Sometimes we need to change our strategy. If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always gotten.

I am drowning. I have far too many things pending and I’m not doing any of them because I don’t even know where to begin. The cloud of undone things hovers over me like a big dark cloud.

My desk is piled in stuff that got put there “until I sort through it”. The desktop on my computer always has at least 200 files on it that are put there “temporarily” because I don’t have anywhere to put them but I don’t want to forget about them. Every month or so I purge back to 50 or so, and end up throwing out most of the stuff because it’s irrelevant or I don’t remember why I kept it or it’s usefulness is now long past. I have items at work that are old and getting more difficult because they are old, but I don’t want to touch them because they are difficult, regardless of the fact that my inaction makes then even more difficult in the future.

Jennifer is trying to get organized using a book called “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It involves making notes of EVERYTHING that even crosses your mind that you need or want to do. The main focus is that if you have something in your mind but no next action for it, then it is a stress-causing “open loop”. Everything has a place, from a file system for papers, to a calendar for date-sensitive to-do’s, to lists of items to do broken down by project and by context. If I’m at the computer and I have a minute, I pull up my “computer” context and see that I need to migrate some websites to a new host, fix some typos on a web page and do some backups. If I’m going out, I look at the “shopping” context. When it’s work day I pull up the “basement” project and see what the next action is.

Essentially, it’s getting rid of that cloud of possibilities and maybes and “Oh yeah, I have to remember that”s and “Oh! That needs to be done sometime”s and putting them on paper where you can sort them and priorize. Once a week you sit and purge the done stuff and categorize the new notes.

This is going to be HARD. Every time I’ve tried a new way to get out of my mire I’ve slipped back into old habits in short order. This is going to require a completely new take on life as a whole. I’m scared, but I’ve had enough of the stress and the hassle. It’s affecting my entire life: my marriage, my parenting, my work, my faith.

Yes, I’m scared, but I’m finally more fed up than I am scared. I don’t want some new toy or system that will change my life. I want to change my life.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. — Thoreau, “Walden”

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