The book and methodology Getting Things Done by David Allen showed up on my radar late last year, and I ended up buying a copy because:

• It has the words "stress-free" on the cover
• I was not happy with my own organizational system.

I read the book carefully over the last month (including losing a copy and having to order another), not just picking up his system but also reflecting on my own system. I like his claims that the book is more about collections of tricks that work than silver bullets, and the promise that the system is more about feeling comfortable with what you are and aren't doing than about being able to simply do more:

And whatever you're doing, you'd probably like to be more relaxed, confident that whatever you're doing at the moment is just what you need to be doing—that having a beer withy our staff after hours, gazing at your sleeping child in his or her crib at midnight, answering the e-mail in front of your, or spending a few informal minutes with the potential new client after the meeting is exactly what you ought to be doing, as you're doing it. GTD page xi.

These claims and promises were partially fulfilled.

The crux of GTD seems to be to be this:

• You can only do one thing at time.
• If you have more than one thing to do, you will inevitably not be doing something you want to do.
• You must write down all of the things that you are not doing right now
• You must truly believe that your system will give you access to these things when you need them.
• Then, you should be able to forget about everything you are not doing
• Then, the stress from those things should go away

I won't further regurgitate his book here; google GTD yourself if you want summaries. Instead, here are the items that struck me especially:

List of things you are waiting for. Delegating doesn't eliminate stress because you still have to worry about the possibility of follow up. Make a list of things you may need to follow up on and then forget them.

Review. This is the big thing I'm missing. I make a lot of good lists and then don't revisit the lists for literally months or years. You need a good system of review, very consistent, before the things that are out of sight truly become out of mind. (a cogent argument for weekly review)

Checklists for review. To improve the review process, create checklists and use them. Here is my in-box checklist:

• email in-box
• physical in-box on shelf above my computer
• things that are on the floor near the front door
• bugzilla bugs for main project
• bugs in other bug tracking systems on other projects
• answering machine
• Files named "notes" in my laptop or desktop home directories.

Keep your inbox empty. The basic argument is that a 1000-item inbox is really a to-do list, and a very bad one. I've already become much better about emptying my email inbox, and can confirm that looking at an empty in-box does reduce stress. I've been worse about allowing physical items to pile up.

Have a good filing system. I realized that, by putting my filing system into a plastic box on a shelf, I created a barrier to filing, and this caused my physical inbox to grow. Last week I bought a filing cabinet (I got a "Hirsh" because it had the smoothest drawer action of the choices at the store) and a label printer, and put them both within arm's reach. I'm very happy with it so far.

Clear outcomes. "One of the most powerful skills in the world of knowledge work, and one of the most powerful to hone and develop, is creating clear outcomes." GTD page 69. This resonated with me. As a project manager, it's my most important skill. It's how I enable a group of people to do work that they can do, want to do, need to do, but aren't yet actually doing. I also find that, in working with developers, the more concretely I can spell out a feature and how users will use it, the more the developers support the feature.

Home/work distinction. GTD freely blends personal and professional, asserting that since they are all things you have to do, you should manage them in one system. I can't rebut that argument, but think it's still important to maintain boundaries between the two. The book erodes those boundaries beyond my comfort:

Many people lose opportunities to be productive because they're not equipped to take advantage of the odd moments and windows of time that open up as they move from one place to another, or when they're in off-site environments. GTD page 90

[If you have] zero built-in time or space for regrouping ... you'll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home. GTD page 188

Doing. I used to have a giant, overwhelming list of things to do. I hardly ever came close to emptying the list, and it stressed me. Eventually I started kicking a lot of things into the future, so that my daily list was, in theory, do-able. A few times I was able to clear the reduced list, and that led to a sense of well-being, but I still usually failed to clear the list. I realized that I had put myself in the psychological situation of started each day "behind" and having as the best possible outcome merely breaking even. One disappointment in GTD is that nothing in it really addressed that process.

What GTD does push is having context-specific lists of things to do. Because I work from home and spend most of my time with the computer and phone instantly ready, I don't context-switch as much as a frequent flier or office worker would. I'll still use context lists for some stuff, and to separate work from personal, but my big disappointment is this: If I follow the GTD method, I end up with a pretty decent-sized list of to-dos, maybe 50, and then the "Doing" chapter of the book stops helping. It suggests trusting your gut, and keeping the lists short enough that you can scan them and the next good thing to do will jump out, but it's very short on practical tips.

So after going through one good pass of the book and starting to change a lot of my process, I feel like I've been gently and persuasively led half-way across a rope bridge to a better place and then abruptly abandoned to get the rest of the way across on my own. So as I do that, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Massachusets has been pushing a new policy requiring all government software to use open standard document formats. The software itself can be proprietary and expensive, but the files have to be standard. Of course this would torpedo Microsoft's monopoly on office software, so Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail. They recently went after the state CIO personally, via bought and paid for state senators, and the CIO indeed quit. Today's good news:

In an important new development, the administration of Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has not only appointed a permanent replacement to State CIO Peter Quinn, but also dedicated the press release announcing that appointment to reconfirming its steadfast commitment to the implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument Format.

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF? I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls? —Molly Ivins

"Republican strategist Ed Rogers," talking to Chris Matthews on NBC, tries to deflect and minimize the Abramoff scandal's impact:

MATTHEWS: The White House put out the statement yesterday that the White House staffers had been meeting with Jack Abramoff. And I just think that's worthy of further discussion.

ROGERS: Is it worthy of discussion whatever Democrats met with Jack Abramoff or met with a Jack Abramoff employee?

[...]

ROGERS: Sure. Look, this is going to come out. Nobody is going to keep it a secret. Jack Abramoff is so radioactive—I've got Jack Abramoff fatigue already. I mean, good grief, he didn't kill anybody. Maybe that one guy in Florida.

MATTHEWS: The perfect time to get that fatigue, as the smell heads towards the White House.

Wait, wait, go back a second, what was that about that one guy in Florida? Do you mean Gus Boulis? The guy whose alleged murders were paid $95,000 by Abramoff's business partner Adam Kidan? You think maybe Abramoff killed him? Or are you just joking about an on-going murder investigation one or two steps away from Abramoff, who was one step away from Bush? Notice also the aggressive, hardball followup from biased liberal media hack Chris Matthews.

The law of unintended consequences states that changes to complex systems will produce results other than those intended. Forest fire prevention in the United States in the 20th century is a classic example; by aiming for total fire suppression, firefighters left huge amounts of flammable material in the forest, and when fires did break through the suppression, they were far more powerful and destructive. Essentially, the forest ecosystem had evolved to anticipate and depend on forest fires, and taking away the regular fires disrupted the system.

It occurred to me that meteorite impact prevention is going down the same path. We are on the verge of gaining the ability to identify and intercept asteroids that would otherwise hit Earth to tremendous effect. Is there any possibility that Earth ecosystems in some way anticipate or depend on meteor impact catastrophies?

Some perspective on the brewing war on Iran:

Speaking as a Canadian who is fond of judicious language, I feel that this situation deserves careful and measured thought. So let me just open with:

Is your entire f*cking country on crack??? Are all you Americans out of your cotton picking minds??? Are you completely freaking delusional? Homicidal? Psychotic? Have you lost any shred of a moral compass? WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CRUTCH IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!!!!!

... Have you all forgotten that the evidence on Iraq was spectacularly wrong? Have you all ignored the fact that it was fabricated? Why then are we going down the exact same road of stage managed, fabricated pseudo-evidence and wild-ass hysteria? What is wrong with you people?

Can't you see that this entire crisis has been manufactured, and has been years in the manufacturing[?]—Den Valdron

Today's good news:

The best route for mass transit in Los Angeles is down Wilshire Boulevard. According to the LA Weekly, in an article I discussed here, this has not yet happened because the wealthy residents along much of Wilshire oppose this for class reasons. Their elected representative Henry Waxman, although primarily notable for a career of good government watchdogging, has duly enacted this opposition in the form of a law blocking subway development in a specified area around Wilshire. The premise of the law is that underground methane pockets make safe tunnelling impossible, but the real reason is class-based NIMBYism. The good news is that somebody has made a deal or twisted Waxman's arm enough to finally change his stand:

But new research has convinced the Los Angeles Democrat that tunneling can be done safely and he has introduced legislation to lift the ban. "We need a transit system. We have to alleviate the congestion," he said.

Today's good news:

A University of Michigan project to bridge the gender gap in science and engineering has been so successful that officials have decided to make it permanent with funding commitments approved through at least 2011.

The number of women hired annually for science and engineering faculty positions has increased three-fold since the National Science Foundation first supported U-M's ADVANCE program as a five-year project in 2001, aimed at improving recruitment and retention of women faculty in science and engineering . The University's commitment to extend the program of "institutional transformation" guarantees the effort will be at least a 10-year mission.

In the years before ADVANCE, just 14 percent of tenure-track hires in science and engineering went to women. Now that number is 34 percent.

An article in Physics Today goes into excruciating detail on car crash physics and economics.

In response to the possibility that fuel-economy regulations might be strengthened, safety experts of major US manufacturers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, and a 2001 study at the National Research Council have concluded that light vehicles are fundamentally less safe than heavy vehicles. ... However, attributing the safety records of today’s vehicles primarily to their masses is misleading. The average heavier vehicle tends to be more protective of its occupants also because of its size, higher general quality, and the incorporation of more recent safety features. ... We have found that among cars, risk correlates much more strongly with the blue-book price of the used car than with its mass.

When two cars hit, the kinetic energy must be dissipated. How it's dissipated determines who lives and who dies:

Robert Zobel, head of accident research at Volkswagen, has analyzed the safety of front-to-front crashes of car models that have “passed” the standard frontal crash test ... two cars could, in principle, safely dissipate their combined kinetic energy if their closing speed is less than 70 mph, independent of their masses.

But there are two important caveats. First, if one car’s front is unnecessarily stiff, the other car may have to absorb so much of the energy that its passenger compartment is compromised. Second, if the fronts of the colliding cars are not sufficiently similar and homogeneous to assure so-called structural interaction in a head-on crash, there may be penetration into the passenger compartment. ... The disparity in height, stiffness, and mass between light trucks and passenger cars is a major safety issue. On a pickup or SUV, the height and localized stiffness of its front is particularly hazardous for others. The typical pickup truck chassis shown in figure 7 has two horizontal “rails” that are high and extend far to the front. Pickups and body-on-frame SUVs impose high risks on occupants of other vehicles.

Drive a truck, make other people pay for your mistakes. But not only do trucks and SUVs externalize the risk of bad driving, they also increase the total risk:

... we have estimated that replacing with passenger cars all the light trucks in the US that are used only as “car substitutes” would save three to four thousand lives a year.

Today's good news:

A new law in Wisconson ...

requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.—The Capital Times

The law also, and equally importantly although unmentioned by the Capital Times, requires open source software:

5.84 (3) If a municipality uses an electronic voting system for voting at any election, the municipal clerk shall provide to any person, upon request, at the expense of the municipality, the coding for the software that the municipality uses to operate the system and to tally the votes cast. 2005 Assembly Bill 627