Mind On Fire: One Hot Dashboard
Had an Aha! moment reading Nick Duffil’s recent post on the GTD_Mindmanager yahoo group (which discusses ResultsManager) just now. He used the term “hot” dashboard to mean:
the amount of “must do” actions in the dashboard appears to be many times the capacity of their owner
Well, then I think my dashboard is blistering hot, which may account for a fair bit of the heartburn 
I did a rough estimate on the number of Next Actions on my Daily Actions Dashboard. Next Actions are those activities that I can or should do now-ish. They aren’t blocking on any other activities. And I haven’t deferred them by setting start dates into the future. And I haven’t marked them as Someday/Maybe for future consideration. So as far as my mind is concerned, I owe every one of these actions to myself or someone else NOW.
How many Next Actions are on my dashboard? Drum roll….
About 100.
100?! (choking…)
Admittedly, I’ve been tempted to think that this ResultsManager thing was just killing me. But actually, it isn’t ResultsManager’s fault. It’s actually doing a good job of showing me my work. And it makes it really easy to move stuff off of my dashboard, if only I’d maintain the discipline to make front end decisions about my work, using “No” more aggressively, being more realistic about punting more stuff to Someday/Maybe, and delegating a lot more.
Doing this little exercise of counting how many Next Actions are on my Dashboard has been an eye opening way to tell me what I already knew–I need to trim the fat. Trimming the fat happens during the Weekly Review. Ergo, I gotta do the Weekly Review. QED.
(BTW, though I estimate about 100 Next Actions, the stats on my dashboard show that there are about 485 activities all together in my system, some of which are delegated. But, even the 100 Next Actions, seemingly impossible in their own right, only accounts for 20% of the “stuff” that I think I’m supposed to care about!)
September 27th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
I hear you, Brother! The Weekly Review is crucial. Without it, frankly you only get about 10% of the benefit of GTD/MM/RM framework. I was in the same predictiment for many, many week - until the lightbulb finally went off. Being “organized” just isn’t enough. All my to-dos are meticulous categorized (too much so!), but I just couldn’t do all of them. So I cut, and cut hard. No regrets. No backlash. Just more piece of mind! Recommendation: Read Tom Peters “The Brand You 50″ to get even more motivated about cutting the fat…