narrative problems
these are a lot of semi-disparate thoughts but I’m going to try to concatenate them as well as possible:
Chapter One:
In thinking about GTD (Getting Things Done): a lot of y’all folks that I hang out with use this system. I am somewhat in awe of how effective you are; I’m not sure what the correlation/causation relation is with effectiveness and GTD, but I’m pretty sure that in some way they’re linked. I can’t do GTD; I don’t want to do GTD (except maybe for tasks I don’t care about at all). Why? arrkay and I talked about this a bit, and it ties in with Chapter Two of this blog post: GTD is highly non-narrative, and non-narrativity causes littlewidget some serious kernel panic. ;)
Chapter Two:
Okay, I recognize that life is non-narrative. Things in real life don’t really arc or resolve ever; they barely ever even move forward. If you’re lucky, your life doesn’t slide slowly and disturbingly backward; if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you might be able to drag things forward somewhat. But certainly nothing develops in a traditionally plotlike way. I know this, but I don’t particularly like it. Part of what’s so upsetting about being in a liminal state is being in a state with no narrative at all, not even a treading-water type narrative. Everything is disruption, everything feels at random. Things are broken down into action items; things get accomplished, but not as a part of a larger whole (except perhaps a whole still in potentia). Most of the time I struggle to make things in my life as narrative as possible. I don’t mean this in the soap-opera way; I just mean that I try to maintain plot threads and encourage them to develop; also, if I’m going to introduce a subplot, I like it to stick around for a while.
Chapter Three:
GTD (and most organizational systems) break down the larger narrative structure (such as it is) of life until it no longer resembles a story but instead a set of elements which can be put together in one or another different ways (this I call the tinkertoy effect). Using organizational systems like this makes me feel pretty off-kilter. A good story, after all, should feel both surprising and inevitable: the tinkertoy effect turns my world all topsy-turvey not because it reveals the end of the story (I’m the author, after all), but by vivisecting its elements in such a way that they stop looking inevitable at all. It frightens me.
Chapter Four:
I need an organizational system. My life is kinda in shambles. There are a lot of things to get done. But being off-kilter, in my experience, actually contributes to the shambles! And if non-narrative organizational systems like GTD make me feel so off-kilter, they can’t really help me with the shambles (which might at this point, post car-crash*, be described actually as “shimbles”) that is (are?) my life at the mo’. So! obviously, I need to develop a narrative organizational system.
To Be Continued. In the next installment: GTD for the storyteller.
*I crashed my car today. It sucked. total shimbles.
