WHY NOT SAVE THE WORLD?

Does this experience sound familiar?

Ideas and more ideas abound in your mind. You have so many inspirations, you don’t know where to put them. Couple that with the inspirations you find on the internet, you simply cannot keep track of them all.

And then there’s ….

Paper, paper, paper. They mound up on your desk, get stuffed into files, and overflow into boxes.

and …

Email, email and more email. You have tried having separate accounts. One for listservs, groups and other interests, one for friends and family and one for work. But entropy takes its course as the borders get fuzzy and they start to merge into an undefined and unmanageable blob.

We live in exciting times. We do more and more in less time than every before. Yet with all this stuff, things get lost & tasks can go uncompleted.

So how does one keep track of all this stuff?

Inspired by David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology, here’s how I started:

1. I decluttered over 1000 items in four different email accounts by:
   • Unsubscribing to any mass mailing that I no longer needed.
   • Providing rational storage using the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) methodology
     • Creating 5 status buckets
       • Action (Take action - items that can be completed in less than 2 minutes)
       • Next Action (Important items that will take more than 2 minutes)
       • Waiting On (Items that can be completed once something else arrives)
       • Someday (Ideas that may be useful someday)
       • Finished (To be filed into folders)
   • Using the email search engine or filter to sort through my items and:
     • deleting more than one item at at time
     • or grouping them into completed project file folders
     • or sorting them into their appropriate status buckets

Using this method I reduced all my inboxes to zero! The energy this releases is phenomenal.

Now I can routinely empty my mailbox daily. I sort them into the five status buckets. I then review the action bucket and act immediately on those items and move them to another status, usually waiting or finished. At the end of the day, I review the next action bucket to see what I need to process or schedule.

Wow! What a difference GTD has made in my life. The loose ends are closed up. Minute details are handled quickly. Long-term items formerly lost are now in process. I feel like I’m humming.

A confession: Up to this point, I’ve been posting articles rather aimlessly. I have just been trying to learn the technology…getting my feet wet by writing a few posts now and then. I look back and see that the articles were written in the spur of the moment. This has occurred when I come across something extraordinary during my binges of web surfing. The inspirational impulse must reach a certain critical threshold before I take the time to actually write a blog post for I’d rather surf to explore new territories in the vast ocean of the web. The process of exploration accompanied by a few blog entries is fun and personally satisfying, but I am aware that it will lead to a body of fragmented and unfocused blog posts.

As a result of this, I have attempted to give the blog some shape by classifying and tagging my posts. I have also been looking through my interests for a unifying passion. My hope was that by finding it, I would be able to generate enough discipline to stay focused.

Now I know myself well enough to state unequivocally that my interests are stubbornly broad. They span a large range of educational, scientific and global topics. It is a reasonable expectation that these fields will change substantially as educational reform, scientific progress and global change accelerates. That understanding put me in a bit of a quandary trying to come up with an theme that could be sustained over time.

I had begun to realize that I need to define my audience. I asked myself, “Who am I writing for and why am I writing.” It sounds all so simple and obvious doesn’t it? Yet for me, the simple and obvious was obscured by the flood of ideas on the Internet and the pleasure of responding in the moment.

The epiphany came after I was invited to talk to a group of lateral entry teacher-candidates. That invitation stirred my mind into a frenzy of questions and ideas.

1. What do I hope to leave behind for future generations?
   
2. What would I tell these young teachers about my love of teaching?… in the context of the realities posed by working in a public school?
3. How does one find what is essential to the heart and soul of a teacher’s practice? …and how are they preserved in a highly-regulated, regimented and scrutinized environment?

Ahhhh…it is within these questions focused for that particular audience that lies a fountain of ideas for a lifetime of blogging.

And so it is, let the blogging begin!