Getting Things Done (30 page)

If you’re like most people who go through the full collection process, you probably felt some form of anxiety. Descriptive terms like “overwhelmed,” “panic,” “frustration,” “fatigue,” and “disgust” tend to come up when I ask seminar participants to describe their emotions in going through a minor version of this procedure. And is there anything you think you’ve procrastinated on in that stack? If so, you have guilt automatically associated with it—“I could have, should have, ought to have (before now) done this.”

At the same time, did you experience any sense of release, or relief, or control as you did the drill? Most people say yes, indeed. How does that happen? Totally opposite emotional states showing up as you’re doing a single exercise, almost at the same time—anxiety and relief; overwhelmed and in control. What’s going on here?

When you understand the source of your negative feelings about all your stuff, you’ll discover, as I did, the way to get rid of them. And if you experienced any positive feelings from collecting your stuff, you actually began the process of eliminating the negativity yourself.

Where do the not-so-good feelings come from? Too much to do? No, there’s 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—voilà! anxious and overwhelmed.

If the negative feelings come from broken agreements, you have three options for dealing with them and eliminating the negative consequences:

All of these can work to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.

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!

You’d lighten up if you would just lower your standards. If you didn’t care so much about things being up to a certain level—your parenting, your school system, your team’s morale, the software code—you’d have fewer things to do.
¹⁴

I doubt you’re going to lower your standards. But once you really understand what it means, you’ll probably make fewer agreements. I know I did. I used to make a lot of them, just to win people’s approval. When I realized the price I was paying on the back end for not keeping those agreements, I became a lot more conscious about the ones I made. One insurance executive I worked with described the major benefit he derived from implementing this system: “Previously I would just tell everyone, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’ because I didn’t know how much I really had to do. Now that I’ve got the inventory clear and complete, just to maintain my integrity I have had to say, ‘No, I can’t do that, I’m sorry.’ The amazing thing is that instead of being upset with my refusal, everyone was impressed by my discipline!”

Another client, an entrepreneur in the personal coaching business, recently told me that making an inventory of his work had eliminated a huge amount of worry and stress from his life. The discipline of putting everything he had his attention on into his in-basket caused him to reconsider what he really wanted to do
anything
about. If he wasn’t willing to toss a note about it into “in,” he just let it go!

I consider that very mature thinking. One of the best things about this whole method is that when you really take the responsibility to capture and track what’s on your mind, you’ll think twice about making commitments internally that you don’t really need or want to make. Not being aware of all you have to do is much like having a credit card for which you don’t know the balance or the limit—it’s a lot easier to be irresponsible.

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. If you’ve begun to complete less-than-two-minute actions as they surface in your life, I’m sure you can attest to the psychological benefit. Most of my clients feel fantastic after just a couple of hours of processing their piles, just because of how many things they accomplish using the two-minute rule.

One of your better weekends may be spent just finishing up a lot of little errands and tasks that have accumulated around your house and in your personal life. Invariably when you capture all the open loops, little and big, and see them on a list in front of you, some part of you will be inspired (or creatively disgusted or intimidated enough) to go knock them off the list.

We all seem to be starved for a win. It’s great to satisfy that by giving yourself doable tasks you can start and finish easily.

Have you ever completed something that wasn’t initially on a list, so you wrote it down and checked it off? Then you know what I mean.

There’s another issue here, however. How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days, guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.

Not only that, but if you have a boss, what do you think he or she is going to do, after noticing the high levels of competency and productivity you’re demonstrating? Right again—give you more things to do! It’s the catch-22 of professional development: the better you get, the better you’d
better
get.

So, since you’re not going to significantly lower your standards, or stop creating more things to do, you’d better get comfortable with the third option, if you want to keep from stressing yourself out.

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 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.

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably got some storage area at home—maybe a garage that you told yourself a while back (maybe even six years ago!) you ought to clean and organize. If so, there’s a part of you that likely thinks you should’ve been cleaning your garage twenty-four hours a day for the past six years! No wonder people are so tired! And have you heard that little voice inside your own mental committee every time you walk by your garage? “Why are we walking by the garage?! Aren’t we supposed to be cleaning it!?” Because you can’t stand that whining, nagging part of yourself, you never even go in the garage anymore if you can help it. If you want to shut that voice up, you have three options for dealing with your agreement with yourself:

I’m quite sincere about this. It seems that there’s a part of our psyche that doesn’t know the difference between an agreement about cleaning the garage and an agreement about buying a company. In there, they’re both just agreements—kept or broken. If you’re holding something only internally, it will be a broken agreement if you’re not moving on it in the moment.

This method is significantly different from traditional time-management training. Most of those models leave you with the impression that if something you tell yourself to do isn’t that important, then it’s not that important—to track, manage, or deal with. But in my experience that’s inaccurate, at least in terms of how a less-than-conscious part of us operates. It
is
how our conscious mind operates, however, so every agreement must be made conscious. That means it must be captured, objectified, and reviewed regularly in full conscious awareness so that you can put it where it belongs in your self-management arena. If that doesn’t happen, it will actually take up a lot more psychic energy than it deserves.

In my experience, anything that is held only in “psychic RAM” will take up either more or less attention than it deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it’s that it’s
not.
Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up.

You’ll feel better collecting
anything
that you haven’t collected yet. When you say to yourself, “Oh, that’s right, I need to get butter next time I’m at the store,” and you write it on your grocery list, you’ll feel better. When you remember, “I’ve got to call my banker about the trust fund,” and you write that down someplace where you know you’ll see it when you’re at a phone, you’ll feel better. But there will be a light-year’s difference when you know you have it
all.

When will you know how much you have left in your head to collect? Only when there’s nothing left. If some part of you is even vaguely aware that you don’t have it all, you can’t really know what percentage you have collected. How will you know when there’s nothing left? When nothing else shows up as a reminder in your mind.

This doesn’t mean that your mind will be empty. If you’re conscious, your mind will always be focusing on something. But if it’s focusing on only one thing at a time, without distraction, you’ll be in your “zone.”

I suggest that you use your mind to think
about
things, rather than think
of
them. You want to be
adding
value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist. To fully realize that more productive place, you will need to capture it all. It takes focus and a change of habit to train yourself to recognize and download even the smallest agreements with yourself as they’re created in your mind. Doing the collection process as fully as you can, and then incorporating the behavior of capturing all the new things as they emerge, will be empowering and productive.

What happens when everyone involved on a team—in a marriage, in a department, on a staff, in a family, in a company—can be trusted not to let anything slip through the cracks? Frankly, once you’ve achieved that, you’ll hardly think about whether people are dropping the ball anymore—there will be much bigger things to occupy your attention.

But if communication gaps are still an issue, there’s likely some layer of frustration and a general nervousness in the culture. Most people feel that without constant baby-sitting and hand-holding, things could disappear in the system and then blow up at any time. They don’t realize that they’re feeling this because they’ve been in this situation so consistently that they relate to it as if it were a permanent law, like gravity. It doesn’t have to be that way.