Tim Noyce Advies

I have a confession to make…. Recently I let my home inbox pile up for more than three weeks. It got bigger and scruffier all the time and started lowering at me while I tried to do other things. Of course something like that has a double whammy for me. I have all the guilt about stuff piling up that anyone has, plus the fact that I am a GTD coach, I teach this stuff, and should of course never have that kind of problem. Ahem.

But of course GTD does not stop you being human and fallible, in fact it rather assumes that you will get out of control sometimes: that is what the Weekly Review is for. So after me and my stack had stared at each other for a while I shelved the useless guilt and just got stuck in and processed the damn thing. Of course, once you actually attack something like that, it is nothing like as fearsome as it seemed. In fact I had the whole thing sorted in fifteen minutes. The rest of my system was fine, so I could process, grab next actions and dump to my heart’s content.

When I was done I felt much, much better: just as if I had finally got a hot shower after a long, dirty bike-ride. I have been living with “zero in” for long enough that I got a really itchy feeling from having a stack in there.

I also found the cause of the backlog at the bottom of the pile: it was a small repair job that my wife had left for me and which I had not been able to decide how to do. I had been picking this thing up, looking at it and racking my brains about how to fix it and then putting it back into in until it got covered over and “fossilized” by accumulating stuff. Once I uncovered it I was on enough of a roll that I tried the first thing that occurred to me and that worked just fine. Sometimes the next action is just “do the most obvious, simple thing that you can think of to solve this problem”. Another thing I learned from this is the danger of only doing a Weekly Review at work: you can find yourself avoiding tackling things at home.