In a recent interview with The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows, productivity guru David Allen underscores the ultimate point. It's a thought that I keep having to remind myself of.
"I guess it really backs down to--and I guess this is going to be my message forever, because I don't know how long it's going to take the human beings to change this habit--but your psyche is not your system, in terms of remembering and reminding. And as soon as you've got more than seven meaningful things that you're trying to negotiate and juggle and manage the relationship between them, and they're all in your head, you're dead. You deal with whatever is yelling longest and loudest and then feel bad about the whole game.
However, when you get all that out of your psyche, it doesn't relieve you of the personal executive responsibility to then say "Okay, how do I allocate my attention and my focus right now?" But what it does is, it frees you up to be doing that with your intelligence. So utilizing your intuitive intelligence is something you're not going to be able to computerize."
"I guess it really backs down to--and I guess this is going to be my message forever, because I don't know how long it's going to take the human beings to change this habit--but your psyche is not your system, in terms of remembering and reminding. And as soon as you've got more than seven meaningful things that you're trying to negotiate and juggle and manage the relationship between them, and they're all in your head, you're dead. You deal with whatever is yelling longest and loudest and then feel bad about the whole game.
However, when you get all that out of your psyche, it doesn't relieve you of the personal executive responsibility to then say "Okay, how do I allocate my attention and my focus right now?" But what it does is, it frees you up to be doing that with your intelligence. So utilizing your intuitive intelligence is something you're not going to be able to computerize."
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