Stress of GTD

Cpu_Modern

Cpu_Modern

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In your post on Medium you don't specify the stress you experienced when trying to implement GTD, therefore it is impossible to answer your question in the affirmative. I personally have not experienced anything I would call stress from implementing GTD.

What is it specifically, that you are stressing yourself out with when doing GTD?
 
dtj

dtj

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As with anything new, and something that is gonna impact important parts of your life, you’re gonna experience stress. It’s no different than trying a new restaurant or vacationing in a completely new place. Throw in a little bit of performance anxiety, in that you *really* want to make this work and you spent all that money on a labeller, sure theres gonna see some stress. I’d actually be worried if you didn’t have stress about it. But its what you do with that stress and how you react.

Like how exercise generates more energy than it uses, implementing and using GTD generates more positivity and ultimately vastly more energy (in the form of calm and productivity), than stress.
 
Murray

Murray

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GTD, especially in the beginning, can often surface pre-existing stress that was hidden under various coping mechanisms.

The stress may be because, by using the tools of GTD that help us objectify what has our attention, we may discover that we are in one or more of these states:
- Overcommitted
- Out of control
- Focused on the wrong areas, for example what's important to others rather than what's important to us
- No idea what's important to us, rudderless
- Using busyness, crisis mode, conflict and latest-and-loudest to avoid the hard work of thinking and making clear decisions
- Struggling to choose between and leverage many great options (the stress of opportunity)
- Burnt out or temporarily unable to access creativity
- Confronting backlog, which may have a lot of volume or psychic baggage

If we find that these are true, GTD gives us the tools to unearth this truth and also to engage productively with it. It is our "stuff" and it was there all along, before GTD came along. It has been a weight around our ankles, an itch in the back of our mind, a vision of the future that nagged at us, a vague longing that haunted us.

Wishing you well with engaging with whatever is most real for you today!



"Welcome... to the real world"

"I didn't say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth."

- Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

(5 second clip from movie)
 
Wilson Ng

Wilson Ng

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Most of my stress came from not routinely performing the reviews. Eventually, I learned to create my own checklists which helped tame down some of the stress. If I didn't review regularly (daily, monthly, weekly, quarterly), I found that reality no longer matched my project lists and next actions lists.

The other stress came from not managing my time and energy correctly. That stress seems to originate mostly from over-planning (thinking I can do more in a shorter time) and not maintaining my health (diet, exercise, sleep).
 
schmeggahead

schmeggahead

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@MartinJ stress is a natural occurrence in life. Identifying the type of stress (productive vs harmful) is important to assess. Some stress spurs action. Yours seems to be producing anxiety and appears to be harmful.

The next thing I do when I encounter harmful stress is looking at the activity surfacing the stress. There is a key difference between where stress surfaces and the source of stress.

GTD is a great exposer of existing stressers, making us aware they are stressing us. GTD is not usually the source of those stressers - merely a mechanism for exposing them.

However, I have experienced being stressed by GTD practices where my focus was on perfect process. This is totally counter productive in many situations.

David often indicates things like - think about it long enough to get it off of your mind - put reminders of actions where you know you will look - etc.

If recording a less specific step than the next physical visible action works for you (and it seems it does), then do that. The tool in your tool box is when projects or actions are stuck and not moving forward: then use that tool to find the next visible physical action & get it moving again.

As far as dropping GTD in the personal sphere, my experience was I was capturing too much in my personal world, generating too much planning and tracking. There were so many open loops in my personal life, I needed a way to park them somewhere as quickly as possible and a way to find them later (organizing Someday/Maybe).

A key goal is to get it off of your mind, deal with it when it shows up, not when it blows up.

Hope this is helpful,
Clayton

You don't have to capture every thought since you were born, you can be strategic. - Meg Edwards about Mind Sweeps
 
schmeggahead

schmeggahead

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schmeggahead said:
I needed a way to park them somewhere as quickly as possible and a way to find them later (organizing Someday/Maybe).
Click to expand...
Just a note on this organization for me. I have an index list of rooms in the house, outbuildings & yard with one sheet per of a Mind Sweep that went straight into a Mind Sweep folder (that I consider Someday Maybe incubate). I also added another index of less location specific things like activities / habits with one sheet for each. (e.g. Paper files, Finance, GTD Practice, Health Recover Plan, Home Maintenance, Hone technology, etc.).

Hope this helps.
Clayton.

Sometimes one example is worth a thousand definitions.
 
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