Getting things done

This is about creating order in your life at a basic level, keeping track of the things you have to do, and getting them done.

Countless people are stuck, because their lives are flooded with emails and other demands; because filing is just not happening; because the eyes are bigger than the stomach. More and more things keep pouring into our already saturated lives. Modern life is pretty crazy.

As David Allen points out in his splendid book, ‘Getting Things Done’, we need to build order from the ground up. Don’t start with the big picture. Start right here, where your desk is a mess, your files need updated, and you are letting yourself get committed to things which you can’t possibly do.

This is a cyclical process, with four stages –

1. Collection
2. Decision
3. Action
4. Learning

This section ends with a note on evasiveness as a spiritual practice.

Collection

First of all, you have to gather together ALL your loose ends.

Anything left hanging is a weight on your mind, which is ill-designed for holding onto stray information. Collect together everything you haven’t yet done – which you have to do, or want to do, or feel you ought to do, or might do one day. Everything.

Decision (+ projects)

Second, you have to make an upfront decision about every single item. Don’t postpone. You MUST decide.

Just work through:

1. Throw out all the rubbish. File the things you want to keep. Do any little two-minute actions as they come along.
2. Say “No” promptly to whatever is unnecessary, or adds nothing, or is a side-issue, or which (in fact) you will never get done, or which is too much to take on.
3. Delegate what you can, and set up a waiting for list, so that nothing falls out of your life.
4. As for the remaining actions, they go into a system of lists, if they are not time-specific; into your diary or calendar, if they must done at a certain time.
5. For any item, if it requires more than one step, then it is a project. Here the word “project” means “anything you intend to do which requires more than one action”. Any project goes on your project list, and may need its own project file.

Action

Third, you have to DO the actions you just decided on. There are two cases here:

1. Since you now have everything under control, you can act very freely, trusting your instinct from moment to moment.
2. But when you are working through a certain kind of actions, it generally pays to be dogged. Work through steadily. Don’t keep picking and choosing. Don’t avoid the next one on the list.

Just do it.

Learning (+ review)

A week has gone by, and chaos is creeping back.

You have to review:

• Where did I get to?
• What loose ends are gathering?
• What am I avoiding?
• Where is trouble brewing?
• What did I learn?

Did you do what you decided to do? What happened? What worked? What didn’t work? What can still be streamlined? What will you do differently next time?

Every week, as you restore the system to order, you see what you can learn.

Once in a while, you step back and make a much wider assessment of where you are now, in both these respects:

• Where does chaos still loom in my life?
• What have I learned over the past while?

Keep answering the master-question:

• What am I going to do?

By applying the four-stage process of getting things done consistently, you will transform your life and your consciousness. This is the most direct and powerful context for the cycle of action and learning.

You will feel free and have a clear mind, because you are no longer desperately clinging to lots of unrecorded loose ends – and you will be learning a great deal in the process.

Evasiveness as a spiritual practice

Getting things done is demanding, because we lie to ourselves, and are ruled by habitual evasions. So it becomes a spiritual practice, in which we search out our weakness and destructive self-indulgence, and look at them eye to eye.

The secret of getting this process to work for you is to track down your weak links and fix them. You may not like doing this. You may kick and scream. But you will like the results.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So when you deal with some seemingly trivial evasion, the good effects may be disproportionate.

Finding-and-fixing can become a passion. It’s well known that people who least need to refine these skills are just the people keenest to make yet more progress.