The past several weeks have been much working, much thinking, little writing. A lot of my Rosh Hashanah pondering was about my goals for the year — not so much spiritually as practically, although even practical goals have spiritual implications in terms of what turns out to matter most, no? I swear I am making incremental progress on many important fronts, but it’s hard to see amid the vast chaos. The same could be said of my actual day-job work, of course, too.

In that vein, I’ve started experimenting with Getting Things Done — kind of backwards, in that I spent a while reading around it, largely by means of The Simple Dollar, then spent lots of time looking for a suitable (and free) online tool*, and only then actually sat down and read the book. I have still not done a proper Collection, which they would probably say explains why my anxiety level around my Stuff [to do] has generally risen of late even while I’m spending more focused time tackling it. But, on the whole, a net gain. Like “how could I, of all people, have done without this system for so long?”

*There are a million task- and project-manager sort of things, half a million of which are free, and I signed up for accounts on fully a dozen of them, but none struck the right combination of ease/elegance of use with functional categorization and project-vs-task manipulation. Finally I ended up at one that’s in beta called Nirvana, and I really, really like it. It stays open in the background all day so I can add everything as it comes up — and check it off as it goes out. There are, however, a few features I can already perceive as still missing; I’ll be interested to see what they add in future releases.

I suspect I was going to close this up with something pithy, but I have to go to work. :-}