The first few times I listened to this I never really seemed to catch that David said:

You also need to know I am not a naturally organized guy. I know it’s going to look like it … But that does not come naturally to me. I mean, ask my wife. My life, my toolshed, my desk, everything—get out of control on a regular basis. I think that’s a good thing frankly … I think in your next perfomance review, if you get a performance review, you should sit down and say, “Listen, I want you to know that I get out of control on a regular basis—because I’m consistently tossing the rock a little further, challenging myself to knew levels of expressing and fulfilling my destiny on the planet and recalibrating all my systems to match. How are you doing?”

I think that many of us feel guilty when our system seems to fail us, or we find that we need to make tweaks to how we collect, process, organize, review, and do. David has said, “The better you get, the better you better get.” How true thatis! Because we’ve gotten better at the five phases of workflow management, we will either get more stuff piled on us, or we will willingly take on more stuff. When the rock gets tossed a little further is tests our systems. That’s where I am right now.

At work right now I have 25 projects. At church I have 4 major projects, and some of them have smaller projects under them. In my side businesses I have 7 projects. In my home life I have 13 more. (These are projects in the traditional sense of the word, not the David Allen sense of just ‘more than one next action’.) I see more stuff on the horizon heading this way. Moving everything forwards every week is a real challenge. That is what inspired my to listen to the GTD…FAST CDs again, only slowly so that I could better contemplate the meaning and application of what David is teaching.

With the added responsibilities and projects, I’ve tossed the rock a little further. I’m challenging myself. My system is holding fast, and I’m discovering more than ever how important things like “the Two-Minute Rule” and “Keep the Calendar Sacred” are.

I had recently fallen back into the trap of trying to mix the phases of process and do. What I mean by this is that as I processed my inbox, I would usually try to go ahead and knock out the small things even though they may have been 5-, 10, 15-, or 20-minute tasks—well beyond the two-minute rule. I was getting bogged down doing those things. I’ve started adding them to my next actions list instead.

Another trap I had fallen into was deciding, as I processed, that things really needed to be done today even though they didn’t absolutely positively have to be done today. I would add them to my next actions list as an item for today. A dated next action is a hard landscape thing. I found that I was carrying many of these over from one day to the next, again and again. Apparently they really didn’t have to be done that day after all. This was causing me a lot of stress as I continually saw those things that needed to be done “today”. I’ve gone back to only dating things that truly must be done on a certain date. If the world won’t stop because they aren’t done on that day, it doesn’t get dated. I no longer pre-prioritize my next actions. It just causes too much psychological stress.

This has had a couple of other positive side effects as well. First, I get more done! It forces me to review my lists more often, and thoughtfully weigh the importance of everything with everything else along with how much time and energy I have at the moment. It really is like just cranking widgets (which David talks about later on the CDs). I knew this, but had slipped back into the pattern anyway.

The other side effect is that I procrastinate less. Yesterday I mentioned The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. In chapter 3, “How to Talk to Yourself” he tells us to replace the “I should do…”, “I have to…” and “I must do…” statements in our life with “I want to…”, “I decide to…”, or “I choose to…” statements. Instead of saying, “I have to add a date validation routine to the program” we should instead say, “I choose to add a date validation routine to the program.” One of the best ways to do this is to get rid of our “Must do today” list and replace it with a list of everything we have to do so that we can make a conscious decision about what “I choose to do”. Once I have previously decided that “I must do this today” then I have given myself a motivation to procrastinate. I’m much less prone to procrastinate now that I’m making a conscious choice about what to do now.