Using ResultsManager to Reorganize My Work (Again): Part 4 of 9
Concept #2: Separating the Someday/Maybe activities from “Maybe Never” ones
In the recent past, the Someday/Maybe designation for activities had begun to lose all meaning to me. Part of my journey back to sanity is to reclaim it!
I had been using Someday/Maybe like a black hole, relegating anything marked Someday/Maybe to oblivion. And since so many things lived there, I became rather unmotivated to review it often enough to pull things back onto my dashboard when they should.
Now you might be asking, “Well what difference does that make? Why bother to bring it back once you’ve pushed it out to Someday/Maybe? It must not be that important.”
All I can say is, I just need to have a trusted mechanism for moving things off the ASAP radar onto the “I’ll revisit this in the future” radar. If I can’t make that separation at all, then the ASAP radar loses it’s focus. And if my system for revisiting things punted to the future (someday) doesn’t work, then I break trust with myself. When that trust is broken, every time I go to mark a project as Someday/Maybe, something inside me whispers, “if you do that, you’ll never see it again.” And that makes me hesitate, because if it’s important, I don’t want to forget about it, even if it isn’t for today. When I don’t trust the Someday/Maybe mechanism, I tend to make the mistake of keeping active that which should be punted, contributing yet again to dashboard clutter.
Enter the Maybe Never bucket. The Maybe Never bucket represents all those activities that are even less likely to occur than “maybe”, and more likely to occur never than someday. In other words, these are things I probably won’t ever do.
I know that there are some things that I’ve assigned to Someday/Maybe that I’ll probably never do. But I just can’t bring myself to delete them altogether because it feels like I’m killing brain cells. Who knows when I might want to retrieve something, or just remember what I used to think–like a sort of work journal?
Yet if my Someday/Maybe list is too full of things that I know in my gut I’m unlikely to ever reactivate, then I tend to develop an internal resistance to reviewing the Someday/Maybe list, thus making it less trustworthy.
If I can’t bring myself to delete those unlikely activities, I need to at least move them off of the legitimate Someday/Maybe list. In ResultsManager, that means that marking them Someday/Maybe won’t suffice. There’s no Maybe Never attribute in ResultsManager. In a future installment, I’ll describe how I implement Maybe Never with some ResultsManager and MindManager tricks.
Wrapping Up
So now you’ve seen the two concepts that I’ve used to revolutionize my system (for now): Separating Committed from Active, and Separating Someday/Maybe from “Maybe Never”. Next, I’ll tie this together by summarizing my new review process. After that, we’ll look at the nuts and bolts of implementing all of this in ResultsManager and MindManager.
November 21st, 2006 at 3:02 am
Mike
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.
Best regards
Nick
November 21st, 2006 at 11:37 am
Nick, good word. And one I need to hear, no doubt. So, thank you. Admittedly, I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes this stuff. I have actually been swifter with the delete key lately, and I can attest to its cathartic benefits
Your comment will no doubt ring in my mind next time I’m making a decision whether to move something to Maybe Never, or to just delete it.