Idea Dump

Once I start doing the dishes, the laundry, cleaning the house, taking a shower – ideas come. And if I write down anything that crosses my mind, it feels as if I clear it out of my head and make room for more, because very suddenly I get new, seemingly unrelated ideas.
In Ready For Anything, David Allen talks about always trying to do the best you can. “Make the best spaghetti sauce … the best staff meeting … the very best conversation [with a friend, your spouse, etc.].” Best does not mean perfect, but the best you can do given the circumstances. Doing this for mundane tasks, such as making a sandwich or a cup of coffee, seems to help you to immerse in what you’re doing. I like it. It’s a western formulation of a Zen idea.
In the context of GTD, I’ve been thinking about the friction that would come from using paper for my lists instead of outlines on my powerbook. I seem to put too much things that really belong in “Someday/Maybe,” which I suspect wouldn’t happen if I had to manage my lists on paper. Rewriting them every once in a while – when some have been checked off and the paper is filled with new action items – would reveal those that linger, those that I apparently never consider moving on.
In the IT Conversations podcast with Alistair Cockburn, he says that the ones that coined the term “software engineering” did so based on a misunderstanding of what engineering is. This apparently happened in 1968 at a NATO conference.