Keeping lists, creating 40something folders, making labels. The Heloise Hints of the Get Things Done (GTD) crowd concern moving the clutter out of your brain, unto paper, or now, the electronic frontier. As if those contents, ideas of yours presumably, thoughts you conceived, matters that merited your time to mull them over, needed disposing like so many packing kernels.

GTD is the ADD solution for your attention span. Get it out so you don’t have to think about it again. Say it, file it away, be done with it, get it done. Not done as in accomplished, done as in terminated. GTD is lobotomy by office supplies.

For workaholic fetishists, GTD appears to put substance over style, but the substance is style-conformity in disguise. A thought, spit out unto a post-it note is not the same as a thought. A list made of your favorite things, is not the equivalent of you enjoying those things.

I have a nagging feeling that a blog serves a similar GTD [dis]function: to vent our thoughts into the ether.

These might often be thoughts that would have done better to incubate with one another, to gel into broader perspectives. Like wine, I suspect they are really best uncorked after due time. Novelists perhaps draw these thoughts as needed to weave into their loom. Bloggers spin theirs into wads of yarn, hoping overnight they might be discovered to be made of pure gold.