Conversation

A thing David Allen noted in the original GTD was that clearing the decks (inbox zero, sweep your commitments into clear lists) tends to unleash a burst of new creative energy. Somehow that's stalled in pandemic. Clearing the decks sends me immediately into couch-potato lethargy
6
53
It's because the energy of clear decks is infinite-game energy, and the infinite game is now basically shut down. There's no "how to continue the game" horizons to chase until a way out of the Covid valley becomes visible.
1
17
I think of it as the dark side of "we're all in this together." It means we all share one inbox, and the biggest item on it is not going to zero for a while. Plus we're doing a proper civilization scale GTD sweep. All the shared commitments and crap are being surfaced.
Replying to
Yep. I'd like to social-distance from other people's inboxes and shared societal inbox, but it's not easy. "Solve Covid" is not on any of my lists, not even someday/maybe. It's on an entirely new 6th list called "Someone Else's Get This Done" SE-GTD.
1
8
The trick with GTD is always to clarify your commitments to a project/thing dragging on your mind. My commitment to the covid project so far has mainly been "don't get covid, try to help family and friends stay safe from covid, opportunistically help people getting harder hit"
1
10
This maps allegorically to "rearrange deck chairs and keep the string quartet playing on the deck of the Titanic" I like my premium mediocre delusions of being more consequentially involved in the bigger challenges of the times. Except I've got very little to offer here.
1
7
Significant and specialized collective crises turn all of us into commodities. In the Covid project, most of us top out, in terms of qualifications to contribute, at "wear a mask, sit down, and shut up"
1
11