My Morning And Getting Things Done Or The Genius of Getting Things Done

My mom hosted Thanksgiving this year. We have our lunch/dinner at 1:00PM. I got home at 5:30PM on Wednesday, but during the day I realized that our (my mom's) house was a mess. There were a thousand things to do between 6:00PM Wednesday and 12:59PM Thursday.

Being the good son I am, I wanted to help. My mom told me to not worry about it Wednesday night. Thursday morning she was getting flustered. We needed ice. We needed to sweep. We needed to clean the bathroom. We needed to walk the dog. We needed to make beds etc. etc. etc. I said we needed to stop and discuss everything that needed to be done and assign tasks, next actions to her, my dad and I. She didn't listen. She just kept doing things. I kept doing things, and my dad kept doing things. We just went after it with no idea what "it" was.

Of course, Thanksgiving went well. Everything that needed to be done was done. Nobody got food poisoning or bacterial infections. But it was a very stressful morning. And my mom did the same thing the next Sunday when she decided to put up her Christmas decorations.

This morning I was waiting for the cable man. An hour after he was supposed to be there, I got a follow-up "how good was our service" call. I immediately called customer service, stayed on hold for 20 minutes, and was told that the repairman had completed the service. It was an outside repair, so he did not need to come in and didn't feel obligated to call me. I was pissed, but this is life in the 21st century.

While I was waiting, I tried to clean my mess of an apartment. I washed some clothes. I picked up some things. I washed some dishes. But I did exactly like my mom, I blindly attacked the mess.

I never really thought that there was a big problem with this way of doing things, but it finally hit me this morning. By jumping right in, I have no idea when I am finished. I have no idea what kind of progress I made this morning. I can't say what I need to finish before I leave tomorrow. I get no sense of accomplishment, and now I am in the office, and I feel like the morning was wasted. I have probably increased my stress-load.

Part of the answer is David Allen's system. But it is really about learning to take a deep breathe before acting. Attacking something blindly might be a way to start things, but it is never a way to finish things. And most of life is about finishing.