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Beginner's Mind, Metropolis, and all our unnecessary parts

Submitted by Merlin on June 28, 2005 - 9:16am.

a million monkeys typing » The Beginner’s Mind

Metropolitan Clock

Douglas’s post reminds me of that unintentionally hilarious scene in Metropolis where the Beleaguered Iconic Worker is pushed to exhaustion in the clearly meaningless work of moving the clock hands around on the Big Futuristic Machine he’s charged to attend. (God, I wish I had a screengrab to share; it’s a stitch to watch. Found one. Thanks, Douglas.)

There have definitely been times in the past couple years when I’ve felt the same way about maintaining “my system”—driven as if by a motor from one list to another, dashing to connect all the pieces into some theoretically unified field theory of my life. It’s nutty.

The irony is that I, like many of you, tarry in this productivity sweat shop in order to achieve what David Allen has called “mind like water,” or the ability to adapt to change and disruption in a relaxed manner. So often, of course, the result is the virtual opposite. You get so stressed out about moving the meaningless clock hands on your Big Futuristic Machine that you forget what they’re supposed to be attached to.

I acknowledge that a certain amount of Byzantine organizational work is what keeps many of us interested in this stuff, but there is something very compelling about working to adopt Beginner’s Mind—in this case, the idea that you can achieve the higher goals of systems like GTD not by fretting endlessly over the minutiae of your personal ontology, but by exerting the absolute minimum amount of effort needed to get things off your mind and parked in the right place. That’s the sweet spot.

Or, to quote Strunk and White, in talking about writing:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Maybe one good goal this week would be to remove the largest, most unnecessary part from each of our machines. It may not be pure “Beginner’s Mind,” but it’s an easy place to start.

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I just posted this on...

Submitted by JayeRandom (not verified) on June 29, 2005 - 1:35pm.

I just posted this on Bert Webb’s GTD blog and it seems germane here, too:

And now that I think about it, the way that I write down and annotate projects and next actions really doesn’t matter. (As long as I’m doing all that writing and annotating in one single system, rather than several systems scattered around.) What matters is that after I’ve written it down, I will come back to it the next week, reread it, reconsider it, and rewrite it if necessary. Clever methods of annotation and filing will not save me if I do not do a weekly review, every week. They are only useful if they make it easier to do the weekly review.

And now that I think about this, I think I’m really just paraphrasing something that I’ve seen Merlin write here previously. And I’m also probably paraphrasing a key point that from the GTD book or seminar recording. But it’s something I need to keep reminding myself of.