words that work

By Ike Lasater and Julie Stiles

At one level of dealing with the issue of overwhelm is just getting organized and creating a system to handle the “incoming” of things to do. Both of us are using some version of David Allen’s system known as Getting Things Done (GTD) for this aspect of handling overwhelm. In this realm, we have found at least three aspects of the process to be key:

1. Choosing what programs to use for email, calendar, and tasks. This requires knowing something about yourself and how you work. Do you want everything online so you can access it from anywhere? Do you want some things, such as your tasks, offline so you have them whether or not you have internet access? Also consider how those programs communicate with each other and sync across whatever different computers and mobile devices you use.
2. Beyond the tools you use, there is the task of getting everything you have to do into those tools, which often seems to be overwhelming in and of itself if you are starting from scratch.
3. Then, there’s creating a system that you can trust to get all of your tasks processed and reviewed on a regular basis so important projects and activities don’t get lost.

Each one of these pieces is important. I (Julie) have organized all my tasks multiple times, yet each time because I did not have a trusted system for processing and review, I soon felt overwhelmed again and stopped even looking at my task management program. Then I would blame the program (it wasn’t robust enough, didn’t have the features I wanted, etc) and some time later try another tool to get myself organized.

This time, I am working to come up with a system that will help me collect everything, review it regularly (daily, weekly, and monthly), and take action on the things that are important to me.

Of course, setting up these systems and maintaining them can bring up all of our resistance, which might show up in these forms:

• Overwhelm
• Procrastination
• Doing less important but “easier” things
• Escaping

Simply getting ourselves organized and creating a system won’t help with these. In upcoming posts, we will look at what we’ve tried in the past, a process we went through to identify what’s underneath the response we each have to our “incoming,” and an experiment we’ve developed to see if we can shift the pattern of overwhelm.

Until then, how are you doing with the systems side of managing your incoming?