I love to read the I Spy board books with our little one. This particular book is titled “I Spy Little Book” and is coauthored by Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick. There are twelve facing pages, each pair contains two objects on the left hand page and a “still life” picture with numerous objects on the right hand page. The two objects on the left hand page can be found on the right hand page. The last two facing pages challenge the reader to find some additional objects in the book. When we started reading the book to our infant, we focused on the two objects on the left hand page and would ask him to point out the object. “Where is the big rubber duck?”, we would say and he would point at it. Of course, he had a 50/50 shot, and developed a pretty good hit rate. Now he is a  toddler, and we ask him to identify items on the right hand page, and believe me, you have to concentrate to find some of these objects. They typically are not in the same orientation or to the same scale as the picture on the left hand page. But there are some subtle clues: the objects seem to have been digitally cropped from the still life picture, so the shading and lighting is preserved. Jean Marzollo pens a charming rhyme that further adds to the appeal of the book. And the book is charming, in fact it makes me quite nostalgic for my own childhood.

I started 2006 with a the noble goal to organize my thoughts, commitments and the mountainous stacks of sundry and important papers that towered and teetered on my home office desk and inhabited the claustrophobic cabinets and bedroom closets. I’d been researching (read: drooling over) the Levenger Circa systems primarily due to the ability to move sheets from a main notebook to archival storage. During the course of a Google search to find other vendors that might carry the product, I happened to navigate right into a blogosphere discussion of David Allen’s Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, TLA’ed as GTD by the cognoscenti. Enamoured of the fundamental tenets, of which I shall elaborate further in this discussion, I wiped the saliva (engendered by the thoughts of the Circa) that was now threatening to drip off my chin and on to my neatly pressed button down shirt, and quickly put the book on hold at my local library. And so began my personal journey of using GTD from the starting point of “mega-in”. Follow along with me, won’t you?