Busyness

At some point juggling exams, work, writing, relationships and relaxation will come crashing down. I’m a bit busy dealing keeping as many balls in the air as a I can but I would recommend popping into Zen Habits. Not only is there some great productivity and GTD resources there, Leo might remind you why you want to be productive and organized in the first place. And any productivity blog that has a Happiness Day can’t be bad!

Goals: worth the paper they are written on?

Rob in 7Breaths: Written Goals – Another Self Help Myth? has exposed some famous anecdotal evidence for”writing down your goals brings success” as completely made up.

But that doesn’t mean that writing down your goals is not a good to do. Writing down your goals forces you to clarify your goals. And if you don’t know what you’re goals are, how can you achieve them? You might, by good luck or the force of your own unconscious, get there in the end. But why make it hard for yourself?

Writing down your goals is not a magic formula that gets you what you want. It is not enough in itself but it can be a useful tool in helping you get what you want. A shopping list helps you get you what you want from a supermarket. Writing it doesn’t magically put food in the fridge.

So even if writing down our goals helps us to achieve them, will this give us “success”? In the story told about the Yale graduates success was defined purely in monetary terms. The richest = the most successful. If money is your only object in life that might be true. But for most sane people it isn’t. Our relationships, creativity, personal growth, making a positive difference to people around us. These are all important goals.

Don’t let someone else define success for you. Write your own goals – the things that matter to you. Achieving those. That is success.

Productivity vs Information

Ever feel like your head is so full you can’t think? Ever find yourself unable to move because you have too many choices to make? Then you know what Information Overload is.

Gordon R. Vaughan over on All Things has a post all about Overload and that new Web Phenomenon, Twitter. I have yet to try Twitter. I am a little wary of it. I am someone who can spend hours being bombarded with info and when I come round I discover I have got nothing done.

One of the powerful ideas in David Allen’s Getting Things Done is this: Focus on you goals. This is completely unoriginal but needs to be repeated over and over again (at least to me!). Ask yourself: Does what you are doing get you where you want to go?

This question is a great way to decide if a project or action is worth doing at all (so long as you remember that relaxing, having fun, and being with people you care about are themselves important goals).

I have been trying to apply this to my relationship with information and the net. All too often I have done “research” on the web where I have looked at a mountain of information and got nothing to show for it. I am always convinced that if I just look a little longer I will find the answer/product/GTD system somewhere out there. Looking for the best means I never find (or accept) the good.

Now I limit myself. I will go with the best answer I can find in set amount of time (eg 15 minutes) or by a certain date. I keep notes. I clip weblinks. I even write things down.

The only way to get things done when faced with more opportunities and possibilities than any one person can explore is to accept that you may miss something, silence your inner perfectionist and just get on with it.

If it’s not something immediately mission critical (and how many things are?) get started with a Shitty First Draft.

This is one of the “Things I wish I’d learned in school”:
The first draft will be awful. So will the second. Good writers/productive people are those you keep drafting not those who wait until they are perfect before they start.

Every day I try to remember this lesson. Every day I forget.

The sooner you accept that you will continue to fail but you mustn’t fail to continue the happier and more productive you will be.