Horses for Courses

A productivity system is inherently, well, PERSONAL. It is personal in a a few different senses.

First, it takes the focus on a person and, in principle, all of the parts of a person's life that need some kind of systematic thought, discipline, and special planning and execution effort. That means it is not limited to busness, work, school, or occupational activities. It is easy to see why people would like to exclude leisure activities from a disciplining system, but it can be necessary for some to include leisure to make sure that their work activities don't swallow all of their time. Also, it can be very convenient while, say, running errands to do things that support leisure activities while doing things that support work activities.

Second, it is intimately involved with one's own habits, roles, family situation, motivations, emotional states, values, physical and cognitive capabilities, work- and living-spaces, job, and countless other matters large and small that, in combination, define a person.

Finally, it is personal in the sense of private. Our presentation of our selves to others usually does not involve full disclosure of all of our plans and intentions or all of our past and present activities and their results.

It is becaise these matters are personal that there is so much variety in the practices that people have followed, follow now, and will follow as long as mankind continues. I will be attempting to come up with some generalizatons about such systems that may help folks who are designing their own.