I think David wrote somewhere, and I may be paraphrasing, “The only way to feel good about what you’re not doing is to know what you're not doing.” This spoke to me because I read it at a time when my progress with GTD was moving me from stressing about “all these things I’ve got to do” to stressing about specific things I had to do. Instead of saying, “I’ve got so much to do,” I heard myself saying, “I need to finish writing the project schedule for this year’s membership survey.” Or, “I need to ask Rob for the newest draft of that committee charter.” Or, “Gotta purge the marketing database.”
Mind like water? Not even close. But its feeling a little damp. And the stress has a different flavor to it when it is stress about very specific things, each of which has a outcome I can visualize. There is nothing worse than ambiguous stress. It’s like a never ending flu. My Aikido instructor once told me that enlightenment is life’s last great disappointment. I’m not saying mind like water would be disappointing, but I suspect I’m there more often than I acknowledge, and when I do acknowledge it, there ain’t no parade. Look, this is my desk not covered with paper. These are my “buckets” (voicemail, email inbox, desktop inbox) empty at the end of almost every day. Those were my reference files in which we easily located the information on our broadcast fax vendor. Six months ago it was a different story.
I still fail to capture all my commitments and too often my weekly review is AWOL, but every week I get a few more pond-like moments.
