Ask HN: How does one do it all?

>And when it is all over, nobody wishes they had spent more time working.

This is true. But I think it's also important for people to realize this on their own based on experiences in their own life, not just in theory. Sometimes the only way to really understand this is to overwork and burn-out at a job and realize it's not worth it.

If I was on my deathbed when I was 20, I'll bet one of my regrets would have been not working harder to contribute to science, make an impact, be recognized, be an entrepreneur, etc. I haven't been in my 20s for a while and my views on work have definitely changed to what I quoted from you above.

Another thing to keep in mind is that every couple of years, an internal or external shift is going to change what you think is important and what's not worth the effort.

Maybe today you want to focus your time on learning different things and don't want to focus on your job. But then you turn 30 and you realize you want to focus on your career and spend less time learning random stuff. Just make the best decision you can at that moment with the feelings and data you have.

Here's a piece of advice I might have found useful in my early 20s.

Don't project long term consequences on short term decisions. It's really easy to ask yourself what the "right" decision is and then consciously or unconsciously weigh this against every other possible decision and how it could affect your entire life. Even with something like "Should I choose to spend to spend the next 6 months learning anthropology, literary theory, or psychology" turns into an agonizing decision if you start trying to determine how that decision could effect the rest of your life. The truth it, it probably doesn't matter which one you pick or even if you decide you'd rather stare out the window for 6 months first, and then decide which one to study.

Sometimes even the big long-term decisions don't matter in the long run. I know somebody who got married and was divorced by age 22. Now they've been married to somebody else for 10+ years and has 3 kids. They learned some lessons from the first marriage, but in the long term it didn't matter all that much.

Do you use GTD on a daily basis and does it help you? I found the system terrible and convoluted. David Allen is a member of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, which I've read is a cult. The history of the system seems a bit shady when you look at it from this perspective. Essentially GTD is actually just a cult like any other. Scientology is meant to use science to actualize people to their full potential, as another example. I'd love to hear your perspective.

Yeah I hadn’t heard it was a cult, and I wouldn’t read too far into it. Anything taken to the extreme gets weird, and he has made his life from it so he’s as extreme as it gets. I think for him it’s definitely something he came to while taking psychedelics, so it’s probably spiritual and “the right way to live”.

In my mind to have a cult you need other people, and I’ve never met with anyone for a GTD meetup. To me the point of GTD is for it to be as low drag and out of the way as possible, so that you spend as little time on it as necessary.

It’s a tool in the tool belt like anything else. The key ideas I (try) to use:

- Weekly review (just carve out time to get organized each week in a structured way)

- Inbox / place to capture things

- 2 minute rule - if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it (sometimes 5 depending on the context)

- Contexts to let me think about work and personal items separately (though I keep them physically separate and work stays on work machine).

- Agendas (@person) which is a bucket used for anything and everything I need to talk to the person / team / group about. I’ve got tons of agenda lists.

- Snoozed items - need to change oil in 6 months? Put it in the inbox to call the shop to set up an appointment, and snooze it for 5 months.

- Delegate / Defer / Do workflow for email and (somewhat) zero inbox.

- Horizons of focus, and making sure I’m not too heavily focused in one area or missing one completely.

- Natural planning method is also good.

Viewing GTD as a cult to me is like viewing agile as a cult (which… now that I think about it…). In all seriousness, GTD is a way to think about to do lists and all the incoming information, and presents a way to handle it to get it out of your mind. There are a lot of ways one could do that besides GTD, but the book + tools (I use omnifocus) are well established and mature, so it’s a good and time tested approach.

Its about having the right information at the right time so that you can take the desired (pre-planned) action to achieve some outcome. If you want it to, omnifocus will tell you when you are nearby a physical store (context @bestbuy) and show you the to dos or things to purchase only when you are there (project get kids’ Christmas gift & task buy printer ink). Or if you shop online you could make your context @computer, so when you open the computer you can look at the list and work out of it. I don’t go that far, but some do.