With Earth Hour behind us and Earth Day on the way, we thought April would be a good month for Lifehack.org to think Green. In the weeks ahead, you can expect to see posts reflecting all manner of perspectives on how to "Green up" your work and life.
Nowadays, you can hardly swing a free-range cat without hitting someone making Green claims. Products tout their 35% post-consumer-waste packaging and their eco-friendly ingredients. Companies like Wal-Mart make public pronouncements about their commitment to the environment, and every political speech at least pays lip-service to global warming.
You could be forgiven for thinking that it was all a bunch of hooey, just so much greenwashing by companies eager to capitalize on the issue-of-the-week, without too much serious content. You might remember your recent history, the strong public commitments our auto manufacturers made in the ’80s to more fuel-efficient cars and alternative sources of energy — until economizing fell out of style, the Yuppie era rushed in, and car companies started producing gas-guzzling behemoths for the new, trendy, conspicuous consumption lifestyles.
I think there’s something to be said for striving to live a Green life, that in fact ultimately living by Green principles can be far more satisfying than grabbing whatever you can while the getting’s good. But the answers to the problems we face today aren’t going to be found on a bottle of faux-Green dish soap or in the annual reports of a Green-for-now corporation. They’re not going to be found in the things we buy and use at all, since buying and using are part of the problem.
In fact, a better guide to Green living might well be David Allen’s Getting Things Done and the rest of the personal productivity literature, since the principles of Green living are not all that different from the principles we use to help us be more productive. Here are my thoughts on what real Green principles are; they should sound familiar to anyone who takes personal productivity at all seriously.
6 Principles of Green Living Simplicity