Muddled mess

To say there has been a lot going on in my life lately might be a bit of an understatement. At least partly as a result I’ve become rather disorganized and detached. Whether I have an excuse or not is largely irrelevant. I’m a big boy now, or I like to think so most of the time. People depend on me. Things need to get done. Instead I largely bounce from day to day doing whatever is in my face at the moment. I’ve become a muddled mess.

There comes a time when I finally wake up and realize I don’t want to keep living this way. And usually, when it gets to that point, there’s only one thing to do: Allen-ize.

I know at least one of you know what I mean, considering it’s my older brother who put me onto David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” in the first place. Allen’s book outlines an organization program that can really boost one’s productivity. And, I’ll admit, even at my best I don’t follow it. I like to believe it’s because life just doesn’t lend itself to the disciplined routine required, but it’s more likely just that I lack the discipline and determination necessary. I just can’t tell other people to take a hike and leave me my habitual organization time.

But there’s one technique/tool Allen teaches that has always been a big help, and that’s probably more an indicator of my personality than anything else. Allen’s process begins with what he calls a “mind sweep”. The idea is to spend some time going over every aspect of your life and writing down every little thing, no matter how big or how small, that you need to do (or at least feel you should do). The next step is to organize and prioritize that list based on what is most important and where you need to be to do it. In many cases you need to identify those items that are projects rather than tasks, and further break them down into tasks.

For example, “Fix the Drywall” is a project, unless you’re weird and you have everything you need to do that. For me it would require multiple steps, such as “get patching material”, “watch YouTube tutorial”, “patch hole”. Otherwise, whenever I go to fix the drywall I’ll run into the fact that I don’t have anything to patch it with and don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ll talk myself out of doing it. This instead makes it easier to connect it with other projects and, next time I’m at Home Depot, pick up everything I need for all those separate little projects at once.

Anyway, I know that for some people creating this exhaustive list would be depressing, even overwhelming, and convince them to just give up and go back to bed. For me it’s the opposite. Creating that list makes me feel in control. Not tracking things leaves everything nebulous and overwhelming, fearing at any moment something I’ve forgotten is going to blindside me and turn my life upside down. While that does legitimately happen from time to time, when they’re things I should already know about and I’m just not remembering them–well, that’s self-inflicted chaos, and that just makes me feel worse knowing it was avoidable.

Creating the mind sweep is liberating. Even if I don’t use it for very long, it’s nice knowing that I know what’s hanging out there. I feel in control because there are no surprises. I can prioritize, and can give myself permission to stop caring about some things on that list because they’re clearly not as important as some other things and really can be put off indefinitely. Knowing is half the battle.

The other half is remembering, and for some reason, once I’ve written something down in order to remember it I usually no longer need that list to help me remember it. Not always, and usually not for more than the top five to ten items, but it usually make a big difference.

So anyway, yeah. It’s time I did a mind sweep. I’m losing control of my life, and it’s time I did something about that. I don’t like being a muddled mess.