Quote Originally Posted by Tom.9 View Post
To reach that peace,
- do you check all NA against the 5 horizons of focus?
- do you have time-limits on doing stuff which canīt be finished in one run ?
(i.e. you clean up only for 1 hour even if it would be finished after 2 hours?)
- what about backlog ?
I came at GTD top down. I have a well defined purpose/mission statement for my life and that is reflected in every area of focus and project I have both in my active and someday/maybe lists. So in a sense yes, all my scheduled actions are aligned with my higher levels. That was easy for me to do. I think something about the realities of nature's pace mean that farming, by definition, gives you a bit of a longer view of your work than many other types of jobs.

I sometimes set time limits but usually the deciding factor is energy levels or the pressure from pre-defined work that is time dependent. I can decide to work all day on a project but I still have to do the evening chores for the animals, fix dinner etc. Sometimes I set alarms on my phone to get me to work on a task for X many minutes or hours then I am free to move on. That's for jobs I am avoiding.

One bad habit is if I know that I can't finish a task in one sitting my tendency is to leave all the materials and stuff to work on it out. My thinking is I'll get more done if I am not spending time getting ready and putting away. However that clutters up my spaces so it becomes harder and harder to work on anything as all the in process tasks and materials are all over. My tactic now is I am slowly figuring out ways to make project boxes or other containers that I can dump the materials for in process work in when I am done and neatly store them away until next time. I've implemented that first for my WIP knitting projects and it's working great so I'm expanding that method to a lot of other projects.

Backlog is still a bit of a problem. When we inherited the farm we had a backlog that spanned many buildings. I'm slowly crunching through that backlog. Most of the outdoors physical backlog is now handled. The garage has the last remaining bits and one barn. The inside paper, photos and digital files backlog is still quite large but I am making progress.