Are My Limitless Productivity Systems Crushing My Soul?
Over the last couple years, I have developed a productivity system that let’s very little slide through the cracks. It would make David Allen proud.
Every single item I think of that needs to be done gets thrown into a small pocket-sized Field Notes journal, which at the end of each day (or most days) gets tossed into Trello (major projects) or Todoist (small quick-hitters).
Everything gets captured, but not everything gets done.
The slow, pain-staking reality that I am now understanding is that it can’t.
As the, possibly kindest, anti-productivity writer I’ve read gently put it, “Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.” (Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman)
Like my late-grandmother’s basement, junk is just piling up. What started as a means of productivity, to thrust me towards success, is week-by-week becoming a look into my failures, a look into the dreams and tasks left undone. It’s a daily look at the people I let down, or the things that I “captured” but couldn’t possibly do. It’s a daily look at the things that I still somehow a week, a month, a semester later feel like I need to do. And it leaves me wondering, is the limitlessness of the technologies that I’m using crushing my soul?
How Tools Make Us More Than Human
It seems as if tools are a part of human existence. Some of the earliest of human remains are accompanied by a gaggle of rudimentary tools.
A tool is simply any natural thing that is used by a human agent to transcend the limitations of humanity to serve a purpose desired by that human.
A rock becomes a tool the moment it is used to crush a bug.
A stick becomes a tool the moment it is sharpened to spear wild game.
As humanity has progressed, so have our tools. In place of rocks, we have hammers. Instead of spears, we have firearms. Instead of charcoal scratched upon a wall, we have these small magical devices that ooze liquid out onto another tool crafted out of trees (pen and paper).
As tools have advanced, their purpose remains the same: to take us beyond our human limitations.
A rock is used as a weapon because it’s harder than a fist. A stick is used as a spear because it’s easier to throw a projectile from afar to kill a wild rabbit than to chase it down and catch it. Writing words on a page transcends human limits by allowing the writer’s thoughts to live beyond both space and time.
What’s notable about all of these tools (and many more) is that these tools all have self-imposed limits. They can help us to transcend our own human limits, but they cannot take us beyond the limits of the created tools themselves. The rock can only be used as a weapon if the human agent can lift it. The stick-turned-spear can kill a rabbit, but not a rhino. The pen is limited by the amount of ink in it, and by the 8.5x11 inch bounds of the piece of paper, not to mention the amount of paper one has bound together.
Analog tools take us beyond ourselves, but never beyond themselves.
But digital tools are completely different.
The Perils of Limitlessness in the Digital Age
With the advances in digital technology, we are at a moment in time where digital space is virtually limitless. Sure, our devices do have some limitations; your iPhone may have 64GB of storage, while your Google Drive has 15GB. Were it not for your pictures, videos, and music, you would likely never run out of space.
Words in the digital world leave an infinitesimal digital footprint. One word only equals 2.0E-9 gigabytes. To size that up for you, it would take 1,000,000,000 (that’s one billion) words to take up just 2GB of storage. That’s more words than the average person will speak in their whole life time (British writer Gyles Brandreth posited rather confidently that the average person would speak 860,341,500 words in their lifetime).
When it comes to sheer information (the exchange of ideas through words), we are at an unprecedented time, in which we functionally have no limits. Any word that we could record, we could keep. And not just any word that is spoken, but any word that is thought. It can be stored and kept digitally forever (or at least until the tech giants close up shop).
Which brings me back to the question at hand: “Are my limitless productivity systems crushing my soul?”
Capturing Everything
On my journey towards bringing order and chaos to my overwhelmingly demanding job, I stumbled upon an idea that I believe stems from productivity guru, David Allen.
The idea is simple: capture everything.
It’s a great idea on the surface, because as Allen says, “Brains are for thinking about ideas, not for storing them.” Rather than trying to hang on to an idea in our brain, the principle is to write it down so the brain can be freed up to think about other important things when needed.
So, for the last 3 years or so, I have religiously carried down a Field Notes notebook with a Bic Metropolitan Micro (cannot recommend this little guy enough), and every idea or task that popped into my brain that seemed important or relevant to anything in life, I wrote it in that little book.
That little book is tattered, torn, and filled with things to do. But, it has its limits. There are only 48 sheets of 3x5” lined paper, and nothing can be done about that.
So, I capture every idea that flits and floats about, and at the end of each day put them into my digital systems (a combo of Trello and Todoist). And in walks the limitlessness that gnaws away at my soul.
But Storing It Forever?
Notebooks tatter and tear. They fill up, and as they fill up, ideas get left behind undone. And after 6 months of one notebook, it’s on to the next, the undone tasks left in the dust forever.
But not so with Trello, or Todoist, or Wunderlist (RIP), or Google Tasks.
I have Trello cards on my board from 4 years ago. Not all small tasks that I just couldn’t squeeze in for weeks and weeks, but grand ideas that I would love to sit, think, and work on to bring vital improvement to our organization.
But rather than serving as signposts of hope for what could be, they often serve as a banner for what I can’t complete. It’s downtroddening to see the small tasks that I’m not able to fit in due to the lack of time in a given week; it’s even more depressing to see the things that I want to work sit in a corner and collect cobwebs (Trello has a power-up that will “age” your cards the longer they sit idle, if you want to make this a literal reality for you). These are the dreams, the aspirations, the yearnings, that stare back at me telling me that I’ll never be able to get to the work I really want to, because I can’t even handle the overflowing deluge of tasks that have been imposed upon me.
The undeniable reality is that these (virtually) limitless productivity storage systems not just take me beyond myself like an analog tool, but they take me even beyond themselves, to the land of no limits. Like most technology, they promise to make me a god. If I simply capture every task, then I can get every single one done. But as I feel too often, there is not enough time in the day. To that these limitless systems scream, “Well, leave it there, because one day you’ll get to it.” Which is an elusive promise that pushes me to again be god-like by stepping into eternality.
Forgetfulness Is Freedom
If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that I am not God.
Yet, as I strive towards capturing every fleeting task or idea, and storing it forever, my soul shrivels as it tries to live beyond that which it was meant for.
Admittedly, I find myself looking down at those who don’t write things down, or have a system for storing their tasks. But, you can’t be reminded of the task you didn’t do if you just…forget it.
My headlong dive into the GTD world, which preaches a mantra that organization equals freedom has counter-intuitively left me more in a place of enslavement to my Trello board. It perhaps has helped me to become successful (by getting things done), but I’m not quite sure it has led to my flourishing.
Where does that leave me?
Well, I don’t quite know. I’ve heard of a 2-week task clear-out, which requires just dumping everything out that has been there for more than two weeks. It sounds good in theory, but like everybody that’s experienced Spring cleaning, it’s hard to get rid of that shirt that you might wear again. Perhaps I need to literally take everything analog? Maybe embracing the limits of notebooks will make me be more discriminate about what gets captured, remembered, and acted upon. Maybe I’ll abandon David Allen’s greatest commandment and try to just remember things…in my brain.
Just saying that feels sacrilege.
But, perhaps the very limitations of my own brain are exactly what I need to embrace. More things will be forgotten, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing.
