I began keeping on-line journals during my undergraduate years for two simple reasons.

1. It felt really good to drain the “stuff” out of my head and to let it fall onto a page: physical or electronic.
2. Competition.

How does competition come in to writing a personal journal? I’ll tell you. My roommate at the time, who later turned into one of my closest friends, was extremely competitive. He was smart, funny, athletic and an all around good guy. He was exactly like me. I don’t mean we were alike, I mean we were the same.

We both had:

• the same major
• the same course schedule
• been in the same orientation group
• similar taste in music
• similar taste in girls
• similar taste in alcoholic beverages
• similar taste in tastes…
• etc. etc. etc.

It actually got to the point where people had trouble telling us apart. This led to some amazing times, great stories and a healthy competitive spirtit which helped us to become healthy, better students, better people, and better friends.

The best part about this whole competition though was the need to outdo each other in every facet of our lives; to lift the bar to knew heights in everything we did, including the writing we each did on our electronic journals.

I would read his post. Take a peak at where he had been funny or used a play on words, look at the depth of his topic or the way in which he turned a phrase and suddenly found myself injecting more humor and looking for ways to make my writing more engrossing than his.

Let me back up a quick step. I was an architecture major at the time and although I was given the opportunity to take liberal art courses and round off my education, I have always been technically minded. I’d take things apart as a child to see how they worked. I marveled over the Rube Goldberg
types of contraptions in movies and cartoons. I’ve always been better at crafting equations than words, but with the spark that competition created, I wanted to write and found a way to force my full brain into action instead of the single half.

So now we know why I write the way I do. But why focus on the marriage of art and science? Simply put, because I want to. This is my site after all.

There are so many areas of the world and of my life that involve either art or science. I’d have no problem saying that everything involves one or the other. The parts of this life that really excite me, though, are the experiences which place the two in the same room and let them create happiness or war.

Here’s an example that was recently brought to my attention by a fellow grad student.

Science: ElectroMicrograph

Basically an image from a really powerful microscope of really small things. (Extreme Simplification)

Art: Photography

A mix of patterns, light, shade, color and texture which create atmosphere and mood

The Part that I see as important:

A published site containing the work of researchers to produce artistic images from the work done to characterize booze. Check Out Beershots!

It’s this kind of stuff that gets me really excited. Not just because it involves humorous material (that does help.) but because it is appreciable in both realms by anyone with a soul and a calculator.

Ahhhh. I think I’ll go enjoy my favorite beer now and look out at the beautiful day. Yet one more thing that science and art collectively create. There is no feeling better than a deep breath, a cold beer and a warm spring day out on the porch.

Jason

Science is linear. Do A then do B and record in C. The beauty in science is that it has structure and is so rigidly fixed and fully developed that anything can be given a place within.

Art on the other hand runs in complex directions. The dynamic nature of the art cannot be confined into boxes. Its why we have such trouble defining a peice of art into a period of time or a stlye. Its why music has so many genres with new ones being developed and explored each time you plug in your headphones.

Neither of these systems works for everything. A classical piece by masters like Beethoven or Bach can be easily defined by the structure with which it was created. While the work of jackson Pollock cannot be summed with any known equation. Similarly the rules governing free fall are laws in the scientific community used to prove ideas, while the evolution of freezing surfaces which has yet to be fully characterized and mastered can produce snowflakes more beautiful than any which could be drawn.

There is something in our nature that allows us to be both a scientist and an artisan at the same time. We are allowed to check off to do lists and do interpretive dance. We are naturally do-ers, capable of both linear and dynamic thinking, and it is within this juxtaposition that problems manifest in our daily lives. What happens when the scientist in us decides to go to a concert or when the musician in us wants to do calculus? We can’t be only one. Too much linear thinking and we lose the ability to adapt and overcome obstacles. Too much dynamic thought and we lose focus and procrastinate.

I have always been a procrastinator. I’ve made a pretty tough habit out of it and although I have tried hundred of things to get myself out of the habit the only thing I have been able to do so far is to “play the slice” as my dad says. The main problem for me is lack of focus on thing at a time.

I’ve learned through many trials that I am not going to beat my procrastination by reading a book. It’s not going to magically go away overnight through relaxation techniques. Procrastination doesn’t yield to motivational speakers for more than an hour and no matter how many inspiring quotes I read, the procrastination junkie in me is always looking for another hit.

I’ve recently started graduate school after almost a year in the work force. College had prepared me to handle most tasks with ease even after procrastinating myself into a corner. Anything could be solved with an all-nighter and breakfast at the local campus grease shack, but grad school is different.

I realize that being away from the student life for a year has probably dulled my academic ferver, but the general feel of grad school is more imposing. Suddenly courses have meaning past their effect on the grade point average. Research is not just a project weighing in as part of your grade. It is the means by which the rest of your career may have be seeded. Professors are no longer looking at you as children they are preparing for the world, but as worker ants ready to be exploited and crushed if need be to make way for better and brighter slaves. (A little dramatic I know, but its the feel I’m trying to impart here, not the actuality.)

My transition to grad school was tough. Mostly because I was still without an adviser until late in my first year. In that year I had to take advanced courses on material I never learned, TA a course of 70 students, search for an adviser, find support for the summer and hopefully have some time left over to meet people and build friendships strong enough to keep me going through the next 4+ years.

In any case it seemed as though my procrastination finally hit a home run and looked as though it was about to take the pennant. I fell behind with work, I retreated from my daily life and let myself go physically.

I needed help and although I had tried hundreds of things before, desperation is a strong motivator. And so I took the plunge one last time into the pool of supposed quick fixes for procrastination. This time I came upon a book by David Allen entitled Getting Things Done.

Let me begin with this. This book is not for everyone, and even I wasn’t thrilled about all of the information within it. What I did get out of it was a plethora of ideas and sometimes that’s all you need!

I was excited by the books main points. We keep too much stuff in our heads and because of it we never have the proper attention to what we are doing right now and in some cases we have no way of knowing what it is we should be doing. David elaborates that “[we] can only be happy not doing something if we know what it is we are not doing.” Keeping it all in our head means never feeling relaxed and in some cases (like mine), it can lead to burnout, forgotten items, lack of quality in the work we do and mental blocks.

The book was great as a tool which showed me what needed to change. The practices offered by GTD didn’t, however, suit me exactly. There are bloggers out there who comment on the strict following of GTD by some enthusiasts as being cult-ish, obsessive compulsive or counter productive due to the time it takes to implement the system. I think these people miss the point. David’s basic premise is that there are phases which need to be kept separate but each taken care of for every item that would otherwise be left in your head to distract you.

The key to his brilliance is in the tips, tricks and lessons to be learned from each action that needs to be taken. I’ve also purchased his audio book and a second text on the topic which collects a few of his shorter articles, each with a firm point to be made. These together are what moved me toward a more productive lifestyle.

But the fact remains that David’s methodology is not for everyone and certainly was not for me. I tried anything and everything I could get my hands on at first.

• I revived a long dead PDA. The battery would died, or the input system was so difficult it made capturing everything too tedious to be bothered with.
• I tried using online GTD products. These were always cumbersome and although possibly useful in the right hands, I am not always near an Internet connection, and so inputting my thoughts became again, too tedious.
• I tried local software to make life somewhat easier by just needing my laptop there, but who wants to wake up a windows PC to write “get milk”.
• I tried keeping a notebook with appropriate sections, but never had it near me when I needed it.
• I built a desk, bought folders up the wazoo, killed about 30 trees worth of plain white sheet paper and bought a filing cabinet (which is still near empty)
• I tried single sheets of paper origami-ed into planner, index cards clipped together, keeping todo lists on my arms, using gmail as a GTD system, placing notes in my ipod and every other supposed solution.

Until finally… I hit the holy grail.

No one solution is perfect and what works for me may not work for you, but once you have tried about a million other people’s solutions you learn what you need and want in your own productivity system. The key is to do what works for you and stick with it. If something about your system isn’t working, find out why and change it. If you don’t like the way part of your system works, you are not likely to do that part. Stop fighting the system and change it to something that works for you and that you can do without hesitation.

In my next post I’ll explain my system and the benefits I’ve seen from it.

If you want to start researching your own method for the madness, start with these. They are some of the places I found which got me inspired.

ZenHabits – A blog dedicated to simple and effective implementation of the principles of GTD.

43 Folders – Another blog, this one is dedicated to tips, tricks and anything that can help to make your productivity increase.

LifeHack – This site gives more tricks to making life easier. While it isn’t dedicated to productivity exactly, it does make the things we all have to do more easily done and with less effort and time.