The time has come. I was hoping to begin it some time later, but my situation is forcing me to start it now. Thus begins the gauntlet of productivity and personal development systems!

I had two objectives when I created this blog - first, to learn only the useful parts from various productivity and personal development systems, and second to test their effectiveness in a case study by applying them in practice on a pet project.

The pet project has a name - “Project Panther” and it has initially started with a roar, but is now at a level of a purr. Project Panther is in stealth mode so I can’t go into too much details, but basically the project has not been getting the attention it deserved because other responsibilities in my life are taking more time and attention than what I planned for.

I was one of those classic can’t-say-no type of people until one day someone gave me the sound advice that when I do say “yes” to something, I am indirectly saying “no” to other opportunities. After that advice, I’m now like that two year old petulant kid who says “no” all the time because the word is fun to say. There a few things I had to say “yes” to because they were really important, and now I’m experiencing one of those perfect storms of things happening all at once, which leaves me struggling with managing my personal time (and hence, Project Panther). I need help with Getting Things Done®.

Yes, the first productivity system I will engage in for this experiment is GTD! I’ve been hearing a lot about it, both good and bad. I feel like I have a similar profile with the type of people that found the GTD system to be useful, so I do expect it to be helpful to me. I am an engineer, so structure and organization appeals to me (only up to a certain point though). It’ll take a few days for my book to arrive from Amazon, but since money has been spent, I will be reading the book!

I started a list of productivity and personal growth systems that I intend to learn from. The Law of Attraction and Neuro-linguistic Programming (used by Tony Robbins) are a couple of the personal growth systems on this list. To be honest, I do have opinions with these two, and my opinions aren’t favorable. Particularly with what I know about the Law of Attraction, it seems like it takes the notion of positive attitude over the top. My impressions are that the Law of Attraction asks people to believe in it with blind faith, and I do not trust systems that asks for blind faith. However, I do know that a lot of people have improved their lives significantly with this system, so that tells me there must be some truth within the Law of Attraction.

As I learn these productivity and personal growth systems, I will do my level best to approach it with an empty cup for my serving of tea (borrowing from an old Zen story). When all is said and done though, I will be falling back to this quote:

Believe nothing,
no matter where you read it,
or who said it -
no matter if I have said it -
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.
-Buddha