wood.tang's blog

There’s an obscure rule in baseball for a situation that rarely occurs, when an ambidextrous pitcher faces a switch-hitter. The pitcher has to declare which arm he’s going to throw with before the at-bat and stick with it, else the batter could keep jumping back and forth to either side of the plate in an endless game of one-upmanship that would make Tony La Russa’s head explode. The intent of the rule is obviously to keep the game moving, but it also saves the pitcher from himself; it forces him to pick his weapon given the challenge he faces, and just go with his best stuff.

I need a rule like this when it comes to picking the tools I use to manage my system for getting things done. I know my last post gave the impression that I’m almost proud of changing my system more often than Barry Bonds changes hat sizes, but deep down I’m rather ashamed. I need something to force me to go with my strengths, and just throw strikes the best I can.

Someone suggested that I think about what causes me to monkey around with my system as much as I do, and what, if any, elements stay the same. Then maybe as a means of public psychotherapy, the hive mind can help me identify my best pitch.

To start, let’s look at the reasons why I switch:

My name is Matt, and I’m a chronic system switcher. Read through some of my old forum posts and bear witness to my shame. You’ll see me talking about using text files and Moleskines; Treos and Pocket PCs; index cards and Hipster PDAs; iCal, kGTD, Backpack, Gmail, and Mail.app. There have been stretches when I made so many wholesale changes in how I Got my Things Done, shifting from digital to paper and vice versa, that I never needed to do a weekly review because I was picking through every scrap on my plate so often.

This is highly ill-advised behavior, I know. You’re not the one who has to look the Staples clerk in the eye every other week when I pay for that armload of binder clips and gold star stickers (“They’re for metadata,” I say). And yet while I’ve tried every combination of bits and black ink known to man, I’ve never once felt like I was letting things slip through the cracks.