Confession time

One year at Mayhem in the Midlands, Kent Krueger moderated a fascinating panel called "The Me You Never Knew."  And among other things, I seem to recall, he asked his panelists—Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, Sharan Newman, Ellen Hart, and me—to 'fess up to something we’d never before revealed about ourselves.  I can’t remember what I confessed there, but I know what I should have blurted out.

I’m a recreational reader of books on organizing and time management.

There. I’ve said it.  I’m a productivity geek.

I have a whole shelf of these books in my bedroom, where they’re convenient for whiling away attacks of insomnia with a little self-improvement.  Since I bought one or two of them from Amazon, back in the days before I realized that my friendly local indies would gladly feed my habit, I get an email from Amazon every time a new book on the subject comes out.  Occasionally I do a little surfing to find out if anyone’s done a killer site on organizing. 

Ironically, people who know me through my books seem to think I’ve got this whole organizing thing down pat, because Meg is so organized.  And even friends who only know me online sometimes think I’m organized because I often mention organizing projects or ideas in my posts.  I hate to disillusion anyone, but the reason I’m so interested in the subject is that I have so much to learn.

But a couple of years ago I ran into a book that is actually starting to make a difference in my ability to get and stay organized—Getting Things Done, by David Allen. 

For anyone who hasn’t read it, Allen contends that a main source of stress and unproductivity is trying to keep everything in our heads, instead of in some system. He recommends that you:
•    Capture everything that has your attention.
•    Process it all to see what you need to do with it.
•    Organize the resulting information into a trusted system that includes a list of your projects, a list of the next actions you could take on those projects, and a "someday/maybe" list—things you can’t tacklenow but might eventually.
•    Review your system regularly.
•    And get stuff done . . . because moving all this stuff out of your head and into a trusted system can free up an enormous amount of mental bandwidth.

Long before I read Getting Things Done, I noticed both the benefits and shortcomings of to do lists.  I suffer often from insomnia of the "can't turn my brain off" kind.  I learned that by doing a brain dump--grabbing a pad of paper and writing down everything that was in my head--everything I had to do or wanted to do or didn’t want to do, everything that was nagging at me--it helped the insomnia.  Especially if I committed to start working through the list in the morning.  And if I did that regularly most nights, life got a lot less chaotic.  Especially if I kept each night’s list and updated it instead of starting from scratch.  So I started typing my list into the computer as a Word document, and . . . you get the idea.  I’d created a rudimentary version of Allen’s trusted system.  Far from perfect, but still a giant leap forward from any of my previous organizational schemes. 

At the same time, I was writing about Meg, who is superbly organized, though bad at saying no to her family. In Murder with Peacocks, she is rarely without her "notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe," as she calls her organizer.  In Murder with Puffins, she notes "For some reason, people interpret my attachment to my organizer as a sign that I am unnaturally organized. I’m not, really; just the opposite.  I long ago accepted the fact that if I write something down, I’ll probably get it done, and if I don’t, all bets are off."  And in Owls Well That Ends Well, she is juggling far too many projects, and reports that "the only thing that kept me from panicking was that they were all neatly jotted down in the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant to-do list.  Once they were in the notebook, I could manage not to think of them all the time."

In other words, she’d figured out how to keep all the stuff she had to do out of her head by putting it into a system. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, Meg had read Getting Things Done—even though at the time I wrote that, I hadn’t. Maybe I should sit down and figure out what else she’s doing that I could learn from.

I’m definitely going to keep working on implementing the GTD system, because—big insight I managed all by myself, without Meg’s help—it solves one of the biggest stumbling blocks I have to overcome in my writing—the desire to achieve a clean slate before I start.  I’ve seen a lot of people sabotage themselves by not feeling able to sit down and write if they have anything else hanging over them.  An upcoming appointment, a meeting, an undone project, a messy desk—it’s all too easy to say, "I’ll just finish these few things and then I’ll be able to concentrate better on my writing."  Maybe. But maybe, when those few things are gone, you’ll think of another few things that are equally pressing, equally urgent . . . and before you know it, your writing time is gone, eaten up by things that could have waited until after you did your day’s writing. 

I’ve learned, most of the time, to ignore the siren calls of competing projects—learned not so much how to put them out of my mind as how to shove them aside and write anyway.  But the more I work this GTD thing, the better luck I have achieving what Allen calls "mind like water'’—a mind that’s clear, empty of distractions, and ready to focus fully on the task at hand.

That’s definitely worth working on.

And as a side benefit, since discovering GTD, I’m sort of sneaking up on the idea of dumping all those other books on organization and time management. Maybe I won’t be needing them quite so much any more.