IrishOboe

Quite a few months ago I made yet another attempt at getting my life organized and while looking online for the best filing system I read about Getting Things Done by David Allen.  It intrigued me and after reading the summary on Wikipedia I thought the ideas worth a try.  I implemented a few and it all but revolutionized my life.  I’m talking big life changes such as always having a clean desk as opposed to always having stacks of unorganized papers collecting – and it was so easy!  I’ve been trying my whole life to keep a clean desk, so this was major for me.  I annoyed all my friends talking about how wonderful and amazing it was.  So with all the excitement over results I figured I’d better get the book and read the whole thing.  It turns out the university business library has it, so I got it out of the library.

I doubt I can summarize better than the Wiki article, so I’ll just leave you with a few quotes.  If you identify with these quotes then maybe this book is for you.  If you don’t, then you probably don’t need it.  As with many things it is likely to apply well to certain people and not as well to others.  If you can keep everything you need to do in your head and it doesn’t stress you out, then don’t bother with this method because it’s all about getting clutter out of your head and into a reliable system.  It turned my life around from always feeling overwhelmed and behind to feeling like I knew where I stood and how to get where I wanted to go.  This freed my mind up to enjoy time relaxing with people rather than always worrying about the known and unknown things I had to do (like the bill buried in a stack of “important papers.”)  I’d love to blab about all the ideas and how they changed my life, but I couldn’t get them all down and Joseph is about to wake up and this post is probably going to be long enough.  If the quotes resonate with you, get the book!  It takes far less time to implement than you might think!  Italics are mine.

Always feeling guilty and overwhelmed

“There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is on your mind and how much it’s getting done.”

“Why Bright People Procrastinate the Most . . . Because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project, and all the negative consequences that might occur if it weren’t done perfectly!  They just freak out in an instant and quit! . . . ‘Do my taxes? Oh, no! It’s not going to be that easy.  It’s going to be different this year, I’m sure.  I saw the forms – they look different.  There are probably new rules I’m going to have to figure out.  I might have to read all that damn material.   Long form, short form, medium form?  File together, file separate?  We’ll probably want to claim deductions, but if we do we’ll have to back them up, and that means we’ll need all the receipts.  Oh, my God – I don’t know if we really have all the receipts we’d need and what if we didn’t have all the receipts but we claimed the deductions anyway and we got audited?  Audited?  Oh, no – the IRS – JAIL!!’

And so a lot of people put themselves in jail, just glancing at their 1040 tax forms.  Because they’re so smart, sensitive, and creative.”

 “Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? . . . If you felt bad simply because there was more to do than you could do, you’d never get rid of that feeling.  Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling.  It comes from a different place. . . The price people pay when they break agreements in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship – a negative consequence. . .  But what are all those things in your in-basket?  Agreements you’ve made with yourself.  Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements – they’re the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust.  If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad.  Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration.    Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don’t – voilá! anxious and overwhelmed.”

 “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

“If you’re like most people, you’ve probably got some storage area at home – maybe a garage that you told yourself a while back (maybe even six years ago!) you ought to clean and organize.  If so, there’s a part of you that likely things you should’ve been cleaning your garage twenty-four hours a day for the past six years!  No wonder people are so tired!  And have you heard that little voice inside your own mental committee every time you walk by your garage?  “Why are we walking by the garage?!  Aren’t we supposed to be cleaning it!?” Because you can’t stand that whining, nagging part of yourself, you never even go in the garage anymore if you can help it.  If you want to shut that voice up, you have three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself:

1.    Lower your standards about your garage (you may have don that already).  “So I have a crappy garage . . . who cares?
2.    Keep the agreement – clean the garage.
3.    At least put “Clean garage” on a “Someday/Maybe” list.  Then, when you review that list weekly and you see that item, you can tell yourself, “Not this week.” The next time you walk by yourgarage, you won’t hear a thing internally, other than “Ha! Not this week.”

I’m quite sincere about this.  It seems that there’s a part of our psyche that doesn’t know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company.  In there, they’re both just agreements – kept or broken.  If you’re holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you’re not moving on it in the moment.”

 “It has been a popular concept in the self-help world that focusing on your values will simplify your life.  I contend the opposite: the overwhelming amount of things that people have to do comes FROM their values.  Values are critical elements for meaning and direction.  But don’t kid yourself – the more you focus on them, the more things you’re likely to feel responsible for taking on.  Your values may make it easier for you to make decisions, but don’t think they’ll make things any simpler.”

Get everything into your system and off your mind so you know where you stand.

“In order to hang out with friends or take a long, aimless walk and truly have nothing on your mind, you’ve got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait.  And you need to be able to do that in a few seconds, not days.”

 “I know this is heresy to traditional time-management training, which has almost universally taught that the “daily to-do list” is key.  But such lists don’t work, for two reasons.  First, constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time.  Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment.  Trying to keep a list in writing on the calendar, which must then be rewritten on another day if items don’t get done, is demoralizing and a waste of time.  The “Next Actions” lists I advocate will hold all of those action reminders, even the most time-sensitive ones.  And they won’t have to be rewritten daily.

Second, if there’s something on a daily to-do list that doesn’t absolutely have to get done that day, it will dilute the emphasis on the things that truly do. . . The way I look at it, the calendar should be sacred territory.  If you write something there, it must get done that day or not at all.”
 
“One of the best things about this whole method is that when you really take the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make.  Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don’t know the balance or the limit – it’s a lot easier to be irresponsible.”

“It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.” – O. H. Mowrer

“You must be assured that you’re doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be NOT doing what you’re not doing.  Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control.”

“After you review all your day- and time- specific commitments and handle whatever you need to about them, your next most frequent area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context.  If you’re in your office, for instance, you’ll look first at your lists of calls, computer actions, and in-office things to do.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you will actually be doing anything on those lists; you’ll just evaluate them against the flow of other work coming at you and ensure that you make the best choices about what to deal with.  You need to feel confident that you’re not missing anything critical.”

Always have a discrete ‘next action’ for your projects/tasks so your lists are not overwhelming
This is a huge help for me.  I often get mental blocks and the system works almost miraculously by giving me baby steps.  First, simply think of the next action that needs to be taken.  Telling myself I don’t have to DO it, just decide the next action helps enormously.  Second, when I have a moment to do something, my action list is full of simple discrete tasks that don’t take much mental energy to do so I am much more likely to do them.  Then, once I’m acting on a project, I’m much more likely to continue another few steps because I’ve been tricked into starting and the inertia has been overcome.  This works particularly brilliantly with phone calls.  Step one is write down the call on my “calls” list with the number and all the information I need (but I don’t have to call!).  Later, when I have energy and time to do something on my lists I have everything I need in one place and just have to pick up the phone and go forward without giving my phobia a chance to butt in.  You might think making a phone call into two steps with time inbetween would result in the call taking longer, but you don’t know how much I can procrastinate on phone calls.  I’ve made all my calls so much fast since using this system!

“You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn’t any neutral territory.  You are either positively drawn toward completing the action or reluctant to think about what it is and resistant to getting involved in it.  Often it’s simply the next-action decision that makes the difference between the two extremes. . . I’ve discovered that one of the subtler ways [people] fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. . . They often find themselves stuck, and procrastinating, because they’ve allowed their action lists to harbor items like
‘Meeting with the banquet committee”
‘Johnny’s birthday’
‘Receptionist’
‘Slide presentation’
There are no clear next actions here, and anyone keeping a list filled with items like this would send his or her brain into overload every time he/she looked at it.”

Deal with each item you touch.  NEVER put it down again without deciding the next action associated with it.  This would be hard if you had to DO something about it, but since it only forces you to THINK about the next action (and record it) it is possible to implement, then it is impossible to forget and becomes an obsession.  This is why I have a clean desk and why I know where everything is (most of the time).  One of the main tools in having a place for everything is a Tickler file: a file with one folder for each day and one for each month so papers related to a specific date (like directions to a party) get filed and show up precisely when they’re needed rather than piled on the desk.

“’Create a way to regularly spend more time with my daughter’ is as specific a project as any, and equally demanding of a next action to be determined.  Having the vague, gnawing sense that you ‘should’ do something about your relationship with your daughter, and not actually doing anything, can be a killer.  I often work with clients who are willing to acknowledge the real things of their lives at this level as ‘incompletes’ – to write them down, define real projects about them, and ensure that next actions are decided on – until the finish line is crossed.  That is real productivity, perhaps in its most awesome manifestation.”

Happy organizing!