Trying to understand lists of actions

[TesTeq]

Weekly Review is the time to reflect.

BTW, the weekly review doesn't help me with the items I'm avoiding. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. The weekly review only moves items from someday to a context list. But since my context list is long, and I am just picking the ones I want to do, many will simply never be picked. I need a mechanism to move them up in priority (i.e., do today) or put them back on the someday list.

Weekly Review is the time to reflect and decide if the Project should be still considered active despite the fact that there was no progress. If you are leaving stalled projects active you are cheating. David Allen suggests to renegotiate the commitments in such case.

 

[Brent]

I think what annoys me most is the very simple single items that take longer than 2 minutes, but less than 15, and keep getting pushed down the list. That makes me really feel like a failure - I go two weeks and still haven't put my clothes away in the bedroom.

What were you doing instead of putting away your clothes in your bedroom? Was that stuff more important than putting away your clothes?

How important is putting away your clothes in your bedroom?

 

[genelong]

Well, it's a bit like the guy who doesn't fix the hole in the roof because it's not raining today. When I make priority decisions on the fly, something else will always seem more important than picking up my clothes. But it sure depresses me to go to bed every night and see a reminder of how I'm not in control of my life.

The only thing I have found so far that works for me is to put the item on a top-down list, and do it when I come to it, no matter how trivial it seems in the moment. I'm open to other ways. What's your suggestion?

 

[kewms]

Household maintenance is different than fixing the roof, though. Fix the roof once and you're (hopefully) done for a while. Laundry and dishes keep accumulating.

I don't have trouble doing this kind of stuff, because it's great for structured procrastination when I don't have the mental energy for anything else. And I work at home so it's always there and therefore more difficult to ignore.

You might try blocking time out on your calendar, though. Maybe a weekend morning when you feel like lounging around the house: it's more productive than watching TV, but not all that much more demanding.

Katherine

 

[sdann]

Well, it's a bit like the guy who doesn't fix the hole in the roof because it's not raining today. When I make priority decisions on the fly, something else will always seem more important than picking up my clothes. But it sure depresses me to go to bed every night and see a reminder of how I'm not in control of my life.
QUOTE]

It looks to me as if putting away your clothes really should be a priority, since it is subtracting from the quality of your life. You may want to look at what is and should be priorities in your life. Many function better in one type of environment, others in another. Most have to take care of the basics before they can move on to other things. Just what you need to do to be your most productive, creative, etc., really is the learning experience. And, as life throws all types of things at you, you will continuously be redefining.

 

[genelong]

Thanks for your patience in continuing this thread. This is very useful to me.

Miscellaneous household things like this are a major problem. It is not just clothes, it's putting away things on my desk, cleaning the kitchen, little repair things, laundry, etc., etc., that keep slipping through the cracks.

How do others handle this? My schedule is pretty irregular, otherwise I could schedule the same time each week to organize the house. When I make it a bunch of tasks in my house context list, along with dozens of other tasks, like making phone calls, writing, looking up something on the internet, etc., there is always something that seems more important than straightening my desk or doing a load of laundry (until I run out of underwear!). I've currently got 35 tasks on my home context list, and most of them have been there for a couple of weeks. I can list a dozen items that seem more important in the moment than picking up my clothes. Surely researching a medical issue to be ready for a medical appointment tomorrow rates higher. But then, something always rates higher than laundry.

And yes, a neat house is critical to my peace of mind, and a feeling of being in control of my life. But I could spend all day doing those kinds of items and not get other things done.

A related question: do you all place similar tasks, like doing laundry, doing dishes, straightening the living room, under one project, and only have one next action item out of the list? Or do people make each one a separate task, and place some on the context list and some in someday? It's not really a project, since it is never ending, and things get added regularly and (hopefully) taken off regularly, and there is never a point where it is actually completed. But treating it like a project might cut down the number of action items I have on my next action/home context list. I keep thinking that if my context list is short enough to empty in one day, then items can't slip through the cracks.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

 

[Julia]

Never-ending things...

Hi there, I know how you're feeling... I tended to have household things that are really, really not that hard to take care of to get ridiculously overwhelming before I dealt with them. I don't know why... I just felt like there's always something else more important and I'd get to whatever it is later.

The best thing that I have found, for me, is to think about those things as routines... even making a checklist for the ones that I get the most hung up on. So every day after I feed the pets, I also do xy and z or whatever. I've decided that a certain amount of "maintenance" effort has to be a priority over all but the most urgent of other actions or projects... just to keep myself on track. Just being able to get a grip on the "basics" also makes me feel better and more positive about tackling other things.

So, I don't put those things on my next action list or have them as a project. But I do have a checklist that I use, sometimes more, sometimes less... depending on how much I feel I need it.

Hope this helps... good luck!

 

[Cpu_Modern]

Miscellaneous household things like this are a major problem. It is not just clothes, it's putting away things on my desk, cleaning the kitchen, little repair things, laundry, etc., etc., that keep slipping through the cracks.

During my college years I had several (male) housemates with this problem. It is clearly a matter of habbits.

First rule: Don't put things somewhere so you can later put them at the right place. Put things away instantly. (This is a habbit you have to train until it sticks. (Yeah, screaming at my housemates didn't help always )

Actually the first rule: Everything has it's place. You can't put things away if you are not clear about where they belong.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

I find this process, where GTD mirrors to us our issues with what we call life one of the highbits of GTD. When actions don't get done it is important to investigate why. What is the best way to do them?

I think this question is not so much a question of GTD-system technicalities, but more a lifestyle decision. Put the lists aside for a moment. What would be the best way to get your household chores done? Given your values (That means here: what do you consider 'style? What would the cool dude do?), how would you do it? Once you know this (or have a preliminary version) you can ask, how do I incorporate this into my GTD-system?

 

[TesTeq]

The most important advice.

First rule: Don't put things somewhere so you can later put them at the right place. Put things away instantly.
Actually the first rule: Everything has it's place. You can't put things away if you are not clear about where they belong.

I second this. It's the most important advice.

 

[Borisoff]

I had problems with priorities as well. Set up a timemap. For example, do your laundry weekly on Saturday from 9 to 11 am. You can set as many maps as you want. I like to keep them as little as I can i.e. work (9-19), children (19-21), sports (19-21 two days a week) etc.

The other helpful question in the moment is "What has the most of my attention now and what would give me the greatest pain relefe?". Work that out and feel free!

 

[Jay Levitt]

I feel your pain

Gene,

I'm struggling with the exact same thing. After a decade of being an office workaholic, I took time off to go to school, and then I took time off from that to be a consultant. So I've got all the time off I want, and that's dangerous. I haven't done laundry in weeks.

I'm a lot better this week than last week. A few things I learned:

* Don't do what I'm doing now (stop your daily tasks to read and respond to forums). Instead, capture the idea of doing so in your UCT, process it normally, and do it when it's appropriately important enough.

* I'm a gadget freak, so I am playing with gadgets like multiple virtual desktops and multiple browsers (one for work, one for play), Yahoo Widgets (for clock, timer, etc), and the Interruptron nag-a-bot to keep me on track. Of course, that's a rabbit trail in itself, especially since I'm a programmer, and I "know" I could write better replacements for all these if only I had the time, so I'm trying to limit myself to maybe an hour a day of "process improvement".

* In theory, you should have only one list. In reality, I found that none of the good task-list tools helped me with daily habits. As I said to someone last week, "I need a habit-forming pill, and not in the usual sense." http://www.joesgoals.com looks nice; personally, my daily goals match up better with Sciral Consistency, even though it's somewhat outdated and limited.

* I've never seen a productivity guru that didn't start out by saying "I was at rock bottom, I had no job, I had no girlfriend." I think there's a reason. This week, I have had two goals every day: (1) Get through all my tasks in Consistency, and (2) do something else too, if possible. That's right: my main goal each day is to accomplish my own habit training. That's a lot easier if you don't have a real life.

The first few days, thanks to my lovely ADD, it took me all day just to get through my list of stuff I wanted to do every day. (I'm talking simple things: shower, eat, exercise, vitamins, have some fruit, feed the cat.) But it's like anything you practice: You'll start doing it faster and more automatically. It's 10:25am and I'm now where I was yesterday at 6pm.

If you're a musician, or an actor, you know that the first time you play a piece or run through a scene, it'll take you forever to get through it; eventually you can do it at triple-speed while juggling. (If you're not, I'm sure there are other metaphors: video games, sports, reading a book vs. re-reading, anything.) Try doing that with your life for a while.

 

[Mindi]

5 minutes

But I could spend all day doing those kinds of items and not get other things done.

I agree with what others have said about making routines for things like laundry and dishes, and for making good habits about putting clothes away in the first place. My suggestion for tackling organizing/ cleaning tasks is to set a timer. Everyday, at some point, I set a timer for 5 minutes and pick up my house. Sometimes it means only putting away half of the pile of clothes in my bedroom, sometimes I go around the whole house and pick things up, sometimes I spend all five minutes cleaning a desk drawer in my office. But I pick something and work on it for 5 minutes, and then I STOP. The stopping is critical, otherwise I get overwhelmed and depressed about all the other things that are not neat and clean around my house. With just those five minutes, I have moved the project forward and I am rewarded with a sense of relaxed control, even though I have oodles of home projects staring me in the face. With my situation (three bedroom house, husband, no kids) I am able to maintain a pretty pristine home environment with just those five minutes a day and I don't feel like I am spending all of my free time doing it.

Mindi

 

[sdann]

The most mundane parts of life are those we have to do continuously. Unless I had someone continuously pick up after me, and there are a very few in the world that do, I have to take care of it myself. Whether I want to do it right away, or in chunks of time daily, or in large time slots weekly, is something I grapple with continuously. But I do know that if I tend to something regularly, it is much easier to handle. For example, cleaning your stovetop daily or even once a week is much easier than having to clean off the layers and layers (and sometimes more layers) of accumulating grease. I have forced myself to not apply my perfectionist tendencies to these areas, or else they'd never get done. One of my best tricks is to perform a "quick pick-up", where I run through my home putting stuff away, just like a waitress would pick up and put away things as quickly as possible. It's not dusting, nor is it vacuuming, or other important tasks, but immediately I see a difference.

 

[Brent]

And yes, a neat house is critical to my peace of mind, and a feeling of being in control of my life. But I could spend all day doing those kinds of items and not get other things done.

No offense, but you're wrong.

You're right in the sense that, right now, you could spend all day cleaning up and it wouldn't be done that night. But once your house is clean and your laundry is done, upkeep won't take all day.

Okay, a few random items that you may need to take care of:

[ul]
[li] Laundry[/li]
[li] Straightening up (putting away accumulated stuff)[/li]
[li] Cleaning (as in dusting and vacuuming)[/li]
[/ul]

If your schedule's irregular, you have to tie chores to a daily event, not a time.

So, here's the challenge: When you get home tomorrow night, do a load of laundry. First thing. Then straighten up for 15 minutes. THAT'S IT. How long will it really take you to stick a load of laundry in the washing machine? Ten minutes? So, this whole thing will take less than half an hour. Then you can eat dinner and enjoy your evening.

Next night, do another load of laundry if need be, and clean for 15 minutes. That's it. Stop after 15 minutes.

You will have to spend 30 minutes each night for probably a month or so to clean everything. Then you should only need 15 minutes or so each day.

 

[MarinaMartin]

Here's my solution...

I also struggled with how to fit in routine tasks, and then I created a solution that works perfectly for me.

I made a chart with each household chore running down the left and the date of the month (1-31) running across the top.

I then put a circle in the square for each day I should do that action. This was a little arbitrary at first, and then I moved the circles around to more or less frequent as needed.

I put the list in a photo frame, glued magnets on the back, and put it on the fridge with a dry-erase pen.

Each day, I look up the date of the month and see what little circles I have to do that day. If I get behind, I just do all the unmarked circles -- or I ignore them, if it's a particularly hectic time.

You can see a photo of my chart by clicking here.

(Click "All Sizes" above the photo to zoom in.)

Marina

 

[unstuffed]

This is one of those grey areas in GTD. Household maintenance isn't a project that you can begin and work through and complete: you have to keep doing it. And that messes with our sense that we should be progressing through our lists.

Others have already provided lots of great suggestions here, so I'll just repeat what they've said.

• Do stuff daily, for 15 minutes, at the same time each day. I find mornings or evenings work best.Do one room, or one task, each day. Either clean the bedroom completely or do one cleaning job through the house. The routine aspect of this means that you do it without even thinking about it. After a while, you find you're starting to do things (like tidying up) as you go along, just like magic.Get a timer and work to the clock: if it doesn't get done today, it will get done tomorrow, and having a fixed time frame makes it less onerous.

You might look at the Flylady's website for more on this.

Also, for prioritising and procrastination issues, it might help to include dates in your NA lists. That is, note down the date when the NA went onto the list, so that you can clearly see which ones are getting stale.

When things do get stale, one of the reasons might be that the NA is not well-defined. Things like "buy comforter" would fall into this category, because an NA should be something that you can do without using your brain: there are no decisions to be made, no issues to consider, you just pick up the comforter and hand over the cash. If you haven't decided which one you want, or how much you want to pay, or what features you want, then that Next Action will lie about on your NA list and you'll keep putting it off.

Hope that helps a bit.

 

[shivas]

Well, it's a bit like the guy who doesn't fix the hole in the roof because it's not raining today. When I make priority decisions on the fly, something else will always seem more important than picking up my clothes. But it sure depresses me to go to bed every night and see a reminder of how I'm not in control of my life.

The only thing I have found so far that works for me is to put the item on a top-down list, and do it when I come to it, no matter how trivial it seems in the moment. I'm open to other ways. What's your suggestion?

I like to think of tasks in 2 buckets - "routines" and one-off's. Many of the household tasks can be broken down into routines. For example, the laundry "project" (from doing the laundry to fold & put away) can be done as a routine. In my experience, these type of tasks although trivial have a habit of becoming uncontrollable if you don't tend to them on a regular basis. So I have made them into routines and assign these to specific days or weeks. So, on that day that particular task becomes high priority to get completed. I find these tasks to fall down in my perceived priority list and so making them a routine and forcing myself to tend to them on a specific day has helped me a lot. Another trick I have used is realizing that the laundry project is not complete unless the laundry is folded and put away. Doing the laundry was never an issue with me -- the procrastination pops up when I had to fold & put away

As always, YMMV.

-- ss

 

[Jay Levitt]

Don't try this at home

Another trick I have used is realizing that the laundry project is not complete unless the laundry is folded and put away. Doing the laundry was never an issue with me -- the procrastination pops up when I had to fold & put away

I used to solve that problem by throwing the clothes back in the washer again. Then it was back at @Waiting For...

 

[ladyinblack1964]

Actions list and projects

Here's where I've been running into problems:

I know a Projects list is just supposed to have the name of the project on it, but I am finding it easier to create a page in my notebook for each project, then list steps needed to accomplish it, with dates if needed, and little checkboxes. It just seems easier to keep the actions with their projects rather than to have a separate page of Next Actions and a separate page of Projects. That way, I know what stage each project is at.

This seems to be the way Omnifocus works.

Any opinions?