Orgflow: How I Work
We have introduced a new monthly standing meeting at the Music Cognition Group where the focus is meant to be on how to work. At some point this year, I’d like to share the system that I use. Not because it’s particularly more productive than anyone else’s, but because since adopting it, my mental health has improved ten-fold. A combination of adopting these principles plus a lot of soul searching and self-reflection has reconfigured my relationship with “work”. The goal of writing this is not to make you more productive, it is to change how it feels to sit down and work. I will inevitably also do a bit of sharing about my personal relationship with work.
I am also taking my approach to organizing a bit more seriously in the new year here as I had a few moments last year where I could have done a much better job at handling some of my communication responsibilities. I don’t mind telling people that I need more time to respond, but I do feel horrible when I forget to respond to people and what could have been an easy “Sorry, just not now” email turns into me realizing several weeks later I have left someone hanging. While I am aware this happens to everyone, it’s just another thing I want to practice and improve on.
I call my system orgflow since it is a combination of using Emacs Org-mode and my general work flow.
The actual system is 100% inspired by Getting Things Done and I cannot recommend getting a copy of this book enough if this kind of thing interests you.
I have both the audio book and a physical copy and would recommend the audio book.
The book has a bit of a corporate new-age guru vibe to it (the book has a very ‘I’m an e-suite exec / consultant’ feel at times which some academic readers might find off putting), but the content is marvelous once you get to the actual system.
Over the holidays I sketched out what I think the series of blog posts that I would need to explain most of it will be, and they are as follows:
- Saying No
- The Orgflow Theory (General Overview of GTD, some personal reflections)
- The Tools (minimally explain what you need to implement it)
- Separating Content from Context (or, why time blocking is not a vibe)
- Actionable Items (the basic unit of work)
- Building TODOs (capturing without doing)
- Notes on Minutes and Communications (forcing actionable items on your colleagues)
- Building the Reference Archive (a work in progress)
Now it’s not like what I do is some perfect system that has clear boundaries. As discussed in GTD, learning to work this way is not about quick fixes. There are no hacks in this system, it’s more of a practice that takes time to improve and get better at. If you try to do what I do from day one, it will be too much and you’ll probably not end up on the wagon. Just take from these ideas whatever resonates with you and come back if what you tried ended up serving you.
Looking back, there were clear traces of my system today in posts of mine going back to 2018. Back then I used just a hierarchical, color coded text document when I was learning vim. Today, it’s pretty much vanilla org-mode. Maybe in the future I will learn some more emacs lisp and customize it more.
As mentioned above, my goal in the next several posts is NOT to make you more productive. I wasted a lot of time the past several years trying to optimize my life for work, thinking that it’d eventually increase my quality of life when I was not working. What ended up happening is that I was able to take on more work, which I did. This ultimately resulted in just being able to spin more plates at one time. You could use a system like this for that, and I totally get that, it’s really competitive out there.
But I think the long term solution is using a system like this as a means to first improve your quality of life. Then once you have a better grip on your relationship with work, you can decide if you want to put your foot back on the accelerator.