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

The Major Change: Getting It All Out of Your Head
There is no real way to achieve the kind of relaxed control I’m promising if you
keep things only in your head. As you’ll discover, the individual behaviors
described in this book are things you’re already doing. The big difference
between what I do and what others do is that I capture and organize 100 percent
of my “stuff” 
in and with objective tools at
hand, not in my mind.
And that
applies to 
everything
—little or big, personal or professional, urgent or not.
Everything.
There is usually an inverse proportion between how much something is
on your mind and how much it’s getting done.
I’m sure that at some time or other you’ve gotten to a place in a project, or in
your life, where you just 
had
to sit down and 
make a list
. If so, you have a
reference point for what I’m talking about. Most people, however, do that kind
of list-making drill only when the confusion gets too unbearable and they just
have
to do something about it. They usually make a list only about the specific
area that’s bugging them. But if you made that kind of review a characteristic of
your ongoing life-and work style, and you maintained it across all areas of your
life (not just the most “urgent”), you’d be practicing the kind of “black belt”
management style I’m describing.
There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like
having that thought.
I try to make intuitive choices based on my options, instead of trying to think
about what those options 
are
. I need to have 
thought
about all of that already and
captured the results in a trusted way. I don’t want to waste time thinking about
things more than once. That’s an inefficient use of creative energy and a source
of frustration and stress.
And you can’t fudge this thinking. Your mind will keep working on anything
that’s still in that undecided state. But there’s a limit to how much unresolved
“stuff” it can contain before it blows a fuse.
The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of
the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM
on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a

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focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things
at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory
space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff”
you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high
level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re
constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental
overload.
For example, in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some
area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here? Probably.
And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete
situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out
of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally. And what did you do
about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted “bucket” that you know
you’ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you 
worried
about
it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was
increased.
The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you
can’t 
do
anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that
as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your
RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something 
all
the time
. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should
be doing 
right now
. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your
RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do them both at the
same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be
pin-pointed.
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in
your head.
—Sally Kempton
Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so
consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re 
in
it. Like gravity,
it’s ever-present—so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even
aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension
they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel.
Can you get rid of that kind of stress? You bet. The rest of this book will

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explain how.

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