As I was taking my Sabbath rest, I picked up my husband's copy of David Allen's Making It All Work and read a bit. Allen is the creator of the Getting Things Done method of self-management.
According to Allen, the biggest obstacle to productivity is all the thoughts of undone tasks that are floating around in our heads; the mind won't let go of them until it knows they are safely done, or at least written down.
So his first step in Getting Things Done is to write all these tasks and projects down in a list.
This seemed like a good idea to me; I have a system where I capture most of my to-dos, but some of them slip away before I can write them down, and others have gotten left behind in the flow of life and written notes.
So I started my list, and I ended up with over two hundred things that I have been thinking about doing. Many of them are quick, five-minute tasks, and some are full-scale projects.
If they were all five-minute projects, it would take me only 17 hours to complete them all, not including the time spent on transitions, equipping, interruptions, and clean-up.
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