The Plan

I have been a fan of personal productivity systems ("PPS"s) and the associated books, blogs, groups, and industry for some time. Time management systems ("TMS"s), workspace organization, and tickler and calendar systems are included in my definition, as are systems for developing one's objectives, goals, intents, roles, visions, or purposes. I include Getting Things Done ("GTD"), Do It Tomorrow ("DIT"), the Deseret School (Franklin-Covey, Byrum Smith, Hobbs), the planner notebook publishers (filoFAX, Time/Design, At-A-Glance, etc.), as well as the independent web-published discussions that have originated the Hipster Personal Data Organizer ("hPDA").

There are quite a few things about PPSs that have made me curious. A partial list of questions I would like to address follows:

Why do the bibliographies of time management books written in the last 40 years include almost no books written before 1970?

Why is there so little interest among pschologists about PPSs and TMSs?

Why are PPSs usually not part of the curriculum in schools?

How do we know when a PPS is working?

What is the effect of having an external PPS on one's brain's executive functioning?

What is the capacity of human's to manage their tasks and projects without external aids?

How do humans manage their tasks without external aids?

What were the earliest external aids?

How do PPSs change over the user's lifetime and in different task environments?

What is the role of affirmations, inspirational quotations, and proverbs in a PPS?

My plan is to attempt to address these questions using a broad range of secondary research. I would welcome any suggestions. In fact, getting such suggestions is one of my prime purposes for using a blog format for expressing my thoughts on the subject. History; archaeology; anthropology; papyrology; psychology: evolutionary, cognitive, memory, attention, consciousness, motivational; paremiology (study of proverbs); secretarial and general education; the therapy of learning disabilities and ADHD; popular culture studies; and literacy studies are all of potential use.