Zerebria

…to enhance lists

“Man gave name to all the animals”, sang Bob Dylan, and he knew what he was doing. From tribal cultures who honor the magic power of language (with their taboo words that cannot or can only be spoken under certain conditions) to high culture products like Borges’ short stories (more…)

The mystery

Not very uncommon: there was this silly commercial I used to ran into every time I watched TV, a commercial that I particularly hated. I thought it was one of the silliest commercials of the decade, which is a lot to say, and every time I recognized it, I had this “oh no, here it comes again” sensation, knowing that I was going to waste the next twenty seconds of my life with an idiotic story that made me cringe. (more…)

In terms of energy consumption, pedantry is an outrage. It could be defined as an inflammation of language in which a lot of resources are invested in saying quite little, sometimes even nothing. (more…)

It is always nice when a science guru ratifies something you had been doing merely by instinct. In “Emotional Intelligence” (chapter 14), Daniel Goleman talks about Jerome Kagan’s research on the effects of overprotective mothers on their children. In short, Kagan’s conclusion is that those mothers of very reactive children who try to protect them in excess (more…)

…”but I used to have a calendar!”

Don’t worry: you still do. It is just that it is not going to be that populated anymore. Allen’s methodology reduces its using to:

a) events with a fixed date (dentist, birthday, deadline set by somebody else) (more…)

The weekly review, or where we mix 1 and 2

So now we have 1) lists of tasks (one for each context), and 2) project plans full of future tasks, grouped by sequences, priorities and components. Let’s mix 1) and 2) and we’re almost there, can you believe it? (more…)

Natural planning

So now that we have discussed the basic “bricks” of an organization system (lists), lets take it a step further: let’s talk about project planning. First of all, what is there to plan? Almost everything, in fact, because the GTD methodology (more…)

Like Buddhist communities or UNIX programming, the GTD organization system has a modular structure. It means it is integrated by a series of elements completely independent between them, so a failure or misconception in one of them does not affect (more…)

Abbreviations: a discipline itself

A very common mistake in my note taking was (and still sometimes is) that I unconsciously intended to be “understandable” to others. There always seemed to be a sort of imaginary reader (more…)

I have always been a natural note taker. Ever since I learned to write, I have been used to carry with me some kind of capture device. Looking back at my (huge) piles of notebooks, I guess I was missing the second half of the process (more…)