The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be a real ass. It coldly says that entropy, a measure of disorder in nature, will increase. At best, entropy might slightly decrease or halt momentarily, but it always resumes its ascent. Always.
Even when we, the order-chasing beings that dwell on particle Earth, create the illusion of new order, we do so at the expense of past order. Try as we might, our net contribution to the universe is the same every time: chaos.
Probably the most satirical, if very macroscopic, frustration of our existence is that we’re hardwired to seek order in a universe that’s destined to undo all of it in the end.
The arrow of time runs one way and one way only.
The good news: we’re a very long way from the end—of time, that is. Even better: we’re not terribly far from the end of this post, which, at this point, could go many directions. I’ll nudge it toward GTD.
You take GTD seriously; the universe laughs at it
Like any other highly ordered, well-organized toy of nature, complex GTD systems are more vulnerable to failure than their simpler counterparts.
One of the easiest-to-digest proofs of the Second Law is the simple fact that, at any moment in time, there are more opportunities for disorder than order. Like WAY more. It’s true for wine glasses sitting next to white sofas; it’s true for your just-raked yard; it’s true for your workday.
On any given day you will encounter far more roads to nowhere than somewhere. Every email, tweet, phone call, unannounced office visit, spinning beach ball, coffee spill, and paper cut is the universe’s attempt at sending you down a different path than you planned.
It’s up to you to consciously slow the slip toward disorder by contextualizing and prioritizing the faint signals hidden in the noise of knowledge work.
Hopefully you’re successful at maintaining order most days. But some days, life doesn’t allow you the luxury of writing things down first, or deciding which of your multiple de facto bosses to listen to, or not working out of email. Some days, the universe decides what’s next for you, right that moment, and you have no choice but to say “… OK.”
After a few hours to days of being the universe’s bitch, you might give up on your highly structured system altogether. In fact, I bet it’s during these rough patches when most people bail and become one with chaos.
All or nothing attitudes almost always result in nothing, and it’s all because of the Second Law. Nature simply doesn’t permit perfection because there will always be exponentially more possibilities for imperfection than perfection in any circumstance.
The statistical mechanics of the universe can beaten occasionally, however. You can increase your odds of winning—sometimes—in your local region of the universe by learning to play by different rules.
Tip your hat to chaos, and switch regimes
Statistical models of unpredictable things often work well—until they don’t. “Until” is usually unannounced, too.
Economic variables are a classic example. During calm periods, things like stock price returns follow fairly simple distributions, but as we all know, calm doesn’t last forever. Things change, sometimes in seconds, and stock markets begin following completely different sets of rules.
So econometricians came up with the idea of “regime-switching” models, which as their name implies, are designed to adapt to new environments with new sets of rules.
I think the regime-switching mindset is easily extended to personal productivity. Your highly structured GTD system works well in calm regimes, but not so well in chaotic ones. However, unlike statistical models, which seem to only get more complex and less elegant, I think you’re better off making your system simpler the more complicated the outside world gets.
As I’ve said before, something as a simple as a sticky note often performs better in regimes of extreme volatility than a system that requires multiple cerebral inputs per action.
Turning chaos on its head
There are probably a lot of folks that write about productivity—me included—that have given you the false impression that we’re perfect GTD canon-abiding machines that always process life by the book.
Real life doesn’t allow that—certainly not for me. Real life is messy and unpredictable. Moreover, the odds will forever be against order in the universe we were dealt.
But, I’ve found that I’m most successful at postponing disorder when I have a humble attitude about my well-oiled GTD machine, which happens to be OmniFocus. Some days it breaks down totally, and I have no choice but to leave it on the side of the road until I have time to get it going again.
I always come back for it, though, and that’s what matters. Over time, my productivity reverts to an orderly state. That’s the best that I can hope for anyway:
To get up smiling when the universe hits me in the mouth. To make something out of nothing, even if that something exists in a reality known only to me. To defy the Second Law as many times as I can before it beats me for good.
To be an anomalous crook on the arrow of time.
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So true. Except: energy, in our case, the Sun. Energy and entropy must meet and balance. Exactly why energy creates order, complexity, patterns and the like, I do not know, but entropy has met its match. At least until it burns out. I guess I owe a bit of GTD thanks to Old Sol.
I think the arrow of time goes both ways according to Feynman and others I have read.
You write: “All or nothing attitudes almost always result in nothing, and it’s all because of the Second Law. Nature simply doesn’t permit perfection because there will always be exponentially more possibilities for imperfection than perfection in any circumstance.”
That’s only true if chance or something heavily determined by chance decides the outcome. It falls apart when knowledge, thought and planning enter the situation.
The street in front of my apartment may tie into millions of streets, highways and roads across North and South America, but I not only have no trouble getting ‘perfectly’ to the grocery. The presence of all those other options makes no difference. My movements aren’t random, so the presence of huge numbers of alternatives doesn’t matter. Only when I don’t know where I’m going or how to get there does complexity matter.
Our real problem also isn’t that the sum total must always favor entropy. As Radiophage notes, the Sun provides us with more than enough energy to make a massive reorganization of our world in favor of order. The Second Law applies to a closed system. Focus on just part of it and the law isn’t in control. While our sun shines, it matters not if the total entropy of our solar system is rising. On earth, we can ‘cheat’ on the Second Law, turning all that sunshine into buildings, bridges and computers. We can create order, although it does require thought and labor.
The real reason most human schemes to go awry isn’t the Second Law or the mere number of possibilities we face. It’s our bent to do things we shouldn’t do, whether they be foolish or evil. As Kant put it, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” It’s one item in Judeo-Christian theology that can easily be proved.
The horrors of the twentieth century came because some forgot that. That was particularly true of communism, which was born out of the mistaken belief that humans aren’t irretrievable flawed. Like all ‘Great Simplifiers” Marxists believe that the problems of society lay in the carpenters in charge rather than the wood itself. Replace capitalist carpenters with Marxist ones, these people claimed, and those crooked timbers could be beaten and pounded into something straight.
They seduced so many that in the twenties and thirties there was steady stream of intellectuals coming to see what they thought the future would be. Roger Baldwin, the founder of the ACLU, was one of them. He wrote a book entitled Liberty Under the Soviets that admitted that Russians had no civil liberties. He excused that by claiming they had something more important, economic liberty. But it’s as impossible to have can have economic liberty when the State controls all the means of production,as it is to have free speech when the State controls all that gets said. Stalin’s term for such people was “useful idiots.”
Accept that people are and always will be imperfect, and you can make society tolerable and even improve it. But you have to realize practical things such as that a farmer will work hard to give his wife and kids a good life. However, he’s not going to break his back for some giant collective beehive like the Soviet collective farms. He’d starve rather than do that, which is precisely what happened in the Ukraine of the 1930s.
In similar fashion, we can deal with our personal ills my little patches, to do lists, working on building good habits and that sort of thing. We can’t achieve perfection that way, but we can achieve something good. And that is what matters.
Entropy is, therefore, the necessary ingredient to force a periodic regime change, without which there would be stagnation. Developing regime changes (no matter how small) uses energy, forces the mind to grow, and allows for sloughing off the weakest elements of a system–thus creating order AND more highly evolved systems. Survival of the fittest at its finest, regardless of which way the arrow of time flies! (Consider switching to white wine?)