I am a grade A procrastinator, someone who has tried and failed to follow GTD and whenever I get a “system” I change it a week later. The result is one stressed out me. I recently read Leo Babauta’s ZTD book, it’s a refreshing look at productivity. Two of the most important points for me are around simplifying and taking action, two things I am not very good at.
Lets be honest, taking action is what matters at the end of the day, you could have the best capture and processing system in the world but if you don’t action anything it’s all for nothing. In ZTD the key is to start the day by listing your three MITs for the day. Your MITs are what you must get done, no excuses, but they are also the things that will move you towards your bigger goals. There is no point in having a todo list with a hundred items that just freak you out, instead just have three per day. I’m sure there are many psychological reasons why this works but I don’t know what they are. All I can say is try it.
The second major thing for me is keeping things simple. I work in a technical role, and as most techies I have the tendency to complicate things and then spend hours tweaking. I think a lot of people are guilty of this, especially those trying to follow GTD. I’ll cover my simplified system in an upcoming post. Suffice to say by simplifying you don’t tweak as much, which in turn causes less stress. If you’ve spent hours trying to perfect your system and then stress out because you’ve not actually achieved anything you need to simplify.
I’m sure I’ll talk more about ZTD in the future, in the mean time I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Leave a Reply