Fitting History into Your Life

Although my primary focus in PHR will always remain to provide readers with guidance in finding the best history books ever written, I decided that in this first offering of PHR, I want to start by introducing you to a book that will help you find a way to fit more history into your life.  In fact, it will help you fit that much more of anything you can’t seem to make time for yet!

For me as a historian, fitting history in has never been a problem, of course; my issue tends to be fitting life in along side history!  But the basic organizational problem the vast majority of us have in the modern world is the same.  It’s the problem of having too much “stuff” to do.

The solution is a system explained by organizational guru David Allen in his book, Getting Things Done.

Allen defines “stuff” as “anything you have allowed into your psychological world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step.” It’s often this overwhelming amount of “stuff” that we haven’t tamed that reduces our efficiency and saps our motivation, and renders our myriad goals into what one of Allen’s clients called “an amorphous blob of undoability!” 

The answer to this problem is an efficient procedure to capture and process the “stuff” in our lives, remove it all from our consciousness, and put it into an organizational system.  The result is a higher level of clarity and definition. Your mind is freed from the lower-level value tracking that it otherwise insists on performing at the expense of the focus you need to be optimally productive. 

Although there’s nothing easy about the procedure itself, and the system, like any other, requires maintenance, the payoff is very real.  For one, I couldn’t have made the time to start up the PHR blog without it.

Make sure you check out this great resource, at:

www.powellhistory.com/phr/phr2007.html.