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

Your Mind Doesn’t Have a Mind of Its Own
At least a portion of your mind is really kind of stupid, in an interesting way. If it
had any innate intelligence, it would remind you of the things you needed to do
only when you could do something about them
.
Do you have a flashlight somewhere with dead batteries in it? When does
your mind tend to remind you that you need new batteries? When you notice the
dead ones! That’s not very smart. If your mind had any innate intelligence, it
would remind you about those dead batteries only when you passed live ones in
a store. And ones of the right size, to boot.
Between the time you woke up today and now, did you think of anything you
needed to do that you still haven’t done? Have you had that thought more than
once? Why? It’s a waste of time and energy to keep thinking about something
that you make no progress on. And it only adds to your anxieties about what you
should be doing and aren’t.
It seems that most people let their minds run a lot of the show, especially
where the too-much-to-do syndrome is concerned. You’ve probably given over a
lot of your “stuff,” a lot of your open loops, to an entity on your inner committee
that is incapable of dealing with those things effectively the way they are—your
mind.
Rule your mind or it will rule you.
—Horace

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The Transformation of “Stuff”
Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological
or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet
determined the desired outcome and the next action step. The reason most
organizing systems haven’t worked for most people is that they haven’t yet
transformed all the “stuff” they’re trying to organize. As long as it’s still “stuff,”
it’s not controllable.
Most of the to-do lists I have seen over the years (when people had them at
all) were merely listings of “stuff,” not inventories of the resultant real work that
needed to be done. They were partial reminders of a lot of things that were
unresolved and as yet untranslated into outcomes and actions—that is, the real
outlines and details of what the list-makers had to “do.”
We need to transform all the “stuff” we’re trying to organize into
actionable stuff we need to do.
“Stuff” is not inherently a bad thing. Things that command our attention, by
their very nature, usually show up as “stuff.” But once “stuff” comes into our
lives and work, we have an inherent commitment to ourselves to define and
clarify its meaning. That’s our responsibility as knowledge workers; if “stuff”
were already transformed and clear, our value, other than physical labor, would
probably not be required.
At the conclusion of one of my seminars, a senior manager of a major biotech
firm looked back at the to-do lists she had come in with and said, “Boy, that was
an amorphous blob of undoability!” That’s the best description I’ve ever heard
of what passes for organizing lists in most personal systems. The vast majority
of people have been trying to get organized by rearranging incomplete lists of
unclear things; they haven’t yet realized how much and what they need to
organize in order to get the real payoff. They need to gather everything that
requires thinking about and then 
do
that thinking if their organizational efforts
are to be successful.

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