Getting Things Done - GTD
Gaining Perspective
AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez
"Only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road." ~ Dag Hammarskjöld.
Gaining Perspective:
1. Gaining Perspective
2. Gaining Perspective Through Actions
We mentioned a while ago that personal productivity is achieved through a balance between two elements:
- Organization. You need an efficient structure that allows you to store all your commitments, reminders and related materials. Good organization is the basis of any productive system and is achieved through control.
- Focus. You need something to help you concentrate without distractions on those commitments that are most important at any given moment. Meaningful work is achieved through perspective.
Organization is quantitative work that gives you a tremendous sense of clarity, but it is not an end in itself. You need to add a qualitative approach to the equation.
The most effective way to achieve this balance is to gain control before approaching the perspective. By gaining control of your work and personal life through capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting and executing actions, you are also developing the right mindset to establish a higher-level prioritization approach.
If you have already managed to get all your things under control, you have a complete inventory of pending or ongoing actions and projects that gives you a gratifying sense of control. Everything you need is there and there is nothing anywhere else.
Now, which of all these actions should you focus on? Where should you put your attention? Are there projects that were interesting a while ago and now don’t seem so interesting? Which projects are really important to you right now? This is where perspective comes into play.
Perspective is key to maintain control
Without the power to decide which elements of your organizational system should be eliminated because they have lost interest or become obsolete, and which elements should be moved to the front line because their time has come, it will be very easy to lose control again.
It’s easy to forget perspective because the relative control that organization produces makes you feel great, especially if you were completely disorganized before.
But if you ignore perspective your list of commitments will grow and the sense of control will soon disappear. To maintain control of your system it’s necessary to review, recalibrate and update the meaning of all the elements that compose it.
You will never have total control if you neglect perspective. You need to apply it to be the Captain & Commander of your life.
Controlling the horizons of perspective
Perspective develops when you gain sufficient control, so, in theory, if you fully and correctly implement the five stages to gain control, no additional procedure should be necessary to reach a good standard.
By regularly capturing, clarifying and reviewing all the things that catch your attention in the different horizons of your life, your ability to choose what to do at any given moment should be pretty good.
However, perspective is something that is in constant movement and the human being is sufficiently complex that each of these horizons must be dealt with in a dedicated and separate manner.
Let’s briefly recall the different horizons that make up the perspective according to GTD, from bottom to top:
- Next Actions: These are the physical and visible activities you need to undertake to move a situation forward toward completion.
- Projects: Any outcome that requires more than one action to resolve.
- Areas of Focus: The different facets of your life in which you want to improve or maintain a good level.
- Goals: The achievements you want to reach in the medium term, usually in one or two years, both in your personal life and in your work.
- Vision: It’s the image you would like to project of yourself in the not too distant future, from three to five years.
- Purpose: What gives your life meaning.
Guidelines for working on your perspective
Focus on one horizon at a time
GTD consultants recommend focusing on a single horizon at a time. Even so, exploring one level of perspective will trigger thoughts and discoveries at other levels, which you should capture and integrate. Thinking about a certain project may remind you of a goal you wanted to include or nuance, thinking about a goal may open your mind to pay attention to a new area of focus, etc.
Don’t avoid the process
Be careful, because it’s very common to procrastinate this process. I myself have done it for a long time. The reason is that, as you move up the ladder of horizons, you gradually move out of your comfort zone to face issues that tend to generate uneasiness and insecurity.
It’s not so easy to think about what you want to do and where you want to be in the future, or what your most important values are, because we tend to contrast them with the sometimes harsh reality of today.
But you won’t regret it, the result can be very rewarding in terms of clarity. To have total control of your life you need to have a greater awareness of all aspects of it.
Better from the bottom up
For most people it makes more sense to start working at the lower levels (actions and projects) and work their way up from there, for several reasons:
- It can be overwhelming to start thinking about the higher horizons of your career and personal life.
- It’s easier to gain control in the more mundane activities.
- As you gain awareness and control over your commitments at a certain level, your confidence to tackle the higher level increases.
Achieving a certain sense of control first will greatly help you face higher levels of perspective, which require a lot of clarity and capacity for reflection. As in famous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it makes more sense to address the basic needs of personal and professional life before other higher aspects.
That said, there may be situations where the perspective needs to be aborted from the top down, or from different levels. If the president of a company urgently needs to clarify his strategic vision, then he’d better start there.
Actually, the ultimate guideline you should use to focus on a level of perspective is to identify which one grabs your attention. It makes perfect sense to pay more attention to what has your attention.
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