Merlin Mann’s excellent talk on How to Blog is one of the things that convinced me not only to revive my blog TETSUJIN.ORG but also to start up 1 Thing Done, which had been percolating in the back of my mind for the better part of a year.

So naturally I’m going to ignore his powerful advice about how to start a new blog. Rather than diving directly into hardcore content, I’m posting this note to explain the purpose of the site and give you an idea of what you can expect to find here.

This post is more for me than for you. Which may prove true for most of what appears on this site. I’m writing this post to help myself sort out the direction for the site.

A number of related ideas have been rising to the top of my thoughts over the past year. Some have been steeping for longer than that. A partial list:

• Systematic approaches to workflow, productivity and creativity.
• Organization — personal and professional, physical and mental.
• Space, stuff and “Decluttering.” Paying due attention to physical environment and the things we allow into our lives.
• Effective living. Bringing together the skills, habits and attitudes needed to live a life in which you can experience, create, learn and above all be happy.

Of course, there are plenty of books and web sites out there already covering these subjects. Many of those are great, but even more are deeply wrongheaded. Too often the discussions stray far afield from the principles that lay behind the systems, and lose sight of the goals they can serve. “Decluttering” becomes making fun of other peoples’ choices and knee-jerk condemnation of “Unitaskers.” “Productivity” becomes a fetish for to-do lists rather than a thoughtful approach to what is allowed onto those lists. Frugality becomes just another way of obsessing over physical possessions. Many wonderful ideas can become parodies of actually living an effective life, if you lose focus on why the ideas matter.

On 1 Thing Done I plan to keep purpose and principle at the heart of things. And this includes the most important principle: effective living means taking action.

No matter how much you plan, organize or mind-map, in the end you have to get one thing done.

Then another.

Then another.

And eventually these small changes in the state of the world can add up to great achievements.