If ‘make a list’ is on your list, does that mean your lists aren’t working?
I recently read what a realise now is a pretty well-know productivity book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. For years I’ve been (sloppily) following the four Ds mantra of Do / Delegate / Defer / Delete without knowing where it came from… and had heard speak of strange wonders such as \”getting to zero on your inbox\” without ever fully understanding what it meant. My inbox is – and forever will be – as un-tidy as my sock drawer. Full of odd socks that I keep hold of just in case the other one ever turns up (or I need it to make a puppet).
Well, it’s fair to say that as often happens when I read a new book, I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. For those who don’t know, the GTD method centres on collecting and clarifying everything that might be creating an \”open loop\” in your mind (I want / need to do x) and getting it organised outside of your head so that you can use your brain for thinking instead. I LOVE this idea. And the whole thing involved lots of new stationary and even a labelling machine, so I was sold.
Three weeks in and I’m still going. The labelling machine has stopped whirring quite so much and there are days when I’m not sure I’m doing it right, but I’m going to persevere, because the promise of a mind as calm as still water is just too appealing to drop just yet. And I know from coaching (myself and others) just how long it takes to break old habits and embed new ones.
So if you’re trying to nurture a new behaviour in yourself, here are a few reflections on what can help taken from along the route:
💃Make it fun. Yes, the stationary thing is a bit of a trope, but I genuinely find joy in my new coloured folders and the spreadsheet macro that means when I cross something off my ‘Next Action List’ it greys out the row automatically. Allen is clear that you need to enjoy engaging in the process for it to work. So I’m all in with these little gratifications.
🪞Reflect. One thing I’m learning is to have patience with a new practice and not bin it immediately if it doesn’t work. Treating this as an experimental phase means I’m not yet obsessed with getting better, my goal is to learn what may and may not work for me. This is also true of a lot of the leadership development work I do myself and with clients – our first step is to experiment and notice whether what happens reinforces the deeply-held assumptions that might be driving our behaviour or if it allows us to question them.
🎉Celebrate. Sometimes we move so fast that we don’t notice small improvements or congratulate ourselves for them. How is today better than yesterday because of this new thing I did? Well done me! I noticed that the trick of having little notepads around the house means I can write a passing open loop down (“need to email accountant”) and chuck it on the pile, leaving my mind free for that game of cards with my son, and trusting that it will go somewhere it won’t be missed.
🌄Zoom out. I felt a little like I had betrayed Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 weeks when I started to make these changes. Didn’t I still believe that one of the ways we can manage in life is by NOT trying to do everything? That we need to embrace the fear of missing out and reduce our action lists to just one or two things at any one time? Yes, I do still believe that, but I also know that in my life as a parent, child, partner, business owner and friend, I still have a thousand open loops in my brain at any one time. And these are ultimately driven by my commitment to the person I want to be (and become). I can’t just put ‘the kids’ or ‘my marriage’ on the back burner today. So, zooming out and focusing on the bigger picture of who I want to be in this world keeps me going through the ups and downs of changing my habits.
How do you organise (and change) yourself?
