In Search of Kingdom Living

A while ago on this blog, I added a category called ‘mind-sweep‘. It’s a pretty helpful tool for processing all the clutter in your head. Sad to say, I haven’t been doing it very regularly since then. I was blog surfing one day, and read an entry by Prof John Stackhouse (of Regent College) talk about the useful source of the mind-sweep – the book getting things done by David Allen.

This book offers some great ideas about productivity and time management. The website has some very good (and free) audio and print resources.

Instead of me writing out some comments about the book, I will defer to some commentary by Prof Stackhouse.

But it’s a wonderful book. It differs from the usual, and helpful, “time management” books with their top-down approach (”Decide what you really want to get done and then give it priority”–you know, “The Main Thing Is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing” and such)–by moving from the bottom up. There’s your desk, strewn with paper. Worse, here’s your mind, littered with all kinds of stuff you care about and are trying not to forget, from the meeting in an hour, to the argument you had with your beloved this morning, to the errands you have to run on the way home, to…. Getting Things Done is all about organizing your life in order to let you be truly, fully present in this moment–with confidence that everything else is in order and will be dealt with in due course.

Allen has at least one other diamond to offer, the sharp-edged, crystal-clear advice to make sure that you never leave off dealing with an issue before you decide, “What is the next action-step? What is the next particular thing I must do?”

Most of us write crummy memos to ourselves such as “Plan trip” or “Get car fixed” or “Clean the garage.” And then we wonder why nothing gets done. Instead, says Allen, you have to envision and articulate the actual next thing to be done: “Look up telephone number for travel agent” or “Check calendar for days open to bring in the car” or “Buy work gloves for cleaning the garage.” Once that task is accomplished, articulate exactly what the next thing is to do.

(This is also excellent advice, by the way, for dealing with procrastination–not that any readers of this blog ever wrestle with such a problem….)

This book helped me especially with my online habits. Although I still tend to ignore emails/tasks that I find unimportant, I’m able to accomplish all my tasks (electronic or otherwise) in a timely manner. Now I just need to figure out how to work on those troublesome tasks that others find important, but I find troublesome.