Commitments
Posted by Robert Frittmann on 11 June 2009
I stumbled upon a dumb little man today, who gave me the next piece of the puzzle for my personal ontology. This blog post, written on 27-Apr-2009 by Ali Hale and entitled “Are You Effective Or Just Efficient?” is well worth the read. The author defines the terms “effective” and “efficient” as follows…
Being efficient means processing things fast. You get through your to-do list quickly and, in any given task, you eliminate time-wasters. Being effective means choosing to do the right things. You eliminate time-wasting activities or “busy work” from your day.
She then goes on to explain that, in order to improve your effectiveness, you should “write down a list of all the commitments that you have in your life”, categorize them, and then analyze which commitments add to your life and which ones just take up time.
This is a brilliant suggestion, and will fit quite nicely beside my other key category in my personal ontology: Goals. So now, for each aspect of my life in my ontology, such as Family, Friends, Faith, Employment, Education, etc., I now have a sub-category of Goals, and a sub-category of Commitments. I can have Family Goals in my ontology, as well as Family Commitments. Employment Goals and Employment Commitments. And, as with the current Goals category, the new addition to my ontology also becomes a new top-level category in itself, linking to all the other Commitments in my life.
This makes for a very interesting emergent set within my personal ontology. That of Goal Commitments, and also of Commitment Goals. It could be that one of my Commitment Goals is a life-goal to reduce my overall workload, or to distribute my commitments more evenly. It also allows for a possible Goal Commitment, that I force myself to reviewing my life-goals on a monthly basis.
My wife and I have just now been discussing where our two cats fit into this personal ontology. As a childless couple, we often refer to our cats as our children, and thus Family. But technically they are not the same species, so could not be family from a strictly semantic point of view. We do own them, giving an ownership relationship similar to a house or a car. But they are more than just chattels. We often refer to them as our animal friends, but the Friend relationship fails a semantic test just as the Family relationship does. I am starting to think that perhaps our cats should best just be defined as Pets, and have a new top-level category for them. We can have Pet Commitments, and Pet Goals, I guess, so that would probably be the most appropriate. What do you think?
Arthur said
Hmm, stumbled on this today.
Pet is good, as long as you don’t refer to each other as “pet”!
Excellently interesting blog.
Thank you.