Posts Tagged ‘Personal Productivity’

We often struggle with deciding what to do, as there’s so much of it to go. And then, when we do know what we have lined up for the day, we then struggle with our mental chatter, otherwise known as ‘procrastination’.

In other words, we have to fight two battles – we have to take arms against the external forces of the world, then we have to take arms against our internal forces.

While David Allen provided some very incredible and useful tips in Getting Things Done for organising our ‘stuff’ and deciding what to spend our days on, there was little in the way of organising and ‘defeating’ the mental chatter that goes on in our heads.

How to actually do something – that’s the problem.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done System points out that the “daily to-do lists don’t work” because of two reasons. One is the constant input of new tasks and shifting of their priorities. This makes your game plan difficult to follow. Another reason is that you water down the emphasis on the unfinished tasks that need to be re-listed for the next day because those have to compete with the new priorities. If you’ve been wondering why your keeping a daily to-do list doesn’t seem to be of any help, you now know why.

The Habit Of Celebrating Milestones is the most important among the three practices (Habit Of To-Do List, Habit Of GTD, and Habit of Celebrating Milestones). Its purpose is to avert the possibility of monotony. The antagonist of maintaining a constant workflow in the workplace is the tendency to fall back to the old ways. The GTD system is prone to constant disruption; that is why a constant care of the system is necessary. You do not want to head on to rigidity. You must celebrate each milestone.