Self-Organizing Man

Changing Personal Assclownery

July 12, 2007 – 4:51 pm

As some of you may know, I characterize behaviours such as racism or sexism as assclownery. People tend to respond quickly, after they’ve said something racist, for example, you call them an assclown. Call them racist and they deny it. Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. (The same thing happens when you say to a man, “oh, I’m sorry about the size of your penis…”)

I am in constant quest to dismantle my inner assclown. Disorganized, oriented to victimhood, whiney, dissociative, my inner assclown has caused me nothing but t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

For unfathomable reasons my trip to Minneapolis awoke in me a single-minded focus to get really, really organized. Not my strong suit for sure. So I revisited Patrick Rhone’s site, where he has written, and updated a comprehensive white paper on his own lo/hi-fi system for Getting Things Done. Through Patrick’s site I found Leo of Zenhabits.

One of the principles of Getting Things Done is the habit of ubiquitous capture. What this means is that you use pen/paper, cell phone, microcassette, chalkboard, whatever, to capture everything you have to do, follow-up on, answer, find, fix, send to grandma, etc. The David, originator of GTD, has declared that if it’s in your head it’s causing you trouble.

So I’ve revamped my ubiquitous capture to Vitalist for my hi-fi use and Levenger’s pocket briefcase and the awesome Fisher space pen (Futura gun metal) for lo-fi use. Previously I had been using GTDInbox, a Firefox app that worked through gmail and any old piece of paper for lo fi. While I was initially very enamored with GTDInbox, I found the biggest problem was always working from the inbox. Never far away was I from email, which became a time waster for me. Plus Vitalist works through my cell phone, which gtdinbox never did. The big problem with any old piece of paper is that I needed an additional system to keep track of the post-it notes, scarp pieces of paper, gum wrappers, envelopes, airline ticket stubs, receipts and any other dead tree I used to write something down.

I have dedicated myself to carrying my lofi system with me at all times, including my robe in the morning. When I’m at the computer I have my vitalist account open at all times to jot down things to do. In three days I’ve downloaded a 7 double-sided 3 x 5 cards worth of to-dos from my brain. Already I feel more relaxed , have needed increasingly less sleep but feel more energized.

Ubiquitous capture has proven to be an antidote to internalized assclownery. I also think ubiquitous capture makes me more effective in my social justice work. Why we on the left have decided that productivity and money are not to be discussed as strategies for improved outcomes in social transformation I’ve yet to understand. Stay tuned for updates.