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February 22, 2007

Challenge - Make it a low priority day

Here's my GTD challenge of the day for you: block out some time to do the relatively low-priority items on your to do lists. That means look at your next action lists and literally pick out the items that tend to be ignored because they're not urgent. Low priority items can lurk on your action lists for a long time, creating psychological resistance to your lists.

The best time to identify any stale items on your list is during the weekly review. If you're looking at your action lists (by the way you're way ahead of the game if you are doing this semi-regularly) and you've found yourself thinking "Something has changed since I put that there", then it's time to review your system and update your lists.

Items tend to get stuck on my lists because they are either ambiguous, stale, or already completed (my favorite, of course). To speak to the ones that need more thank just ticking off the list...

Ambiguous Reminders

-It's not a next action at all. This means it's probably a subproject that needs to be broken down to a more granular next action. What is the next physical visible action I could take to get this off my mind? Another thing I've noticed lately is that I tend to want to create a next action to track everything, but sometimes forget the next action is not mine! It's a "Waiting For" item. Those items need to be securely tracked as well, but they shouldn't clog up my lists of what I can actually make progress on in this moment. Ambiguous reminders mean rethinking the whole scenario every time you see it, not an effective use of energy.

Stale as day-old bread

-New information has changed my purpose, vision, goal, area of responsibility, project, or next action about that reminder item. In my current work with the ever-evolving and quickly expanding GTD Connect program, this happens a lot. It's not unusual for an email, forum post, or phone call to rapidly change what I want to do about any given situation or project. The skill to build over time is the flexibility and intuitive trust in the system to allow those rapid fire changes to go smoothly. The more you review and update your lists, the less you will find lingering stale items. A well maintained action list should give you the freedom to glance at your list and decide what to do based on your physical location and how much time and energy you have available.

The Dare

Look at your action lists now. Are there a few conspicuous items that have been there for a long time? How long have they been there? How would you know? If you care to do an experiment, put the date on the end of that action item or project heading now. In future reviews you'll get a little more information about how long that item has been parked (no forward movement). Please note this is not about making yourself feel guilty for what you're not doing, it's all about helping yourself re-assess why an item has gone stale. Maybe it's absolutely perfect you haven't gotten to that thing yet! But how can you know until you get objective about the situation? In other words, you can't feel good about what you're not doing, until you know what you're not doing.

Posted by Lisa at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)