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Wayne Pepper
System Bloat
“You are either attracted or repelled by your systems and/or your work.” This is a quote that many of you have heard us say in coachings and in seminars. There are plenty of tips for keeping your lists attractive, but an important key is to keep your lists from becoming too cumbersome. When I have too many items on my lists (for me my Calls and my Computer lists can get huge), I find myself not wanting to even look at them – not good news! I call it “System Bloat.”
I don’t believe there’s any rule for the specific number of items on a list that make it “too long,” I think that’s up to the individual. Some folks have a comfort zone of juggling 100 calls in a day because that’s necessary in their work, but at some point each of us will hit a number where we’ll feel “that’s just too much” and start to resist even looking at the list.
How does System Bloat occur in the first place? We have to face the fact that more will come at us than we can possibly eliminate through completion. We’ll complete many items during the course of a day (depending upon the day) but many more will come at us through email, voicemail, “in-basket” and our own mental thoughts.
What to do? As my lists begin to grow in length past my comfort zone, I know that I need to reexamine my priorities. That’s not to say I start ignoring priority items, it’s just that my criteria for prioritization becomes more stringent.
In addition to growing more discerning with my daily processing and prioritizing, I also do the same during my Weekly Review. If my lists are bloated, I make sure to reevaluate whatever I can during Weekly Review, placing as many Tasks and Projects as feasible into Someday Maybe (or even deleting them if that’s possible).
During the Holidays as an example, I parked several Projects in Someday Maybe, knowing that I just didn’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to devote attention to additional Projects. In order to do what I did however, I had to have the confidence that I would review my Someday Maybe list the very next week to re-evaluate my ability to engage with those items.
If your Someday Maybe list isn’t reviewed once a week during Weekly Review, then it’s turning into a Someday Never, and you’ll lack the confidence that you can safely plant something there and re-engage with it when the time is right.
I have often heard David Allen say that GTD is simple enough to be easy to use when the firehose of work is coming at us, but sophisticated enough to assist us to gain perspective and control. Our job is to keep our systems simple, lean, and highly relevant so that they can work as they’re meant to.
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