Recently, I stumbled back across a blog for students, called Study Hacks, that’s written by my friend Cal Newport. After getting sucked deep into the archives, I can definitively say it’s not only a great and well written site, but also one that’s genuinely and broadly useful for even those of us well out of college and into the ‘real world’. Go give it a read.

In particular, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about his Law of Action Planning: that no rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete.

As Cal observes, (and as I have in the past) productivity largely boils down to two problems: capturing and organizing the stuff you have to do, than actually doing that stuff.

But, Cal goes on, while a simple system can solve that first ‘capture/organize’ problem for years and years with little change, it’s the second ‘do’ problem that constantly needs new solutions to keep up with the realities and demands of our lives.

Previously, I’d taken that as either a flaw inherent in a given system (like, say, David Allen’s Getting Things Done), or in myself. Now, I’m starting to see it’s perhaps just the way human brains are wired to work.

Admittedly, that doesn’t really change anything in terms of my actual productivity output. But it does, at very least, allow me to skip from one form of time management to another without all the mental angst. Don’t worry, I can tell myself; it’s a feature, not a bug.