Need Some Focus

I was puttering around this morning... Read the news on the ipad, put away a couple of things lying out in the kitchen, went out in the yard with the dog and pulled a few weeds, came in and decided that my mental lists need to be written down. I poured a new cup of coffee and started moving purposefully towards the computer, to crank it up and get things written down. I thought of the top priority item on the list. As if taken over by an alien source, I put down the coffee and started moving in the direction of the tape measure to start the first project.

Wait! What am I doing? Am I going to sit down and commit to making a list, or am I just going to plunge into the next top-of-mind project? This is how my days have gone, drifting from thing to thing. I am not frittering away all my time - things are getting done. Often, there is no question what is the most important thing to be doing (eg, installing the new smoke detector). But I'm not prioritizing or being terribly efficient in how I go about this. There is no doubt that some very important things are NOT getting done. The mental list is too long, and some things have to be in order, or at certain times (eg calling to schedule appointments, trips to a certain store).

Y'all know I'm a big fan of self-help books. I read Getting Things Done by David Allen a number of years ago, and a couple of years ago took a training class in how to apply the principles. The big thrust of this is to reduce mental drag and boost productivity by mastering the to-do list. Having mental lists creates mental drag, as the mind constantly says "I have to do this thing!", but says it at a moment you can't actually do it, so you make a mental note and have to put mental resources in remembering it later. If it's on a list, and you can be certain that list will be reviewed at some time in the future, then you can forget completely about it for now. Hence, peace of mind.

So the rest of the book and the training class are all about how to do this, full of practical techniques for capturing the list and working down the list. This is not project management so much as life management. But it's also not time management, or scheduling. Key points: Capture Everything that needs to be done in a limited number of input devices throughout your day (eg, email in-box and pocket notebook, don't also have sticky notes and phone notes and voicemails and other things floating around to remember); have set times during the week you take all the input and either do the thing right then (works for email replies, appointment scheduling, other things that take less than five minutes) or write it down in your single master to-do list. A major tenant is Do Not Maintain Multiple To-Do Lists, because then you have the mental drag of finding and looking at all your to-do lists. Many nuances about then working down the to-do list, what tool to use as the to-do list, how to code the to-do list. This group is not a fan of prioritizing a to-do list from top to bottom (because just by looking at the list you know what is urgent), but of using tags to group related items both by subject (home maintenance, gardening..., and by aspects of the task (phone call, email, trip to store, wear dirty clothes, how long will it take) which they call "context".

As in all these books, there are nuggets that are useful and have helped me out. I violated the One List tenent by always keeping work and home lists separately. My last couple of years at work were more reactive than planned, and we lived on email, so I just used my work email as my master list for work. For home, I've used various things, physical and of course many apps. Again, this is not detailed project management, but rather how to move through and between the myriad of different projects and tasks that make up life. It's not time management, in that it doesn't tell you how to schedule your day. It's simply ensuring that things you want to get can get done, and not slip through the cracks. But without having to expend mental energy always thinking about it.

Right now, I have notes scrawled around in various places, many things are not on the list at all, and I need to make a better list. Which I set out to do an hour or so ago, and immediately distracted myself into a new task. Then I caught myself in the distraction, went "AHA!" and cranked up the computer and instead of capturing tasks I wrote this post.

The good news is I have TIME. I'll get this figured out. I don't have to be phenomenally productive because I'm not juggling a gazillion things with deadlines. Just things I want to do, and sometimes it doesn't matter if they get done right now, but sometimes it does matter. I need a list.