Ch. 2/3 Post

I found the material in chapter 2 to be more immediately actionable than that of the first chapter.  Even though I already had an inbox of sorts (a portion of my desk), I felt no closer to being the productive overman that Allen envisions.  Instead, I just had a lot of papers sitting in a particular spot.  Allen's three tenets to making full use of an organization system (open loops should exist only in the collection system not in your hear, have as few collection buckets as possible, and empty your collection bins regularly) made me realize why I my in box alone had not made me get things done.  Even though the physical documents were designated a certain place, a good first step, their actual content, and with it its meaning and urgency, still existed only in my head.  Until the papers are sorted through and organized into their respective places according to subject matter and time sensitivity, the oppressing clutter of unfinished tasks would linger in my mind, creating fatal inertia against getting things done.  Using the flow chart on page 32, I was able to organize the documents in such a way that I now feel, and rightly so, that the lot of them, even though it is not actually less, is far more manageable.
The material in chapter 3 was also very useful in terms of generating next steps after having completed the organization step in chapter 2.  Crafting clearly defined desired outcomes, Allen explains, is essential to creating a successful plan.  He states that the common line of thought, thinking about what actions you can do and what result they will yield, is backward.  Instead, one should envision a wild success and capture its core properties and features, and only then can one determine the precise actions which are optimal.  I am often guilty of the backward thinking he describes, but hopefully with this information I can begin to change that.