The Power of Lists
A colleague recommended David Allen’s book Getting Things Done to me after witnessing my pre-occupation with efficiency. Giving crack to an addict would have been more conscionable. The undistracted reader can digest the contents in an afternoon as his techniques take little effort to grasp. At first glance, GTD is unremarkable–at more than one point I thought, “Yes, that makes sense. I almost do that today.”–a characteristic that usually indicates the author has realized some fundamental insight. In the three months since I started GTD, I have found these principles to be the most liberating:
- Get tasks out of your head and onto paper
- Build a trustworthy filing system
- Make lists
Minimalism As Necessity
People often ask me why I found the Middle East so captivating. A recent article about the Omani architect Samiya Al-Harthy Sheridan illustrates one reason: a minimalist aesthetic rooted not in taste but in circumstance. Until the last 60 years or so, southern Arabia’s indigenous peoples did not accumulate possessions without purpose. The Bedouin lifestyle required the ability to travel quickly, precluding cumbersome possessions like beds and bookshelves (those of us who move often know this truth). Per capita wealth was also very low, so many people could not afford excess.
These conditions did not prevent the development of style. Arab men took great pride in their camel sticks, khanjars (daggers), and prayer beads. The women used kohl to make their eyes seductive. Their hands kept busy in the production of splendid yet compact rugs. Despite the massive expansion of wealth induced by oil, the application of “less is more” remains strong outside of royalty.
Sheridan’s home reflects her heritage. Unlike the other gauche castles and monuments to decadence that appear in Architectural Digest, her design demonstrates an innate understanding of elegant simplicity. The walls are white, the floors almost bare. Each decorative piece meets a need; collectibles are absent. She minimizes distraction to direct attention to the Omani coastline’s real treasures: light, color, the gentle sound of water against rock. These are the simple treasures that Middle Eastern culture taught me to prefer.
Amateurism: Out from Under the Shadetree
Jeff Howe’s 2006 article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” called attention to new methods of directing collaborative energy. As with any next “big thing,” the first principles from which this movement grew have been applied for some time. The field of mathematics often turns to the masses for proofs—witness the Poincaire conjecture proof from the Millenium problem list, for instance, or the Universal Turing proof—although these masses are a decidedly rarefied lot. The Ansari X-prize pried space from the hands of bureaucrats, and more than one explorer set sail without professional credentials in hopes of disproportionate payoff. A variety of factors—cheap infrastructure software, fast communications technology, effective information search—now makes it possible to apply this open approach to various tasks. Howe assigned a category to this field: “crowdsourcing”. The Wikipedia definition follows:
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.
A more complete definition would make a distinction between crowdsourcing and other forms of collective enterprise such as Wikipedia, Yelp, and the Linux kernel. Whereas compensation for these efforts emanates principally from enhanced reputation and self-satisfaction, crowdsourcing attempts to exploit the power of weak links. Success stories from InnoCentive—one of which is chonicled in Howe’s article—illustrate this objective. As one sardonic wag wryly noted, experts are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. By contrast, an amateur may bring a diverse set of loosely connected skills to bear on a problem. If innovation results from questioning assumptions, then amateurs have an ex officio advantage in that they often do not know which assumptions to make from the outset.
