibilities for a project as early as possible and to identify the stress points, dependencies, and critical paths. Still, having done all of that thinking and planning, it can be very challenging for even the best PM to develop a Unified Field Theory that accounts for every variable—especially days, weeks, and months into the unknown. After all, we’re not Kreskin, right? ;-)

The notion, ultimately, is to manage action by understanding the rules and constraints of reaching the goal. Making a plan is not hard; anyone can build a GANTT chart that has nothing to do with reality. But making sure that the most important touchpoints of a project don’t get neglected during the inevitable bloodbath is a good deal harder. That’s where the real art of project management lives, IMHO.

Make sense?

Awareness is precisely what’s important for self-improvement, no doubt about that. But unawareness is what’s important about self-maintenance.

The goal of all these self improvement programs should be to keep people aware of their actions until they become good habits. It’s very Aristotelian. We are what we do, if we focus on doing good, we become habituated towards doing good, and become good. And once we’re good, we don’t have to be aware of our good actions, we’re on goodness autopilot.

I think the failure of most self improvement programs is that they require so much work and conscious effort that people tire of them; they never really become habits. The difference between a dieter and someone at their ideal weight is that the dieter needs to work to eat healthy, but the other person does it naturally.