Getting Things Done

[Carolina]

Dearest Angels,

I often write about relaxation and mediation as a way  of clearing my mind and dealing with stress.

This is another way I use, but until now I didn't have a term for it:

To extricate the things that don't belong in your brain, you need a systematic approach, Allen contends. His book and its concept, abbreviated among the lifehacker-ati as GTD, is a detailed prescription to fix this problem that I will over-simplify into four steps:

1) Adopt a reliable capture method (Evernote, voice memos, a Moleskin notebook, etc) to get thoughts out of your head.

2) Distill them to actionable items and next steps ("send receipts to Finance", "call a kick-off meeting for an office-wide re-org") on your daily to-do list.

3) Dedicate yourself to multiple reviews in which you put these action items into the right buckets ("must be done today", "phone calls when I'm on the train").

4) Do the things on the list, when you have time, prioritising as you go.

The result of this is that the ever increasing sense of pressure to get things done is relieved because I know I CAN get things done, but I don't HAVE TO DO IT ALL THE TIME.

I even write something on the list, that's not there, if I DO IT.  That way I understand why I don't always get everything ON MY LIST DONE.  Because I've done something else.

Is this weird?  Well maybe so.  But then, I'm pretty weird according to everyone who knows me.

Hugs,  Elaine

[Mexgal]

Great advice Elaine. 
Thanks so much for sharing.
Have a great week end
Sallie

[MarieB]

Hi Elaine,

I was just thinking about this because lately I've noticed that I can go totally blank and seemingly not have a thing to do or worry about, which is laughable if you knew my life. 

Anyway, I'm thinking of trying the notes pages on my phone.  I can't decide if typing in 'Notes' or learning to use the voice notes would be better. 

I like the idea of 'getting thoughts out of my head'.   

Marie