GrandPerspective to the rescue! Using this little utility, I was able to find my biggest space wasters and trash them (or, possibly, save them to my terabyte NAS).

For funsies, I made a snapshot (post cleanup and Win7 install) of my home directory. I thought I’d share it. (If you’re still not sure how the Web works, click the image for a bigger, clearer picture)

This idea is foreign to me. It’s so foreign, in fact, that I have to stop myself from calling bullshit whenever I hear it (fortunately, I’m used to being the odd one out in most things so I can cope pretty well with other people having a completely alien mindset). I suppose that there are, in fact, people who love their jobs so much that they can’t possibly imagine not doing it every day. But these people are the most fortunate of the fortunate: somehow, the very best thing in the world for them was not only attainable but actually attained. Bravo.

Perhaps I’m just honest with myself, or perhaps I’m just discontent, but I’m not that fortunate. That’s not to say that I don’t love my job. I do. I get to do interesting work with really great people and I have a fantastic management team all the way up the chain and, to top it off, the work I do directly benefits the world. As a job, I can’t really ask for anything more. This might even be the best job on the planet for me right now.

But it’s still a job, you know? I still have to get up every day and go, even when I have a headache. There are still pretty awful parts that I have to deal with anyway. That’s why they pay me, right? And it works out pretty well. They give me money and I get up in the morning and deal with the unpleasant bits of the job (but the joke’s on them, because the vast majority of the job is pretty fun!).

So if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet went crazy and gave me their fortunes, I just can’t imagine working for a living. I’d go to school and get a math degree (and since I wouldn’t have to worry about tuition, I could take it a bit more leisurely and avoid the stress) and maybe even more degrees after that. I’d travel the world (I hate traveling, but I suspect I’d like it a bit more if it were by private jet to fancy hotels). I’d start some foundations and try to save the world (Even the actual Bill Gates finally decided this was more worthwhile than working). I’d follow Yo-Yo Ma around on tour for a while.

I most certainly would not use Windows.

Ok. So, maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle. Maybe most people, when they consider this topic, don’t immediately jump to becoming fabulously wealthy overnight and still going in to their nine-to-five the next day. Maybe I need to scale it back a bit. Instead of Bill Gates giving me all his money, let’s instead imagine that he’s just going to be giving me a weekly stipend: enough to live comfortably but not outrageously. Let’s say something around $150k a year (and, because he’s extra generous, he’ll pay the taxes on it as well).

That certainly puts an end to my plans of world-tour via private jet. Still, it’s easily enough to go get a couple of stress-free degrees at my favorite institution of higher learning. Or to start my very own Web 2.0 company (as long as I’m the only employee, I would never have to worry about making a profit…). Or I could become a full-time web crackpot, hanging around message boards talking about the aliens who are stealing my light bulbs.

I still wouldn’t use Windows.

Ok. Maybe I’m still imagining too much wealth. Maybe Bill isn’t as generous as I thought and he only wants to give me my own current salary. This, by definition, is exactly enough for me to quit working and still maintain my current lifestyle. I could still start that Web 2.0 company, but as the cost of living increased and Bill’s gift didn’t, I’d be a little more worried about turning a profit and I don’t particularly want to be an actual entrepreneur. Maybe I could still go get a math degree, but the cost of education is soaring and I’d be under similar pressures to get it done in a short amount of time.

Or, I could keep working and double the amount I pull in every year. And, like I said, I love my job so this wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would keep me busy and by suddenly having double the funds available, I’d certainly have less stress in my life when those unexpected bills pop up.

So, in this last case, I suppose I too would keep working. Probably not forever; I’d have more freedom for saving and investing in this situation and might eventually find myself in an “early retirement” situation (and isn’t this just the name we use when people actually do get to quit their jobs and do things they’d rather do?).

But even then, it’s not because I like my job so much that I can’t imagine doing anything else (though, I should repeat: I do love my job. I just have a good imagination.); it’s because I don’t like stress and in that case, keeping my job would actually lower the amount of stress in my life. That would be all sorts of win.

Sadly, this type of naval gazing doesn’t really accomplish anything. Bill Gates, living the dream, is far too busy trying to save the world to throw large sacks of cash in my direction. So I’ll continue to get up every morning and be extremely happy to go to a job I enjoy going to and doing work I enjoy doing and cashing paychecks that I enjoy spending.

With all of this positive attention (and the chance to try new tools, from the low-tech to the high-tech), how could I resist getting things done the David Allen way? But attempt after attempt at organizing my life this way has failed. I’ve carried around a Moleskine. I’ve set up folders and tags and rules and labels and colors in Mail.app and Outlook and Google Calendar and Gmail, and iCal and Media Wiki Remember the Milk and who knows what else. I’ve prioritized and I’ve categorized and I’ve contextualized, but my use of the system never lasts for more than a week at a time.

But here’s the thing: I still get things done. I meet my deadlines at work. All my bills get paid. There are groceries in the house. Christmas presents get bought by the 25th.

My work projects tend to be pretty big and monolithic. “Implement feature X”. And I have to break feature X into manageable four or five hours chunks when crafting an estimate so by the time I actually start working on feature X, I’ve got a pretty good idea in my head of how to logically proceed from step one to step two to step three and finish it. I cross these steps off of a list, but it’s not on my master list in the @featureX context; it’s on the list I keep next to my computer on my desk at work. That’s the context for it.

My other main task at work is fixing bugs. And those are already listed out in our bug database. I don’t even have to cross those off of a list; I just mark them fixed in the database. Again, they don’t need to be on a big master list; the bug database itself is the context.

Things that aren’t implementing features or fixing bugs (like writing my annual self-review or something like that) come up pretty rarely for me. Rare enough that there’s no point in having a system to deal with these tasks (the system would sit idle for so long that I’d forget to use it when the time comes); I can just add an appointment in Outlook and it will pop up a box telling me to get it done. And there’s the context for that: I’m sitting at my desk with Outlook open.

So I don’t have to come in to work every day and review my tasks. I know if I’m working on implementing a new feature or fixing bugs today because I can remember if I was assigned a new feature or finished work on one yesterday. I can just sit down and get to it.

At home, it’s pretty similar. For the most part, I don’t have things to do at home. I lead a pretty laid back lifestyle. When I get paid, I pay bills. When the cabinets get empty, we go grocery shopping. When the house gets messier than I can stand, I stop watching TV for half an hour and clean up a bit. I don’t need a “@house” context because when I get annoyed by the mess, I’m already in my house. That’s the context for me.

So, I guess I’m pretty lucky. In a world where consultants can make a pretty good living teaching people how to get things done, my life is simple enough that I can get things done just by looking around and saying “Oh. Let me do that and then I’ll watch more TV.”

That simplicity makes me pretty happy, all in all.

(For the curious, this blog post was inspired by finding yet another “How To Use Tool Y to GTD” post I came across; in this case, it was a blog post about using GTD with Evernote.)

I got home from work this evening to discover Bran cooking up some Indian food. It was the inaugural batch of Indian food since she moved down here. Growing up, our family meals didn’t branch out much beyond fried Americana. So Indian food is a fairly new thing for me (new to the point that I can’t remember the random sounds Bran used to name the dishes); but it’s delicious.

I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Now, we’ve settled down for yet another evening of watching Stargate Atlantis. Various flavors of Stargate have been our primary sources of entertainment for a while now. I’d never watched it before (I bought the first season of SG-1 a couple of years ago, but couldn’t make it past the second episode), but Bran’s a big fan. Big enough that it was imperative to her that I watch it too.

It turns out that this was great for me. I might be late to the Stargate party, but I’ve finally made it and I couldn’t be happier.

Between Stargate seasons, we’re watching Star Trek: The Next Generation courtesy of Netflix. TNG’s first season is much worse than SG-1’s; but I’m confident that once we make it past “Shades of Gray“, things will pick up.

And that’s what’s happening chez James. Can’t get any more boring than that.

Which, honestly, is exactly the way that I like it.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” or “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” or “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Or “You might think that if you were about to debut a Macintosh-oriented weblog, it would be quite a stroke of good fortune for some Really Big News to break on the very day you plan to start writing.”

Frankly, I can’t compete. Which, I’m afraid, is indicative of things to come. Those other great works are also distinguished by being long. Their authors wrote and wrote and wrote because they had something to say (or, in the case of King, they wrote well past the point they ran out of things to say). I probably won’t do that.

I’ve left the empty and charred remains of blogs littered behind me as I’ve sojourned down Mr. Gore’s information highway. It’s not unreasonable to expect this one to fall to the same fate. Indeed, I completely expect that.

In light of that, I’ve taken some steps to prevent the ultimate demise of this space. Or, at least, to stave it off a little longer than usual.

First, I’ve purposefully decided that this blog is for the meaningless trite no one cares about. That means that I don’t have to worry about not having anything to say: I can natter on about what I had for breakfast without worrying about boring my audience.

I don’t expect to have an audience.

Second, I’ve attached this blog to a domain that has my name in it. A very little bit of my reputation is bound up with this site. I’ve got some skin in the game.

Third, I’m playing around with MarsEdit. I’m hoping it will make the mechanical act of blogging fun (or, at least, not as annoying as doing things via WordPress). So far, it seems like it actually might.

The downside of that is that I’ll have to spend $30 on MarsEdit. Well, the author Daniel Jalkut just had a kid. So maybe it’s worth it.

So that’s this blog. If you’re reading it, you should stop before you get bored. Go read one of the works quoted above instead.

If you insist on reading anyway, well. Thanks.

It gives me the warm fuzzies, it does.