BenCrowder.net

I’ve got too much on my plate. You know the feeling — so much to do, so little time, and before long it’s crowding around you like a gang of thugs in a dark alleyway. By that point you want to wake up from this bad dream and start with a clean slate. But that doesn’t happen. ~sigh~

So, because this is a recurrent theme in my life, I’m deciding now to do something about it. What exactly that something is, I don’t quite know yet, but I suspect it’ll have something to do with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I also have a feeling that Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People could be helpful. I’ve never read either book (but they’ve been on my to-do list for a while), and I’m getting to the point that I have to do something.

Right now I’m juggling a lot of things, but I don’t know that it’s the number that’s hard so much as the feeling of not being on top of things. I don’t mind having tons of projects if I’m in control and know what I need to do next (and have a feeling of accomplishment). I also need some way to ensure that my projects and other to-do items are meaningful and aren’t just avenues for escape from real work. (Covey talks about this in First Things First, how being efficient won’t help us if we don’t know what we’re really trying to achieve.)

It is tempting to just keep trucking along, hoping things will get better on their own. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen. Temporarily, perhaps, but that’s just mowing the weeds — the roots are still down there, and they’ll be back before you know it.

Here’s part of the first chapter of Getting Things Done: BusinessWeek. I also highly recommend Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com.

[tags]GTD[/tags]