Wow, I am overwhelmed (emotionally) at the kind and insightful responses from everyone! I've received several emails as well from people expressing their appreciation and personal experiences that relate to my own, and it's been incredibly humbling!
tonyp;111466 said:
Wow! I can't believe how close to home that hits, Evan. I think you perfectly summarized a LOT of people's reasons for constantly falling off the GTD wagon. We ARE overcommitted, plain and simple. I'm going to print your article and review it a couple more times through the end of this year, and make whatever adjustments are necessary to have LESS things to focus on.
Great idea! I'm going to do the same. I've already found myself slipping on some of my own advice, and it's clear I need some reminders to help break old habits.
tonyp;111466 said:
I'd also add that some people are much better delegators than others. It's something I constantly struggle with, especially as somebody who is good at "doing" a lot of different things. It's hard to let go. But, from my experience, many of the folks who are truly successful are the ones who have invested in others (or some type of automated system) to offload the "low-payoff" activities from their plates, which frees them up to pursue the "high-payoff" activities.
Again, great article. Thanks for sharing. I'll definitely be exploring your blog as well. I'm particularly interested in learning about what kind of tools you are using to manage all of your tasks (the ones you have left, that is). ;-)
Cheers,
Tony Pinto
Thanks Tony! My perfectionist tendencies have made me into a control freak with the projects that I care deeply about. It has been very difficult to trust other people to do the quality of job that I would do. Recently, out of necessity, I've started to let go. I'm shocked every day at the talent that surrounds me that I've been blind to. In several cases, the people that I've let take over certain aspects of projects are more skilled and talented at that aspect then myself, and the end result turns out much better! This is one of those things that's incredibly exciting and maniacally frustrating, given how long I've held on to things. Definitely an area I need to keep working on, however.
I have an article on my own personal tools very high up on my list. I need to finish my Omnifocus 2 for iOS review asap first, however. It has gone from unusable for me to one of the most critical pieces of my machine with the update!
Barb;111500 said:
Your blog post was very well written and probably describes lots of people and their experience. I think "failing" is how you learn. I don't really think of anything in my life that didn't go well as failure...just more as feedback and course correction. Now some of that has been HARD feedback and IMMEDIATE course correction, but looking back most of what didn't go well really doesn't feel like failure.
Amen! I'm far better for my failures than I am for my successes. I wish I had learned that much earlier in life. I played it safe for far too long.
ryanirelan;111501 said:
Thanks for sharing, GTDerEvan. One thing that helped me this year was to attend one of the Mastering Workflow seminars. It wasn't inexpensive but even though I thought I knew everything about GTD I found tremendous value in the seminar. It helped set me right when I needed it most.
All the best in your journey!
As I recover from the financial setbacks that my recent "pruning" resulted in, I'd like to take the time and money to invest in one or multiple of these. There is very little that DAC has produced that I haven't found great value in. Thanks for the advice! If you'd like to do a writeup on the value of your experiences there, I think that may provide great value to readers of GTDReviews. Any interest? No pressure, just an option if you'd like to.
Steele;111541 said:
GTDerEvan,
It sounds like you really want to help others, thank you. All the other posts summed up the positives about your article/views pretty well, so let me just say thank you for taking the time!
Young guns like you are the future of GTD. I very much respect that you asked for honest feed back and here it is:
Some of your challenges and solutions, as described in the article, do not well represent the realities faced by the common man/woman. For instance, your solution for over-commitment was to pare back to only two thriving businesses to run.
The average family faces challenges that are a lot more like a stalemate. If they scale back their efforts, they may well lose their house, etc... they probably have far fewer options than you did, yet they suffer the same, or greater, damage from over-whelm as you did. The solution path for most of us will require a careful, synergistic application of multiple strategies together, in just the right way.
To make a real difference-- to bring powerful, insightful solutions & perspectives that greatly help others, you might consider approaching things as an anthropologist; you may want to study the nuances of the struggle. There are reasons why many, many people that already know the GTD concepts & constructs still struggle to make it all happen. Without this kind of understanding, you could eventually end up just repeating the generalities we hear all over the web already.
Evan, we greatly need your talents, and thanks again for having a heart for service!!
Steele, first of all thank you for taking the time to read and offer your feedback. Your kind words certainly add fuel to my fire to help others overcome similar struggles.
It's interesting that you suggest approaching things as an anthropologist. What's interesting is that my original intention of the article was to do just that. As I began writing, my tone became much more personal given how close to home this was for me. While I definitely feel that I can dive deeper into the nuances of the struggle, I wrote the article the way that I did for two reasons:
- I wanted readers to be able to see my voice show through, and get a glimpse of who I am and what I've struggled with.
- I wanted to see what aspects of it resonated with people, so as to highlight those aspects in more depth in a follow-up.
I'm afraid if I were to dive into the nuances of every aspect of the struggle in this one situation, I'd have a book on my hands. Hmm, perhaps not a horrible idea?
To the point about my situation being quite uncommon, I can't disagree with you, but I would say that the problem and the solution may likely be identical for a massive variety of unique situations. To over-simplify, my story is this: I have ambitions, and GTD made me feel like I could accomplish everything. I tried, and got so buried in this vast array of projects and areas of focus, that I lost perspective of what was most important in my life. I needed to take a step back, evaluate what's most important long-term, and eliminate the things that detract from what's most important.
In your example, you mention scaling back efforts resulting in losing a house. To apply the lessons learned from my experience, one would hopefully realize that keeping their house supports whatever is most important to them - providing for and protecting their family's health and wellbeing. They would find that their hobbies or side-projects may be having a detrimental impact to that end, and prune the things that are getting in the way. Perhaps the end result is just to prioritize time better now that you have a perspective of what's most important. With these lessons applied, I believe the end result in your scenario would be to double their efforts in whatever avenue maximizes their opportunity to pay the bills, set money aside for a rainy day, and establish that security for their family that is so important to them.
That being said, it's possible the length of the article or the interweaving of my personal story detracted from making that point clear? What do you think? Am I off base in saying any of that, or have I contradicted myself in any way? Thank you again for the honest feedback!
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