dougist.com

David Pogue, the Technology Editor at the New York Times, has caused a stir with his last email update. In it he described a short list of his productivity secrets and to the gasps of GTD/David Allen proselytes the world over he declared that he uses his email inbox as his todo list.

I thought I heard the followers of Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders InboxZero program clutch their collective chests.

I joined in by posting…

I love todo list so much I had dozens - Omnifocus, iGTD, iCal, Things, legal pads, 3×5 cards, all of it. Then I relized the wonder of the one inbox, and I have made my email that box. Like Pogue, anything that comes in is filed, replied to, or tossed a la basic GTD principles. What is left over are todo/project emails.

The problem with using the inbox…

A great way to waste time not writing is to set up your system for managing writing time during the time when you should be writing.

I used to write non-stop, heads-down till my body collapsed, lost in the tunnel of creativity, absorbed with characters and stories. While exciting and vaguely mystical, this is not a long haul strategy for writing sucess. Eventually things (like, you) begin to break down.

Somewhere along the way, I think from the Scrivener boards, I learned of a system for working in periods of forty-eight minutes followed by breaks of twelve minutes. The idea was to train the subconscious to visit during the twelve to help the creative process along.

Easy to adopt, right? All you need is a great timer, because if it works you’re fully absorbed during the 48 and will/should/hope to loose track of time until the bell goes off.

So I had to go find the right timer. Don’t laugh, this is a big deal and it can take dozens of hours of frittering to try them all and get just the right one….

Of all the artists, we writers are uniquely beset with the chore of dealing with the piles of stuff we produce, and making sure it doesn’t get lost in some tornadoing swirl of trash papers, dog eared towers, or misnamed folders, never to be seen again.

This is not to disparage my friends who are visual artists, they too have vast quantities of stuff, paints, easels, those funny little wooden figures with articulated joints, but their problems are different. A thirteen foot canvas is not likely to just up and disappear overnight, while a 10,000 word story can fall into some crevasse of a hard drive and go missing for years.

I’m also not speaking ill of my friends the performing artists, who’s work is basically geographical. Their biggest organizational issue is making sure they show up at the right place, at the right time, on the right day, hopefully without forgetting their Strad, or Gibson in the cab on the way to the hall.

But we writers, our burden is the crap load of words we have to wrangle. Even if you only do the Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird 300 words a day minimum quota (or the 3,500 I seem to average) a writer can easily develop a whole attic of text, mounds of little stories, herds of ideas, notes, quips and quotes from observation or reading, and it’s easy for stuff to slip off on the wind, which is a shame because that cloud of pages heading over the hill has good stuff in it.

Ah, the trade offs of the different vocations…

When I flip through the files in my writing folders I invariably trip over a little gem, something I forgot, something valualble. The other day I found a wonderful description of a feeble old man stumbling off down a hall, he was fragile and vulnerable like he was made of spun candy, along the way he had to stop and remember where he was going. He was a perfect model for a director in my book.

The natural question is how to keep something like that from being lost…

In response to a question on another site…

“Once you have written down the inspiration that comes to you, then what?”

…I replied…

Outline, reorder, revise, wrestle with syntax, realize that there is no message or point, start over….Get to same place, cry, make coffee, read someone else’s work, say “I can do better than that”, start over, fail again, make choice between Martini or scotch, check facebook, read emails, call a friend, fritter, decide to give it another run…Find original point is not that bad, re-outline, like the way it looks, fill in gaps, change “its” to “it’s”, check spelling, publish, collapse exhausted and get another Martini…

Or something like that.

One of the things I’m surprised about is the resiliency of the economy. Things are flattening out, opportunists are making their moves on low prices in many industries. Business is starting up again, mostly because credit is beginning to flow out of the banks.

I really thought it would have been much worse. Given the environment of the crisis, regime change in Washington being the largest and most disruptive, I would have thought by now the pavement would have been fracturing, buildings collapsing, that there would be revolution in the streets.

I said this to Shannon yesterday as we walked cross town on the way to a meeting of one of her non-profit groups that works with disabled vets, and she stopped cold in the middle of Park Avenue.

“You? I can’t believe it….

Back when I was in commerce we’d watch a young executive making a play for relevance and import and say, “Big heros don’t solve small problems.” It’s a version of the old “make a mountain out of a mole hill” idea, but much more dangerous if you let it get out of hand.

On April 3 Eamon Javers at Politico reported on Obama’s meeting with the nation’s finance executives (Inside Obama’s bank CEOs meeting) One could call it a staff meeting since everyone in the room now works for Obama.

The description of the meeting went…

“Dimon (JPMC CEO Jamie Dimon) also insisted that he’d like to give the government’s TARP money back as soon as practical, and asked the president to “streamline” that process.

But Obama didn’t like that idea — arguing that the system still needs government capital.

The president offered an analogy: “This is like a patient who’s on antibiotics,” he said. “Maybe the patient starts feeling better after a couple of days, but you don’t stop taking the medicine until you’ve finished the bottle.” Returning the money too early, the president argued could send a bad signal.

Several CEOs disagreed, arguing instead that returning TARP money was their patriotic duty, that they didn’t need it anymore, and that publicity surrounding the return would send a positive signal of confidence to the markets.”

But you see all this isn’t about confidence in the economy, is it? The government has its hooks in the banks now and it is not going to let go.

“Just don’t call it a surge”.

From a policy perspective I guess I should be happy. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that look identical to those from the last administration, even if they are named differently. It’s become so blatant that even the New York (Obama is the messiah!) Times has begun to report it, and Jon Stewart is laughing at it.

Tens of thousand of troops are pouring into terrorist enclaves. (We used to call that “the surge”)

Know enemies of the state will be detained indefinitely (Close Guantanamo, but move the prisoners to an other secret facility, and keep some there, perhaps, forever)

Pay cap restrictions are being circumvented (The administration is building loop holes into the Pay for Performance act and providing instruction to their employees at the banks on how to use them)

We no longer are fighting a war on terror, now we have “overseas contingency operations” to prevent “man-caused catastrophes” (Listening to Hillary say these ridiculous phrases makes me think of the sweetness of political revenge. No woman from the Midwest can say those words without sounding churlish.)

But somehow I am dishearten by the disingenuousness of it all…

The first good news to emerge since the start of the Financial Crisis came out yesterday as the remarkably dumb regulations requiring Mark-to-Market accounting were repealed. Maybe the government can do some good, after all.

Mark-to-Market (MtM) accounting, along with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) were the two prime regulatory failures leading to the current crisis. Coupled with public mandated policy to extend mortgages into sub-prime markets through the facilitation of Fanni Mae and Freddie Mac, Mark-to-Market caused, and then accelerated, the financial crisis and lead to the failure of major banking institutions around the globe.

“But I thought it was the greedy bankers that did this?”

Yes, that is what you are being told. Targeting a small group for blame is easier than telling you the truth, that those bankers were working in a system created by *gasp* Washington.

It is nearly impossible for the current administration to say this becuse they have a vested interest in villifying a secret enemy of those that ‘did’ rather ‘that’ which did, because the ‘that’ is them. Now however, having exausted all other options their only recourse has been to do what works and change some really bad regulations. It took the French and Germans to beat it out of poor Mr. Obama though.

SOX and MtM came out of …