Rob’s Blog

The trick, as always when trying something that is supposed to change your life, is to stick with it. Steve Pavlina has a 30 day experiment thing that he does. Basically, he says that if you want to do a new thing, commit to doing it for 30 days. If at the end of 30 days you don’t want to do it (or not do it, I suppose) you can stop. Read about it here. The beauty of this is that it tricks your monkey brain, the one that says “This is too hard,” by making your logical brain say “You can do anything for 30 days. If it sucks, quit after that.” I like it, but I haven’t yet decided on a project for my 30 day experiment. Steve has some ideas in his article, so feel free to try ‘em out. If you’ve already done one, let me know what it was and how it worked in comments.
 

I’m thinking a quick introduction and background should be in order, before we take the kids to the mall for midnight madness, or whatever they’re calling it.

I am a chronically, some would say pathologically unorganized person. My journey towards organizing nirvana has taken me from paper planners through several Palm OS and Pocket PC devices, to the hodgepodge system that I have now that is a little of everything except effective.

The Moleskine that I mentioned in the first post has been a nice thing to have in my coat pocket, but so far has not been useful as anything other than a capture device. I make notes about music I hear, or interesting things I see, and notes about where I want my life to go, but I don’t use it for a to-do or calendar or anything else.

Some of you have heard, no doubt, about David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. I linked to his page over there on the right. I was fortunate enough to take a class from him in 1999 or 2000 at my then-employer, Mallinckrodt. It was life changing in at least one important way: I learned that some people are organized. I, alas, was not one of them.

My problem is always follow through, and that stems from not having a trusted system. More about that later.

Let me know in comments what your trusted system is, and what you do with it.

Since this is my very first blog post, I’ll try to keep it on point. I really don’t know what I expect this blog will accomplish, just that I will have interesting things to say about several topics, but mostly I will try to chronicle my ongoing and frustratingly complex battle with personal organization. Although politics and literature might creep in from time to time.

And since it was on a whim that I started this in the first place, posting should be light.

P.S. Did I mention I bought a Moleskine, and I’ve been trying to write a little in it every day? You can get ‘em here

That is all.