What Has My Attention
I think David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity methodology is so successful because it does something fundamentally different than most “productivity systems.” David writes about it a little bit in the book, but I don’t think it gets enough appreciation: it’s a bottom-up approach to doing meaningful work and being effective. Counterintuitively, David doesn’t ask you what your priorities are or what your values are or for you to figure out your overarching “purpose” in his book. None of that. He simply asks you to start at the lowest and most simple level — the current tasks on your plate.
The basic idea is that you can’t think about that higher level stuff until you get your arms around the stuff that is currently taking your attention. I would go a step further and say that you can’t even figure out that “higher level” stuff until you take a good hard look at how you’re already spending your time and attention. Your values and principles will emerge from that — and therefore be grounded in your actual reality — rather than just being plucked out of the sky based on what you think they “should” be. It’s a simple but pretty radical idea.
The reason I bring it up, though, is because I’ve been playing with a similar concept but in a little bit different domain. David was focused on personal productivity and I’ve been thinking more about personal development broadly. And, in a similar way, I think a lot of advice out there is incredibly top-down: Figure out who you want to be, figure out your “values,” figure out your “purpose,” and then you can work on creating the habits that’ll get you there.
What might bottom-up personal development look like, though? What if you didn’t sweat the bigger picture so much and instead just committed to doing a series of short experiments around whatever happens to catch your eye? What if you noticed what sounded interesting or what piqued your curiosity and you just tried some stuff for awhile? My guess is that you’d start to form a picture of who you are and what you want to be like that’s much more grounded in reality — and not fanciful visions of what you think you “should” be like.
Links Worth Your Attention
Our post-pandemic selves: Why the virus is an opportunity to grow and develop. (The Guardian)
Boredom is a pit stop. (Austin Kleon)
Cal Newport on surviving screens and social media in isolation. (GQ)
You have 2 minute 28 seconds. (Henri Hypponen)
Is your organization — and leadership style — adaptive enough for this moment? (The Ready)
Personal development is an expedition, not an exercise in perfection. (SamSpurlin.com)
Closing Round
Reading: Finished Indistractable by Nir Eyal (meh). Finished Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. I need to read more Vonnegut, stat. Finally digging back into book two of the Hyperion Cantos series. Personal Knowledge is still taunting me from my digital bookshelf.
Watching: This YouTube video of a concert pianist realizing she prepared for the wrong concerto, and then nailing the correct one from memory anyway, put me on an emotional rollercoaster (one of the articles I shared above goes into more detail about this, but the video itself is harrowing and inspiring).
Listening: In this moment, as I sit on my balcony and write these words, the rain. I am stoked for summer rainstorms to finally return.
Playing: My brothers and I have had a lot of fun playing No Man’s Sky together. Working together to actually complete a mission together or even just each doing our own thing in a shared world has been unlike any video game experience I’ve had in a long time.
Your friend,
Sam