Spring Cleaning / Getting My Birds Done

In the midst of the chaos of juggling a million things in the last week, I’ve had one important revelation. My organization system (or general lack thereof) is severely affecting the time I have to meet my writing goals and my personal and work commitments. I meet my deadlines, of course, but I’ve found that’s come at the expense of sleep, personal downtime, and, particularly, my non-work writing.

So I decided to punt everything that wasn’t essential in the last week and focus on developing a better system. The problem was that so much was essential last week that this was really hard, but I finally ‘got it’ that one of the best times to buckle down and get organized is in the middle of a lot of chaos.

Despite some significant deadlines, an emergency trip to the dentist, and a sick kid, I actually got all this other stuff done.

• I deleted over 10,000 e-mail messages. No kidding.
• While I was at it, I got my Inbox down to ZERO. Admittedly, some of that ended up in an Action Items folder of messages I still need to respond to, but my Inbox was no longer a dumping ground for piles of mismatched pieces of information.
• My Inbox has stayed at zero because I’ve been processing that e-mail regularly. Setting my ‘automatically check e-mail’ interval to one hour instead of five minutes has done wonders. It no longer interrupts me and I can process it more efficiently when it comes in.
• I dumped everything I had in my brain for projects, action items, future tasks, anything I’d like to do but haven’t started on, calls I need to make, plans for world peace, and anything else that popped into my head down on to paper. Man, that felt good.
• I stashed little notebooks and notepads all over the house, in my pack, in the car, and anywhere else I might be. A notepad and a writing instrument are never more than 10 feet from me. Whenever I think of it, whatever ‘it’ is, I write it down. If I’m driving, I record it on a pocket recorder. It sounds obsessive, but my mind is so much more relaxed knowing I don’t have to remember something important until I find a place to get it down on.
• I took that entire brain dump and organized it into categories of projects, where ‘projects’ could be work-related, personal, or anything in between.
• I organized a big chunk of my project folders on my hard drive into groupings that made better sense.
• I made a calendar entry to remind myself to review those project and home lists regularly.

The end result? I’ve been frighteningly efficient the last couple of days. My mind feels a lot more relaxed. I had a really good Monday. You can’t beat that.

I even made some progress on a novel I’ve been working on. I got with it enough to do some research that’s been blocking me there for a long time.

If you’ve read time management books, you may already know the method I’m playing around with. Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method developed by David Allen that is by far the best approach I’ve come across. I’ve had to tweak it some to meet my style, but so far, it’s been a real load off my mind to follow it.

To borrow some more David Allen, the process of dumping the contents of your brain on to paper serves to offload your “psychic RAM”. Again, it felt great because instead of having to lug all that around in my head, it was down somewhere where I could locate it later.

This strikes me as an approach that fits naturally with how writers work. We carry around a ridiculous amount of stuff in our heads from bits of dialogue to plot ideas to nice phrases to solutions to sticky problems that have been plaguing us for weeks. Getting it down is a huge relief.

Working out the discrete steps required to keep a project moving along has been extremely helpful as well. Instead of “Create this web site” – which you can’t do without performing dozens of steps – I started figuring out very specifically what those steps were, especially those I need to do next. Instead of seeing a project with a hundred steps and a fuzzy sense of where to go next, I had the next actions right there ready to be tackled.

I don’t know what would happen if you locked David Allen and Anne Lamott in a room together, but GTD seems a lot like Bird by Bird to me. You write about only that little slice of the world that you can see through your one-inch picture frame; you complete that one small task on a big project. That’s how you complete a novel, a web site, or whatever else you’re working on.

Related Sites: 43 Folders | Lifehacker