So you’re sitting at your desk, trying to focus on a piece of creative work – but it’s hard to concentrate, there’s something nagging at your attention. Suddenly it pops into your mind – you’ve forgotten something urgent! Or even worse, you get a phone call or an e-mail out of the blue demanding to know why you haven’t delivered on a promise. Or you notice a post-it on the floor, which has fallen off your monitor, containing a reminder to DO SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT… by yesterday.
If this happens to you often enough, you get used to living with a constant low-level anxiety – scanning your memory, your desk, your e-mails, you post-its, your scattered to-do lists – as you worry that you’ve forgotten something important. When you agree to do something, you may write it down – but can you be 100% sure you’ll notice the note in time to do it? Or if you’re out and about and make a commitment, how can you be sure you’ll remember to put it on your to-do list when you get back to the office? Wherever you go, whatever you’re doing, somewhere at the back of your mind you’re wondering whether you’ve forgotten something vital that could blow up in your face at any moment.
How about this for an alternative?
- What if you could dedicate fully 100 percent of your attention to whatever was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction?
- It’s a condition of working, doing, and being in which the mind is clear…
- Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don’t operate with a “mind like water”.
No, it’s not an ancient Zen text – these words are lifted from David Allen’s best-selling book on productivity, Getting Things Done. When I read this section of the book, I grasped the true value of having a system for managing your workload – not merely to be more productive but to reclaim your own mind by clearing out unnecessary mental clutter caused by trying to keep track of all your work commitments.
Before discovering the Getting Things Done system, I would typically have several to-do lists on the go at once, on different sheets of paper, not to mention the post-it notes stuck to my monitor. But I wasn’t in the habit of writing everything down, so there were always several items I had to remember at any one time. I was vaguely aware that the effort to remember – and anxiety about forgetting – was taking up valuable mental energy and clouding my mind. I resented this all the more, because I had experienced the opposite. I had been on retreats where I had experienced a wonderful mental clarity and peace of mind after several days of silent meditation. But each time the retreat ended, I was frustrated when this clarity was eroded by the demands of everyday life.
When I read David Allen’s book, I saw the possibility of experiencing the clarity of a ‘mind like water’ in the midst of my daily work. Apart from the obvious emotional benefits, I could see that it would help my creativity – the ‘mind like water’ state sounds very similar to creative flow as described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: ‘an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness’.
So how does David Allen suggest we can achieve this state of mind while dealing with the pressures of work?
Set up ‘buckets’ to capture your commitments
‘Buckets’ are physical or virtual containers where you capture important information, demands and commitments so that they can’t ‘leak’ away and be forgotten. You should have as few of these as possible, but as many of them as you need.
Here are my buckets:
- A plastic in-tray for incoming letters, business cards, papers, meeting notes, scribbled to-do lists, etc.
- My e-mail inbox
- The inbox on iGTD – the software I use to manage my to-do lists
- My two answerphones (one mobile, one landline)
- The ‘Drafts’ folder on my mobile phone – I always carry my phone with me, so if I have an idea or make a commitment when I’m out and about, I write a text message to myself and save it in the drafts folder.
Important:
- Put ALL your commitments into these buckets. Even if I think I can remember a task easily, it will take up valuable mental space – if I put into one of these buckets, I will get it off my mind.
- NEVER put a commitment anywhere but in your buckets. If I don’t put it in one of the above places, I have to assume it won’t happen. So I’ve trained myself to do it. This was a bit odd at first, now it’s almost automatic and I feel a slight sense of relief each time I get something off my mind and into a bucket.
Benefits
- When you get things off your mind you can forget about them and give your full attention to whatever you’re doing in the moment – such as your creative work.
- You’ll stop forgetting important things – the number of commitments I’ve forgotten has dropped dramatically since using this system.
- You’ll stop worrying about forgetting things – see above.
- You can easily review your commitments – so you’re less likely to take on more than you can manage.
So am I now living in a constant state of blissful peace and clarity? Not quite. If that’s your goal then it’s hard to beat the monastic routine. But I’ve definitely removed one big source of stress from my life – the effort of remembering important commitments and the danger of forgetting them. I’ve been using the ‘buckets’ system long enough to know that once I put a task in a bucket, I won’t forget it. So once I’ve made a note, I can stop thinking about it and concentrate on whatever I’m doing right now.
Yes but…
- I don’t like the idea of having to write everything down – Neither did I. But once I tried the system, I found the benefits easily outweighed the effort. Now it’s become a habit and I hardly notice it.
- It’s all very well capturing all this stuff in buckets, but how do I know I’ll do anything about it? That’s what the next post is about - stay tuned…
How about you?
- What difference would it make to your life if you knew you would never forget another important commitment?
- What would it be like if you could get your commitments off your mind and stay focused in the present?
- What difference would it make to know that you could review all your current commitments by looking in 5 or 6 convenient ‘buckets’?
- What buckets do you / could you use to capture your commitments?
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