39. Part 1: This is true for me, is it true for you? Via Stepcase Lifehack.
"We feel agitated when we read articles, pick up books or take programs that implicitly assume that we are novices who are taking our first steps. The truth is that we aren’t: we already have time- and self-management systems in place that have worked for several years. Sometimes decades. We don’t want to be treated as if we are starting from scratch, like five-year-olds at their first music lesson."
40. Part 2: I took the quiz, I'm a green belt! Via Stepcase Lifehack.
"The fact is, like most people, you started to put together your own time management system in your teens and completed the process in your early twenties. You may have tweaked it since then, but most people don’t – they stick with what works for them, and they forget the fact that they ever put it together; it sinks deep into the world of their unconscious competence."
I mean, systems isn't unconscious competence for me. Systems is, actually, my hobby, or I guess now I'm calling it home. Well, systems is my home. Systems is practically, like, my bar, seriously, cue the theme song to Cheers. I do love the notion of unconscious competence, though. You know what that is for me? Like I tell people I don't count calories or grams, which I love like freedom. Just remember where there's a blowhole, there's a whale. Meaning that I did count, for years. So I'm not sure how much my current lightness of being owes to that ballast, what, my whale has ballast, I write what I want. Also all this talk of whales and lightness is not about my weight, it is about my miiind. ANYWAY back to systems, I occasionally think about getting my systems together and taking them on the road; but these two posts sort of crystalized for me why I don't, or haven't yet:
- People don't need my systems, because they have their own systems.
- I kind of don't think that my systems will, you know, "freeze beautifully." They're not so much a package or a product, they're a process. I do, and basically have done for over twenty years, which is how long ago my early twenties was, pretty much what he says above, and I owe the organized person that I am not to a particular system, but to having been actively engaged in organizing, experimenting, and improving my personal systems for longer and more continuously than I have done any other thing in my life.
- And it's that engagement, if anything, that I should sell.
But anyway at the moment, I am not in the life design business. I bring this up just because this is the sort of thing I get geeked on, and also because you may have noticed it says TRACK in a few places on the training skeleton and those are places where a good grasp on systems will really help you get what you want. And a trainer helps you with that, I basically design spreadsheets for fun and can save you a little work up front. Then though, you do your own work. I can't do your work, I can't help you much if you don't do your work.
So basically: want to get strong or fast or agile or lean, tune up your systems skills. It's not all about situps. It's not even all about your body. It all works a lot better with your brain in the game.
