Nothing Undone

Do you want to be happy? Do you know what determines whether you’re happy? Maybe you do. Maybe you have no idea. I’ll give you my interpretation.

Somewhere deep inside each of us is a little gnome. (Stay with me.) The gnome experiences everything we do. He’s the one who actually cares about what we do. You may be very good at getting things accomplished efficiently. The gnome doesn’t really care. He cares about what you’re doing.

He’s an opinionated little guy, and most of us don’t listen to him very often. “Quit your job,” he’ll say, “this is no fun.” Or “Major in music. It’ll be great!” No, you say, that’s not practical. I can’t do that. Nose to the grindstone, be productive, force yourself through it. But there’s a problem with that idea:

The gnome always wins.

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I want to share a new element of my productivity practice with you. I developed it recently while working with someone I’m coaching.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen exhorts us to track every single project we’re working on. That is, keep any outcome which requires more than one physical action on a single list.

The David also says that this list should include only outcomes which we’ve committed to. Anything we haven’t decided to take action on right now goes on another list: the Someday/Maybe list. Part of the Weekly Review is reviewing the Someday/Maybe list to see if it’s time to start working on anything there.

I love my Someday/Maybe lists. (I keep a few different kinds.) They give me a place to put things I don’t want to forget that I wanted to do, without cluttering up my Project list with things I don’t actually want to do now.

But I’ve found that some things fall through a crack between the Project list and the Someday/Maybe list: things I’m committed to doing, but not committed to working on right now. For that, I use the Back Burner.

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