Getting Things Down the David Allen system of managing all your actions is to hard. sure make your lists , assemble things, then do them. when you don’t feel like it do something else on your list. One way he sells it is
- Make decisions about what next Actions are required
- Put the outcomes and actions down in written form
- Look at the lists and do things
3. Of course being the hard part, because after all how do you just look at a list and do things? It seems easy to say and much harder to do when the wife is bitching at you to take out the trash, the boss is screaming where’s his report, the kid has just discovered porn on the computer, who the hell has time to do anything? I have of course been focused on two things lately, directed practice, targeted exercises to improve skills in doing things, and learning how to sit, in the Buddhist kind of way. Sitting actually being the more complicated of things because you are told to drop all thoughts of the evil boss, the evil kid, the evil wife, the evil crossing guard, they really mean all thoughts. Sitting is directed practice for paying attention to your life.
I always thought of Buddhism as this weird non-existence of self, Zen kind of eastern thing, if you were a Buddhist you smoke a lot of dope, hang with beat poets and naked hippie chicks? But sitting and dropping all your thoughts and just paying attention to one thing, that’s actually hard. The torrents of one’s thoughts are much more fascinating then that next breath.
But if you can pay attention to the one breath, then you can pay attention to the blog post, the accounting , the drawing, the wall painting, the lamp hanging, the drawing, your actually free to pay attention to what you have to get done.