Node Glue

I’m about to commit GTD heresy. But I have to be honest–I’m feeling a little more like “Mind Under Water” than “Mind Like Water” lately.

I’ve been using GTD for probably three years now, and I think the first big “Aha!” for me was the idea of Collection–getting all my stuff into one pile. Never leaving “open loops” to bounce around in my mind, but getting them all written down where I could see them and organize them. And I still believe in the merit of that–in theory.

But my current reality is that I have so much stuff that I collect all the time, that it is overwhelming to wade through it all and make “front end decisions” about what to do about it. Just looking at the massive piles of stuff makes me dizzy.

Meanwhile, I watch non-GTD-ers apparently going wherever the wind blows them. They work from a mental to-do list. Whatever is on their minds is what they do. Once they do it, it’s off their mind. (Or so I imagine). Basically, they are using their intuition to guide what they spend their time on–to define their work, in a sense, just in time to do it. So there’s a filtering process. If they aren’t thinking about it, it isn’t getting done. And that, I claim, is a mixed blessing.

David Allen reassures us that it doesn’t work to only write down the “high priority” things, because our minds don’t know the difference between the low priority nags and the high priority deliverables–until we capture them in our trusted systems and make some decisions about them. But I’m starting to wonder–and here’s the heresy–if perhaps the unconscious filtering processes of our minds (intuition) aren’t more effective at sorting and filtering and handing to our conscious minds a pre-cogitated todo list that really matters. Maybe that’s more effective–faster and more accurate–than explicitly lining up all of my stuff, looking at it, and trying to make conscious decisions about it.

See, I have my “trusted system” constantly reminding me by it’s sheer volume, that there’s a lot that I’m not doing. The ratio of “stuff I’m doing” to “stuff I’m not doing” is very small–precisely because I collect all of it (like a good GTDer should), but I can only do (relatively) small chunks of it at a time. So I always feel buried. And the jury convicts on the evidence of the number of outstanding projects and next actions in my system–evidence that I daily accrue against myself!

I think I know how to resolve this problem. But if I just came right out and said it at the beginning, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think it was too simple. So I wanted to give you first an honest snapshot of the insanity that still plagues the mind of this three year GTD veteran.

Review. That’s the solution. And in the frenzied mentality that I’ve had lately, my reviewing has suffered. When my Weekly Review stops but my Collection continues, the piles, increasingly large and ambiguous, become overwhelming.

To quote a recent issue of the Gyronix Newsletter,

Even one of David Allen’s top trainers constantly reminds his seminar attendees, ‘If you’re not reviewing, then you’re not Getting Things Done.’

Guilt, you might be surprised, is one big reason why I don’t do my review as often as I’d need to in order to keep things running smoothly. I feel like taking time to do the meta-work of defining and organizing my work isn’t real work, and thus I’m somehow cheating or “getting sidetracked” if I take time to do it. Now, when I stop to think about it, I know this isn’t rational. I appreciate the point that David Allen makes here–the secret that no one ever tells us is that defining our work is a substantial part of our work–real work.

So I’ve got to decide that my Weekly Review is mission critical work. When that happens, as I know it has in the past, I can finally–to use David Allen’s language–feel good about what I’m not doing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 9:08 am and is filed under GTD, productivity, Heart of Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.