The techniques discussed in this book so far offer a systematic method to keep your mind distraction-free, ensuring a high level of efficiency and effectiveness in your work. That in itself would be sufficient reason to implement these practices.
However, there are even greater implications for your life in general and these will be discussed in chapters 11, 12 and 13. These longer-term results can have a significant impact on you as an individual, and they can positively affect larger organizational cultures as well. For example, when people with whom you interact notice that without fail you receive, process, and organise in an airtight manner the exchanges and agreements they have with you, they begin to trust you in a unique way. Such is the power of capturing placeholders for anything that is incomplete or unprocessed in your life. It noticeably enhances your mental well-being and improves the quality of your communications and relationships, both professionally and personally.
If you are like most people who go through the full collection process, you will probably feels some for of anxiety, being overwhelmed, panic, frustration of fatigue as well as guilt over not having completed all the things you wanted to accomplish. When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you'll discover the way to get rid of them. The source of these negative feelings is not having too much to do (because there is always more to do in life), but rather from not keeping agreements you have consciously or subconsciously made with yourself..
If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:
- Don't make the agreement: It can feel very good to just throw away a bunch of old stuff, finally deciding not to deal with it. You lighten up if you just lower your standards in relevant areas of your life and operate more according to the 80/20 principle, while rejecting exaggerated perfectionism. Realising the huge price you pay for making and not keeping a large number of commitments can help with being more conscious about what you take on in the future. If you really capture and track everything that is on your mind using GTD, you will think twice about making commitments internally that you do not really want or need to make.
- Complete the agreement: Another option is to finally complete the task. Actually, you love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you have achieved something. The magic of the two minute rule (i.e. immediately complete all action, which require up to 2 minutes to complete) shows how life changing this can be in practice.
- Renegotiate the agreement: A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one. The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself does not mean that you are not holding yourself liable for it. As soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, there's a part of you that things you should be doing it all the time. For example, if you walked by your garage six years ago and told yourself that you should clean it, then every time you walk past the garage a little voice in your head that keeps complaining that you still haven't done it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have 3 options for dealing with this agreement with yourself:
- Lower your standards about your garage: "So I have a lousy garage... who honestly cares?"
- Keep the agreement - clean the garage
- At least put "clean garage" on your "someday/maybe" list. Then when you review this list weekly (or monthly) and you see this item, you can tell yourself, "not this week". The next time you walk by the garage, you won't hear a thing internally other than a "Ha! Not this week." :-)
So, every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn't happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves.
If you wonder how much collecting you should do, then the answer is "Until nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind". Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. Doing the GTD collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behaviour of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering, productive and in many instances "life changing". In particular, it will naturally make you stand out in any organisation that you work for, i.e. your boss/colleagues can trust that you keep track of all your open loops, tasks, todos that are your responsibility.
In conclusion, organisations of all types should seek to creature a culture in which it is acceptable that everyone has more to do than she can do, and in which it is wise to renegotiate agreements what every is not doing. Unfortunately, you can't legislate personal organisation systems. Everyone needs to have her own way to deal with all outstanding todos. However, you can hold people accountable for outcomes, and for tracking and managing everything that comes their way.
Based on: David Allen (2001), Getting Things Done, Penguin Books, p.225-235.
