i spoke too soon

I hope it is not too late to be talking about new year’s resolutions. For the record I started this one just before Christmas.

My new year resolution (one is plenty) for 2007 is to get thing done. I’ve always gotten things done to some degree of course and I was generally accepting of my productivity levels. I haven’t missed any critical deadlines and I’ve kept up with my business, although with much toilsome effort. December was a month of escalating stress and anxiety for me and I got to a point where I could hardly get anything done because I just couldn’t focus.

Following a random path of links from a blog that I read, I discovered the popular book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. I was able to get this book from our public library in short order and learned David Allen’s time/productivity management system. I read that stress-free productivity is possible. On December 22 I made the transition to the system and stress-free productivity is now my daily experience. The anxiety is gone as is the feeling of being overwhelmed by so much to do.

I have always wanted to become more organized, maybe even half as organized as my wife (who I sometimes think fell into a vat of productivity potion as a little girl.) Now that I’m using this GTD productivity system I am way more organized than I ever thought possible. I now have a system for dealing with any piece of paper, email, or whatever that comes my way.

One of the key points in the book is that by keeping track of everything we have to do, we can feel good about what we are not doing. This means more focus for what we are doing. I used to have such a hard time focusing on a project and I would constantly shift from one task to another or to a game of Mahjongg or check email again… Now I can focus on the task at hand because all my other things to do are listed in a system that I trust.

I no longer suffer from procrastination. I enjoy procrastination.

Filed under: business, productivity on January 20th, 2007