Tim Noyce Advies

Whenever I give a Getting Things Done training course I start with a funny little exercise I developed. I spread out a pack of “e-mail” cards on the table, labeled “urgent”, “from your boss”, “from a colleague you do not like” and so on on the table. On the other side of the cards is a money amount representing the value of handling the e-mail. People home in on the Boss and Urgent e-mails and find tiny or even negative amounts on the reverse of the card. Naturally, some of the least appealing cards have very high values. , making this a game that is hard to win.

Once a couple of people have failed to “score” by picking random e-mails I show them that the only way to truly win is to turn over all the cards. You cannot choose what to do until you have Once you have found out what something means, to you, you can decide about priorities.

Back when my beloved wife and I were DINKs (Double Income No Kids) we had a cleaning lady called Norma. She was a smart and capable lady but had a tendency to store anything we left lying on a surface in any random, nearby place into which it fitted.  This made things so hard to find that even now, years later, we  we call any situation in which something has been carefully put away in the wrong place “Normalized”.  Norma was no dummy, but of course did not know where to put our random items because she did not know what they meant, to us. To give an example, nobody could know where to put the cinnamon away in my kitchen, unless you know I like cinnamon on my raisin-toast in the morning (habit I picked up in Australia).

The point of this is that if you do not know what something means, what action it demands of you, you will be unable to store it correctly, let alone attempt to prioritize it with respect to other things in your world.