empty your brain and get things done

I've been on a quest of late to find some tool that could help me manage my work, home and personal projects effectively. That search has led me to an excellent book and a useful (and free) software program.

The book is entitled “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” by David Allen ($9.00 at Amazon.com). It’s been around for the better part of a decade, and has been a hot seller all the while, for good reason.

David teaches the reader that stress is caused (mostly) by our brains being full of those things we need to do but haven’t done yet. As a result, our brains become overloaded and eventually completely ineffective.

His solution is to empty our brains of these things regularly into a trusted system that can remember and organize them for us. The keywords and phrases in that last sentence are: “regularly,” “trusted system” and “organize.” David describes such a system and gives us the motivation to implement it in whatever ways suit us best personally.

The software program I found to go along with this book is called “Thinking Rock” by Avente Pty Ltd, an Australian software company. Click here to go to their website. Besides being free, its appeal lies in the fact that it very closely follows David’s model, and that it’s available for MS Windows, Apple OS X and Linux.

Even if you don’t make use of the software (and if you use computers on a daily basis, you should), you’ll benefit tremendously by reading the book. I highly recommend it, and look forward to hearing success stories from those of you who have or will do so.

Empty your brain, buy the book, download the software and get it done.

Unlimited Possibilities

There's nothing new under the sun. So says the Bible, and in that context (an explanation of which is left for the reader to discover) I accept the statement. Fine.

But where does that leave the creative types and innovators? Are they doomed to simply repeat history, with no hope of every generating a new thought or design? Is there actually a dark, lonely truth at the end of the mental roadblock?

I submit for your consideration the following concept: as more ideas and designs are created, the possibility for new ones increases rather than decreases.

Increases? How can that be? There must be a limited number of thoughts we can think and gadgets we can invent, right? Won’t we soon run up against the limits of thought and technology?

On the surface this seems to be a logical conclusion. But let’s think outside the box for a moment. What would happen if you took a cell phone and a PDA (personal digital assistant), slathered some glue onto each one and stuck them together? You’d get (a mockup of) a Blackberry.

Or let’s say you took social networking concepts (thousands of years in the making) and implemented them with computer technology (barely a few generations old). The result? You’re looking at MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, … you get the idea.

My point should be obvious. Taking two things and somehow gluing them to each other can create a third thing. A successful result isn’t guaranteed every time, to be sure. But when it does occur, you’ve just increased the number of things in your parts box.

The next time you feel as if there’s no way to pull another creative thought from your tired brain, remember that your possibilities for success increase day by day. Just dig deep into your box of parts and get out the glue.