Getting things done the neurophenomenological way

[English]
David Allen is a guru on productividad, and he is world-known thanks to a coherent and practical system developed to organize ourselves and being really able to get things done. A key piece in his system is to avoid those loops like "I should be doing this instead of that" or "heck!, the deadline for that is only a week away..." "instead of playing with the PS3 I should replying to that email", and instead to organize everything in a system, in such a way that while we are working on something we can concentrate on that, because we know that this is exactly what we need to do, there is no need to do anything else instead.
I believe that a big deal of the success of Getting Things Done -tens, maybe hundres of thousands of people use his system around the world, some even swear for that book like it were the Bible- resides in the fact that it is not a pure analythical method, but looks forward to create a mental state instead. Allen refers to Zen and the idea of a "mind like water". However, the mind of a zen master is quite different from the mind of someone that just got her tasks into a GTD system, no doubt about it. Nevertheless, I think that Allen is putting the basic elements for a phenomenology of productivity. Being productive is not simple about having acces to rules to state to to arrange materials, a well sorted agenda. Being productive is -above all things- a mental state. As Allen argues in his book , we know that his method really works when we find ourselves in such a fantastic mental state of "I'm writting this post in the blog because there is nothing more urgent right now" or, even better, "I can still playing Spore another hour, because I've already done the things I had to do for today.

[Spanish]
David Allen es un guru sobre productividad, mundialmente reconocido por un método coherente y práctico para organizarnos y conseguir realmente hacer las cosas. Una pieza clave de su método es salir de los loops del "debería hacer esto" ,"huy, si sólo queda una semana para que se acabe el plazo de..." "en lugar de estar jugando con la PS3 debería estar contestando ese mail..." y en lugar de eso tenerlo todo organizado en un sistema, de manera que mientras trabajamos en algo, podemos estar concentrados en ese algo, pues sabemos que ese algo es lo que toca hacer ahora mismo, no hace falta nada más.
Creo que buena parte del éxito de Getting Things Done -decenas, quizás centenares, de miles de personas usan su sistema en todo el mundo, algunas hasta juran por ese libro, como si fuera la Biblia- reside en que no es un método puramente cerebral sino que busca crear un estado mental. Allen apela al Zen y la idea de "la mente como agua". Sin duda el estado mental de un maestro zen es bastante diferente del que conseguimos una vez tenemos todas nuestras tareas metidas en un sistema GTD, pero sin duda Allen está apelando por una fenomenología de la productividad. Ser productivo no es simplemente disponer de reglas de ordenación de materiales, una agenda bien ordenada; ser productivo es sobre todo, un estado mental. Y como argumenta Allen en su libro, sabemos que el método realmente funciona cuando nos encontramos en ese estado mental tan fantástico de: "Estoy escribiendo este post en el blog porque no hay nada más urgente ahora mismo"o "todavía mejor, puedo seguir jugando a Spore una hora más porque hoy he hecho todo lo que tocaba hacer."

The realm of neurophenomenology

Extremes tend to meet. No matter if you are a hard monist or a emergent/dualist, your solution to the hard problem of consciousness is usually to deny the possibility of a scientific analysis of the subjective qualities of consciousness. On the surface they might look quite different: the hard monist denies that there is such a thing as the "first person view" and the dualist does insist on how nothing is more important than that. But if you make something important but at the same time push it into a realm which does not admit intersubjective discussion then the final result is quite close to a plain denial.
Is it possible to take into account the first person approach to mind; introspection, qualia and the like from a scientific point of view? I think there is, and one possibility is the field of neurophenomenology which argues that the study of consciousness from a first person approach is not only possible, but necessary if we really want to have a science of mind (as opposed to a mere "science of the brain").
In neurophenomenology -as well as this blog devoted to the subject- you will find analytic philosophy hand in hand with phenomenology; neurologists working together with buddhist monks, and lots of combinations that nobody considered possible just 20 years ago.

I'm sure we will all learn something during the way