About

I hate it when a blog does not include an "about" section, a "mission statement", or something to give me the faintest idea of whatever was going through the blogger's mind when s/he started to write. So, here I come.

First of all, a disclaimer:

I am no productivity guru. Far from it. I am a tweaker and a thinkerer who, being alive in the era of blogs, thought it would be nice to write down some experiences along the path of actually achieving results. Not being authoritative here; this is no expert advice. Things written here might prove useful to you. Or simply fail and burst as a slimey green blob of chaos. You have been warned.

In the begining

Since I was I kid I felt fascinated by personal organizers. My dad used to carry around a beautiful European organizer, I guess it was an A6 format (small: 105 × 148 mm). It was made of black leather and it had all kinds of sheets for every imaginable purpose. I liked to see him get his new set each year, sit down, and dedicate the next hour or so reviewing and changing the old pages for new ones, which he kept inside last year's hard plastic box. For my incipient engineer mind, all that made sense in a beautiful way.

So, I did my own version. Of course, my kid's income couldn't afford my father's organizer, but I tried to do as well as I could, with the organizers he was given as business presents each year and never used. That, only to discover a pattern: until the end of January, everything was OK. By mid-February I almost never read it or write anything in it, and by May, I had already started -and failed- a couple more.

Enter PDAs

Fast forward to the beginning of my job life (I am guessing 1999/2000) Dad -again- had got himself one of the first PDAs a couple of years before. It was awful and huge, but not so expensive, and the concept, somehow, made sense. Few months later, he got himself his first Palm (still a 3Com Palm Pilot Professional). Later on, I bought it from him, as soon as he upgraded to a Palm V.

At the moment, it made sense. What made more sense was when months later, I found myself carrying the device with me almost every day (huge as it was), and keeping it updated most of the time.

Enter GTD

I liked to believe that a gadget, along with my simple intuition, could make for an organization system. Wrong. Absurd task lists, events that weren't realy events and other nonsense populated my Palm. And most of all: many things were not getting done at all, and I wasn't happy about it.

It was 2005 and the blogosphere was healthy and happy. I first read about GTD at some blog, quite possibly at Steve Pavlina's excellent site. On to Wikipedia to get the scoop on this new -for me- TLA, and it really made sense.

I won't bore you with the details of my ongoing quest for the state of stress-free productivity. Not in this first post, at least. Suffice to say that it was a complete revelation. If you stumbled upon this blog, you may already know what GTD is about. If not, take a look here, as I did. You owe it to yourself.

(Re-)enter lo-fi

From my early collection of digital watches to my ever-present smartphone, I have always been a gadgeteer. All of my friends could only find it logical that I used to carry around a "Bat-belt" wit my huge first Palm, along with the cellphone. Bits are in, paper is dead.

Or so I thought. But there is always a right tool for every situation. And every time I look, there is a new paper-based "lo-fi" tool: hPDA, D*I*Y hPDA, 3x5-cards fever, the Tickler file, Moleskine (reborn from its ashes) and lots of DIYers sharing their productivity wares to the world, no software involved. Besides, I found myself frequently resorting to the dangerous Post-Its, so I decided to give paper a new try, in a better version that those sticky notes.

And here I am

It's 2008, and my productivity arsenal features a smartphone, a binder with my own sheets (more on that later), and recently again, 3x5 cards. And now also this blog. My friend Hans always talks about how sad it is to "read and read web sites, and never write one and share". I think it was about time to start. Someone might find these articles useful. Someone might feel like sharing their own stories, so comments are welcome and will be read. The beauty, after all, is in the community. By the way, AdSense is enabled, and Google promises links will be be kept in the context of the site.

That, in few words, is the story so far. Some chapters of it are -I believe- worth sharing. And that is why this blog exists. Hope you like it. Welcome.

(It feels good to mark as done the "start blog" task on my list ;) )