Control Or Spontaneity: The Paradox

When people discover the level of personal organization I work within, they often ask, "Gee, does this guy ever have any fun?! He's so organized!" My response is usually, "Who's not having fun?" Frankly, I organize for freedom, not for hard work.

Much of my personal system of organization was built and is constantly being refined by negative feedback--having to work harder than I need to, having something slip through a crack that caused inordinate pain, cost, or stress later on. Those are indicators of constriction, not freedom. When something like that shows up in my life, I'm always on the hunt for how to set up a system that will automatically prevent that kind of thing from ever happening again.

I just had lunch with a top management consultant who had just finished participating in my seminar. He confessed that in his 62 years of life, he had always equated his disorganization with "spontaneity." He humbly acknowledged that now he knew it was a pretense, and that having seen another level, he hoped he could change his habits to move to the more real freedom of relaxed control.

There is a freedom that is only approachable by the sacrifice of our attachments to anything, including our organization and commitments. That is the ultimate thrill, living without fear of consequences in the material world. ("Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..." -- Kris Kristofferson.) My ideal scene would be to trust that I could walk up to a phone booth in the airport, and have the person I need to call and their number appear in my mind in full detail, exactly (and only) when I needed it.

I'm not there yet. If you are, let me know how you got there. Until then, I'll fumble along capturing my thoughts, commitments, and agreements with myself into objective, external systems, which I will review regularly, feeling absolutely fine with what I'm doing, and what I'm not doing.

People seldom complain that there is a line painted down the center of a crowded highway. Without that structure, we would likely be in constant stress going down the road, and we would not take advantage of the luxury of enjoying the beautiful scenery along the way.

I do as little as I can get by with, and as much as I need, to get to the place of no distraction, a clear head, and the ability to follow my moment-to-moment intuitive hunches.

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You can find out more about David Allen and GTD at www.davidco.com/.

The David Allen Company is a professional training, coaching, and management consulting organization, based in Ojai, California. Its purpose is to enhance performance and improve the quality of life by providing the world's best information, education, and products in the fields of personal productivity and work/life balance.

Comments

[justjohn]

So, this is an advertisement, right?

I mean, I agree with the general premise, but classify this as an ad. It's part of being organized.

[drumdance]

WTF? He offers specific advice and you call it an ad?

[justjohn]

How many ads DON'T offer specific advice?

Look at the blurb at the bottom, informing us how he earns his keep.

[fairwitness]

The thing is, he is "feeling absolutely fine with what I'm doing, and what I'm not doing", while he strongly and repeatedly suggests no one else who is not doing his hyper-organized thing should be "feeling absolutely fine", inasmuch as they are, I guess, wasting their mental energy in ways that the author is not.

One man's waste is another's obsession, it appears.

[Susan60]

Not so fast. I have a friend whose obssession for order is part of a personality disorder that has brought alot of pain to her family.
So happy and stressfree is she when she organizes the bills, her cabinets, her closets, that she forgets to take care of her family, preferring to put her children in the shower then into their pajamas as soon as they get home from school.
She also is so busy with minute details that her husband, who drives six hours a day for his job, is left to cook dinner when he gets home.
Being organized is a way some people escape stress and feeling. She learned early on as a child that no matter what she did it wasn't good enough, so trying to be perfect all the time was her way to deal with problems and stress. I'm not saying a little organization doesn't go a long way, I'm saying that when you do it to allay fears and relieve stress and to the exclusion of feeling your feelings, you not only have a problem, but so do those who love you. I would call overorganziation not seeing the forrest for the trees.