Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Zen and Life 2.0 Wonderful piece from Nick at Life 2.0 about the value, or lack of, in being thoroughly organized: The joy of wallowing in mess. I'm impressed and even envious of people who can organize themselves into near-complete efficiency, who adopt GTD to clean their desks, their email inboxes, and lives of all clutter. But I'm not at all interested in achieving that goal myself. My head would explode if I were so organized that I could cram even more activity and accomplishment into my life. No, thanks. I'm quite comfortable with the clutter I have. As Nick points out, serendipitous discoveries arise from such clutter, where odd and unexpected juxtapositions raise new insights. Every time that I complain about chaos, I also remind myself that chaos is the fount of creativity. I spent somewhere near to 12 hours over the last week pulling together an hour presentation for work, intended to summarize some common threads in the four conferences that I attended this spring. Every time I tracked down one reference I was taken down a path that led to more, and then more, interesting connections; I wanted to follow each one, to absorb and interpret and apply each little lesson. It's still happening this evening, after I already gave the presentation this morning. Those connections come from clutter, not from order and efficiency. Control is an illusion; let go. 9:51:08 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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