The Exclusive Or

Several students have recently asked me for advice about time management. When people ask you a important and difficult question like this, usually the best thing is to think of someone else who can give a better answer than you. For time management, an obvious person to turn to is the late Randy Pausch, a noted computer scientist who became an internet sensation because of an inspirational lecture that he gave after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I’m naturally disorganised, but I have so much stuff to do that out of necessity I get organized. (Then more stuff comes and I get disorganised again.) The way I get organized is by attempting to follow a system called GTD. GTD comes from a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. The book is an unusual read, a mix of management-speak, Zen-speak, and tips for organizing your filing cabinet. But for all that, it’s a good book.

Due to a recent bout of jet lag,¹ I have found myself this week waking up at 5am. So I am experimenting with reading a paper first thing in the morning.

Ubiquitous capture is a great term from Getting Things Done. Like the best ideas from GTD, it is simple, obvious in retrospect, but changes everything. Ubiquitous capture means: When you think of something, you should write it down, right away, in some place where you will check it later.