Sorry for starting yet another thread on the Zen GTD tie-in. It’s just that I read a lot of Zen books, and the similarities with GTD always strike me very forcibly.
At the moment I am reading “A Zen Harvest” (out of print according to Amazon, but got it through abebooks.com second-hand service). Take a look at these, and then tell me that this is not what GTD is trying to achieve:
“Be thoroughly
dead
While alive!
Do just as you wish:
All you do is best.”
And
“If you want
To live long,
Just work.
Look, running water
Never stagnates.”
I read these last night and fell asleep happy.
Just imagine, working solidly at what is on your lists with our mind cleared of all the calls of “What about me!” that comes from our files and from the people we are thinking about.
Planning is where all the deciding gets done. As Rainer pointed out on http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=728&start=60 planning is fraught with emotional pulling and dragging. But when the planning and the deciding are finished, then all that is left is the mechanics of the work.
David tells us that it is beneficial to do the thinking up front. What an understatement!! Getting all that deciding out of the way makes the actual work a restful experience.
Zen urges us to be as one with the work we are doing in order to peacefully be in the moment.
I know that David will say that “mind like water” means that our mental work bench is cleared of all preoccupations and ready for the next piece of knowledge work as it shows up. At first sight David’s meaning seems to incorporate a dynamic sense of potential, rather than the more accepting tone of the old Zen teachers.
But my argument is, once you are working, you are working. If you follow David correctly, your mind will not be hopping about – to the future, to whoever you are working for, to what you will be able to buy if you get a raise and so on – it will just be working.
GTD takes us to a good place - I think Zen takes us by the countryside route to the same place.
Dave
At the moment I am reading “A Zen Harvest” (out of print according to Amazon, but got it through abebooks.com second-hand service). Take a look at these, and then tell me that this is not what GTD is trying to achieve:
“Be thoroughly
dead
While alive!
Do just as you wish:
All you do is best.”
And
“If you want
To live long,
Just work.
Look, running water
Never stagnates.”
I read these last night and fell asleep happy.
Just imagine, working solidly at what is on your lists with our mind cleared of all the calls of “What about me!” that comes from our files and from the people we are thinking about.
Planning is where all the deciding gets done. As Rainer pointed out on http://www.davidco.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=728&start=60 planning is fraught with emotional pulling and dragging. But when the planning and the deciding are finished, then all that is left is the mechanics of the work.
David tells us that it is beneficial to do the thinking up front. What an understatement!! Getting all that deciding out of the way makes the actual work a restful experience.
Zen urges us to be as one with the work we are doing in order to peacefully be in the moment.
I know that David will say that “mind like water” means that our mental work bench is cleared of all preoccupations and ready for the next piece of knowledge work as it shows up. At first sight David’s meaning seems to incorporate a dynamic sense of potential, rather than the more accepting tone of the old Zen teachers.
But my argument is, once you are working, you are working. If you follow David correctly, your mind will not be hopping about – to the future, to whoever you are working for, to what you will be able to buy if you get a raise and so on – it will just be working.
GTD takes us to a good place - I think Zen takes us by the countryside route to the same place.
Dave