Anyone who knows me knows that my life has generally been controlled by loosely contained chaos. I’m always working on a bunch of things, and I rarely have taken the time to keep those things organized.
In the past, I’ve tried a number of things to get my life in more order. In college I tried using Palm Pilot, but that just ended up being one more way for me to tune out of my accounting class. Tetris sure was a great game…
Later I tried using a Franklin Covey planner, but I couldn’t handle carrying that bulky thing around. You know, bulky. Like a laptop case. Ha.
Luckily, most of my life has been governed by order imposed from outside forces. Whether it was parents telling me to get up, class schedules or the demands of office life, I had a system of checks and balances to keep me fairly organized. When I was doing Zosima back in the day and lacked all these things, I was a wreck. And eventually so was the business.
Given all this self knowledge, once I found out I was moving to Chicago, I had a reality check. Though still employed, I was now in a position to control what I did and when. And while the past three months have been very liberating and mostly stress-free, it’s only because I took the plunge and finally imposed some order in my life.
If you haven’t read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, I heartily recommend it. It provided me with a framework within which I could operate successfully - it has succeeded (for the most part) where other tools have failed.
The best thing it encouraged me to do was to process things immediately. Where I used to let things pile up, I do my best to filter things as they come in. What I’ve discovered is that many of the things that I used to think were important and worthy of being called “action items” aren’t at all. It has allowed me to focus on the five or six things that are really important in any given week, get them done well, and do so with a minimum of stress.
If, after reading the GTD book, you think you’d like to incorporate the strategies in your life, there are a couple of resources I’ve found pretty useful:
- GTDGmail - Email has a tendency of determining how we spend our time, if we let it control us. Thankfully, the things that make Gmail such a powerful email tool also make it fantastic for organizing our lives. GTDGmail incorporates the GTD framework into Gmail to help you filter and organize things appropriately. After a couple days using this, an inbox that previously held thousands of emails was totally empty. And there was a huge stupid grin on my face.
- Backpack - Part of my problem in the past was that I tried to put too many rules in place. The fact is that our lives will always have a bit of chaos, only more so if you consider yourself one of those “right brained” types. The best tools for managing oneself are often ones that recognize the chaos and try to capitalize on it. Backpack is one such tool - it allows you to create pages of “stuff” - lists, notes, links, images, and the like - allowing you to keep track of everything, in any way you see fit. It’s easy to use, fun to interact with, and inexpensive. A worthy investment.
- 43Folders Merlin Mann’s blog helps you expand upon and implement the GTD philosophy, as well as offering dozens of times for life management in general. A very worthy read.
Any suggestions you have for managing oneself more effectively? I’d love to hear them…
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