Getting Things Done - GTD
Gaining Control Through Reflection
AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez
"In the end, we only regret the chances we didn't take, relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make." ~ Lewis Carroll
We have seen how we can achieve a very high level of control in our life by capturing everything that holds our interest, clarifying what each thing means and deciding what to do with it, and organizing all those reminders so that we can easily access them at the right time.
Processing everything that comes into your life, applying a strategic vision and making decisions about the things that affect your work and personal life is, in itself, a high-value behavior worth acquiring.
Moreover, this work allows you to keep all your commitments in a kind of “extended mind” and, therefore, free your head to do the real work in a calm way.
Now, to achieve a continuous effect of freedom, focus and personal productivity, you need to pay due attention to that inventory of commitments and interests that you have built. A system that isn’t used, isn’t a system.
That is why the fourth stage of the GTD methodology consists of reflecting on the system you have generated, something necessary to absorb the information it contains in a consistent way, which provides you with motivation and focus.
Reflecting consists of regularly reviewing your system with two objectives that, although different in nature, go hand in hand:
- A practical one: to keep the content up to date, so that it continues to be useful.
- A strategic one: To give it the right perspective, so that it leads you down the right path.
Keeping content up to date
One of the main reasons why people abandon GTD or any other personal management system is because they have not managed to have a complete and updated system. And if they have succeeded, they have not known how to keep it in that state with consistency. A system that is not up to date generates more stress than it is capable of alleviating.
It is essential to review the system’s information and update it so that it fits your reality at all times. You will only be confident enough to fully rely on it if you know that its content is up to date and consistent with your objectives.
The world changes very fast and, surely, so does your life. It’s very likely that your calendar contains events that have already happened, but you haven’t deleted because there is some unfinished business to resolve. Or it may contain upcoming events that require some action that you hadn’t thought of before.
You may have some notes from a meeting in your notebook that you have not yet had time to process and determine what actions and projects need to be extracted from them.
You may have items on your list of next actions that you haven’t had time to eliminate, or to reflect on whether anything else needs to be done.
Your priorities and projects are constantly changing, and you need your system to reflect those changes. The Weekly Review is GTD’s proposal to keep your system up to date, updated and reliable.
Reflecting with perspective
On a day-to-day basis you are doing things, and when you are doing one thing, you don’t think about the others. That’s the way it should be: effectiveness requires concentration.
In a typical work day, most of the time you will be executing tasks and capturing new issues. When you have time, you will clarify your captures and organize them. It is very likely that, by the very nature of the work, you will operate with a level of perspective that is not very high. Your thinking will be mostly focused at the level of actions and projects, you will rarely think at the levels of focus areas and goals, and virtually never at higher levels of vision and life purpose.
That is the reason why, in addition to updating your inventory of commitments through the Weekly Review, you need to establish some mechanism that forces you to reflect on the higher levels of perspective from time to time.
That mechanism can be something as simple as a periodic reminder to take a bigger picture review. Although if you feel like you’re getting swept up in the day-to-day and don’t have a clear sense of where you’re headed, you shouldn’t wait for the moment you’ve scheduled. It’s always good to stop, take a breath, raise your head and review the big picture from a higher vantage point.
As David Allen says, “you can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing”.
Reflecting allows you to renegotiate with yourself which commitments are now more important and which are no longer important.
How often should you reflect on the different levels of perspective? It depends on your activity. If you move in a fast-paced environment, you will need to review them more often to prevent outdated aspects of your life and career from getting in the way of your progress.
The point is, if you don’t review your issues as often as you should, they will once again take up totally unproductive space in your head. A part of your brain will keep doing “constant reviews” of those things you are not at peace with. That is, if you don’t consciously and clearly reflect on your commitments, your brain will try to compensate by thinking about them in a vague and diffuse way all the time.
If you know for sure that your career goals are not going to change in the next two years, you don’t need to revisit them every three months. It’s up to you. All GTD principles are based on you paying adequate attention to the things that matter to you, no more and no less.
Reflect periodically on the different perspective horizons, and do so as often as it allows you not to think about them at any other time.
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