Resolutions for the New Year: surfing for ideas, continued

Still not satisfied with yesterday’s web-based suggestions, I am digging deeper into other people’s failed lives and unaccomplished goals from years past. Maybe in these heaps of botched effort I’ll find inspiration – or at least nuggets of wisdom on what to avoid for 2005.

When I need to find the weird, the obscure, the original weblog, I go to the cool, the wonderful, the prolific boingboing.net. After all, they were the source of the link to Shizzy’s Page, where a guy recounts how he developed an email correspondence with a lowly employee of Starbucks while pretending that he, the blogger, was the CEO. [A handful of Ocean readers thought the prank was mean beyond mean and they threatened to boycott Ocean if I posted a link to it, so I restrained myself. I agree that it’s mean beyond mean, juvenile, impish, vile even. To agree along with us, check it out for yourself, here.]

Boingboing did not disappoint. They offer a link to 43folders.com where a geek (Merlin Mann) recounts his implementation of principles articulated in the popular “Getting Things Done.” Yeah!

Reading just the last few entries floods me with the realization that things are slated for failure unless you keep your projects small and you get rid of ambitious and complicated to do lists. I am staring at my ambitious and complicated “to do” list as I type this. Dare I tear it up for the New Year? Wee hoo! Merlin writes [emphases are my own]:

I try to ensure that any action I identify as a next action can be finished, front to back, in less than 20 minutes time—preferably in fewer than 10 minutes. So, forexample, while “Write an article on GTD” is practically useless (that’s a project!).

[Furthermore:]

In a previous life as a producer and project manager for some good-sized web projects, I once approached my work with a completely baseless optimism and sense of possibility that I had absolutely no business feeling—let alone foisting off on others as way to guide big projects... Yikes. Simpler times.

The reality is that projects change, and projects break; that’s what they do. It’s their job. The smaller your project is, and the shorter the distance there is between “here” and “there,” the less likely you are to have to chuck it and start over for reasons you couldn’t possibly have foreseen when you were knitting up them fancy GANTT charts for Q3/2007.

Okay, resolve to resolve small things, and get rid of grand plans and unwarranted optimism. I'm getting warmer now to the day when I can actually resolve something! Stay tuned.