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.

This is the first in what I hope will be a continuing series on Really Important Choices that turn out to have Really Good Consequences. My time interning with Creative Commons (CC) has positively impacted my life’s direction moreso than probably any other event in recent history.

Most of what I’m doing now is for CC in one way or another. The most obvious is that I’m still a contractor. Half-hacker, half-data analyst is a good spot for me, I think. A few months back I helped the development team analyze their past fundraising efforts (statistics to the rescue!). My senior thesis was about Creative Commons. I’m still working on a broad research agenda — like, what do I want to study during my time in grad school — and I will almost certainly swing CC in there somehow.

The people I met at CC are utterly fabulous. I interned with Tim Hwang, Brian Rowe, Grace Armstrong, Steren Giannini, and Greg Grossmeier. Allison Domicone, who is particularly cool, was sort of an intern too, and of course who can forget Jane “I-can-drink-twice-as-much-as-you” Park.

I’m still doing some good work with Tim Hwang and his motley group of cool kids in Cambridge, MA. Tim also turned me on to Getting Things Done, perhaps the greatest productivity tool the world has ever known. And over time I have come to realize that a significant chunk of my t-shirt supply is CC swag. Check it out.

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.