Sometimes we need large chunks of time to devote to the “do” part of the collect, process, organize, review, and do workflow phases. I had some next actions on my @Home list that had been there for well over 6 months and possibly a year in some cases.

Some of the tasks needed several hours at one time to do properly, or at least I thought they would. As I would look at my list each day, these weighed on me immensely. Yes, I made the conscious decision each time to NOT do these tasks, but they still gnawed at me every time I saw them. This had the negative side effect of taking away energy from other tasks that I could have been doing. Since I wasn’t doing what I knew I was supposed to be doing, it made it all too easy to do nothing at all.

For a couple weeks now I’ve been listening to, and taking notes on, the Conquering Procrastination CD series by Neil Fiore. Like the Getting Things Done…Fast CDs, they will well pay for themselves. I took last week off as a vacation from my full-time job and used that time to put some of the new techniques into practicet. These techniques compliment the GTD methodologies quite nicely.

During the week, I resisted the temptation to start new projects or to add new next actions that weren’t absolutely necessary. Sure, new things came to mind, but I just added them to my Someday/Maybe list knowing that I wasn’t going to make any progress on them before my next weekly review. When began my weekly review this morning I had only two next actions on my @home list—and they were tied to my only two @HomeProjects. It felt great! During my review I moved some items from my Someday/Maybe list to my active lists. I haven’t done much of this in a long time.

I would have expected it to take me a solid 40- to 60-hour week to wrap up what I did this week. I didn’t spend near that much time, however. In fact, I slept in most mornings and took a nap most every afternoon. One of my goals was to really get some much needed rest. I don’t idle well, so sleep seemed to be the best way to accomplish this. The naps gave me a pleasurable goal to work towards which increased how much I accomplished.

As I looked at some of the things I had been resisting, I consciously “chose” to do them. I saw myself as being in control instead of whatever external agent had brought them onto my list. In another tip from Dr. Fiore, I decided to do them “humanly”—I have a habit of trying to do everything perfectly. The results were still high quality, but the fact that I had given myself permission to just “get started doing something” was both liberating and motivating.

Do you have a number of things on your lists that have been hanging around for far too long? How can you grab a large chunk of time to get out from under some of the stuff that’s been weighing you down? Make sure you do it as your own choice. Take a vacation day from work to do some things at home, or decide to go into work on a Saturday, or at 4 AM to get some things done at work. Be sure to mix in some pleasure into the time and give yourself permission to do the work “humanly” instead of “perfectly”.