Author: Patrick Rhone

Item #2 on the Personal Manifesto I have been slowly building is the following:
All notes, lists & ideas worth keeping should converge in one location, be readily accessible and easy to locate quickly.
As I mentioned previously, I have been feeling quite out of sorts lately. One of the reasons for this is that I have gotten out of my system of keeping it all together. I am seriously organizationally challenged and I absolutely have to have a system to follow to even function on a day to day basis. I do not say this lightly. I believe I actually have a undiagnosed mental disorder that causes this, especially because I see the same thing in my (medically diagnosed) oldest son and my brother. Therefore, when I get off track, when my system suffers critical errors, it makes my entire life seem broken. I find it hard to even start doing anything, which in turn feeds into my (well diagnosed) bi-polar condition.
This is why Getting Things Done appealed to me so much. Not only did it propose a great and effective system, it emphasized that the key was not just having a system, it was having a system you could trust. Lose trust, lose faith in your system, any system, and it will no longer work. This is why some of the endless tweaking done by many to get their system “just right” may, in the end, be just as much of a failure as not having a system at all. The tweaking generally means that you have lost, or do not yet have, faith in the system. Without that faith it is useless. I lost faith.
I did not really see this until Bethany pointed it out to me without really realizing that was what she was doing. Bethany is not a GTD convert but she is very insightful and wise. I was trying to explain to her the problems I was having being on top of things, or at the least feeling like I was. I was telling her how I felt my system was broken in some way that I had yet to truly identify. Then, she said the following:
” When you started with your Moleskine you wrote everything in the book. Then you got the index cards that you attached to the top of it, and would write down things that came to your mind when you were driving and could not open the Moleskine. Then you seemed to get afraid that the things you were writing in the Moleskine were not pretty and organized enough so you started to write on the cards first for everything and transcribe to the Moleskine. That’s where it all broke down. Now you have to write in two places and it takes longer and often does not make it into the Moleskine, and you lose the card. You need to pick one or the other.”
Did I mention that she was brilliant too. I mean, she saw what had happened. Somewhere in the tweaking to get a perfect system I lost faith in the one that I had and was working. It was at this point that the bell began to toll the beginning of my end. It all fell apart from there. I started losing information. I had things spread out all over the place. I was never sure where to go for my next action. Because some items were being tracked several different places, when a task was completed I would mark it done one place but not on the others. This all left a lot of “open loops”. It was a mess.
OK, so there is the problem… Where is the solution?
The wonderful thing about a system is that, as long as you know what that system is and it works, you can always go back to the beginning and start it up again. That is what I did. I went back to the beginning. I went back to my system.I sat down and started the collection phase of GTD again, gathering up all of those “open loops” and tossing them into my inbox. Then I just followed the basic model. I processed them, put them into their context and acted on the ones I could using the two minutes or less rule. Since then I have been back on track with my combo of Moleskine, Backpack and Now Up to Date and am starting to feel a little bit better and less scattered.
The moral of the story is that in the tightrope of life, if you start to feel unbalanced, simply stop where you are and find your center.

I have always admired those that use pencils. I have never really liked them, not even as a kid. Unless a pencil is very sharp, I can’t stand the way it feels when I am writing. Not sure if I can describe it any better than that. Pencils do have several advantages over pens though. They don’t run out, they don’t leak, they are erasable, they are waterproof, I could go on. Don’t just take my word for it. After all, I don’t use pencils. Instead, listen to the folks at Pencil Revolution. They love pencils and have a lovely blog all about them. If you are a pencil freak, this is pr0n of the highest order.

Yesterday, Michael and I added a photo section to the site. This is to share my favorite photos, which I hope to update very regularly, and to give a visual glimpse into my life, loves and interests. I am also hoping that this, along with the purchase of a new camera (Canon SD400), will spur me into taking pictures more often and improving my photographic skills.

I have just been so out of sorts lately. Hard to focus. Too many lists and I seem to have lost trust in my system of keeping it all together. All my thoughts are scattered like a game of 52 pickup. Hence the lack of posts. I am just not quite feeling myself lately. I plan on having some “me” time this weekend to try to get things together. Maybe I will work on trying to get my my system back in order. Maybe I will just sleep.

Today, I have finally finished adding all of the posts from my previous blog to the archives here. This blog now contains all of the posts I have made since last February, after my hard drive crashed in my former Powerbook. All other posts, previous to that, most likely are lost for good. A small bummer but if I happen to get those back I will back post those as well.

One of the things I just love about my Dad, Kenneth, is the really great quotes he often includes in the e-mail and letters he sends me. They never fail to enlighten, impart or just plain make me smile. A recent one really floored me:
“If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.”
If that is not a life motto I don’t know what is. I just had to ask him where it came from. Here is his response:
“I get it from astrologist Caroline Casey. She says it sometimes during her radio program, which I sometimes engineer. Over the years, I’ve collected about 5 of her most often used little sayings and I employ them sometimes in letters… You’ll get more.”
I can’t wait.

The Financial Times has a great article on life hacking, cringe busting and the cult of the productivity obsessed (of which I am a full fledged member). Good “getting it” coverage of what this stuff is all about:
To do or not to do – that is the question

It was Bethany’s birthday last Friday (Happy Birthday Baby!). I did my best to plan a whole day worth of fun activities in order to celebrate. We started with a great brunch meal at Hell’s Kitchen, saw a Fringe Festival show and went to the Lagoon Theater and saw the film Crash, and that is only half of it.
After the movie, we decided to walk around uptown a bit and do a little window shopping. We stopped a few different places but eventually came to Urban Outfitters. For those who don’t know, Urban Outfitters is the place to shop for the to-cool-for-school crowd. It was here, between the throwback-logo-ringer tees, too-hip-to-do-the-laundry denim, euro-trash-trainer jackets and mad-cow-suede track shoes that it finally hit me… I am too old for these clothes.
I have now reached an age where, some of the fashions that would have looked great on me even a few short years ago, now would look ridiculous on me. I don’t quite know when or how this happened. It seems like just yesterday I would have looked great in this stuff. And it is not just this store either. It seems about half of the stores that exist in todays retail mall landscape largely sell stuff that, if I were to wear it, I would look like a 37 year old trying to look 17. Do you know why? Because, I would be a 37 year old trying to look 17. I am just not a demographically catered-to mass market consumer any longer. At least not to the stores I used to frequent.
It all makes me feel so, well, old.

The theme for this week seems to be:
Simplify
Next up in my quest to carry less is my “wallet”. The reason for the quotes is that it is not really a wallet but a card case. Having lived in the big bad east coast, where pick-pocketing borders on olympic sport, I have learned to carry everything in my front pockets. For years I have carried around my ious cards in a card case of some sort. My current model is metal and clear plastic and the lid is attached by an elastic bungie style system. I do like it and it gets attention whenever someone notices it while I am out (“What is that?”).
The problem (and perhaps benefit) is that, due to the metal body of the case, I have a limited and inflexible amount of space and therefore a finite number of items it can hold. Still, I have managed to pack this thing to the hilt with all sorts stuff. Not just the stuff I need to but all sorts of things I could just as easily have in a separate holder in my car. Discount cards, coffee punch cards, gas punch cards, membership cards, you get the idea. None of these items do I need to keep in my pocket constantly. Therefore, it is time to once again “get real”.
I have cleaned it out and here are the only things I really need:
1) Drivers License
2) Check Cards (I have two as I have two regularly used bank accounts)
3) College Staff ID
4) Insurance Cards (Auto, Medical and Dental the total of which equal one credit card in thickness)
I will keep the rest in a separate case in my car and access when needed.
Next up, doing something about that anchor of a computer bag I carry.

Item #1 on the Personal Manifesto I have been slowly building is the following:
Travel as light as possible. Get rid of uneeded items. Carry only what you need to have.
In that spirit, I have been thinking about how to reduce the number of items I carry with me. For instance, do I really need all of the keys I own on my chain or should I have a chain just for my car and house keys and leave the rest on a separate chain or chains at home? Do I really need all of the items I carry in my Timbuk2 Messenger Bag? Do I really need a bag that size and does the fact that I have the room simply encourage me to carry more? If I have a smaller bag will it force me to be more selective about what I chose to carry?
A number of the items on my manifesto are things just like this. Things I believe in and try to strive for. I am not always successful but from time to time, I revisit the list just to do a check of how I am doing. Today, I came across an article at Celsius1414 called Zen Pockets and it has inspired me. I am really going to “get real” about this one.
I am starting small, with my key chain. Here are the only keys I need on a regular basis:
1) Car
2) House
3) Office
4) Bethany’s House
Four keys. That is all I am going to carry from now on. I have taken all other keys from my keychain and have put them on a separate ring which I will keep at my house and only take when needed.
There. I feel better already.