David Allen's time management trickery has nothing on John Muir's 19th-century gadget-aided study practices

John Muir is known as a environmental conservationist. He founded the Sierra Club and penned many an article -- like this one for The Atlantic -- advocating the preservation of the nation's wilderness areas.

Less apparent from a cursory investigation of his career is that he was inveterate inventor and gadgethead. While a student, he came up with all kinds of strange contraptions like an alarm clock that pushed him out of bed. You can see packet of his sketches at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

But it's the mechanical desk you see above that interests me most because of what it says about the newness of the getting things done ethic.

Here's how Muir described the invention in his book, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth:

I still indulged my love of mechanical inventions. I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arrange in order at the beginning of each term. I also invented a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, the moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study.

In other words, this desk was a timer that kept Muir on task for exactly the periods that he'd set to study Latin or botany or whatever else he was supposed to be learning. Muir was like David Allen before there was a David Allen*. At a time when accessing information required more effort, it still took human effort to stay on task. And when that human effort failed, it took funny gimmicks that kept our minds from wandering.

H/T: Adam Lerner, director of MCA Denver.



* Update: In a somewhat humorous but embarrassing mistake, my mind appended Cohen to David Allen's name, an accidental, subconscious reference to the controversial outlaw country singer, David Allan Coe. We regret the error.

