Separating Personal vs. Work Systems

[Dave Edwards]

Should you use one productivity system or split your productivity system in two? It can be challenging to balance the needs of both your professional and personal lives. Here's my take on the problem.

https://youtu.be/QwY928pYris

 

[JamesT]

Good thread Dave. The bit about both systems needing to be reliable and
trusted is the key point most discussions of this miss.

One thing I'd add from running my own GTD system across personal and
work contexts for years: the bottleneck usually isn't the systems being
separate. It's the gap between them. The capture-and-transfer ritual you
described, where you write a personal note on a card at work and input
it into your personal system at lunch or that evening, is the part most
people skip. And the moment they skip it, both systems become
untrustworthy because the cross-context items leak.

So the question I'd ask anyone in this situation isn't "one system or
two" but "do you have the discipline to start a ritual for moving things between
them." If yes, two systems works. If no, even one system breaks because
the cross-context capture is what fails.

Having the discipline to do the transfer is what makes the two-system approach work!

 

[mcogilvie]

For users of digital systems which support the needed technology, it may be useful to have a kind of universal inbox tool which can collect input anywhere and send it to the relevant work or personal tool via email or other mechanisms. A sophisticated example of this is the Apple ecosystem app Drafts, but there are several others. I don’t use them because I have a single system, and it’s overhead, but if you have two systems it makes sense.

 

[fooddude]

I use one system. One life to manage one system to manage it.

 

[gtd solo-studente]

I use one system. One life to manage one system to manage it.

@fooddude

Agreed . . . while one seemingly has 'four lives' . . . in the midst of Decreasing~&~Increasing all four realities of one's life from life giving Means* to Ends for Means to Ends for Means to Ends for Means to Ends, etc. . . .

Intrinsically:
intrinsically~Internally

intrinsically~Externally


Extrinsically:
extrinsically~Internally

extrinsically~Externally


A Commitment is an Obligation . . . an Obligation is a Commitment

Thank you very much

*Everyone's initial means' was a gift?