To say everything went as planned this week would imply a cruel outlook for myself. After feeling incredibly sick in the middle of the day, calling off work, and spending nearly 20 hours in bed, it’s safe to say I didn’t quite get what I wanted to done in accordance to the original vision for the week. Instead I took the time I needed to recover, assessed my to do list and worked to get back on course.
A Good System Doesn’t Fail
In my adulthood, I’ve always had a hard time sticking to specific daily schedules like I would have in structured systems like college. I say college and not school before due to not really being able to construct days as freely.
In college, I had both specific classes as well as a team practice of a specific type for a given day of the week. For example, a Tuesday would be economics classes in the morning and afternoon with a medium run and weights for practice. Each Tuesday, I was able to frame my mind for those given scenarios. For some reason, in adulthood, I’ve just found it much more difficult to create that structure freely.
Still, I try to have a rough plan for how a week may go. I’ll jot down when a certain event is happening or when I think I’ll be able to tackle a given task. With the help of friends, I’ve been able to set up a pretty solid climbing routine on Mondays, Thursdays. and Saturdays, but even that has some flexibility.
Sometimes these items shift around slightly. I might get groceries a day later than planned or I push an item from the weekend to the next Monday after a long weekend. This flexibility hit critical mass after I hit the aforementioned sick days that wiped me out of commission for a day and a half. During that time I mostly laid in bed with my eyes closed and was sometimes asleep.
I didn’t stress about what I was supposed to be working on, because at that point the only thing I needed to do was help myself recover. Once I felt a bit better, I could look to my do next list, and begin work. And in that time, I’ve written this post and wrapped up the first pieces of what should be my first published DnD work.
For that I have to thank the Getting Things Done system I’ve been incorporating.
On Maintaining Lists
One element of GTD that I really enjoy is how easily the maintenance process fits right into one of my existing habits, the weekly review. I think it’s safe to say that the review is the most referenced habit of mine throughout my time writing. It seems to come up at least every other trial, if not more, but that’s because that brief period of time is so critical for not only looking back on the days past, but to also tidy up loose ends and prepare for the next week.
The GTD system insists on having a small maintenance period to organize all new tasks into one set of lists: do next, deferred, and delegated. Do next is the simplest, it’s whatever should be completed next, for example write this blog post. Deferred are those tasks that can or need to wait until a later time, for example write next week’s blog post. Delegated tasks are given to someone else, an area I don’t quite rely on currently. An example there is as simple as a roommate to do the dishes.
There are items that don’t even make it to these lists, and those are any that “take less than two minutes to complete.” If going through tasks reveals anything that can quickly be resolved, it’s best to just do it without worrying about where it falls into the system. Once it’s done, you can forget all about it.
Trying Out Before Buying In 