Increasing numbers of poor and excluded people are at the receiving end of human rights violations, market invasion, and unilateral militarization. Poverty is deepening; inequality and injustice are expanding at an unprecedented pace, resulting in exclusion, conflicts and the erosion of rights. Women and excluded people bear this burden most, and are at greatest risk of loss of security and rights.
Poverty is the denial of the right to live with dignity, and a result of unequal and unjust power relationships within and between families, communities and countries. Poverty is driven by the engine of neo-liberal economic globalization, perpetuated by powerful countries, multilateral institutions, corporations and organizations that vie to accumulate wealth and power at the cost of others. It is driven by failures of governance in states, where public resources are squandered without accountability on military and on satisfying the ever increasing needs of the elite and middle classes. Governments across the world have pursued power in order to maintain themselves in office, leading to wealth accumulation, systematic corruption and sabotage of institutions. Corruption reproduces the impoverishment process and weakens the very core of democratization.
These failures of governance are related to the inability of governments to address issues of unequal power distribution, impeding the opportunities people have, and the ways in which they can participate in shaping the priorities of their governments.
Far from defending rights and advancing freedoms, at their worst, states are at war with their most vulnerable citizens. At best, they adopt residual approaches, making few significant advances structural change or redistribution. The task of poverty eradication and development is too often left to the markets, which, without active regulation from the state, simply amplify existing inequity and exploitation.
These trends raise many questions. What forms of governance can best protect and promote rights, deliver justice and build equity? How will these forms of governance provide integral spaces for participation?
Forms of democratic governance, designed to respond to these issues, are in themselves displaying deficits while addressing these fundamental questions. In so doing they too run the risk of loosing their integral value and legitimacy. In many countries, democracy means political arenas are plagued by dysfunctional parliaments and governments. Often in democracies there is a dualism of power – the formal power vested within the structures, and the informal power obtained from the political culture and operating on the preexisting legitimization of class, caste, religion and history. In numerous countries, corporations control political and democratic processes, and even the media (which remains only notionally free). Corporate control has serious implications on the legitimacy and freedom of democracy.
Arenas of deficit, including participation, identity, power and accountability, have not been addressed. The value of democracy must be seen in what States hold out to their weakest citizens which goes beyond putting “representative governments” in place.
Despite the pessimistic outlook, there are some windows of hope. These are emerging in the struggles of social movements and civil society, in the walks of the anti-war protestors, in the court orders limiting Coca-Cola operations, in the Cancun protests, the G8 rallies in Gleneagles, in WSF spaces in Bamako, Mumbai and Porte Alegre where chants that another world is possible reverberate amidst optimism. The foundations of hope are evident in Mukhtar Mai’s courage, among the Zapatistas of Chiapas Mountains, and in the efforts of anti-privatization campaigners around the world.
The agenda and actions of social movements, civil society and emerging platforms of people and media assure an emergent force to build citizenship and rebalance power. These are spaces of freedom and democracy that can begin to counter the trend towards the centralization of wealth, knowledge and power. Citizen’s initiatives at the local and global level have an increasing potential to channel peoples’ aspirations and in the longer run, to radicalize democracy and build just governance.
[So if the letters GTD don’t mean anything to you this might be a good post for you. If you are a GTDer, this post might be a good reminder of the basics. If you think GTD is a cult, this post might be an outline that will help you understand the simplicity of the system. Sure the gurus of GTD have taken a few hits lately, but I cannot begin to express the amount of time I have saved by doing extensive DELETIONS. And that’s a prime step in the process. So this post is about GETTING TO IT, not about THINKING ABOUT GETTING TO IT.]
Capture everything that you need to concern yourself with in what Allen calls “buckets”: a physical in-box, an email in-box, a notebook you take with you, a little tape recorder, etc. Don’t try and remember everything!
You can put the thing you need to act on itself in your in-box (a bill, an assignment) or write a note on a single sheet of paper (“change oil in the car”). When you first start, or when you feel like there are lots of things on your mind, sit down and do a “mind sweep” of everything you are concerned about.
Now it’s time to empty all those “buckets.” Start at the top of the in-box, pick up each item and ask yourself “is there an action I need to take about this item?”
If there is no action you need to take, either throw the thing away, file it for reference, or make a note on your “Someday/Maybe” list. (critical path decision time)
If there is an action you need to take, can you do it in two minutes or less? If so, do it now! If not, decide what that next action is, and enter it on your “Next Action” list. If one action won’t finish this off, enter the overall goal on your “Project” list.
Obviously, the cornerstone of this system is lists. Like with your collection buckets, you want to have enough lists to keep everything straight, but not so many that you are never sure what list to use. Here are the basics of organization:
Next Action: what is the very next thing you need to do to get your thing done? (E.g., “read chapter 4 and take notes,” or “email a copy of my report to Anne for review”
Projects: chances are, many of your things will need more than one action to accomplish. Keep track of those multi-action things here. (E.g., “class presentation on Dante,” or “write year-end report for boss”)
Waiting: often we depend on others to help get things done. If you are waiting on something, write it down here, so you don’t forget. (E.g. “get back revised version of report from Anne”)
Someday/Maybe: for when you have a great idea or long-term goal that you just can’t make time to work on now. You don’t want to forget about it, but you don’t want it to clutter up your Projects list.
Calendar: try and use your calendar just for appointments and other things that have to happen on a particular day/time.
Filing: keep a simple, easy to update filing system. Don’t let files pile up in a slush pile. Get comfortable with putting a single piece of paper in a folder, labeling it, and filing it away.
If you don’t look at those lists, they won’t do you much good now, will they? You’ll have to review your Next Action list and your calendar every day (and probably several times a day). Set up an appointment with yourself to do a weekly review, where you process all your in-boxes down to empty, and review all lists to be sure you are on top of things.
GTD tends to leave it up to you as to how to decide what needs to be done right now–Allen seems to believe if you have everything laid out in front of you, it will be obvious what needs to be done at any given moment based on your circumstances (deadlines, how much time you have available, what tools are nearby, how much energy you have, etc.)
Lifehacker talks to Merlin Mann says, “I think people tend not to do the math on how much of themselves they’ve promised to other people, and that disconnect often leads to stress, unnecessary misunderstandings, and beads of existential flop sweat. Getting a handle on your commitments — and only accepting a reasonable and do-able amount of work at any given time — is one of the best habits you can pick up, whether you call it GTD, common sense, or what have you.”
It’s sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy
attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term,
No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing. (read that again and again until you get it)
When it looks like you’re multitasking–you’re looking at one TV screen and another TV screen and you’re talking on the telephone–your
attention has to shift from one to the other. You’re brain literally can’t multitask. You can’t pay attention to two things simultaneously.
You’re switching back and forth between the two. So you’re paying less concerted attention to either one.
I think in general, why some people can do well at what they call multitasking is because the effort to do it is so stimulating. You get adrenaline pumping that helps focus your mind. What you’re really doing is focusing better at brief spurts on each stimulus. So you don’t get bored with either one.
Tags: act, defer, delegate, delete, do, flash preferences, getting things done, getting to it, getting web done, getting webwork done, GTD, GTDer, how do i?, Inbox ZERO, learning, leo babauta, let's go, merlin mann, quick GTD, refer, simple GTD, tech opinion, toss, zen habits