Constrained Bliss Point

I am a list-maker. I enjoy making lists. Getting Things Done (GTD) utilizes lists heavily, and I also enjoy GTD. I’m not sure which way the correlation runs between those two facts. But not all lists are created equal. I think there are very important constraints on the sizes of to-do lists, Next Action lists, and Projects lists, to name a few. For the differences among these types, GTD’s Wikipedia article is a great read — if you don’t care for the distinctions, just think of your own to-do list (and if you don’t utilize a to-do list, may God have mercy on you).

Lists cannot be too long, if you are going to use them effectively. How many times have you created a to-do list for yourself, and everything was going fine for a few days, until eventually you got bogged down and started procrastinating? I find it incredibly easy to convince myself that, paradoxically, I have so many things to do that I might as well not do any of them. This does not bode well for productivity.

Over the last half of last year, I stopped seeing myself as a task-completing machine, who should optimize his throughput of actions for maximal efficiency. I realized that it wasn’t making me any happier, just checking more things off my list, since the other half of the time I was hiding from the morass of tasks. Yet again I’ve remembered that lists are merely tools for being an effective person.

It’s important to keep perspective as you go through life — otherwise you might end up in the wrong place. I realized that it’s not important what actions I complete; it is only important where they are getting me. So, I still use the GTD system, but with a few caveats:

• I keep a short list, on my whiteboard, of the tasks I should finish ASAP.
• I make sure this list doesn’t exceed ten or so items.
• I don’t let any item sit on the list too long: complete it or scrub it.
• If I let the whole list sit for too long, I have to finish as many actions as possible in the next free moment I get.
• If the whole list gets stale, I throw it out and start over. They obviously weren’t the right tasks anyway.
• I warehouse tasks not important enough for my whiteboard list on my Next Actions list.
• I review my Next Actions list periodically to see if any actions should be whiteboarded. Stale actions get thrown out.

The key change I’ve seen is that my lists are much, much smaller. Constant pruning of my Next Actions list has kept it under 15 items for a few months now. And I’ve never felt better.

The past two weeks have been a tizzy. Moving to a new city along with six hours per day of maths all but overwhelmed my ability to keep things organized. I suppose I could have swam harder against the tide, but that’s honestly not my style. Times like those I’m happy to keep my head above water.

This week begins my normal, much more open, schedule — three classes, no more than 4hrs/day, no class before 10am, no class on Fridays. And I am going to get on top of things again, and it is going to be awesome. I have a lot of emails, a lot of blog posts in my Reader, a lot of drafts and emails and phone calls I owe people. But that’s all going to come under control soon. I know that by the end of the week I’ll be back in command. Getting Things Done always has my back.

I’m not a GTD-wizard yet, but it keeps me sane.

I usually pride myself on being organized, but lately I’ve fallen behind. I have not felt on top of things for a week or two at least. When this happens, the optimal strategy is to step back and reevaluate, try to learn something, and come back swinging.

As I’ve written, I’m on the GTD system. It’s the most effective way of managing my commitments that I’ve found yet. But you need to control your system or it will control you. I think this is what’s been happening to me. Of the lists I keep, my main ones are Action lists and my Projects list. Action lists record all the little tasks you need to do. A projects list tracks longer-term commitments that might need multiple action steps before they’re complete.

My folly, I think, is in using my Action lists as a to-do list. Sometimes I think “Oh man, I have things I need to do,” and then try to crank through one of my Action lists. It is overwhelming. At any time I have between 30 and 70 actions queued up, and that’s just far too many to be able to look at and not freak out about.

But I think those lists are best used as a simple corral of your commitments (like an unordered set, if you will). When I have a chunk of time during which I want to accomplish things, here is my new strategy: first, scan over my actions list for about five tasks that I can accomplish given my context, time at hand, and energy level; then work off those five tasks as my todo list. In theory, it’s hard to get overwhelmed by a small number of tasks that you’ve specifically chosen to be do-able.

We’ll see how it goes.

Anyone who talks to me for more than five or ten minutes knows that I’m serious about being organized. My hipster PDA is almost certainly at my side when I’m out and about. I am a disciple of David Allen and the Getting Things Done gospel he preaches. I myself have taken up the calling of preaching; if you’re around me too long, expect an ear full about how great GTD is.

I’m not going to pontificate now, though (not too much anyway). If you’re interested, the book is a fantastic read, A+++ Would Buy Again Great Shipping. Anyone who is an organization junkie needs a copy.

For the uninitiated, one facet of GTD is lists — and lots of them. If you’re not comfortable creating, maintaining, and tracking lists, you’re going to have issues wrapping your head around GTD. One list you’ll come back to a lot is your Projects List, where (surprise!) you keep all your projects. A project in GTD is very broadly defined: anything in your world you have committed to changing, that isn’t currently the way it should be, is a project. Some of my current projects include “Get new running shoes”, “Plan Boston weekend trip”, and “Get reimbursed for eye glasses”.

Essentially these are all the things I’m juggling at one time. The balls I need to keep in the air, if you will, or the plates I have to keep spinning. One thing that impresses me about GTD is the sheer number of projects I can be working on at once. Right now I have 46 items on my Projects List. I never had such precise numbers before I started using GTD, but I have a hunch I could juggle maybe ten things at once, and likely fewer if they were big things. Too many blips on my radar screen and I would stop dropping the ball, plates would stop spinning, and stress ensued.

Now that happens rarely, if ever. If you feel like you want to get control of your life, David Allen has something to teach you.

I approached my final undergraduate semester expecting it to be difficult. I designed my course load to be challenging — probably the most challenging to date. I did this for the same reason people attempt to climb Mount Everest: stressing one’s self to the breaking point, every once in a while, is the only way to really get to know what you’re made of.

Another reason for taking more courses than necessary is as an intertemporal commitment. Deciding ahead of time that I will be disciplined in my productivity is cheap. Choosing a course of action that will require I be disciplined in my productivity is the only way to ensure it happens. You may hear people say, “I could be like that high achiever over there, if I were more organized.” Or perhaps, “I could get better grades than him, I just don’t feel like studying.” That’s a cop out, folks.

In preparation for this semester I decided I needed a pretty serious schedule. Now that a few weeks have gone by, I feel comfortable assessing how the schedule is going. First I’ll describe it as planned before the semester started. Then I can analyze what worked and what failed miserably.

I planned on waking up at 7am every day, and going to the gym. Every day. This was ambitious, and in order to ensure I would get enough sleep, I needed a similarly ambitious bed time: 10pm. I would turn off my computer by 9pm every night to facilitate the ridiculously early bed time. Every day I would have a set number of “work” hours, like school was a job. Each day there would be a different subject for me to do — to make sure that my work in that subject was up to date. And Fridays would be a full day to review my whole organizational system.

Most of the elaborate plan was untenable. I never wound up sticking to the one-subject-per-day rule, nor did I ever count the number of “work” hours I would have every day. Luckily, Friday has been a consistent review day, though not always perfectly. For the first week I stuck very closely to the 10pm-7am sleep schedule with gym every day. Later it would be more difficult to be in bed at that reasonable hour: having friends is a terrible way to ensure a solid bed time. Similarly my computer was only off at 9pm for the first two days of school. All in all, only a few tenets stayed with me, and those were subject to habitual inconsistency.

Still, a lot of good came from this schedule. I find that when my homework gets me hectic, I can take solace in getting it done and then getting to bed early and hitting the gym at 7am.