Organize IT

As you can probably expect giving what I write about here at Organize IT, time is a big issue for me. I have hobbies and interests and goals I want to achieve and they all take up precious hours. This is actually a good thing because I’d much rather spend those hours in pursuits I enjoy rather than in mundane work. The challenge I have then is how to free up more time for the former and do less of the latter. It should be simple but it never is and I think I may have finally figured out why. At heart, we’re all just a bunch of time wasters.

Just do it. Stop procrastinating and get on with it. It really should be that simple and years ago it probably was. We should all have the doing habit – that drive inside to see our daily chores completed despite what’s on TV or our to-do list ticked off despite colleagues pestering us. But nowadays we have so many distractions, so many things fighting for our attention and so much stuff that’s so complicated, that the doing habit has been eroded away and replaced by inaction.

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One of the key elements of GTD is capturing what’s on your radar – offloading what’s on your head so you’re no longer thinking of stuff, but about the stuff. It’s a great bit of advice and it’s something I encourage people to do regardless of what system, workflow or methodology takes your fancy. If there is something that wants my attention I’ll jot it down somewhere so I don’t have to carry the weight of the memory around. It sounds like a sensible, even smart way of keeping track of everything, making sure you don’t forget things, etc. But recently something occurred to me that puts mind sweeping into doubt.

Continuing the theme from last month, I’ve done another guest post, this time for Twitip. It covers how I use Twitter so it doesn’t become a time and energy vacuum. If you’re a heavy social media user, you might find it a useful read. As for the rest of September, it was Organize IT’s third birthday! Be sure to check out my post celebrating the occasion, as well as my top ten tweets by David Allen – very interesting if you’re a GTD fan. Enjoy!

This guest post was written by Rich of Half-A-Dozen Monkeys.

The main focus of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology is… well, to get things done. It aims to give you a tool to enable you to identify everything you need to do and then go and get those things done. This is fine. No, this is superb. But it does create one particular problem – it consciously blurs the boundaries between all aspects of your life. It seeks to provide you with a solution to all strands of what you do in one fair swoop, on the assumption that for a lot of people the boundaries are already a little fuzzy.