This is my major achievement for the weekend home work wise. Pretty pitiful, yet another good baby step toward sanity and that GTD mind like water nirvana. 
I have always kept a stack of next actions on my desk just to the left of my keyboard. The idea is it is just a few easy and time critical next actions - bills to pay, usually. The idea being to keep them in sight and in mind. Sometimes the stack stays nice and neat (although sadly very seldom empty), but usually it cascades out of control and I go numb to it (the highly organized and efficient audience lets out sighs of horror).
So the main thing I accomplished this weekend was to dig out yet ANOTHER Flexible Spending Account check that needed deposit. I was browsing through a thread here this weekend that mentioned finding money in stacks of "stuff".
But what felt even better than depositing that check is stripping that pile down to just one very important item, that unfortunately represents a "project", not a simple next action. And of course I just moved the residue, the less critical and thankfully much smaller pile of stuff that still needs processing, down to on top of my computer tower on the floor, where hopefully I will process it. But now my desktop stack is more in control. Looks and feels great!
I guess I need to be as strict with it as I have become with my work email inbox in working hard to prevent accumulation. I had definitely gone numb to it, largely because it was an unruly mess. Just having a neat stack seems to be a LOT better than a messy one psychologically, although of course I guess we should always work hard to banish stacks to make them just a bad memory of a time when we were not organized.
I have always kept a stack of next actions on my desk just to the left of my keyboard. The idea is it is just a few easy and time critical next actions - bills to pay, usually. The idea being to keep them in sight and in mind. Sometimes the stack stays nice and neat (although sadly very seldom empty), but usually it cascades out of control and I go numb to it (the highly organized and efficient audience lets out sighs of horror
).So the main thing I accomplished this weekend was to dig out yet ANOTHER Flexible Spending Account check that needed deposit. I was browsing through a thread here this weekend that mentioned finding money in stacks of "stuff".
But what felt even better than depositing that check is stripping that pile down to just one very important item, that unfortunately represents a "project", not a simple next action. And of course I just moved the residue, the less critical and thankfully much smaller pile of stuff that still needs processing, down to on top of my computer tower on the floor, where hopefully I will process it. But now my desktop stack is more in control. Looks and feels great!
I guess I need to be as strict with it as I have become with my work email inbox in working hard to prevent accumulation. I had definitely gone numb to it, largely because it was an unruly mess. Just having a neat stack seems to be a LOT better than a messy one psychologically, although of course I guess we should always work hard to banish stacks to make them just a bad memory of a time when we were not organized.