I know I go through cycles of adhering to the GTD system. One of the issues for me is all the things I've stored in the someday/maybe... in OmniFocus I use the on hold project status to place those items.
It's easy for me to get down on myself for all the 'great' ideas that I haven't gotten to. I'm working on learning when to drop a project, which is in the GTD book. Here are some quotes from the book on page 226 (of my copy)
Quote:
The Source of Negative Thinking
Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there is always too much to do. If you felt bad simply because there was more to do than you could do, you'd never get rid of that feeling. Having too much to do is not the source of the negative feeling. It comes from a different place.
How have you felt when someone broke an agreement with you? Told you they would meet you Thursday at 4:00 p.m. and never showed or called? How did that feel? Frustrating, I imagine. The price people pay when they break agreements in the world is the disintegration of trust in the relationship--a negative consequence.
But what are all those things in your in-basket? Agreements you've made with yourself. Your negative feelings are simply the result of breaking those agreements--they're the symptoms of disintegrated self-trust. If you tell yourself to draft a strategic plan, when you don't do it, you'll feel bad. Tell yourself to get organized, and if you fail to, welcome to guilt and frustration.
Resolve to spend more time with your kids and don't--voila! anxious and overwhelmed.
How Do You Prevent Broken Agreements with Yourself?
If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:
• Don't make the agreement.
• Complete the agreement.
• Renegotiate the agreement.
All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.
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The book goes on to explain these three in details.
Here is the first paragraph from each of those:
Quote:
Don't Make the Agreement
It probably felt pretty good to take a bunch of your old stuff, decide that you weren't going to do anything with it, and just toss it into the trash. One way to handle an incompletion in your world is to just say no!
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Quote:
Complete the Agreement
Of course, another way to get rid of the negative feelings about your stuff is to just finish it and be able to mark it off as done. You actually love to do things, as long as you get the feeling that you've completed something.
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Quote:
Renegotiate Your Agreement
Suppose I'd told you I would meet you Thursday at 4:00 p.m., but after I made the appointment, my world changed. Now, given my new priorities, I decide I'm not going to meet you Thursday at four. But instead of simply not showing up, what had I better do, to maintain the integrity of the relationship? Correct -- call and change the agreement. A renegotiated agreement is not a broken one.
Do you understand yet why getting all your stuff out of your head and in front of you makes you feel better? Because you automatically renegotiate your agreements with yourself when you look at them, think about them, and either act on them that very moment or say, 'No, not now.' Here's the problem: it's impossible to renegotiate the agreements with yourself that you can't remember you made!
The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at the same time.
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This is the part I'm working with in GTD. Learning when to drop something, and when to file it for reference as 'good ideas' that I will never get to, and when to keep it on the list.
In my weekly review I take a look at completed projects before I archive. I do this for celebrate completed projects.
I find that I don't have as many projects as I would like to see there. Part of the problem is many of my projects are indefinite with repeating tasks. When I look at completed projects those projects don't show up, even if I have completed a great deal that week.
These are usually maintenance projects; maintaining the GTD system, house cleaning, errands, grocery shopping, fitness and other life projects that are habits I want to get into.
One solution would be for me to have all the actions not repeat and repeat the project. However, when I complete all the actions of a project, I feel that OmniFocus hides that project from me in the contexts. I don't know that I need to complete it. If I don't remember that a certain action is associated with a project and this is the last action of the project and then flip to the project side, search for the project in the project list to complete the project so that it repeats, then the project hangs there... stalled.
The actions don't show up the next day because I didn't repeat the project. And so I don't trust OmniFocus to show me a project with no actions (or action group with no actions) that needs to be completed. Therefore, I don't repeat projects or action groups as much as I would like because there is a risk of that project or action group stalling. And so, I repeat actions and never see my work in the completed projects list.
One of the great things about GTD is when I fall off the wagon, it's still there when I get back on. It can take some time to clear the decks again, process all the collection buckets, but then I'm right back on.