Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity pdfdrive com

The Principle: Dealing Effectively with Internal
Commitments
A basic truism I have discovered over twenty years of coaching and training is
that most of the stress people experience comes from inappropriately managed
commitments they make or accept. Even those who are not consciously “stressed
out” will invariably experience greater relaxation, better focus, and increased
productive energy when they learn more effectively to control the “open loops”
of their lives.
You’ve probably made many more agreements with yourself than you realize,
and every single one of them—big or little—is being tracked by a less-than-
conscious part of you. These are the “incompletes,” or “open loops,” which I
define as anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the
way it is. Open loops can include everything from really big to-do items like
“End world hunger” to the more modest “Hire new assistant” to the tiniest task
such as “Replace electric pencil sharpener.”
It’s likely that you also have more internal commitments currently in play than
you’re aware of. Consider how many things you feel even the smallest amount
of responsibility to change, finish, handle, or do something about. You have a
commitment, for instance, to deal in some way with every new communication
landing in your e-mail, on your voice-mail, and in your in-basket. And surely
there are numerous projects that you sense need to be defined in your areas of
responsibility, as well as goals and directions to be clarified, a career to be
managed, and life in general to be kept in balance. You have accepted some
level of internal responsibility for everything in your life and work that
represents an open loop of any sort.
Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop”
pulling on your attention.
In order to deal effectively with all of that, you must first identify and collect
all those things that are “ringing your bell” in some way, and then plan how to
handle them. That may seem like a simple thing to do, but in practice most
people don’t know how to do it in a consistent way.

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