Maybe Never becomes Exactly Never
This is an update to a series of posts from almost a year ago, back in November 2006. The series was entitled Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again). In the final article in the series, I suggested the idea of adding a bucket called “Maybe Never”. This was the bucket of tasks that wouldn’t even show up on my dashboards, I was so uncommitted to them. And yet, I couldn’t just let myself delete them either. It was my ResultsManager equivalent of the Windows XP Recycle Bin. I can delete…and then if I change my mind…undelete.
Well, it’s nearly a full year later, and I’m here to report the total number of times that I’ve opened my Maybe Never map and reviewed it.
Never.
Nick Duffill of Gyronix (the maker of ResultsManager) commented insightfully in that series that:
You’re absolutely right about resistance to deleting things, but it is a cathartic habit to take positive decisions, even wrong decisions. History and commerce have always favoured the decision-takers higher than the opportunity-creators, even if they turned out to be wrong later. Another way to deal with things in this category if the review process might not catch them is to defer them for a few months, then they will come back again. When you have deferred them several times in a row, you might feel more comfortable with deleting them.
So, lately, I’ve been much more free with the delete key–and I rarely look over my shoulder. This is yet another example to show that my biggest productivity bottlenecks are not in my software, but in my mind. The corollary would seem to be that my biggest productivity gains will be achieved by tweaking my mind. So I do that. And then I tweak the software some more 