Organize IT

I think I’ve realized why it’s so easy to succumb to the whole getting things done, do stuff for the sake of it attitude. We all want to achieve Big Things in life. We want to feel like it’s all worth it and that at the end of the day we’ve achieved something with our time. But what happens if you don’t have that in your life? Rather than looking for that sense of achievement through quality, we try and achieve it through quantity – replacing a handful of big achievement with lots of small, often irrelevant things.

Clutter is a big problem for numerous reasons – it gets in the way, it makes it difficult to find stuff. In fact, I think that de-cluttering your surroundings is so important to your overall wellbeing I have an entire section called Clutter 101 dedicated to it. But what about the psychological effect? It’s great being able to find your keys, know exactly where your passport is and not have to dig through piles of paperwork to find that old receipt, but it goes much deeper than that.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt know how keen I am about the whole idea of breaking your work down into tiny chunks of activity (or next actions if you’re a GTD fan). I do it so often in fact that any little project I have I will look at how it can be broken down. When I decorated my bedroom recently, I did one wall per day. That might sound obtuse and on the surface a little counter-productive, but what’s the alternative? Several hours one weekend doing a big, laborious chore.

The hardest part about getting things done isn’t necessarily trying to shift through countless productivity books, attending numerous GTD seminars until you ‘get it’ or implementing a fancy, hi-tech setup to manage your super-crazy life. It’s not even trying to regularly do a weekly review or capturing all the loose ends in your head. It’s often just finding the motivation to take action…

When it comes to being productive – much like anything in life – there is no one definitive way of doing things. Approaches covered in books like Getting Things Done and The Four Hour Work Week provide a solid framework and best practise for effective and efficient productivity but they don’t cover everything. One of the biggest tips you’ve probably been taught from an early age is to plan. Plan, prepare, do your research. Only fools rush in, after all.