GTD and Creative Expression webinar with David Allen

There was quite a bit of discussion in the webinar about how making space and creating structure support creativity.

Here's a link to a profile of writer John McPhee. I liked his Rising from the Plains, which I read years ago partly because it's about a Wyoming geologist, and I grew up learning about that during drives and hikes. Until reading this profile, I had no idea how prolific McPhee is.

I was intrigued by how methodical, how structured, he is in his approaching writing. That's mostly described in the second half, if you want to skip to that.

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Every writer does some version of this: gathering, assessing, sorting, writing. But McPhee takes it to an almost-superhuman extreme. “If this sounds mechanical,” McPhee writes of his method, “its effect was absolutely the reverse. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html
 
I've listened to this all the way through at least four times. For me, as a frustrated writer, it is one of the absolute greats in the GTD collection.
Dave
 
Hi John;

Thank you for the link to the article on John McPhee ~ I am not familiar with him, and am now going to investigate his writing.

One other tidbit from this article that I found were the author's comments about John McPhee's reaction to the author using his mobile phone's GPS system to get him to a destination. McPhee asks the author what route he took. Here is the author's response:

"Unfortunately, I told him, I had no idea. I had hardly been paying attention. I just trusted the computer, followed its instructions turn by turn and spent my time daydreaming about this and that"

Perhaps there is also a GTD analogy to be found in this....when we don't take the time to investigate, assess, organize and prioritize....we have no real sense of where we are going or how we got there. And we miss so much along the way...!!

Thanks again John for sharing!
 
And perhaps yet another -- GPS offloads to an external system most of the decisions, worry, timing, etc of navigation, leaving the mind free to do what it's good at: having ideas, thinking, enjoying the scenery, talking to companions -- or even daydreaming about this and that!
 
Hi TesTeq,

I read that article....wow, very powerful in how the GPS system aligns to GTD!

AnneMKE, you are spot on! Unloading every little detail into a trusted system frees our mind to emotions to really dig into "the present moment"....thank you both for sharing.
 
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